The Complete Collection. William Wharton
go back to the bathroom, fill a bucket with warm water and pour in a cup of laundry soap. I take one of the more ragged towels and hurry back to the bedroom. He’s still quiet but I can’t tell if he’s asleep. The smell is overwhelming. I’m usually good with things like shit, garbage or vomit but this is at the limits of my endurance. It’s on everything. It’s on the walls, the woodwork, the door and, worst of all, the rug. I scrub, wipe and scrape. Mom is always so worried about dirt; boy, this is the end of dirt. She has a special thing about shit, anyway.
Now, I’m an anal personality by Freud’s or almost anybody’s definition. I like to preserve things, hold on, I’m a nest maker, husbander and conserver; but I think there’s good reason.
There was an event when I was two years old – not even that. Mother likes to brag about it. And it’s strange, while I’m wiping all this up, it comes to me clearly. To be honest, I don’t think I ever really remembered this incident, but there on the floor against the closet door, it comes back; I have a memory, not a memory of Mother telling the story, but a real memory of it actually happening.
This memory draws open a curtain and allows me to have some empathy with Mom. I’ve always felt I should have remembered because it must have been a terrible shock but I’d never been able to.
My mother had me ‘trained’ by the time I was eighteen months old. One day she dressed me in a white suit without diapers and was taking me to South Philadelphia for a visit with her mother and some of her sisters. She was going to show me off: ‘Look, curly blond hair; look, no diapers.’ My mother was twenty; I’ve got to give her credit; at least I was alive.
Mother has me ready and stops to take a pee or put on some powder. She comes out and I’m standing there, red-faced, smiling, legs apart, proud. I’ve crapped in the white pants. The story at this point goes, ‘I’ll tell you, I gave him the best smacking he’d ever had. I take those pants, filled with it, pin them around his face and lock him in the hall closet.’
I’m remembering this. There’s something about the combination of the smell, the woodwork, the door and Dad’s helplessness which brings it all back. I’m crying. I’m scrubbing and crying. I could be crying for my father but I think I’m crying for myself, still crying out a fifty-year-old event. I might also be crying for Mom. I hope so. There’s something of wanting to tell her I won’t do it again.
I wipe things up as best I can. I dump the bucket in the toilet, wash out the tub, rinse and soap everything down. I spray pine deodorizer. I change jockey shorts and put on my T-shirt. I go back to Dad; he’s still curled up. I’m dead tired. It’s about six-thirty now. The lack of sleep, the strain is getting to me.
This time I decide to do it differently. I close off the side of the bed with chairs again. Then I lie out across the foot of his bed with my hand on his left foot. I don’t want to tie him down. I go to sleep like that, at the foot of his bed. When I wake, it’s light. Dad’s still there. I look at my watch and it’s almost nine o’clock. He’s asleep.
Everything still smells shitty so I go in and take a shower. I don’t take a bath in the tub, even though I’ve cleaned it out with Ajax. I swear I have the smell of shit caught in my nose hairs. I take my shower fast, running back and forth to check while I dry myself, brush my teeth and get dressed. I’m like a mother with a young baby. Now I know what Vron means when she says that for seven years she never went to the bathroom without a baby on her lap.
At about ten, Dad wakes up. I get him dressed. I want to try giving him breakfast as if there’s nothing wrong. I sit him in the armchair at his end of the table.
But he won’t eat; all he does is play with it. So I feed him. He doesn’t fight me; just keeps opening his mouth. We get down two eggs, some roll and orange juice; at least he won’t starve today. I watch him carefully. When he reaches for anything, he misses. It’s almost as if he’s half blind. Then, when he tries to compensate, like as not, he moves his hand in the wrong direction.
I turn on the record player; Guy Lombardo this time.
Dad’s just as interested in the table, the legs of the table, the pattern on the tablecloth and, of course, the rug as he is in food. He keeps leaning over trying to touch the floor. So, while I do the dishes, I tie him to the chair lightly with the belt from his bathrobe. I can’t think of any other way.
Just after I’ve gotten the dishes off the table and put them in the hot water, I look out and see he’s leaning so far he’s tilting the chair over with him. I run fast as I can, but he hits with a thump before I get there. He looks up at me in noncomprehension, probably thinks I’m standing on my head. He makes no effort to get up, only whimpers.
I feel terrible. I untie and lift him to his feet. I look him over and there’s a big, black-and-blue mark rising on his hip and elbow. I never knew old people bruised so easily. People are going to think I’m beating up my own Dad.
It’s a gorgeous sunny day. I finish the dishes and take Dad out to the patio. That’s one thing Dad and Mom like to do, sit out there and sunbathe; it’s part of their dream come true. I lower him into one of the redwood chaise longues he made. I have him in his button-down sweater, gray trousers, socks, black shoes, and he has the cap on his head. If you just looked at him lying there, you’d never know anything was wrong.
I settle into a chaise longue beside him and start up a running conversation. I try remembering everything of my childhood with him. I ask questions, and when he doesn’t respond I go on. I talk about his brothers, his sisters, his mother and father, all his life I know of. I feel he’s beginning to listen; in some passive way, he’s tuned into it; but I don’t think he understands. He’s listening as a dog or a child listens; for the tone of voice only, without comprehension.
I close my eyes and listen to the sounds. There’s the beginning hum of insects and the twitter of ground thrushes. I hear the sound of the screen door slam; must be Johnny going out to feed the chickens before school. I’d better be getting on up there with this water.
After more than an hour, he stirs, and tries to speak. I lean close. He speaks in a deep breathy voice with a heavy stutter. It’s as if he’s forcing his voice out.
‘They’ll get mad at us if we stay here. Where’s the owner of this house?’
It’s such a wild, crazy thing for him to say; still it’s something, words with sequence. But it breaks my heart. He’s built this house, nail by nail, from the ground up, foundations, framing, electricity, plumbing, the whole thing. Now he thinks it’s somebody else’s. He can’t claim for himself this one visible proof he’s even lived.
He reaches out tentatively with his shaking hand and pats me lightly on the knee, very tenderly; I can barely feel it, a ghost tap. He lifts his head again, looks left and right, then up at the sky. He almost seems to sniff the air the way I’ve always thought the groundhog would on Groundhog Day. He leans toward me again and whispers excitedly.
‘They’re going to throw us out on our ear! Let’s get going.’
I put my hand over his and try to look into his eyes; the pupils are somewhat dilated but he won’t look at me.
‘Relax, Dad, you own this house. Nobody’s going to throw us out. This whole property is yours.’
He looks at me quickly, a fast, sneak look; a faint quivering smile goes across his face. I can’t tell if the smile is saying, ‘Is that so, isn’t that marvelous?’ or, ‘You must be out of your mind.’
That’s the only contact all morning. The rest of the time I’m mostly talking to myself. Dad once rigged a little loudspeaker system connected to the record player in the living room for music in the patio. I go put on a big stack of Bing Crosby, Perry Como and the Hawaiian music. Dad and Mom have a passion for fake Hawaiian music. We listen to Bing Crosby sing ‘Sweet Lailani’, then something about a little grass shack. Dad seems to relax; he even falls asleep sometimes. But each time he wakes it’s the same nervous shaking.
At two I make lunch; we get most of the beer down and