multiple myeloma. Kurt said the only difference between her situation and ours was that she didn’t have to wonder how and when she’d die, a prophecy that unfolded twelve years later. Her surgeries and cycles of medications began thirteen years after Sam was gone. At the end, stoic as her hero Dorothy Parker, she slumped in a wheelchair, a silk scarf serving as a sling for her broken arm, a glass of champagne in her free hand. During her final months, I drove home most weekends, and we lay on her bed, talking. Although she didn’t ask about my work, I once heard her say into the phone, “She’s an authority on the indigenous people of Latin America.”
When my father had a heart attack two years later, Kurt, by then a celebrated surgeon, inserted a calf’s aortic valve, and following recovery, Dad broadened his contemplation of the spiritual. During weekly phone calls, he’d make some reference, like “avoid the tunnel,” or “exponential diminishment,” or “the Gnostic self as compared to the Buddhist self.” I visited him on Christmas and his birthday. He never asked me to stay, but occasionally he’d call me Mama. His hand squeezed my elbow, bruising, when he walked me to my car.
He drove to Austin for acupuncture treatments and began a regimen of vitamin therapy. He’d been visiting me monthly since my mother died. Over vegetarian lunches—his acquiescence to my new habits—he asked questions about other cultures’ medical theories. I hoped he’d incorporate some of the more conservative ideas into his own practice, but my brothers, of course, wouldn’t have approved. He arrived most third Mondays at 11:00 a.m., once asking a waiter to take a picture of us sitting at our table eating geranium ice cream, our dishes topped with blooms. Two weeks after his funeral, as my brothers, their wives, and I walked through the house, Hugh, who’d slept in a recliner at the hospital, held out the framed photograph, our father’s smile straight from my youth, genuine. “Here,” Hugh said, “this is yours.”
C HAPTER 8
1964
D URING THE FIRST MONTH after Sam left, I pretended he still lived upstairs. The second month, although he skipped my fifteenth birthday, he came home to see Terezie. That weekend, he slept at our house, but he spent his days with her parents or fooled around at the farm. After he left again, I tried to figure a way to visit him in Austin. He shared an apartment near the campus with Kurt, who spent most of his time at the ΣΑΕ house. In November when President Kennedy was shot, the school sent us home at exactly 1:42 that afternoon, and I phoned Sam. I didn’t care if I got in trouble over the long distance bill. I needed his reassurance, but, instead, he cried. After that, I made myself wait until the Christmas holidays, thinking we’d have time to go to the movies, to talk. Instead, he spent his two weeks with a few friends and, again, Terezie, then Kurt drove him back to school. He hadn’t mentioned the torso on the postcard, but to tell the truth, he was already somewhere else. By February, I turned my attention to my father.
On a Saturday morning at the end of spring break, I stood in the upstairs hall ironing a blouse on a contraption that folded out from the wall. From my position, I could see Hugh’s back as he stood in our parents’ bedroom. Together, we watched our father sitting on the bed, tying his wing tips. I imagined his hands gloved, holding a metal tool, blood daubed with cotton by an attentive nurse.
Routine circumscribed my father’s life. Saturdays, he met my grandfather for golf. He used an old set of clubs, the bag limp and faded, its crudeness, for him, advertising his sacrifice. “My P.G.A. rabbit’s foot,” he’d say before he left, holding out the stained canvas, hoping someone would comment on its ragged condition. At the end of the match, he’d privately tip the course starter so he could return at 5:30 the next morning and practice a
When my father had a heart attack two years later, Kurt, by then a celebrated surgeon, inserted a calf’s aortic valve, and following recovery, Dad broadened his contemplation of the spiritual. During weekly phone calls, he’d make some reference, like “avoid the tunnel,” or “exponential diminishment,” or “the Gnostic self as compared to the Buddhist self.” I visited him on Christmas and his birthday. He never asked me to stay, but occasionally he’d call me Mama. His hand squeezed my elbow, bruising, when he walked me to my car.
He drove to Austin for acupuncture treatments and began a regimen of vitamin therapy. He’d been visiting me monthly since my mother died. Over vegetarian lunches—his acquiescence to my new habits—he asked questions about other cultures’ medical theories. I hoped he’d incorporate some of the more conservative ideas into his own practice, but my brothers, of course, wouldn’t have approved. He arrived most third Mondays at 11:00 a.m., once asking a waiter to take a picture of us sitting at our table eating geranium ice cream, our dishes topped with blooms. Two weeks after his funeral, as my brothers, their wives, and I walked through the house, Hugh, who’d slept in a recliner at the hospital, held out the framed photograph, our father’s smile straight from my youth, genuine. “Here,” Hugh said, “this is yours.”
C HAPTER 8
1964
D URING THE FIRST MONTH after Sam left, I pretended he still lived upstairs. The second month, although he skipped my fifteenth birthday, he came home to see Terezie. That weekend, he slept at our house, but he spent his days with her parents or fooled around at the farm. After he left again, I tried to figure a way to visit him in Austin. He shared an apartment near the campus with Kurt, who spent most of his time at the ΣΑΕ house. In November when President Kennedy was shot, the school sent us home at exactly 1:42 that afternoon, and I phoned Sam. I didn’t care if I got in trouble over the long distance bill. I needed his reassurance, but, instead, he cried. After that, I made myself wait until the Christmas holidays, thinking we’d have time to go to the movies, to talk. Instead, he spent his two weeks with a few friends and, again, Terezie, then Kurt drove him back to school. He hadn’t mentioned the torso on the postcard, but to tell the truth, he was already somewhere else. By February, I turned my attention to my father.
On a Saturday morning at the end of spring break, I stood in the upstairs hall ironing a blouse on a contraption that folded out from the wall. From my position, I could see Hugh’s back as he stood in our parents’ bedroom. Together, we watched our father sitting on the bed, tying his wing tips. I imagined his hands gloved, holding a metal tool, blood daubed with cotton by an attentive nurse.
Routine circumscribed my father’s life. Saturdays, he met my grandfather for golf. He used an old set of clubs, the bag limp and faded, its crudeness, for him, advertising his sacrifice. “My P.G.A. rabbit’s foot,” he’d say before he left, holding out the stained canvas, hoping someone would comment on its ragged condition. At the end of the match, he’d privately tip the course starter so he could return at 5:30 the next morning and practice a
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