Elizabeth had efficiently taken control of the household chores, meals, and Mom’s care. She had let him know she would be hon-
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ored to nurse him as well. He was too weak to be proud and had gratefully accepted.
“I might as well be lying in my own bed as here,” he said. “Of course, I’ll have to take it easy.”
“Oh, you mean no heavy lifting?” I asked. “You won’t be out climbing on the roof and cleaning gutters?”
“Not right away,” he said.
“You better take it easy, mister,” I admonished, “or when I get home, you’ll have me to contend with.”
I could feel his smile through the phone line.
Chapter 29
o
Iflew into Detroit Metropolitan Airport on the morning after Thanksgiving. Michael met me in baggage claim.
“How is Dad doing?” I asked as we drove home through
a steady drizzle.
“Status quo,” Mike said in that infuriatingly opaque way of his.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
“Holding steady,” he said. “Of course, the chemo is taking its toll.”
“How?”
He hesitated as if considering where to begin, then simply said, “Well, you’ll see.”
As I walked in from the garage to the laundry room, I plucked from the recesses of my memory one of the corny family expressions I had grown up hearing whenever a close friend or relative arrived. “Hey, hey,” I called out. “Look what the dog dragged in!”
“Ruth! He’s home!” I heard my father’s voice from the next
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room. After a long moment, longer than I had expected, he came around the corner, and I sucked in my breath. I barely recognized him. Dressed in pajamas and a robe, he leaned heavily on a cane as he shuffled gingerly toward me, his slippered feet not lifting off the linoleum. My always ramrod-straight, speed-walking, up-with-the-sun father was stooped over as he inched forward in a manner that can only be described as doddering. What was most shocking, though, was his face. It was as round and puffy as a beach ball, his skin stretched tight as if ready to pop. He had told me the daily steroid treatments had caused him to retain fluids and swell, but I wasn’t expecting this. I noticed his wrists and hands were just as swollen.
“John! You’re home!” he said jovially but in a voice weaker than I had known. I took his hand in both of mine and gave it the vigorous Grogan shake.
“I’m home, Dad,” I said. “It’s good to see you.”
“Well, I’m not much to look at right now,” he said, “but I’m getting along. Come on in and say hello to your mother.”
I followed behind him as he inched his way into the living room, where she sat in front of the window, her own cane across her knees. “Look who’s here, Ruthie,” he announced.
“Hi, Mom,” I said, dropping to one knee in front of her so we could be eye to eye. “It’s John.”
“Who’d you think I thought it would be,” she shot back, “the milkman?” I saw a little of the old glimmer in her eye and smiled.
“Come here and give your old ma a kiss,” she said, and I smacked my lips against her forehead and then her cheek.
“Where are Jenny and the kids?”
“Remember, Ma? I came alone this time,” I said. “You’ve got your baby all to yourself for a change.” For effect, I draped my arm over her shoulder and pretended to sit in her lap, putting no weight on her.
“Oh, what a darling baby you were,” she marveled and patted my leg.
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“And it’s a good thing,” I said, “or you would have sent me back.”
“You were my little pistol,” she said.
We made small talk about my flight and the house and all the leaves that still needed raking.
“We’re in crisis mode around here,” Dad announced. “With this darn cancer and the hospital and everything, I’ve given up on all my fall chores. I’m just letting everything go.”
“Don’t worry about that, Dad,” I said. “Reinforcements have arrived.”
My mother now slept most of the day, as many as eighteen hours out of every twenty-four, and since returning from the hospital, Dad was quickly exhausted and taking extended naps, too.
I planned to fill the quiet hours working around the place. Elizabeth, in addition to caring for both her new parents-in-law, had the inside of the house looking the best it had in years, but outside awaited a long backlog of jobs.
“There’s a new yardman in town,” I said, “and I hear he works cheap.”
Mom looked up at me with clear, green, faraway eyes and asked, “Are Jenny and the kids here?”
One missed beat. My eyes met Dad’s. “Not this time, Mom,” I said as I would another half-dozen times throughout the day.
Dad eased himself down into the chair next to me, and I asked about his swollen face and hands. He pulled up his pajama pant legs to reveal ankles that looked like something out of a circus sideshow. They were the size of clubs, with large sores and cracks marbling the skin. “It gets stretched so tight, it splits right open,”
he said. Michael had been cleaning them for him and wrapping his legs in gauze. The pain was impossible to ignore, but he did his best, offering it up, as he had with all hardships over the years, for the poor souls in purgatory.
“The worst part is my mouth,” Dad said. “It’s so dry I can hardly swallow. Everything I try to eat tastes like sawdust.” He
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opened his lips to expose a swollen, cracked tongue that looked like it should belong to a tortoise. The chemo, as Michael had hinted, was wreaking havoc on him.
A few days earlier he had been inching his way down the stairs when he fell backward on his butt. He wasn’t hurt, but he was stuck on the step, unable to pull himself back to his feet. He had to call for help, and it took both Michael and Elizabeth to haul him up. My dad, the man who as recently as a few months earlier had started each morning with sets of jumping jacks and push-ups, had lost nearly all his strength.
