Dad. William Wharton
coming back in style now, so Mom’ll need to work out a new outfit; maybe thin ties, button-down collars, narrow lapels. Or maybe that’ll be my old-man costume.
But I know the drill. He’ll wear a striped tie, with tie clasp; a gold wristwatch; clean fingernails; flat-surfaced, shined leather-soled shoes.
I find everything and lay it out on the bed. What a crappy job I’m doing. Here I’ve gotten him dressed, and now, less than two hours later, I have him undressed again. It’s like playing paper dolls.
Dad asks if he should take a bath.
‘Usually, Johnny, I only take a bath once a week; an old man like me doesn’t get very dirty.’
‘You just wash your face and hands, Dad; clean your fingernails and brush your teeth; that’ll be enough.’
I’m not going to wash and dress him. I’m not going to hold up each arm and rub soap in his armpits. Ha! Little do I know what I’ll be doing.
I’m having a hard time adapting. Dad has always been a very capable person. I don’t think it’s senility, either. He’s become lethargic, inertial, inept. It’s fairly good survival technique; if someone else will do for you, let them. But he’s lost the knack of doing for himself. He’s debilitated.
Painfully, slowly, he washes and gets dressed. When he comes out, his necktie is crooked but I restrain myself. I roll out the car. He insists I warm it for five minutes before we take off. I have a strong respect for Dad’s feelings here.
It’s a whole story about Dad and driving. He’d driven from the time he was sixteen till he was seventy. He’s never had an accident or an insurance claim. Most years he averaged over fifteen thousand miles a year, right up till he retired.
Then, when he went to get his driver’s license renewed on his seventieth birthday, he panicked. He’d passed the written without any trouble, but, because of his age, they wanted him to do a road test. When he heard that, he turned in his driving license to the D M V examiner and quit.
Now, this didn’t make sense because he’d driven over for the test. He was driving almost every day. He’d lost his nerve, that’s all. He was overwhelmingly nervous and frightened.
In any competitive-comparative society there are hundreds of losers for every winner. Somewhere in Dad’s life, deep back, he developed a dichotomy between bosses and workers. He considers himself a worker.
One of the things Dad feels about me is I’m a boss. I can’t convince him how ridiculous this is. I don’t have anybody working for me and abhor the idea.
‘No, Johnny, bosses are bosses, workers are workers, and you’re a boss. You have all the ways of a boss.’
Anyway, Dad sees this guy working for the D M V, just doing his job, as a boss. He freezes, turns in his driver’s license and hasn’t driven since.
Also, he’s convinced he couldn’t’ve passed the test; he’s sure he’s not good enough anymore; there are too many things he doesn’t notice, things that could cause accidents.
‘John, when you’re a good driver, you know when you aren’t a good driver anymore.’
Mother’s another whole story. She didn’t drive till she was in her late thirties, although Dad tried to teach her from the time they were married. He’d built his own car from discarded parts when he was seventeen. That was some automobile; it didn’t even have a windshield. I’ve heard stories and seen one photograph of it. My Aunt Trude said her father, my grandfather, absolutely forbade any of Dad’s sisters to ride in it with him.
When we were kids, the standard thing on a Sunday afternoon was taking Mom out for a driving lesson. At that time we had a 1929 Ford. Dad’d bought a wreck for fifteen dollars and fixed it up. Fifteen dollars then was a week’s wages working for the WPA. As a child, I got the idea driving a car had to be one of the hardest things for a human to learn.
Dad would keep saying, ‘Now take it easy, Bess, relax, it’ll be all right.’ Joan and I would be in the back seat scared, cringing, peeking, giggling. Mom’s best trick was jamming the car into reverse while going forward. There would be a grinding, growling sound from the transmission and we’d be slammed against the front seat. Mother’s tough on any automobile; people, too.
Mom’s so hypernervous she can’t put her mind and body together. She’d have wild crying fits and call Dad cruel. Several times she jumped out of the car. Dad would drive beside her, coaxing her back in, and she’d walk along ignoring him, crying.
In California, Mom finally passed her test. The guy who passed her made a big mistake. She’s a menace on the roads. Is it possible to have too fast reactions? She’s too imaginative, at least to be driving a car. She’s constantly twisting this way and that on the steering wheel so the car weaves down the road. Under her hands, a car takes on a mind of its own, a mind totally in opposition to hers. Mom also talks to cars and conducts a running commentary on any driver within crashing distance.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, she can’t maintain concentration on the road. She’s had a series of minor accidents and totaled one car. It’s a working miracle she’s never killed anyone or seriously hurt herself.
When Dad stopped driving, Mom became the family driver. This is nuts. Dad, at his worst, is ten times better than Mom ever was at her best. But, in a sense, it’s the story of their relationship. Mother, in her determination to dominate, took over. She’s become the leader. Dad, in his timidity, awareness, sensitivity, his superdeveloped sense of responsibility, gradually handed over the reins. Probably this isn’t too uncommon with life in general. If you’re good at something, you don’t fight so hard; you don’t have to.
Still, even now, Dad’s the one who keeps their car in running condition. He makes sure there’s water in it, has the oil changed regularly. He keeps the tire pressure right and has a full tune-up every six months.
We drive off toward the hospital. I want to see if Dad can show me the way. He had a gall-bladder operation there ten years ago and did a lot of driving back and forth.
But he can’t direct me at all; he’s like a child. He’s stopped thinking of streets and directions; he’s only watching things go by the car window. I ask what’s the best route, and he shrugs.
‘I don’t know, Mother usually drives us.’
This is such a role reversal. It’s always been a joke in our family how Mom never knows where she’s been. She actually got lost once four blocks from home because she’d taken a wrong turn. She went into a police station to ask her way. I have something of this myself; I get lost easily.
But I’m beginning to feel Dad is operating at less than a quarter of his capacity. I sense how this happens, how easily it could happen to me. It’s frightening how a combination of resignation and lack of confidence can debilitate far beyond any physiological loss.
I determine to press Dad into naming the streets. I want to force his mind out from the back corner of his hand-built house on a dead-end-street nestled quietly between the arms of giant freeways. I’m pointing out streets as we go along, encouraging him to respond.
Then, in the middle of my spiel, I realize he has something else on his mind. He gives off vibrations like dead air before a storm.
‘You know, John, this is a good hospital; the union recommends it.’
I nod my head and turn left on De Soto.
‘But there’s an awful lot of niggers there; not just niggers, Japs.’
He pauses, looks over at me.
‘Even so, Johnny, it’s a good hospital.’
I try not to respond. I don’t want to get into it, especially right now.
When we go in the hospital, the receptionist is a good-looking black woman and remembers me from the day before.
‘Hello, Mr Tremont,