Parachutes and Kisses by Erica Jong Read Free Book Online Page B

the spheres. I began frenziedly to write this at three A.M. on the night of December 8, 1980, because I felt him dying. I felt his soul slipping from us; but ironically enough it was John Lennon who died that night (though I did not know till the following day). Meanwhile, as the radios all over the world played Beatles tapes, Papa lingered for two weeks past his ninety-seventh birthday. Driving out to see him in the ghastly old-age ‘home’ in Spring Valley, listening to Beatles songs being played obsessively, in memoriam, I did get to ask him where he was born. ’Diatlovo, in the Government of Grodno,‘ he said, but that was just about the last rational thing he communicated. At the end, he issued paranoid warnings to us all (’They don’t know poetry, they don’t know painting, they only know money‘), made me promise to lock up the baby (to keep her safe from kidnappers), failed to recognize his own children and grandchildren, and finally slid into the other world on January 6, 1981, just barely two weeks after his ninety-seventh birthday. He was born on December 24, 1883 and died on January 6, 1981. (It is somehow comforting to write down these ’hard’ facts. They moor us to ‘reality’ when all else seems shaky.)”
    It was the lectern that felt especially shaky now—as if Papa were rocking it from the other world.
    â€œUnlike those pasteboard nonagenarians of pop fiction (who are born with the century and conveniently die with it), he was eyewit ness to none of the great tragedies of his age. During the Russian Revolution, he was in England, then in America. During the Holocaust, he was painting movie posters and posh portraits in New York. When Eliot was writing The Waste Land, he was reading The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. The month before he died, he was still reading it. Besides Eugene Onegin, it was the only poem he really loved. I think he was proud of my poems in his way (certainly he inspired them from the first), but Omar Khayyám he read and read —even to the end. He would not hear of my literary argument that the poems describe the Sufi process of enlightenment, masked in the conventional language of romantic love. He read The Rubáiyát literally and loved it no less for that. He read me this verse (perhaps for the thousandth time in my life) before he lapsed into his last incoherence.
    â€œ ‘Some for the Glories of This World; and some
Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come;
Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,
Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!’ ”
    People invariably love the poetry of their adolescence, Isadora thought—just as Lin Yutang has said that patriotism is the memory of foods eaten in childhood. How funny it is that no matter how sophisticated we think ourselves, in certain areas of life we are incorrigibly nostalgic.
    â€œAt the end there were horrible things—horrible because so ordinary: the old age ‘home’ with no cars in the parking lot, where no one came to visit because it was so sad. The refusal to use the walker, the falling, the outbursts, the desperate mumbles of ’I have to make a living’ and ‘There is a law in the United States that you cannot keep someone against their will.’ ‘Was he a shoemaker?’ the pretty young student nurse asked, hearing him constantly mutter: ‘I have to make a living.’ She wore a gold Star of David, but other than that looked quite as goyish as the Draw Me girl.
    â€œ ‘He was a great painter,’ I said.
    â€œ ‘Oh ...’ said the nice student nurse to be polite.
    â€œOne night, his regular nurse called me in Connecticut. I had driven hours on snowy roads to get to him and then driven back, but he didn’t even remember I had been there. He wanted me to come at once, or to come get him—it wasn’t clear which.
    â€œ ‘Send a car for me,’ he said.
    â€œI