Later that evening, before he went to bed, he said: “This is symptomatic of my condition: You’re my daughter, and I’m proud of you, but I have nothing to say to you.”
He left to get ready for bed, and then came back into the room wearing dazzling white pajamas. My mother asked me to admire his pajamas, and he stood quietly while I did. Then he said: “I don’t know what I will be like in the morning.”
After he went to bed, my mother showed me a picture of him forty years before sitting at a seminar table surrounded by students. “Just look at him there!” she said in distress, as though it were some sort of punishment that he had become what he was now — an old man with a beaked profile like a nutcracker.
Saying goodbye, I held his hand longer than usual. He may not have liked it. It is impossible to tell what he is feeling, often, but physical contact has always been difficult for him, and he has always been awkward about it. Whether out of embarrassment or absent-mindedness, he kept shaking his hand and mine up and down slightly, as though palsied.
Recently, my mother said he was still worse. He had fallen again, and he was having trouble with his bladder. Can he still work? I asked her. To me, it seemed that if he could still work, then he was all right, no matter what else was going wrong with him. Not really, she said. “He has been writing letters, but there are odd things in some of them. It may not matter, since they’re mostly to old friends.” She said maybe she should be checking them, though, before he sent them.
It was a phone conversation with another old woman that reminded me of a name I had forgotten for this time of life. After telling me about her angioplasty and her diabetes, she said. “Well, this is what you can expect when you enter the twilight years.” But it is hard not to think that my father’s bewilderment is only temporary, and that behind it, his sharp critical mind is still alive and well. With this younger, firmer mind he will continue to read the letters I send him and write back — our correspondence is only temporarily interrupted.
The latest letter I have seen from him was not written to me but to one of his grandsons. My mother thought I should see it before she sent it. The envelope was taped shut with strong packing tape. The entire letter concerns a mathematical rhyme he copied from the newspaper. It begins:
“A dozen, a gross and a score
plus three times the square root of four
divide it by seven plus five times eleven
equals nine to the square and not more.”
Then he explains mathematical terms and the solution of this problem. Because he changed the margins of his page to type the poem, and did not reset them, the whole letter is written in short lines like a poem:
“The total to be divided by 7 consists
of the following:
12 plus 144 plus 20 plus 3 times
the square root of 4.
These are the numerals above the line
over the divisor 7. They add up to 182,
which divided by seven equals 26.
26 plus 11 times 5 (55) is 81.
81 is 9 squared. A number squared is a number multiplied by itself.
The square of 9 is nine times nine or 81.”
He goes on to explain the concept of squaring numbers, and of the cube, along the way giving the etymologies of certain words, including dozen, score, and scoreboard. He talks about the sign for square root being related to the form of a tree.
I tell my mother the letter seems a little strange to me. She protests, saying that it is quite correct. I don’t argue, but say he can certainly send it. The end of the letter is less strange, except for the line breaks:
“For me memory and balance fail rapidly.
You are young and have a university library
system for your use. I, who have
a good home reference collection,
sometimes can get other people to
look up things for me, but it is not the same.
I have to explain that I have increasingly
lost my memory and sense of balance,
I can’t go any where, not the libraries
or the book stores to browse. We have to pay
a young woman to walk out with me
and prevent me from falling
though I take a mechanical walker with me.
I don’t mean it has an engine that propels it.
I do the propelling, but that it is
shiny and metal and has wheels.”
Young and Poor
I like working near the baby, here at my desk by lamplight. The baby sleeps.
As though I were young and poor again, I was going to say.
But I am still young and poor.
The Silence of Mrs. ILN
Her children found it impossible to understand old Mrs. Iln now. They were forced to call her senile. But if they had paused a moment from their wild activities and tried to imagine her state of mind, they would have known that this was not the case.
Decades before, when her recent marriage had cast a pleasant light over her otherwise homely features, she had been as articulate as any other woman, perhaps even more articulate than was necessary. If her husband asked her where his cufflinks were, she might answer, “I think they are in the top drawer of your bureau, though it could be that you took them off in the dining room and they are still there, on the table, or perhaps they have fallen onto the floor by now, in all this confusion; if they got stepped on I don’t know what I would do, I just don’t know…” When she had had a little wine and felt moved to give her opinion of the political situation, she would burst out with “You know what I think? I think it’s a case of collective madness: I think they’re all insane, we’re all insane, but it isn’t our fault, and it isn’t the fault of our parents, and it isn’t the fault of our parents’ parents. I don’t know whose fault it is, but I would like to know…”
A few years later, she and her husband understood one another too well to need long explanations. Her opinions did not change over time, but hardened into obsessive and monotonous responses, and remained thoroughly familiar to her husband. She began to curtail her sentences, and her meaning was always clear to her husband and to her children, as they grew up. When her children left home, one by one, Mrs. Iln was gradually overcome by the feeling that she had no purpose in the world and no reason to be alive. She lost sight of herself completely. Her husband had grown into her until she hardly distinguished him from herself, and now her sentences were reduced to a few words: “Dresser drawer in your bedroom,” she would say, or “completely insane.” Since her husband knew what she was going to say before she said it, even those few words were unnecessary and in time were left unspoken. “I wonder where my cufflinks are,” her husband would say softly, more to himself than to her. And even before she wagged her head toward the bureau, he would be there rummaging among his handkerchiefs and foreign coins. Or when he read aloud to her from the morning paper she would purse her lips and give him a certain stormy look and he would hear the “insane” of a few years before echoing in the air. He too might have stopped speaking, if he had not grown to like the constant murmur from his own lips.
Since nothing happened in her house that had not happened before, since her children, who found her silence unnerving after the din of their own homes, rarely visited her, Mrs. Iln no longer had any reason to speak, and silence became a deeply rooted habit. When her husband fell gravely ill, she tended him silently; when he died, she had no words for her grief; when her oldest children asked her to live with them, she shook her head and went home.
Sometimes she felt the need to give a word or two of explanation especially to her grandchildren, as she watched them from beyond her wall of silence; sometimes her children begged her to speak, as though it would prove something to them. And at these times she struggled as though in a nightmare to bring out one sound, and could not. It was as if by speaking she would have damaged something inside herself.