The Subway Stops at Bryant Park, page 3
“How was camp today?” Omeer asked.
“Ok,” the boy said, not looking at him.
“Would you like to eat your dinner down here behind the desk with me?” He hadn’t asked him to do that since the slap, over a month ago. He hadn’t apologized either, although he was beside himself with complicated regret.
“Ok,” said the boy, “but I have to practice first,” and it was agreed that he’d bring his plate down with him after practicing and they would sit together, hidden behind the marble front desk while the boy ate.
“Have you ever tasted mango?” his father asked him when he came down. It was dark outside now, and the boy said he hadn’t. “I have some left over from my lunch. It’s lovely.”
The boy took a bite and closed his eyes. “It tastes like a pine tree,” he said, and his father was proud of him for that. It sounded like poetry to Omeer, like something a smart boy would say.
There were people coming and going, and Omeer had to get up several times to let them in or out. He turned the little TV on for the boy to watch, with the sound turned way down, but the boy turned it off again and read his book that he had carried down under his dinner plate.
When Omeer sat down again, the boy said, “You look different,” and smiled a little at his father. Omeer remembered with shame slapping the boy’s soft, round cheek.
He said to the boy, “Don’t worry about me, ok? Soon you will be better than I am, and remember that I want that for you. I want you to be better than me.” He looked at his boy, at his shiny black hair, at his face turned up to Omeer. “You mustn’t feel bad when you surpass me.” The boy might not understand now, thought Omeer, but he’d remember and understand later, maybe. The boy shrugged and, folding down the page of his book, turned the TV on so that a picture sprang up. “I look different to you?” Omeer asked him.
“Your eyes or something,” the boy said, staring at the TV screen. He turned to look at his father for a moment. “Your eyes don’t look so tired.” He turned back to the television.
A woman in a large hat came to the door and asked to be announced to Mrs. Jacobs on the seventh floor, but Mrs. Jacobs didn’t answer Omeer’s call.
“Jesus Christ,” the woman in the hat said, sighing deeply and staring off above Omeer’s head. “So now what am I supposed to do?”
“I’m terribly sorry,” said Omeer, aware that he was apologizing to this woman who meant nothing to him and that he had not apologized to his son. He felt the boy watching and wondered how his boy would come, finally, to think about his father.
“I am truly sorry,” Omeer said to the woman. He bowed a little to show how sorry he was, but still she looked angry and wasn’t turning to leave.
She seemed like tangible evidence that his currency was continuing its devaluative slide. Omeer had failed his wife, had slapped his son, had gotten himself in debt for nothing, and now he stood apologizing to strangers. His wife only smiled at him in her sleep now, and he was not allowed to share her bed anymore.
Mrs. Jacobs from the seventh floor came in the front door finally and calmed the woman with the hat down, leading her out into the park. He could hear the woman in the hat say, “Jesus Christ,” and he heard Mrs. Jacobs say, “It’s not his fault, Mary! God!” She rolled her eyes conspiratorially over her shoulder at Omeer, and he smiled, relieved.
The boy pretended to be watching TV, but Omeer knew he had witnessed the small disturbance and his father’s ineffectiveness.
“What a lucky man I am,” Omeer said, tears standing up in his eyes. This was as close as he could come to saying that he was sorry, for the slap, the debt, his position in the world, for being unloved by the boy’s mother. He put his hand on the boy’s shoulder, and the boy allowed it to stay there a moment before shrugging it off.
The piano music continued into the fall. The woman with the purses wrapped in Saran Wrap continued to come every Tuesday, and Omeer wondered where she would go for the winter. Who would understand that, although once her shoes had been on the wrong foot, she deserved a place to sit on a Tuesday afternoon to feel like she was not alone?
His Samoan came only once in September and she was with a friend, a co-worker maybe. Omeer was so happy to see her that he jumped up without thinking and tipped his little folding chair over. He righted it and fled the park, his face warm, tremendously glad to have seen her.
