My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

teachers’ desks are piled high with batteries of standardized tests and guidebooks to new reading and math programs that will be deployed in their under-staffed and overpopulated classrooms. A calendar distributed by the district displays eight different diagnostic tests that must be adminis-tered a total of twenty-one times between September and June in the kindergarten. Some tests are given several times a year and others require the teacher to sit with each child for ten uninterrupted minutes, no mean feat for even the most well-organized teacher alone in a room with twenty-three five-year-olds.

Images from the day—Catherine’s extraordinary conversation with her kindergartners, Stephanie’s calm control of her second grade, and the chaos of Diane’s first grade—fill my head as I reach for the phone, awkwardly crouch down to the key pad, and begin the laborious task of punching in the twenty-three digits required by my credit card call. As I wait, listening to the ringing of the phone and for the sound of an approaching train, I wonder who will answer.

While my mother was once guardian of the phone and monitor of all worldly contact, my father has just begun to usurp this function. An important practical and symbolic shift indicating his renewed interest in social life, it is testimony to the workings of a powerful new drug cocktail—an antipsychotic to reduce agitation, a tranquilizer to in-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 15

tensify its effects, and a mood stabilizer to prevent sudden outbursts of anger.

I am, however, unprepared for the emotion in my father’s voice when he finally answers the phone. “It’s been two days since we’ve heard from you. I was terribly worried. I thought something had happened to you.” In a hurry, but wanting to acknowledge his concern, I remind him that my days in the field are very busy and that I am on my way to see him now. He is immediately relieved, and there is nothing more for me to say. Later that night I will play back two messages on my home answering machine and two more on my office voice mail. All are in the same plaintive, raspy, hardly audible voice,

“Jonathan, this is your father. Where are you? I’m worried.”

Despite these words of concern, when I settle into my seat for the brief ride to the city, I am apprehensive about my visit. I wonder if the sudden attacks, which have greeted me throughout the preceding year, are over. Will there really be no battles over money or arguments about the qualifications of his health aides? I am not yet trusting of the new drugs, although there have been other indications of their positive effects. Just this Saturday my father called early in the morning to say that he had been awake all night deciding to give up his obsessive attempts to redeem some very old and very worthless insurance policies. He did not admit that his calculations have been wrong or that the company’s are right. What he did say is that the policies are not worth fighting about and that he would be happier doing other things.

I didn’t want to say anything to give him second thoughts. I told him it was a good decision because it’s too exhausting to fight all the time.

When I asked him why he was ending a four-month battle that has consumed his every waking hour, he said that sooner or later, “the family” will get the money. I have learned enough in these years not to contradict him by insisting on the truth.

The real test of the medications came the same afternoon, when my father called again to ask why I hadn’t sold the insurance policy, as he had directed me to do. I summoned up my best early childhood 16 n jonathan g. silin

education skills, walked him through our earlier conversation, and patiently waited for his acknowledgment at the end of each statement. “Remember when you called this morning?”

“Yes.”

“And you said you had been up all night thinking about the insurance policies?”

“Yes.”

“And you said that you were tired of fighting with everyone about them?”

“Yes.”

“And you said we would get the money in the end?”

“Yes.” Finally he seemed to remember the first decision and to be reassured that it was the correct one. I was unnerved by this need for a step-by-step rehearsal, glad to have found the right strategy this time, and concerned about my ability to find the appropriate tone on future occasions.

Calm and composed, my parents seem genuinely glad to see me when I arrive at their apartment. After a few minutes of family news and recent doctor reports, I find myself listening as my father describes his daily schedule. I don’t know how this recitation begins and why it is taking place, but I try to follow it with interest. Then suddenly, without any warning, somewhere in midmorning after the opening routines of the day and the regular phone conversation with my brother in Taipei, my father hits a brick wall. He bursts into inconsolable tears, overcome, as he soon admits, by what he sees as the emptiness of his life. Wanting to comfort him but also to understand what is happening, I wonder out loud why he has become upset at this particular moment. “It’s only when I describe my life to you that it seems so bare.

Only then do I remember what I once was, only then do I feel despair at what I have become.” Suddenly, I am the mirror, the person who forces him to look at his life, and the one who is blamed for what he sees.

My father goes on to inventory the two things that make his life m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 17

bearable, that provide some reason for going forward—my mother’s presence and my brother’s phone calls. I am thrilled that he names my mother first, and