“I told him there’s only one thing a moral person can do in this moment in time,” she said, her good eye focused not on me but on a spot somewhere out the window, as though she was trying to see something far away. “Create an orphanage for all the children left without parents by the awful war.” So he brought her back to England, and gave her a castle in Cornwall to start the orphanage.
“Gave her a castle in Cornwall.” There’s a sentence I bet no one I know has ever heard in their lives.
She went on, telling me how she went to Scotland and bought some sheep to raise at the castle.
Suddenly, Edith fell silent. I tried to ask her more. I mean, I had a million questions. Led an escape from Dachau? Married a Yorkshire man? Was he the guy with the castle? Was he Domilini, or was that the “Old World Italian”?
But I wasn’t getting any answers. She was done, for now. “The past is the past,” she said, and that pretty much ended it. “This tea isn’t hot enough. I’m going to go warm it up. Lukewarm tea tastes too much like piss, if you ask me.”
She tottered off back to the kitchen, her teacup rattling on its saucer. She crossed the bright ray of sunlight streaming in through the windowpane, dust motes swirling in the light, all my questions just hanging in the air with them.
The questions I had about my dad got answered that summer. He was still slipping, no doubt about it. He’d forget my sister Malinda’s name, which drove her kind of bats. Or he’d ask my mother a question, and five minutes later ask the same thing again. He was having trouble doing math in his head – something he’d always been pretty good at – and that would make him really angry. Angrier than it ought to, frankly. He’d start trying to figure something out, like what’s 15 percent of $150, and the next thing you know he’d be cursing a blue streak. As I said, it was strange to hear my dad curse, and that as much as anything made us wonder if something was up. He wouldn’t talk about it, though. He’s from that generation where you just buck up and hold whatever’s bothering you inside, so we mostly just let it go.
Except for Malinda. Malinda’s my older sister, and the pushiest of us three kids. I mean that in a nice way. She’s the one who’s going to say enough’s enough, let’s get done what needs to get done, period. And that’s what she did in this situation. It was at her urging – her insistence is more like it – that my mom took my dad for tests. They did all kinds of tests those first couple of weeks – dexterity tests, memory tests, blood tests, brain scans, you name it. My dad was none too pleased about it all, but he went along with it.
And it’s a good thing he did, because when the diagnosis came back, it was what everybody was afraid of but nobody had said.
Alzheimer’s.
It’s a hell of a blow, when you hear your dad has Alzheimer’s. It doesn’t matter how old you are; your dad is still a huge figure in your life, especially a dad like mine, who was always competent, in charge, and in control. You can’t picture him becoming disabled, forgetful, unable to care for himself. I tried not to imagine the road ahead of him too much. It was just too hard to think about.
But oddly enough, for my dad, it was just the opposite. I went up to see him right after the diagnosis came through, and I could see right away that he was a lot calmer. It was almost like his frustration wasn’t about forgetting things; it was about not knowing why he was having the problem. Being given an answer, a name for the problem, seemed to make him feel better. He was always a problem-solver; give him a situation and he’d figure out what to do. Now that he knew what the problem was, it was almost like he was saying, Oh, well, why didn’t you say so? Now we know what we’re dealing with so we can figure out how to deal with it.
We knew it wouldn’t always be that easy, of course. But at least some of the steam had gone out of the pressure cooker.
As I drove home that evening, I found myself thinking about going fishing with my dad when I was a kid. There was one time up in Canada, the first time he taught me how to start a fire. We’d gotten rained off the lake, and climbed up on a hill, on a game trail under the trees. There were a bunch of us there, huddled together: my dad, my brother, some friends of the family – all guys, that morning. The women were more fair-weather fishing types, and had stayed back at the campground. I watched carefully as my father gathered up some pine needles, put a pine cone right in the middle of them, and leaned some dried sticks from dead branches on the pine cone. He lit the pine needles with a match. While the fire was starting up, he found a piece of willow, or maybe it was maple, and cleared the bark off it. He gutted the trout we’d pulled out of the lake before the rain started, and stuck the stick through the back of the fish, and out its mouth, and held it over the fire. Maybe it was just the moment, but that trout tasted about ten times better than it ever could have tasted at home. I can still taste the crisp skin, the buttery flesh, the feel of the oils from the meat of the fish sliding on the sides of my tongue.
It was usually a family affair when we went camping, and sometimes another family went with us. But as I continued my drive home that night, my thoughts drifted to the time I got to go fishing with my dad, just the two of us. I was probably about twelve. My mom had taken my brother and sister to visit some relatives in North Carolina, but I couldn’t go, because I had a paper route. So that weekend, my dad took me fishing over to Nason Creek, near the Wenatchee National Forest. To get there you drove over Stevens Pass, which was really cool, especially for a twelve-year-old. Up there in the mountains, you felt like you could see a thousand feet down to the bottom, to where there were boulders, vine maples, and the beginnings of a river. On the opposite side, near the bottom, there’s an old highway and a train rail. The rails had a shed roof over them to try to keep the snow off, and whatever else an avalanche would bring down. It was abandoned a long time ago because it was too hard to maintain, so now it just sat there, and as we drove by it looked like an old toy train set that someone had just gotten too old to play with.
It was really special, having my dad all to myself. He was a soft-spoken guy, but a jocular one, and as we came down off the mountain and glided along those long, curvy, tree-lined stretches of Route 2, the sky big and high around you, the clouds puffy and still, he was doing what he always loved to do, which was give you little brain teasers, stuff to make you think. Like coming up with oxymorons. “I got one,” he said. “Jumbo shrimp.” I don’t know why, but at the time that struck me as about the funniest thing I’d ever heard.
We slept that night in a camper on the back of his pickup truck, and as I was falling asleep, my dad started telling me fishing stories. I’d caught more fish than he had that first day, and he said, well, he was just waiting. “I don’t like to mess with the little ones, the way you do,” he said, just a hint of that jocular tone in his voice, like you couldn’t tell how serious he was. “I’m waiting for the big one. You’ll see.” We went out early the next morning, and sure enough, about an hour before it was time for us to head back, his line went tight, and he landed the biggest salmon I had ever seen. He needled me about it the whole ride home: “Don’t you worry, Barry, those little fish you caught will taste pretty nice too,” or “Well, I guess it’s good that you didn’t try to land any big fish this trip; wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.” I pretended to be ticked off when he razzed me, but he could tell by the look on my face that I was about as high as the clouds. I gave him a playful punch on those big strong arms of his, as he steered the pickup back into the setting sun, headed home, just my dad and me and a big old cooler full of fish.
Edith’s house, which looked a little sad and lonely to begin with, was looking even sadder once all the buildings around it were torn down. It resembled some last outpost of a bombed-out village after World War II, which probably wasn’t all that unfamiliar to Edith, given what I was learning about her past. The block was empty now except for Edith’s