He saw her for the last time in October when she showed up for the final piano performance of the year. She had on a long sweater that came below her knees over her tangerine-colored Spandex outfit. She was pushing a wheelchair with an old man in it. The man was unmoving and listing sharply to one side. The Samoan’s robustness and polish made the man in the wheelchair look chalky and frail like a dried white leaf.
She sat down in a chair just a few tables over from Omeer, and he could hear her talking softly to the man. She took care of him, Omeer realized. This was her job. The pianist came out, a jacket on against the chilly October afternoon. It was a Tuesday, Omeer knew, because the Saran Wrap lady was there, placing her purses on chairs like she was having a tea party and each purse was a guest. His Samoan pulled a sleeve of Oreos from her purse and put one in the old man’s hand, pushing his fingers together so he wouldn’t drop it. She whispered loudly in his ear, “It’s a cookie. You can eat it.”
She stood up behind him and patted down his hair with her colossal hand very gently, smiling down on him. The music started. It was classical, gorgeous, complicated music. It felt like a party. For a moment Omeer enjoyed his place in the park and forgot his debt, the way he embarrassed his son, his wife’s dismissiveness, the board president’s complaints. He felt these people in the park, the man pushing the garbage can and catching every fallen leaf, the woman with the wrapped purses, these were his friends too or, if not his friends exactly, well, they shared something.
His Samoan was tapping on the old man’s shoulder, swaying to the music. Omeer could see her enormous rounded calves like half-melons beneath her long sweater. He could see his building just beyond her, and a wedding party emerging from the hotel next door to it. They served coffee there for $9 a cup. He had asked the hotel’s doorman. Nine dollars a cup. Imagine that, and people paid it.
The two men who had cleaned out the coins from the fountain earlier were there, whispering to each other, their heads close together, laughing, leaning on their brooms. The wind was in the piano player’s hair and made his smile look like it hung under a white cloud. There was a mother with her child asleep in its stroller, completely limp, while the mother texted on her phone to someone who was far away.
Omeer thought of those people in the paper who had lowered the park decades before. They had been visionaries. They had. As everything fell away, his savings, his marriage, his hair, Omeer knew he was still tremendously lucky. Lowering the park had, despite reason and cost and common sense, made the park into a palace, Omeer’s palace. Here he sat amidst the swirling leaves, knowing that he would be back in spring, right here to listen to the music with his companions, the park like a cradle, rocking them all together. Incredible.
Sky View Haven
Dad at eighty-five was pretty far gone already, even before he fell down the stairs with such vigor that he ripped the banister right out of the floor. He lay at the bottom of the stairs while Mom tried to talk him into letting her call an ambulance. “What for?” he asked her. “Let’s just lie here a while, shall we?” He loved spending time with my mother.
She called me from the emergency room. I could hear Dad in the background singing something operatic, Gilbert and Sullivan maybe. “Can you hear him?” she asked. “They gave him some joy juice and he’s singing his heart out.”
I heard a nurse say to my mother, “He has a nice voice.”
And Mom replied, “Yes, well, he was an announcer, you know, on the radio.” I could picture him in his hospital gown, with one arm in the air for dramatic effect.
“He’s fine mostly,” she said to me, “he just can’t stand on his own, so they’re sending him to a nursing home for a few days, to Sky View Haven for rehab.”
“How are you?” I asked Mom, who was eighty herself and skinny as a sparrow.
“I’m fine,” she said, “I wish they’d give me some joy juice. Oh, one other thing. They’ve screwed up his meds and he’s hallucinating just the tiniest bit.”
“He’s hallucinating?”
She paused, sniffled a little and lowered her voice. “He thinks I’m a Nazi,” she said.
Dad was singing loudly in the background, then stopped.
Mom said, “Hold on,” and put her hand over the phone. I heard her say, “Well, that’s not very nice.”
Then I heard him say, “You’re right, of course you’re right. I know you’re not.”
