The Mysteries of My Father’s Mind

Private Lives

Private Lives: Personal essays on the news of the world and the news of our lives.

OMAHA — Mom is doing makeup for the opera and Dad tags along. Beverly Sills has been brought in for the role of Lucia di Lammermoor and she has packed the house. Mom draws wrinkles on a tenor while Ms. Sills is called to the stage. The page is growing urgent. She’ll miss her entrance if she doesn’t show up soon. A crew member blows by and says they found her in the green room, apparently smitten to the point of distraction by a big strapping cowboy, my father. Bill Rotert, Mom would scold, later, on their drive home.

He went to the opera with her for years, and even though he dreaded it — the horrible seats, the suit and tie, the story he couldn’t understand — he never let on. Except to us kids. When they announced that they were headed to the opera, he would make a face as if he were about to undergo a spinal tap. But to her, he remained willing, enthusiastic even. It was one of the things I loved most about their love, the emotional concessions they made. I will not only go to the opera with you, but I will be happy about it, so that your joy can flow uninterrupted.

A year before he dies, Mom goes to the opera with an old friend, and I stay home with Dad. We don’t leave him alone anymore. Without Mom he’s terrified.

Mom around here somewhere? he asks. I tell him she’s at the opera. He looks at the window, then back at me. Is Mom around?

It’s a beautiful evening and I ask him to walk outside with me. We look at the yellow rose bush, the bleeding heart and the rhododendron. His face lights up. Look at that, he says, over and over. Isn’t that real pretty? He bends over the irises, as uncertain as if he were on a cliff, leaning out to retrieve a balloon. Did you see this one here? he asks.

Photo
Credit Rachel Levit

When he was well, and we kids would show him something interesting or beautiful, his famous question was always, What does it do? And we would say, Oh Dad, it doesn’t do anything! It’s just beautiful.

Now he is as intoxicated by this old garden as someone who has never seen a flower in his life. He doesn’t lock up in the face of beauty. He doesn’t repeat, get stuck in a loop. He doesn’t ask where he is. Sometimes I think, if I could always have beauty on hand for him, he might be O.K.

I understand getting stuck. Lately I’ve been unable to sleep. I’m sober but I don’t feel like being sober anymore, doing the work of it. Nor do I feel like doing the work of being an addict. I circle around this neural cage for hours.

I can’t know what his mind feels like, but I keep trying to understand how it operates. I’ve seen images of brains with Alzheimer’s — the frazzled neurons, the moth-eaten hemispheres — and I can’t imagine trying to think, react and remember in this decimated geography.

Beauty pulls him into a brand new place. Beauty doesn’t require you to remember; it doesn’t even require you to be you.

We walk around the house to the front and I show him the peonies, pink and white, obscenely luscious. He looks at them and nods. He looks out at the street, at the cars speeding by. He looks over at the neighbors’ house, at a car full of young men in the driveway, with their windows down, the bass so loud it rattles our screen door. I show him the hydrangea. He nods without looking at it. I’m losing him, I can tell. Let’s sit down, I say. He does, tentatively, still the reluctant good sport. He and Mom have sat on this porch for decades, but without her, every move he makes, even this, appears foreign and halting. The chair is uncomfortable to him; he sits awkwardly on the edge. He looks at the men in the driveway next door, he looks at the traffic moving too fast. He is at the opera and he doesn’t understand the story.

I point to the huge American chestnut in our front yard and tell him there used to be a swing on that branch, that it had been my favorite place, that he had hung it there. He looks up at the branch. I expect, he says, as though it sounds like a reasonable, fatherly thing to do.

He tests his memory more against probability than against the actual contents of his mind. The question is no longer whether he remembers, but whether something seems plausible.

Have you been inside? he asks.

I look at him and try to think fast. There are answers that comfort and answers that increase his confusion. I’m aware I’m taking too much time. Yes, I say.

Have they kept the place up? he asks, interested.

Yes. It’s great, I tell him. Lots of room. Woodwork. I suddenly run out of things to say.

You know anything about the people who live here?

My routine strategy is to go along with whatever narrative he’s stumbled upon, but there comes a point when that tactic can create a new knot of confusion.

You live here, I tell him. With Mom.

He looks at me as if I haven’t yet answered the question.

You’ve been here, let’s see, 32 years. The tone I have chosen is: Isn’t that an interesting fact! I’m careful to siphon out any bit of surprise, anything that smacks of you-should-know-this. I know he absorbs tone if not information. My father’s sense of safety, in this moment, rests on my ability to absorb my sadness, my surprise, and sound as if everything is fine.

Have you been inside? he asks again.

When he was well, his brain ticked along incessantly, always hooked into a problem, real or invented. On holidays, when even Dad was required to go to church, he would sit there and count things — rafters, fixtures, tiles, pews, statues, people — and on the walk home give a full accounting. Mom would listen to him, smile, and then raise her eyebrows at us kids, as if to say, Well, isn’t that impressive.

I don’t recognize his mind now. I don’t know where it goes, how it works — but I have to try to figure it out. So that I can help him feel peace. So that I can help us both.

He wakes up in the middle of the night and wants to go home. It’s his greatest desire, day after day: to go home. It’s no comfort that he is home. He can’t trust this because what he sees around him no longer corresponds to his memories. Home is certainty, a fixed point where, in the brutal tide of entropy, nothing changes. Without memory, there is no home.

At the end of my drinking, I longed for home and felt it nowhere because I had no home inside myself. The only certainty I had then was that I could not stop drinking when I started. I could dance, sing, have sex. And I could count on the holes in my memory the next day. I lay in bed, aching and parched, with the terrible awareness that whole hours had slid into these black holes like rainwater into the gutter. And all the answers I wanted went the way of the hours. Where did I leave my car? What happened last night?

The cat greets us at the door. Hey kitty, Dad says, and I feel a small flood of relief. I find a nature program on television and we sit down to watch. I need a break. He loves the vibrant green leaf filling the screen and he loves the little green worm that the leaf has trapped with its invisible, sticky hairs.

We’ve watched programs like this together for as long as I can remember, me with equal parts fascination and terror. For every gazelle leaping expertly across a plain, there’s a weak one getting picked off by a lion. When I got upset, Dad would say, It’s just nature, Bec. Nature’s a bitch. This was his version of comfort. I know he believed that if I could master my emotional responses, I could do anything. Instead I showed great promise for being overly sensitive, prone to weeping. Nothing like him.

Now we are watching a slow-moving water buffalo surrounded by Komodo dragons. They are circling in. It’s hard to tell if the water buffalo is clueless, paralyzed or indifferent to what’s coming. The four dragons wait, watch, advance with fluid precision.

Just as the water buffalo is about to get the business, as Dad would say, he turns to me, perhaps to deliver the nature-is-a-bitch lesson again. Instead he says, You know anything about the people who live here?

I don’t, I tell him. I used to.


Rebecca Rotert is the author of the novel “Last Night at the Blue Angel.”