On those sooty, gray train rides into the city to take Dad to the VA, I found myself rehearsing the questions that were most on my mind, that I longed to ask but was too afraid to ask. Questions like: Are you afraid of dying? Do you ever regret having kids? Did you have us just to disguise the fact that you were gay? And scariest of all, Do you love me?
I worried endlessly about how little time we had left to say the things we’d left unsaid. I imagined what it would be like to be the only one by his side when he uttered his dying words, perhaps saying, “I love you, doll” the way he had when tucking me in as a child.
When I arrived at his apartment that morning, my father was waiting for me, sitting patiently in a chair in the foyer, like a five-year old on his first day of kindergarten. He wore his shirt collar open and his sport jacket buttoned, his hair neatly parted and swept to the side. He was still a handsome man, with striking blue eyes and surprisingly little grey in his hair.
He didn’t smile when he saw me, not because he didn’t want to, but because he was self-conscious about his teeth. The radiation had loosened some and destroyed others. They were a pulpy mess. He said in his raspy voice, “Hello, doll. Thank you for coming.” and leaned in to give me a kiss. I did my best to receive it without pulling back. His breath was rank from decay.
He needed a close shave, something he’d always been meticulous about. But, because of the radiation they shot into his neck, the doctors discouraged shaving. Even an electric shaver, they said, could tear his skin right from the bone. As a young girl, he and I had a morning wake-up ritual. He would let me wet the tip of his shaving brush and swirl it in the shaving cream in the cup. I would hand it to him so he could brush it on his cheeks and lather them up. I was allowed to sit on the edge of the bathtub to watch him complete the shaving ritual—provided I didn’t talk. Dad liked quiet time with his coffee in the morning.
This day would be a long one, starting with the drive from Manhattan to the VA hospital in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. When we finally got to see the oncologist, a woman he affectionately called the Poison Lady, she would check his lab results and assess his readiness for another round of chemo, radiation, or one of the other soul-destroying treatments they gave him for his throat cancer. She would probably tell him again, to his grave disappointment, that she would have to delay his treatment until his white blood cell count increased. There was always another good reason not to resume his treatment, even though his cancer was impatient.
As we moved through the habitual visits to oncologists, phlebotomists, radiologists, speech and swallow therapists, and social workers, they’d end each meeting by looking at their clipboards and asking, “Do you have any questions, Mr. Loftus?”
He would always answer, “When can I eat again?” His voice scratchy as sandpaper because of the tumor in his throat.
“What did he say?” they looked at me to translate, as if he wasn’t there.
“He asked when he can eat again.”
The answer was always the same. They would look at his chart and say, “I’m sorry, Mr. Loftus. You can’t resume eating or drinking until your swallow reflex returns. Nothing by mouth until then.” At that, they updated their forms, continuing to check their boxes and fill in their blanks. Anything that didn’t require eye contact.
My father winced. “Nothing by mouth until then.” For Dad, food was his religion. It was a spiritual experience and part of our cultural education as kids. The summer of 1964 when I turned nine, he asked me what I’d like for my birthday, and I said I wanted to go to a real, sit-on-the-floor, Japanese restaurant. An ironic smile passed his lips, a smile that was equal measure mirth, surprise, and respect. The kind of smile that told me I had pleased him. The kind of smile I lived for.
“That’s what we shall do then,” he said. We went to a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan where we sat on low pillows, cross-legged under the table. Beautiful Japanese women served us in exotic and colorful kimonos. He showed me how to use chopsticks, ordered sushi, and poured us green tea. When he told me that sushi was raw fish, I said something like, “Raw fish! Gross!” and watched as he popped a piece into his mouth. “Try it,” he said, “You’ll like it. …No risk, no reward.” He was right. I tried it and loved it. He smiled that smile again and I felt awash in his love. It would not be the last time he schooled me in risky behavior, nor the last time I confused approval for love.
“Nothing by mouth until then,” I heard my father repeat in his hoarse voice. After a moment, he collected himself, pushed back his threadbare chair and rose with majesty. Never mind that he was unshaven or that his teeth were black and loose in his head. Never mind that his clothes were worn and ill-fitting from the weight loss. Standing with his shoulders squared and dusting an imaginary speck of lint from his reliable tweed jacket, he signaled to me that it was time to leave. Courtly to the end, he held out his hand to the Poison Lady. “To better news next time then,” he said.
In the empty silence of those rides back to Manhattan from the VA, as the battered tenements fell behind us, I reflected on Dad’s denial about eating. The odds that my father’s swallow reflex would ever return were not good. Yet he clung to the belief that one day he would eat again. By mouth.