“He just apologized,” she said to me, “for calling me a Nazi again, but listen, you have to visit him this weekend, starting Friday. He’s very disoriented and I’m out of town with Aunt Flo for her hysterectomy.” Dad said something I couldn’t hear and Mom snapped at him, “Oh for Christ’s sake, I am NOT.” Then to me she added, “Friday, Saturday and Sunday, ok? Stay at our house so you don’t have that long drive.”
• • • •
I left home late enough to miss rush hour traffic over the Tappan Zee Bridge, stopping for a pedicure to kill time. I handed the girl a bottle of Jelly Apple Red polish as though I were headed for a beach vacation instead of to a nursing home. Grabbing a stack of People magazines, I fell asleep in the massage chair without reading them while she did my toes.
At my parents’ house, I dropped off my bags and picked up the copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that Dad and I had been reading. Dad used to read to me at night before bed, but my childhood ritual had flipped. Dad couldn’t read to himself anymore, could hardly hold a book or focus his eyes, so I read to him, looking up often to see if he understood, to see if he was still awake. As he was already diminished before the fall, I didn’t know what to expect now that he was in a nursing home hallucinating. How much worse could he be?
Sky View Haven, a nursing home for the well-heeled of Westchester County, sits perched on a cliff overlooking the Hudson River, a precarious spot, I thought, for old people who tend to fall off things regularly and with gusto. In the lobby they had a floor-to-ceiling birdcage filled with a dozen Rainbow Finches the pastel colors of Jordan almonds. They preened and perched and feathered their tiny nests while I waited for the elevator, trying not to make eye contact with the woman standing next to me who smelled of Lysol. I tapped on the glass of the cage and noticed how full their food bowls were, how the bottom of their cage was covered with empty seed hulls. It was a plentiful, if trapped, life they led. Up on the fifth floor, the doors opened onto a panoramic view of the Hudson becoming more distinct as the sun rose above the pale blue hills and burned away the haze.
Next to the elevator was a woman in a wheelchair. Her face came to a point at the tip of her nose and she held a stuffed dog with large, floppy ears. She petted it and whispered to it, her lips moving silently. She had on a bright red sweatshirt with a reindeer on the front. I said, “Hello,” which caused her to whisper furiously to her stuffed dog, and then rub his ears to calm him down.
When I got to Dad’s room, he was agitated. “You’re here, thank God. They were supposed to take me to the nursing home.”
“You’re here, Dad. You’re in the nursing home.” A little green teddy bear sat on his nightstand wrapped in cellophane. It had a festive Mylar balloon tied to its paw, which read, “Welcome to Sky View Haven” followed by an exclamation point that seemed to gild the lily.
“No,” he said, “they were supposed to take me to the nursing home.” He was staring into the middle distance, and I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted his leg. His fingers moved across the top of the sheet, back and forth like he was playing the piano. “They don’t know what they’re doing. I was supposed to go to the nursing home.” His forehead felt warm to me and his toes, which stuck out from the bottom of the sheet, looked bony and enormously vulnerable.
I tried to get him to understand and finally just said, “We’re going to the nursing home later,” and he calmed down.
“You’re mother’s a Nazi,” he said, finally, shaking his head in disgust.
“I heard.”
“And there is a Croat following me.” He pronounced it Kro-At.
“A Croat?” I asked, surprised.
“A dirty Croat,” he said, emphasizing the word “dirty.”
“Duly noted,” I said. We sat there for a while, him silently worrying about his Croat, me wondering when he had developed a disdain for Croatian people. I tried to open the window for some fresh air, but it had been soldered shut.
A little later the aide lifted Dad into a wheelchair, and I rolled him down the hall to the common area, where the giant TV was blaring the local weather. Dad suddenly froze and grabbed my hand. “That’s him,” he said out of the side of his mouth, too loud as always. “That’s the dirty Croat.” He pointed with his elbow at a guy in a wheelchair who was propelling himself around the room using his feet. The guy spotted us and hurtled our way. Dad squeezed my hand.