“I’m weak as a kitten,” he confessed.
“But just think, Dad,” I said, searching for a bright spot. “You’ve only got three more weeks to go. You’re halfway through.”
“I just hope it works,” he said.
“If you weren’t getting better, the doctors wouldn’t have let you come home,” I offered, and he nodded as if that made sense.
After lunch, both Mom and Dad went upstairs to sleep, and I headed into the yard under a leaden sky to rake leaves. When all the trash cans were filled, I climbed on the roof to clean the gutters. Dad had been fretting about his clogged gutters for weeks.
The older he got, the more obsessive he had become about the little details of his daily life, especially those that interfered with his routine. If he discovered a new box of cereal opened before the old one was finished, he would shout through the house, “Who opened the new cereal?” and continue to grumble until the old box was finally used up. While visiting him the previous summer, I had volunteered to cut the grass, and drove him crazy by circling the yard in a counterclockwise pattern when he had always—for forty-five years—gone clockwise. At least now he could stop worrying about the gutters. I saved the mucky, soggy leaves to show him all that had come out.
After a few hours of work, I ducked my head inside, but they were both still asleep, so I decided to take a walk—to the first of the twin attractions that had brought my family to Harbor
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Hills. I followed the same path I had taken every school day for eight years, from our back door to the side door of Our Lady of Refuge. The school had a large addition now, and the new church covered the soccer field, but the original buildings looked the same. The door was locked. I walked around to the front of the school, past the footba
ll field where I had played offensive guard for the Refuge Ravens, past the convent where Tommy and I had scrubbed floors, and pulled on the door. It swung open. School was out for the holiday, and the place was silent. But that smell, the permeating aroma of floor wax, chalk, and overripe bananas, with a slight undertone of stale vomit, was just as I remembered it. I walked into the classroom where Tommy had played the Fugs song and sat in a desk approximately where mine had been. I peered through the locked door into the principal’s office where we had been sent for punishment. I found my second-grade classroom, where I had embarrassed myself while fantasizing about Sister Mary Lawrence. On the teacher’s desk was a wooden ruler, and I gave it a practice swing through the air. It whistled just like I remembered them whistling in the instant before contact.
“Wow,” I said aloud to the empty room. “Forty years.”
Back home, Dad was awake and looking more rested. When I announced that I would be cooking dinner, he volunteered to keep me company. The one positive side effect of the steroids was that they made my reserved father unusually chatty and animated.
He leaned against the counter and talked my ear off as I sautéed onions and garlic. He especially enjoyed describing the cooking skills he had found late in life. When we were kids and Mom was not around to cook, Dad had only two items in his culinary repertoire: Campbell’s tomato soup, into which he would melt cubes of Swiss cheese, and fried bologna sandwiches. We kids found both indescribably delicious, which always amused my mother, whose gourmet gifts her well-fed brood mostly took for granted.
Since she had given up on cooking, Dad had taught himself to
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make stew, chili, various casseroles, and his specialty, chicken vegetable soup.
“You’ve become a regular Galloping Gourmet,” I said, and I could tell he liked the comparison even if he knew I was teasing.
“As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.”
My second day home went much like the first. We lingered at the kitchen table over breakfast, talking about everything and nothing in particular. I told Dad about my work at the newspaper and in my garden; I brought him up to date on the kids and their hobbies. He talked about projects he wanted to get to around the house and gave me updates on various neighbors I had known growing up. The Selahowskis from next door were living in Florida now and Cindy Ann, the girl who had showered me with un-requited love at the age of six, was working as a music teacher.
Tommy’s parents were also in Florida where they had been enjoying an active and healthy retirement until Mr. Cullen was diagnosed with stomach cancer, which he was fighting as only Mr.
Cullen could. Tommy, Dad had heard, was divorced and living in Phoenix, where he managed commercial properties. There were funerals to report on and moves to nursing homes. My parents were at that stage of life. For many years now, the obituaries were the section of the paper they turned to first.
When Dad went upstairs to join Mom for a nap, Michael and I put up storm windows. Then I took another walk. This time I headed to the other pole of my Harbor Hills childhood: The Outlot.
In front of the Pemberton house, which long ago had changed hands after the old man died, I paused. Right here, I thought, was where the police car had rolled up behind us. I walked a few steps onto the lawn. And here was where I dropped those two pathetic homegrown joints of mine. I looked down into the grass, half expecting to find them still hiding there.
I walked on, past where we had the Labor Day picnics and
2 6 8 • J O H N G R O G A N
bike parades, and down to The Lagoon where the Mary Ann had spent fourteen consecutive summers before being retired. As I stood on the wobbly boat dock, it came back to me, an event that even in that long-ago moment I had understood was a turning point: the final voyage on the Mary Ann. It was the last time Dad and I would ever sail together.
In 1981 I was two years out of college and working across the state at the Herald-Palladium. Even though I lived three hours away, I came home that spring, put a fresh coat of wax on the sailboat, and launched it for the season. Dad was retired by then, and I thought that if the boat were in the water he might use it.
Even in retirement, he worked too hard; I wanted him to have a leisurely pursuit. But when I returned home in August for a weekend visit, I learned he had not been out once. Honestly, he had been making excuses not to sail ever since I was old enough to take the boat out alone.