He stubbornly refused to accept that he’d spend the rest of his life feeding himself Ensure™ through a tube in his gullet. He landed himself in the intensive care unit at Bellevue for thinking he could get away with eating ice cream. As he later described it, Dad had been angry at Apollo, his swarthy, Greek American health aid for asking him what flavor Ensure he wanted.
“Are you an imbecile, Apollo, or just blind?” he demanded of Apollo, who spoke very little English. After a revolving door of health aids that my father had verbally abused or flat out rejected, Apollo was the only one he could abide. My sibs and I speculated that Dad had a soft spot for Apollo because he wore skin-tight jeans, had Hollywood good looks, and flattered my father with all kinds of flirting.
Pointing to the feeding tube in his neck, my father growled, “Don’t you see that I can’t taste anything?”
Apollo, with his winning smile and mythical name, persisted, “What flavor you want, Mr. Billy—Belgian Chocolate or French Vanilla?”
Exasperated, my father gave in, “You decide, Apollo. Pick your favorite.”
At that moment, my father started plotting his ice cream binge. He would later say to me that he knew, just as he had known with his alcoholic relapses, that the binge started with his thinking, long before he put the first spoonful to his lips. He also knew he wouldn’t stop when the first teaspoon dissolved on his tongue, but would continue until he had scooped the last bit from the carton and into his mouth. He would finish the entire pint in one, orgiastic sitting. Perhaps, he had mused, he should buy two. It didn’t matter, he explained to me, “One was too many and a thousand would never be enough.”
Every single time the Poison Lady said, “Nothing by mouth,” his resolve to eat ice cream had grown stronger. He would play it safe and stick with the basics – no Cherry Garcia or Rocky Road. Surely if he avoided anything chunky, he’d get away with it. He had always believed he was more clever than everyone, and that he could outfox the best of them. Just as he had always gotten away with everything until now—his drinking, his infidelities, his excessive spending—he believed he could get away with the ice cream.
Always good at captivating his audience, my father described his ice cream adventure to me in elaborate detail. I recognized elements of his routine from some of the culinary escapades Dad and I had shared over the years. After Apollo ended his shift, my father bundled up in warm clothes and snuck out to the Korean corner market on 18th and 8th, where he bought two pints of Haagen-Dazs chocolate ice cream. When he returned home, he powered up the stereo and put on his vinyl recording of The Marriage of Figaro. He then pulled out his retro ice cream sundae dishes. Fluted, daffodil shaped, thick glass dishes with pedestal bases and scalloped tops.
In his front closet, behind the jungle of plastic shopping bags filled with a lifetime of useless debris, he retrieved the wooden box with his family’s silver and a musty smelling cotton tablecloth from Provence. Amidst the silverware, he found the vintage long-handled, silver-plated soda fountain spoons that were engraved on the front handle with the word Woolworth.
He had always relished ritual and taught me to do the same. Growing up a child in the 30s and 40s, he admired the glamour of movie stars like Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall. They all had cigarette cases, cigarette holders and Ronson flip lighters. They drank from champagne flutes, brandy snifters, beer pilsners, martini glasses and crystal stemware. They poured their liquor from decanters with silver labels that said Gin, Bourbon, Scotch, and Vodka. “If I was going to binge on ice cream,” he told me, “I was going to do it in style.”
When everything was just as he wanted it, he served himself one mound of chocolate ice cream. He ate slowly. He savored. And just as slowly, because the cancer left him with no gag reflex, the ice cream proceeded to go down the wrong pipe. Without realizing it, he had filled his lungs with ice cream. Once there, he aspirated it. It would be a few days later that we learned Dad was in the ICU with pneumonia.
When the doctors transferred him to the step-down unit, and he was strong enough to tell me his story, he had a mischievous look in his eyes. He was practically gloating! He believed he’d gotten away with breaking the rules. Again.
I said, “But, Dad, you almost died!”
He said, “But, Doll, I didn’t die, did I.”
Long before his illness, long before the divorce, he sat me down one night when Mom was out. He offered me a cigarette and started to coach me on how to drink safely at high school parties. I was fourteen at the time. He winked to signal that he’d once been a teenager too. He wanted me to know how to get away with drinking “without your mother finding out. There’s no need to upset her, is there?”
