Top Down by Jim Lehrer

former Van Buren mansion. Marti lost the race and then punched the kid in the stomach when he tried to kiss her as “a first-place trophy.”
    Marti stopped the Pontiac now at the traffic light. There were a few stores, a bank, a couple of cafés, the city hall, and the library radiating for a block in the four directions of the intersection. All were lit up with lights and holiday decorations.
    Then she gunned the big wagon and resumed her rat-tat-tat talk.
    “I was in this car. My mother was driving me from the airport just like I’m doing with you now. Just the two of us. ‘Hold your breath, Marti, while I show you something,’ she said. Nothing else was said for the next few blocks until she swung onto a major blacktop road, drove for a few hundred feet, and then turned off abruptly into a driveway and stopped.
    “ ‘How do you like it?’ That’s what she asked me, Jack. ‘How do you like it?’ ”
    Marti said she could not see what there was to like. Through the darkening gray atmosphere there stood a modest, one-story faded cream-colored wooden house set back from the road fifteen yards or so.
    “I had no idea what was going on, what she was talking about. ‘Welcome to our new home. The treatment just wasn’t working for your father in Singapore, Marti. We just closed on it,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell you that before. But he needs very special care that is only available here with a particular doctor.’ ”
    Marti said she looked at the house. It didn’t have a single Christmas light or any other decoration. No lights of any other kind were on, either.
    “Mom said there’s a doctor—a psychiatrist—in Boston who is an expert on Dad’s kind of disorder. His name is Reynolds. He believes it may be possible for my dad to make real progress. He has some theories that he’s working on. He has already been here once to see Dad and is coming back this afternoon. Maybe Dad will be going into a hospital in Boston soon.”
    Marti then explained to me some of the chronology of what had been happening. She said her mother had called her from Singapore in mid-November to report with alarm that her dad was getting much worse. A few days later Marti happened to see the story in the Philadelphia newspaper about the press club panel that led to her calling me.
    “After she showed me the house, Mom warned me about what I was going to actually see when I saw Dad this time. She said, ‘It may be all in his head but it’s affecting his body like a regular disease. You will see … he’s not doing well at all. Not physically
or
mentally.’ ”
    Still in the car, Marti told me to look over at another of Kinderhook’s Van Buren landmarks—one of the few she knew.
    “That’s Lindenwald, the old Van Buren place. The one I was telling you about. The one with the tower.” I saw the tower with the house, which looked huge, old, cold, and neglected.
    Marti stopped the car in the driveway of Lindenwald and finished the story of her arrival in Kinderhook.
    “We got to the house where my grandmother and the family lived, where Dad was waiting for me. I dumped my only piece of baggage and raced as fast as I could into the sitting room.
    “ ‘Dad, hi …’ And I stopped talking and running. I had to choke down a scream of horror.
    “There in a chaise lounge a couple of yards away was a shriveled-up shadow of a man laid out under a blanket with his eyes closed. On his head was the dark brown snap-brimmed felt ‘agent’s hat’ he always wore in public when on duty. I looked immediately for a lobotomy scar. There was none. Thank the good Lord. That was the only relief I felt.
    “He seemed to move slightly to the sound of my cry and barely opened his eyes. He reminded me of the pictures I had seen of people who had just been released from Nazi concentration camps.
    “ ‘Is that you, sweetheart?’ He said it in a barely audible whisper.
Sweetheart
. That was what he had always called me. I was