The Doctor's Daughter by Hilma Wolitzer Read Free Book Online Page B

old belongings to make it feel familiar and comfortable. He especially wanted to keep his bedroom furniture and his collection of antique surgical instruments. But he relinquished other possessions with seeming ease, and he finally gave me several things that had been my mother’s, including her perfume bottle, some books and jewelry, a file box containing Faye’s recipes, and an accordion folder filled with literary memorabilia.
    One day last year I was in the office with a client when my phone rang. It was a police officer in Scarsdale, and he asked me if I knew a Samuel Elias Brill. My first gasping thought was that he had died—the somber way the officer said my father’s full name, he might have been reading it from a death certificate or a tombstone—and I realized that on some level I had expected this call for a long time, the other dropped shoe. But it was something worse. My father had left the town house in his pajamas in the early morning and wandered around his neighborhood, where he was discovered, chilled and confused, by some children waiting for a school bus.
    Even then, I managed to find benign explanations. Bad dream. Bad medication. But the confusion came and went as erratically as his moods— rampant rage one day, utter sadness the next; two sides of the same coin. Against all of his arguments, I hired a twenty-four-hour home attendant for him, and the loss of his independence only seemed to make things worse. He told me more than once that he wished he were dead. “He’s being a drama queen again,” I’d complain to Ev, but I felt sorry for my father when I was with him.
    “You don’t really mean that, Daddy,” I said one day. “I know this is hard, but there are still lots of things you enjoy. Your music, the children . . .” I looked around his living room for further inspiration, and all I noted was the ticking clock, the silent carpeting. I gestured toward the window, the gray winter sky. “The
world,
” I said finally, and he said, “I’d rather be with your mother.”
    Maybe it was a mistake getting a man to care for him; someone with the same general responsibilities, but who looked like Faye, soft-eyed and brown-skinned, and wearing an apron, might have been more acceptable. Ralph Spear was a short, muscular white man with a shaved head and multiple tattoos. He reminded me of a circus acrobat. My father referred to him bitterly as “that thug” or “my keeper.” There was unarguable truth in the latter. Ralph cooked the meals and did the laundry, and he took my father to his various medical appointments. They even played chess together some afternoons, but his primary job was to keep my father safe. And one day he failed to do that.
    Ralph was making grilled cheese sandwiches for their lunch when my father said that he felt tired and was going to lie down until the sandwiches were ready. Then he went into his bedroom and locked the door behind him. Ralph heard the click of the lock all the way in the kitchen and rushed down the hallway to the bedroom. As he beat on the door, yelling, “Open up, Doc! Come on, open up!” my father took a case of old surgical instruments out of his closet, sat down on the bed, and, with a primitive scalpel, neatly cut his left wrist. My instinct to hire a strongman saved his life; Ralph broke the door open and, a few minutes later, I received that heart-stopping phone call.
    Sometimes Ev or one of the children reluctantly accompanied me to the Hebrew Home for the Aged to see my father. Violet went there with me only once, and then begged off from future visits, saying she preferred to wait until it was her own turn to be addled and incontinent. We were back in Manhattan, at a Starbucks, rewarding ourselves with coffee and pastries, and I said, “Imagine, Violet,
my
father—my famous, fastidious father—in diapers! If that ever happened to me, I’d want to be shot.” Violet sipped her coffee and said, completely deadpan, “Not me, I’d