“I’m going for a sail, Dad,” I said. “Want to join me?”
“No, you go ahead,” he said. “I’ve got so much to do around here.”
“Aw, c’mon,” I beckoned. “Come with me. For old times’ sake.
Just a short one.” I persisted until he agreed.
The day was blustery but nothing we hadn’t handled before in our sturdy day sailer. I started out at the helm, steering the boat through whitecaps and spilling wind from the sails when gusts hit. Mary Ann heeled up playfully and plunged forward. Across the lake, I offered the tiller and mainsheet to Dad, who accepted them reluctantly. He had not sailed much at all for many years, and I could see he was nervous. But the old magic quickly came back to him, and I caught him grinning as he peered up into the rigging, checking his sail trim.
“We’ve had a lot of good sails on this baby,” I said, and he nodded in agreement. “Remember how you used to tell me that life was like skippering a sailboat? How you needed to pick a dot
T H E L O N G E S T T R I P H O M E • 2 6 9
on the horizon and be careful not to veer off course?” Dad smiled at his attempt to find a life lesson in the everyday.
“Small corrections,” he said. “I think that’s what I used to tell you. Life is all about small, continuous corrections.”
“At least if you don’t want to run aground,” I said.
He was opening his mouth to say something else when the big gust hit. I felt it on the back of my neck first, and then, a fraction of a second later, in the sails. All experienced sailors know what to do when a big gust hits: nose into the wind and release the sails to spill their load. Dad knew this, too, and had done it countless times. Instead, he just gripped tighter to the tiller and rope controlling the mainsail. I let the jib fly and scrambled onto the high side of the boat. Dad sat frozen, staring at the water pouring in.
Another second and he shouted: “John, take it!”
I lunged toward him.
“John! Help!” In his voice was something I had never heard before: panic.
Dad had always been the cool, collected one in our household.
When I was still in preschool, Mom knocked a can of paint off a ladder in the living room, sending it splashing over the curtains, couch, and carpet. She sank to her knees and wept. But Dad instantly leaped to the rescue, barking calm orders to each of us—“Marijo, towels! Tim, a bucket of cold water! Michael, sponges!”—and got most of it up before it stained. Dad was always at his best in a crisis. He had always been the shepherd of his flock, the one we all relied on to fix any problem, right any wrong.
Not on this day. As the boat tipped beyond the point of no return, I realized our roles had finally reversed. He was the lamb now, and I the protector. Suddenly his heart attack from a few years earlier loomed large before me, as did two of the doctor’s stern warnings: avoid stressful situations and avoid shocks to the
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body, such as a sudden plunge into cold water. An electrifying surge of adrenaline coursed through me.
I grabbed the tiller, but it was too late. Mary Ann was already dropping onto her side, her cockpit filling, her mast and sails settling onto the lake’s surface. We both flopped into the water. Terror flashed in my father’s eyes.
“It’s okay, Dad,” I said. “We’re okay. See, everything’s okay.”
I got him into a life jacket and helped him straddle the gunwale sticking out of the water. Then I swam around the boat, gathering up paddles and
seat cushions.
“We’ll have this puppy back up in no time,” I called to him.
In fourteen years of sailing, it was the first time either of us had capsized. “We’re fine, Dad. Just a little wet.”
And within a few moments, he was fine again, his calm, steady demeanor back. “Guess I’m a little rusty,” he said sheepishly.
“That was one big gust,” I said. “I didn’t see it coming, either.”
And with that, I stood on the centerboard, gripped the gunwale, and rocked backward until the boat pulled upright again. Dad clung to the side as I bailed, and soon enough we had drifted onto a sandbar where we could stand and Dad could easily climb back in.
“Way to go, Pops, breaking our perfect record,” I ribbed him as we tied up to the dock.
“Quite a day,” Dad said.
“Quite a day,” I agreed. And it was. As I pulled down the sails, I realized that my father would never again step aboard the Mary Ann, and I would never again share those shoulder-to-shoulder afternoons on the water with him, the closest thing to intimacy we ever had. There are moments in life that fade from memory so quickly they are gone almost before they are over. Then there are those that stick, the ones we carry with us through the years like precious parcels of clarity stitched close to our hearts, becoming part of who we are. Standing together there, soaking wet, I already understood that this was one of those moments.
I saw the paths of our lives crossing like jet contrails in an
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empty sky. Mine was rising toward adulthood and future’s bright promise. His had begun the gradual descent toward life’s inescapable conclusion.
A pair of ducks landed on the surface of The Lagoon, snapping me back to the present. Twenty-three years had passed since that last sail. Twenty-three years, and how far our opposing tra-jectories had carried us.
Chapter 30
o
John, do me a favor, will you?” Dad asked. We were sitting in Marijo’s old bedroom, converted years earlier into a television room, where we had just finished watching the six o’clock news. From downstairs I could hear Elizabeth bustling about in the kitchen and smell the ginger and garlic drifting up as she prepared her specialty for dinner, an Asian noodle dish filled with chicken, shrimp, and vegetables.