The Complete Collection. William Wharton
I put my coat back on.
‘Keep an eye on Mom. I don’t know how she survived this. I don’t know how I did.’
‘Now, you take it easy; you’re fifty-two years old, you know. Don’t go around playing macho-hero.’
When I get to the hospital, Santana is in Dad’s room. There are two nurses with him. He turns to me.
‘What is this, Mr Tremont? I don’t see anything drastically wrong with your father.’
I look at Dad; he’s grinning and nodding with his ‘Yessuh, boss man’ smile.
I hope he really is back in contact, but he still seems traumatized.
‘Dad, do you remember seeing Mother today?’
He stares at me, no response. He isn’t even blinking his eyes. He begins nodding his head up and down again. He’s staring and smiling at Santana.
‘That doesn’t look like normal behavior to me, Dr Santana. I consider it serious. He doesn’t recognize me and he didn’t recognize his wife.’
This gets to Santana. He uses his light to look in Dad’s eyes, checks his pulse. He leans forward toward Dad.
‘Mr Tremont, this is Dr Santana. Do you know who I am?’
Damned if Dad doesn’t start it again, nodding, smiling, saying, ‘I’m fine, yes, I’m just fine, Doctor. Thank you.’
Santana leans back, turns to me.
‘Yes, he’s in shock.’
He sends the nurse out to get some medication. He motions me to go outside the room with him. He’s being more reasonable now.
‘This is standard with older people, Mr Tremont. They often go into delayed shock like this even after minor surgery. He has a history of arteriosclerosis, you know.’
I nod. I’m trying to hold back, trying to think it out.
‘Well, this is a form of senility—’
I interrupt.
‘But he wasn’t senile when he came in, Doctor. Why should he suddenly go into senility?’
Santana runs his hands through his hair, sighs.
‘Senility is a strange thing; it can go on and off. You get a stress situation like this and it crops up. We don’t know as much about these problems as we’d like to.’
I figure now’s good a time as any to ask.
‘Dr Santana, today did you tell my father he has cancer?’
He stares at me and steps back. He doesn’t have to say anything.
‘I told you before, Mr Tremont, I have an ethical obligation to be honest with the patient.’
‘Do you mean, even after I warned you of what might happen, you disregarded my advice completely and told him?’
I point to Dad.
‘Just look what your ethical honesty has brought about!’
I stare Santana in the face. I’m talking in a whisper but I’m furious. Santana is a little guy and steps back again; maybe he’s worried about his surgeon’s hands.
‘It could also be physiological, Mr Tremont. Perhaps as a result of the operation, or the anesthetic, there was a reduction of blood circulation to the brain. That could cause this kind of reaction. I’m sure rest and proper medication will correct the situation; don’t you worry.’
My impulse is to attack, but I back off. I’m too emotionally involved to be effective.
I stay with Dad for another half hour, trying to make contact, but he’s unavailable. He’s not my father at all. Whatever Dad is as a person is not there. There’s a monkeylike quality in the way his head is hunched inside his shoulders, something he never did; he’s using his hands to caress and feel everything. He’s rubbing his lips one over the other, grimacing, smiling and muttering in a totally unrelated way. I’ve watched my share of mentally disturbed people but never one I love.
I go home. I tell Joan Dad’s still the same, that I’ve seen the doctor. I want her to visit; maybe he’ll recognize her. She says Mom is being reasonable but is terribly shaken up; she’s convinced Dad’s crazy.
Joan leaves and I go back to see Mom. Joan has pulled all the blinds and Mother has a cloth on her head. This is an all-purpose family remedy for anything; even if you don’t have a fever, put a wet cloth on the head. I think it’s more a signal ‘I’m sick’ than anything else. But Mom looks bad. I sit on the bed beside her. Now she starts with the theme that becomes a common one.
‘There’s craziness in that family, Jacky. Daddy had a cousin who was deaf; Orin, his brother, wasn’t quite right in the head.’
This is one of my uncles, who is very eccentric, I must admit.
‘Joey’s another one, a drummer in a jazz band. They finally had to put him in a crazy house, too.’
Orin’s son, called Joey, had a serious motorcycle accident, causing a skull fracture, so he had to retrain his motor skills.
Mother goes on and on. She’s apparently kept a careful list of all the Tremonts back three generations. She even brings in my grandfather’s first cousin, who, as a young man, climbing through a fence in Wisconsin with a shotgun, blew off his lower jaw so he could never eat properly. He lived his life out as a hermit in the woods.
She doesn’t miss one variant. Everyone in my father’s family who has been in any way abnormal is on her list.
I don’t argue with her, but my father’s family is, at least, normal. There is no suicide, no divorce, no crime. They generally work hard all their lives. There’s no real alcoholism. Uncle Pete might qualify but he worked till he was seventy, so he’s not exactly an alcoholic; he just drank a lot. All my first cousins on my father’s side, and there are almost thirty of them, work for a living. The state has made money in Social Security off this family.
Now Mom starts her story about Dad. How he was always peculiar; how when she was about to marry him, Aunt Trudy, Dad’s oldest sister, warned her.
I can imagine the warning. The Tremonts are a great bunch of kidders, and Mother has never understood teasing or kidding. Vron’s the same way. It isn’t worthwhile because they don’t play along; they get mad. Also, sometimes Mother will pick out something said in fun, treat it as serious, then use it to her advantage. I suspect Aunt Trudy calling her brother Jack ‘peculiar’ is in this category.
And – oh, God! – Mom’s convinced Dad isn’t quite white. My granddad, Dad’s Dad, was half American Indian: Oneida, one of the Iroquois nations. But to my mother he wasn’t Indian, he was nigger. My father does have a darker-than-Irish skin and beautiful full lips, shovel-shaped teeth. He also has a prominent eye-socket ridge, and high cheekbones. As he’s gotten older, he looks more and more like the Indian on an old nickel.
Also, Mother has a friend named Fanny Hogan. This might be one of the most vulgar women in the world. They’ve been friends since they were twelve. Fanny has a loud, deep, fruity voice. She divorced her husband after driving him into a loony bin, then kicked her only daughter out of the house at sixteen. She’s lived alone since. As a child I hated and feared this woman.
For years, Fanny ran Mother’s life, told her what clothes to wear, picked her boyfriends. Mother likes having somebody tell her what to do, so she can complain. That’s probably not too original a pattern. When Mom met Dad, Fanny Hogan was jealous.
Fanny told Mom Dad was most likely a good part nigger and she’d have little black pickaninny kids. Somebody’d snuck into the woodshed was the way she put it. She insisted Mother could make sure by looking down Dad’s backbone; it would be a deep yellow or brown at the bottom. Mother’s dragging Dad to the shore when they’re