“This,” the Croat said, pointing at my dad, “is a wonderful man.” My dad refused to even look in his direction. “Is he your father?” he asked me, his accent thick. I nodded. “Your father is a great man,” he said, smiling broadly so that the wide spaces between every single tooth in his mouth were visible.
Dad whispered loudly and with great indignation, “Take me back to my room right now.” As soon as we got into the hallway, he said, “He’s not even supposed to be here. Did you see that? Did you?”
“I sure did see that,” I said, hoping the bad meds would leach away soon. I wanted a normal conversation with my father.
That evening, after the aide got Dad into his pajamas, we read a few pages of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Dad began to snore softly and I put the book down. “Don’t stop,” he whispered, half asleep. “How will they know where to find me?”
“How will who know where to find you?” I pushed a wisp of white hair off of his forehead but he just asked the same question again. “I’ll tell them where you are,” I said, “I’ll leave them a note.” He used to leave notes by my bed when he came home too late to read to me. They said things like, “I was here but didn’t want to wake you.”
He began to snore again, and I whispered, “Dad?” I felt all roiled up and rotten, filled with regret over everything on earth. I wanted to say something to him, but didn’t know what, so I gripped the rail on the bottom of the bed and whispered as quietly as possible, so as not to wake him, “I’m sorry.”
“You should be,” he said, his eyes closed, his snoring resuming again almost immediately.
The woman in the red sweatshirt with the reindeer on it was still by the elevator when I left. She was eating ice cream with a little plastic spoon and trying to feed it to her stuffed dog. I told her, “Good night,” and she leaned over to whisper to her dog, keeping an eye on me.
Back at my mother’s house, I showered for almost an hour, watching the soapy water swirl around my Jelly Apple Red toenails.
There was leftover Chinese in the fridge, which I ate in my pajamas, my hair wet from the shower. I tried to parse why I felt so awful, besides the obvious. There was a lot I hadn’t accomplished, and it sickened me to think of it. I put my fork down. He would never know if I finally had kids, for instance. He’d be left with this unfinished version of me that I hoped, one day, might be so much more.
• • • •
On Saturday, I got to Sky View in time for lunch. All of the patients had been wheeled into the TV room. They had bibs around their necks, and CNN was on so loudly that no one even tried to talk. Nurses in candy-colored scrubs, the shades of the Rainbow Finches in the lobby, flitted around the room, cheerfully doling out medication. The sun poured in the window and reflected brightly off of the river below. I stood in the doorway, and watched. The patients looked like white-haired birds, perched in their wheelchairs, their mouths wide open, waiting for food and pills to be dropped in.
I spotted the dirty Croat across the room and we waved at each other. The lady with the dog was in red again, and sat at one of the tables moving her lips silently. As I walked past, she grabbed my sleeve. I looked down and she was grinning at my red coat. “Hello,” I said. She let go and leaned over her lunch tray to whisper something to her milk carton.
“Thank God you’re here,” my dad said. “They’re giving me the wrong food. I specifically signed up for chicken and mashed potatoes.” He pointed at the tray in front of him with disgust. “This is all wrong.”
“It looks like chicken and mashed potatoes to me, Dad.”
“It’s the wrong order,” he insisted so I picked up the tray and carried it over to the nurse’s station and said hello to the woman in pink who was standing there. I read her name tag.
“Hi Janice,” I said, “I’m pretending to get my father a different meal.”
“Gotcha,” she said, winking at me.
I waited a minute and then brought the tray back to Dad. “Here’s the right meal,” I said. “It’s all straightened out.”
“Thank God you’re here,” he said, and dug in. I pulled over a chair and tried not to take in the calamity of him eating, his extended tongue, the worn-down, yellowed cores of his teeth, the food falling in thick, gelatinous drops on his terry cloth bib.
“Where’s Mom?” he asked.
“She’s with Aunt Flo for the weekend,” I said, “Remember? Aunt Flo’s getting a hysterectomy?”
Dad looked confused. “Is Mom ever coming back?” he asked, with a sudden, deep sadness in his eyes. He put his fork down, waiting to hear.