He gave me tips, “Don’t switch your drinks. Stick with beer if you’re drinking beer; scotch if you’re drinking scotch. If you have to drink the hard stuff, don’t mix it with anything but water or ice. No sugar, soda, or juice—they make the alcohol go straight to your bloodstream.” He coached me about the best cures for hangovers. And then he did what he always did. He slipped in a favor. “By the way, doll, can I borrow a $20? Your mother went out with all our cash and we need cigarettes.” He knew I always had money from my part-time job and had no difficulty manipulating me when he was drinking. I wanted to believe he was the coolest dad ever and I could trust him with anything. I was still too young to understand—there was always an angle with “drinking” Dad.
My father’s diagnosis was “cancer with an unknown primary.” This meant that the doctors found the cancer cells after they’d spread, but they couldn’t find the primary tumor. Dad’s cancer had metastasized to his throat. He was fond of pointing out that throat cancer occurred most often in people with a history of too much drinking, smoking and oral sex. He almost seemed proud as he said this, as if he’d reached the pinnacle of a decadent gay career. I could only see the tragic nature of his illness—that after achieving eight years of sobriety, he was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. “No good deed goes unpunished,” he would scoff.
Now, in the taxi back to Manhattan, his right hand rested on the seat between us. The hand with a stump of a ring finger. He’d lost an entire joint of his finger because he’d been too drunk to use the heavy machinery on his job. Once a Madison Avenue, award-winning advertising executive, he’d accepted this job in a printing start-up as an act of desperation. His hand got mangled in an industrial size printer, and his finger was sliced clean off at the top knuckle. Before the accident, he’d always taken pride in his hands, religiously wearing a gold watch and his Holy Cross amethyst signet ring on the same finger that got clipped. Both were probably pawned or stolen during one of his drinking sprees.
How I longed to reach for that hand and take it in my own and tell him how much I loved him. How I’d always loved him. In spite of everything—the alcoholism, the deceit, the self-centeredness. The words were stuck in my throat and my hand felt like it was miles from his. There was a rip in the vinyl seat cover and I started to peel it back slowly, inching my hand closer to his.
Just do it, I thought. Reach for his hand. Tell him you love him. But I didn’t—I was too afraid he’d rebuff me. Instead, I pulled and picked at the foam rubber that oozed from the tear in the vinyl. I pulled on the vinyl, picked at the foam, pulled, picked, picked, pulled, inching my hand closer and closer to his, until a large crater stared back at me from the cushion. I’ve destroyed this man’s taxi, I thought.
My father turned his gaze from the window to my hand. He looked at me with accusing eyes. “What are you doing? Stop that.” He said.
“Sorry,” said my inner six-year-old. “Nervous energy.”
I covered the ugly hole with my left hand, which was again so close to his right, and willed myself not to cry. Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. My heart pounded fast in my chest as I contemplated my next move. The tears fell in spite of my silent invocation. I love you, Dad. I love you. I need you to know how much. Why had I left the words silent for so long?
He twitched and lurched suddenly, the reflex movement of one on the brink of a sleep he didn’t choose. He complained often that naps were consuming too much of the time he had left. His hand jumped on the seat so that our pinkies were now touching. I looked at his closed eyes. Now. Do it now.
put my hand over his, gently tracing the scarred stump of his ring finger, the naked amputation that I had never touched before. I thought fondly of that long-ago amethyst ring and wondered if its daily presence on his finger explained why purple was my favorite color. I noted the purposeful, spatulate shape of his hands. Hands that cut my food into bite-sized pieces when I was a child. Hands that lifted me to his shoulders when I was a little girl, so that I could see the Thanksgiving Parade snake its way down Fifth Avenue. Hands that showed me how to lovingly open bound books, leaf after careful leaf, so that I wouldn’t break their spines. Hands that showed me how to fly kites; that removed painful splinters from my fingers and toes. Hands that hammered stroke after powerful stroke into the wall of my Manhattan apartment until we’d exposed all the brick from underneath the old white plaster.
I took that hand with all its stories and squeezed it gently in my own. In a hoarse whisper, I said the words, “I love you, Dad.” Feeling braver now, the blood rushing to my head, I said it again more firmly, “I love you, Dad.”
This time he stirred, curling away from me towards the window, withdrawing his hand from mine to pull his collar up around his neck. It was in that moment that I thought I heard him say, “I love you too, doll.”
Jill Quist, a native New Yorker and currently residing in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, is a wife and mother, writer, workshop leader, and coach. She has published business articles in trade magazines, theater reviews in The Villager (a Greenwich Village paper), and memoir in “Her Stry,” a literary blog. She was also a semi-finalist in Tulip Tree Publishing’s Contest “Stories that Need To Be Told.” When she’s not writing, you’ll find her traveling wherever her wanderlust takes her.