grieved me, even at that young age. How she must have tired of raising Brent and me; how tired she must be of taking care of father; how tired she must of become of teaching. I also think that she wanted Brent and me to see how we’d end up if we became too enamored of the bottle. Brent’s eyes widened as he witnessed our father soil himself. Then my mom came up the stairs and into the master bedroom where we all stood. She pushed the two of us out the door into the hallway, saying, “Go do your homework.” Like disoriented and disappointed footmen waiting upon their besotted master, we retreated. We retreated to the first floor where I had my Latin to conjugate and Brent had his geography to piece together. Both of us studied at our homework, afraid to look at each other, as we heard our mother mopping up the soiled carpet with wet rags, directly above our heads. Then we could hear her try to wake our father, but knowing it was to no avail, she laid him on his side, so he would not aspirate anything he vomited. Then Brent said, ”Perhaps we should help her.”
I looked over at my younger brother. “Leave her be. She’d only get mad. In about an hour, a taxi pulled up. My father was sober enough to stumble into the taxi, which would deliver him to the Randolph House where he could sleep it off. She grew where she knew all the taxi drivers by their first name; they, on their part, knew exactly where they were going when she called them.
During the week, when he was relatively sober, father would sip Red Label throughout the day, in the back of the store by his stacks of shoes, but almost always remaining just this side of inebriation. Were he obviously drunk, it would be the Randolph House for my father. No farther than the threshold would she let him in the house when he was in this state. He would sit on the stoop as she packed his Gladstone, and waited for the taxi.
Missing work, my father would sip Johnny Walker at the Western Slope Lounge, peeling the label from the bottle as much as one would the label from a beer bottle. In his escape from reality with the bottle, he would often be joined by two or three other buddies. My father would drink for a few days, staying at the Randolph House at night until he then returned to the house on Main Street when his sea legs were back and his mind was clear. When he had withdrawn from the heavy drinking sufficiently, he’d return to the Mercantile Emporium where he’d line up the shoes as though they were toy soldiers. Because his superior, Greg McCue, was also one of his drinking buddies, he and the rest of the staff, would make excuse after excuse for his absence.
Finally, before my father’s drinking gave out, his liver did. It was something that shouldn’t have surprised any of us who knew him. Still, it did. In the end, his liver could not outlast the Johnny Walker. But he gave it his best shot. He was like a fighter who had gone too many rounds fighting a boxer who far outclassed him. Before his body gave out, father was spending more time at The Western Slope Lounge and the Randolph House than he was at the family house on Eighth and Main. Making no excuses for his behaviour, he would suddenly appear at the door, with his tail between his legs. One night, when he had too many, he argued with Rebecca about his drinking, she would have none of it. “John,” she told him. “It’s a weakness of character. You hear me. It’s not the stars that are responsible for your drinking. It’s no more than a weakness in your character.” I was not yet in junior high.
So the pas de deux continued.
As with the passing of the years, each succeeding cycle became shorter than the previous one. With time, my father developed a paunch, the glimmer was gone from his eyes, crinkles formed in his forehead like the creases in a bed sheet.
Then, one night he showed up at the door of the house, all sheets to the wind, but feeling rough, really rough. That was the way he put it to mother. Dr. Reed, the family doctor, diagnosed alcoholic hepatitis. Reed placed him in the medical ward, sedating him heavily; all the while lecturing him at length as he examined him about the pernicious and the inevitable nature of the medical sequelae of consuming alcohol at the rate he was. For a month or two, it seemed to work. He abstained from the bottle and took the vitamins that my mother left out for him on the breakfast table. But then, like the inexorable whirling of the stars in the firmament above, the drinking began anew. After another one or two cycles of drinking, my father developed hepatitis again. Abrupt about his drinking, Reed seemed to have little time for those who did not follow his homilies when it came to the rapacity of alcohol. Reed gave him sedatives to keep the miseries of withdrawal at bay. But it invested her much more than it invested Dr. Reed. Today, the medical profession regards alcoholism as a disease. Both Dr. Reed and Rebecca Beresford Richards ascribed my father’s drinking to some defect in his makeup, an erosion of his character. Standing next to my father in his hospital bed, my mother listened to Dr. Reed lecture my father about his drinking, “Just buck up John. Due your duty to your family and to your religion.” I truly wanted a father, but I had no idea what a real one was.
While taking a toll on his body, the alcohol aged him. It made him senescent long before his time. His hair turned prematurely grey when he was barely forty; he shuffled like a man twice his age; he forgot things the way a grandparent would. But still he continued to drink. Still he continued to be admitted to the medical ward of St. Mary’s for alcohol-induced hepatitis. Over the years, his liver enzymes rose and fell, rising and falling as much as a mercury in a thermometer hanging by the door registering the tempestuous seasons of the high Southwestern Desert.
Over the next year or so, the hepatitis inevitably developed into cirrhosis. When asked to explain what cirrhosis was, Rebecca Richards told Brent and me that father’s alcoholism had permanently injured his liver. Concisely, his continued indulgence changed my father’s liver into a shrivelled and scarred organ, hardly any use to him. Seeking further explanation about cirrhosis, mother directed me to ask one of the nuns at school. So, I asked Sister Mary Arthel, my seventh grade teacher, asking her what it meant. She just said, “It means the liver is shutting down.” She didn’t realize that I was asking in regards to my father’s condition. “Just what does the liver do?” I asked her. She told me that all she knew was that it metabolized many of the toxins in our body. It was also the main metabolic organ of the body. I left from our brief talk hardly the wiser. That was more of an explanation than I had from either Dr. Reed or Rebecca Richards. Finally, because of the cirrhosis, his belly would fill up with fluid like a reservoir after the dam gates had been closed. Were he a woman, he’d look just about due. Were he a television character, I’d have to say he looked like a malignant ochre Michelin man. As this developed, his eyes lost their sparkle, while the whites of them turned the color of a pumpkin. It looked as though his whole body had been doused in a bath of thin, dilute curry. This while his arms and legs became like sticks.
One morning, after several nights on a binge, he showed up on the stoop of our house complaining of belly pain. At the hospital, Dr. Reed tried to delicately explain to us that he had peritonitis. When my mother asked how this had occurred, he seemed as flummoxed as a high school chemistry professor trying to explain to his high school class just what quantum mechanics exactly was. We could hardly blame him. Father was in bad shape that admission. When finally we were able to see him, he was unwashed and unshaved and his lovely Celtic hair splayed out in all directions. Picking things out of the air, he didn’t seem to know who Brent or I were, and appeared more intent on gathering things that were not there. Neither did he know what day it was, nor did he know the month. Coming and going, like acolytes in a church, the nurses hung bottles of antibiotics and vitamins, while withdrawing with partially filled plastic urinals. They, in turn with my mother, applied cool, wet wash clothes to father’s forehead. Brent and I stood there mutely, feeling ridiculous, as though we had been caught in some passion play.
I remember Dr. Reed guiding my mother outside the door, out of what he thought was our earshot, and saying, “I don’t think he’s going to make it this time, Rebecca. Hope for the best, but be prepared for the worst.” Then he moved onto the rest of his patients. He had a full house of them, not a few of them suffering from the same ills as my father, sicknesses induced from the contents of a bottle of liquor.
Easing her way between
