In the last paragraph of the note, almost an afterthought, to pad the letter out to respectable length, he added, “I am going to the hospital in two days for exploratory surgery. You aren’t to worry. My symptoms are too unpleasant to describe on paper. The doctors just need to see what’s going on inside, and for that, they need to crack me open!”
I got the packet the day after the surgery. I called home, but no one was there. He’d listed no other contact, not even the hospital where he was to be operated on. I called Mrs. Samuels, who gave me a hospital number. I knew from her voice that she was trying not to be the one to break the news. I went to Mr. Silber and asked for two days off.
“Who’s supposed to play for my guests? You want me, maybe, to be the jazzman? You want me to pretend I can play like Satchmo Paige?”
I didn’t tell Mr. Silber about my father. My father’s in the hospital would mean Big black buck dying of complications from type II diabetes. If I told him pancreatic cancer, he’d want to know details. I couldn’t go through that with Mr. Silber. Your father, a Jew? I couldn’t force kinship on this man.
I did tell Teresa. She wanted to go with me, even on that first trip. “You don’t need to,” I told her. “But I might need you down the line.” I didn’t need to ask her to pace herself. She knew how long time was. She’d spent her own life waiting it out.
At the hospital, I suffered the usual farce. His son? The surgeon at Mount Sinai didn’t bother disguising his shock. His disbelief had started long before, at the moment of incision. “This cancer has been working a long time. Years, perhaps.” That sounded about right. “I can’t see how anyone could have lived with this for so long and only now—”
“He’s a scientist,” I explained. “He’s not from around here.”
I found Da sitting up in bed, apologetic smile welcoming me. “You didn’t need to come all this way!” He waved his palm at me, dismissing all diagnoses. “You have a life to lead! You have your job, out in Ocean City! Who’s going to make music for your listeners?”
I spent two days with him. I returned the following week, this time with Teresa. She was a saint. She made half a dozen trips with me over the next four months. For that alone, I should have married her. Crisis brought out her art. She handled everything — all the routine realities I used to handle for Jonah when we toured and that I couldn’t handle now. She didn’t have to go with me. Didn’t have to stand at my side and watch me watch my father disappear. I’d already cost her hers. It only crippled me worse, her insisting so gladly on helping me lose mine.
Da delighted in her. He loved the idea of my having found someone, this shining someone in particular. At first, our visits made him feel guilty. But he grew to depend on them. Da went home from the hospital, and Mrs. Samuels moved into the Fort Lee house, as she had in spirit many years before. Whenever Teresa and I showed up there, she made herself scarce. I never knew the woman. Perhaps my father and Mrs. Samuels might have gotten married, had any of his children given them the least encouragement. But I didn’t want a white stepmother. And Da, too, could never have jumped off the world line that he’d drawn himself. How could he have explained to his second wife that he still held nightly conversations with his first?
Terrie and I sat with him as he went down. He must have felt the vigil as a sentence. I waited until I couldn’t delay in good faith anymore. Then I wrote Jonah, care of the management agency in Amsterdam. I couldn’t say “dying” in the letter, but I said as strongly as I could that Jonah might want to come home. With the letter chasing him around the stages of Europe, I figured it might be weeks before we’d hear. I had no way to contact Ruth, or any sense of how she might receive the news.
Da enjoyed our company, as far as it went. The fact is, we didn’t spend much time together when Teresa and I visited. He grew furious with preoccupation, in the homestretch. He continued to work all the way to the end, more fiercely than I can remember him ever working. Science was his way of lengthening his shortened days. He worked until he was so drugged with palliative medication, he didn’t even know he was working anymore. He tried to explain to me what was at stake. Some weeks, he seemed desperate. He needed to prove that the universe had a preferred rotation. I couldn’t even wrap my head around what such a thing might mean.
He needed to show that more galaxies rotated in one direction than in the other. He sought a basic asymmetry, more counterclockwise galaxies than clockwise. He assembled vast catalogs of astronomical photos and was hard at work making measurements with a pencil and protractor, estimating rotational axes and compiling his data into huge tables. The work was a footrace he needed to win. Each day, he did a little more, on a little less strength.
I asked him why he was so desperate to know. “Oh. I think this to be the case, already. But to have the mathematical basis: That would be wonderful!”
I asked him as meekly as I could. “Why would that be so wonderful?” What need could anyone have for something so blindingly remote? I don’t know if he heard my note — my resentment at his living and dying by another clock in another system’s gravitational field, my anger at his listening for sounds that run on ahead of time, too far for human ears to hear. His obsession should have been harmless enough. It didn’t enslave or exploit anyone’s misery. But neither did it lift that misery or set a single soul free. Now that I had something to measure against, I knew my father to be the single whitest man in the world. How Mama could have thought to marry him and how the two of them imagined they could make a life together anywhere in this country would be secrets he’d take to the grave.
When Teresa and I went up to Da’s, we’d end up playing cribbage in the front room while he sat in his study making desperate calculations. I apologized to my Polish saint in a thousand oblique ways, for hours at a shot.
“It doesn’t matter, Joseph. It’s so good for me, just to see where you grew up.”
“How many times have I told you where I grew up? I’d rather have grown up in hell than here.”
Too late, she rushed to fix her mistake. “Can we go over to the city? See your old…” And halfway in, she realized she’d made bad worse. We went back to cribbage, a game she taught me, one she used to play with her mother. The saddest, whitest, most inscrutable game the human mind ever invented.
One night, we sat together under the globe of a lamp, looking over the pictures that had survived the accident of my family. There were half a dozen from before the fire. They’d been pinned to a board in my father’s office at the university for a quarter of a century. Now they’d come home, but to no home anyone in the pictures would have recognized. One photo showed a couple holding a baby. A thickset man, his close-cropped hair already receding, stood next to a thin woman in a print dress, hair pulled back in a bun. The woman held a lump wrapped in a fuzzy blanket. Teresa hovered her nail above the infant packet. “You?”