father on the brow. Squeezing his hand, she said, “I’ll be back up after class, Johnny.”
One nun had the temerity of asking my mother if her husband desired a priest to give the last rights?”
“The last rights.” She smirked. “The last rights. Only if he can give it to him in a shot glass,” she replied. I witnessed this from the foot of my father’s hospital bed.
Then my mother took Brent and me back to Immaculate Heart of Mary grade and junior high school, which sat lying beneath the very hill where the hospital perched and John Richards, Sr., lay fighting for his life. Brent and I were still not cognizant of exactly what death entailed. Like a bolt of lightning, it had never struck close to us.
Then she drove back to Riverton High School, to her waiting class, her pupils expecting her to explain the numeric subtleties of differential equations. It was the first week of November. The wisp of a weak winter storm had just blown through the valley the day before. The snow that fell the day before had merely kissed the earth, much like a mother kissing the brow of her infant. None of it remained, though the sun was now obscured by clouds.
To our surprise – a surprise as profound as finding out that there was no Santa Claus – Brent and I were amazed when he pulled out of his nose dive that November. The third day he was in the hospital, his temperature came down, he quit complaining to the nurses of abdominal pain and he asked for something to eat. Normally, children were not allowed in the hospital to see patients. When the child’s parent was about to die, or there was some other equally dramatic and disastrous situation looming, the nuns would allow the patient’s children or other relatives into the patient’s room. Because my father’s condition was so precarious when he was first admitted, the Sisters of Charity, the nuns whose Order ran the hospital, let Brent and me see our father. We were standing there next to the bed, my father looking like he had been out trick-or-treating with us, his hair mussed, his face unshaved, his eyes still like a carved out pumpkin’s, wearing a hospital gown, when Dr. Reed came in with my mom. My father was sitting on the edge of the bed, eating something that looked like mashed potatoes; and Reed, examining my father like he’d lost a pitched engagement that had just transpired, singly saying, “Harrumph.” There was no small irony in Reed’s triumph, for he was known particularly like his martinis at the lounge in the Bookcliff Country Club. My father spent almost two more weeks in the hospital before being discharged. Just where she found the money for the hospital and Dr. Reed’s bills, I have no idea. During all of this, my mother held the fort back at the house, keeping both me and my brother clothed and fed, while making mortgage payments on the house and instructing. Not a day did she miss teaching at Riverton high school. The only clue to the stress she was under at the time was that she was particularly hard on any of her students who failed to do the homework assigned them. Not even a missive from the Pope would have excused the miscreant. Years later I learned from my mother that she had even consulted her parents. She informed them about dad’s problems with the bottle, about the appalling condition of their marriage. “I want a divorce,” she told them. But being devout Catholics, they just consoled her, telling her of the sanctity of the sacrament of marriage, telling her to last it out, telling her to stick by the man she married. Looking back on it now, it was all a horrific mistake. Things would have been so different for all of us had the Catholic Faith not had such a hold on my mother. How she must have suffered keeping that marriage going.
Father had one more bout of hepatitis to start the new year, then a minor one in February. The Ides of March were his downfall, though. He went on a particularly long bender and was not seen by any of us, mother, Brent or me. Then one night as sleet was falling forming a thin layer of ice crystals in the lawn, and glazing the streets, he showed up on the porch. It was at the front door that he appeared, and he appeared almost like a vagrant, in soiled denims and wool shirt, his ball cap in his hands. His yellow eyes looking like those of a pumpkin, knocking once on the front door and then entering. My mother greeted him with no undue concern. “Rebecca,” he said. “It’s my stomach again.”
As if he was a child, she put the back of her hand on his forehead. “You’ve got a fever now, Johnny.” He walked with a strange gait, each step being light as though he might crush something with each footfall. He must have made that walk from the Randolph House to ours, a mile or so, in tremendous pain. With each step, he groaned and held his swollen belly. Bacteria had taken the high ground again in his abdomen. There were rapidly melting snow crystals on the shoulders of his woolen coat, for a wet snow was falling in still air just out the door.
“Baby,” he said to my mother. “I’ve got this horrible gut ache.”
“You do?” she asked matter-of-factly. With our help, she settled him into the passenger seat of the Ford LTD station wagon. He slipped and fell before he got into the passenger side of the station wagon. Before proceeding to the hospital, she gave us strict instructions on how much longer the chicken pot pies needed to be heated in the oven, and then warned us that our homework better be done by the time she returned. She didn’t return until about midnight, long past our bedtime. The sleet had turned to wet snow that was only gathering on the lawns and in the hedges in front of the house.
“Pray for your father,” she said as she readied us for bed. “Your father has another bout of peritonitis.” Sighing, she was exhausted; and she had to teach the next day. Realizing that was too complicated for us to understand, she reiterated, “Your father has another infection in his abdomen.” Then, before she went to bed, she did something she never did normally: she took a shower. It was as though she was trying to wash something tangible from her husband off.
The following day, Sister Charles Marie McCallister, the principal at Immaculate Heart of Mary Junior High School, called us into her office. The only time we had been in her office before was to be disciplined. She stood up when Brent and I came in. She came around her desk and stood in front of us, as erect as a survey rod. She tousled Brent’s hair.
“You know Brent, you’re the spitting image of your father.” She brushed the hair back from his forehead. She paused and didn’t say anything for several moments. “You’re father’s quite ill,” she said. Then she looked at the floor, and then she looked at the two of us. The three of us stood there mutely for at least a minute as though we were offering up a prayer. But we weren’t praying. Brent and I shuffled our feet and waited for sister to say something.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?” I blurted out.
She nodded. “The Lord has taken him away.” Neither crying, nor talking in any manner, we waited silently for our mother to pick us up as we waited outside Sister Charles Marie’s office. We waited outside her office until mother picked us up in the station wagon. We had to wait while she made the appropriate arrangements for our father.
Despite the mortician’s dark art, my father looked to be sixty as he lay in the casket, though I knew him to not yet be forty-four. In his casket, he looked as yellow and insubstancial as the Straw Man in the Wizard of Oz. Most in attendance at the rosary, the night before the funeral, were coworkers of my mother’s at Rivertown High School. For all my father’s good-time friends, not one was there. I can still remember the tinkling of the beads and the mumbling of the prayers, barely audible, as they performed the rosary. Nor were they there the next day for the funeral. Still, I had a hard time believing he was dead. At any moment I expected him to spring up and have one last round. I guess the joke was on me. Outside the wind tore at the trees, tugging at the bare limbs like fish lines playing out with a fresh catch. But though one of winter’s last fronts was coming through, the skies were clear. There was no moon. Orion and the Big Dipper glimmered. My maternal uncle, William Beresford, came over and put a hand on my shoulder. He was the older of my mother’s two brothers. “You’ve got to pick up where your dad left off. That won’t always be easy.” My other uncle, Joe, had joined
