‘No, not really, it’s all about his head.’
‘None of the fishing trips? Nothing?’
‘It’s all theology – Jonathan Edwards and the Great Awakening. You know. I mean, sure, there’s stuff on us, but not much. And now all of a sudden he’s giving opinions on all of us.’ I laughed. ‘The whole family.’ My brother and I fell silent and studied our parents there, hunched up on the couch.
‘God, it’s sad.’
‘She looks awful,’ Jon said. ‘Really bad. She’s aged ten years.’
‘Twenty.’
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know, Jon. You know how Mom gets,’ I said, echoing my father. ‘She’s having a spell. As long as Dad lets the doctors figure it out, follows their orders, she’ll pull through.’
‘Dad. Yeah, what about him?’
‘I don’t know. He closes ranks when Mom gets sick. Gets all defensive.’ I pulled at my beer and shrugged. ‘I’ll keep an eye on them,’ I promised. ‘Don’t worry.’ Both my siblings consider me the favourite child, my father’s golden boy, and it’s true he listens best to me. Perhaps it’s because I’m the eldest, or the loudest. It’s not because I’m the wisest; I’m not. Nevertheless, because I have clout and because I live closest, I work the front lines. When it comes to my parents, I’m the first responder, the paramedic. I sometimes forget this.
I moved back into the party and tried to reassure the family about my mother, who had sunk into the couch, frightened, her eyes following me. ‘My mom’s all right,’ I told my cousins. ‘She gets like this sometimes.’
My father cut in. ‘Betty Lee is just having a little case of the whim-whams.’
In our family ‘whim-wham’ is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and ’80s – when they were all straight depression – we called them ‘dark nights of the soul’. St John of the Cross’s phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolar disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams.
‘Her whim-whams happen periodically and she always comes through. We’re adjusting her medications. Betty Lee and I pray together every day and that really works wonders. She has wonderful doctors, wonderful – a neurologist for the Parkinsonian symptoms and a general doctor, Dr Hill, that we just love.’
‘And Bryant, the shrink?’ I asked pointedly. I know my parents’ psychiatrist. He’s mine as well and he’s better than most. In my experience, a psychiatrist’s most salient feature is brevity. The therapist’s fate – the actual listening to patients – terrifies most psychiatrists. They clock their twelve-minute office visits with ruthless efficiency and write scripts in a flash. It takes longer to flush your radiator than it does to alter your brain chemistry. Before Bryant, I barely knew my psychiatrists; I knew the guys down at Jiffy Lube better.
‘Bryant? Oh yes, of course.’
‘And what does Bryant say?’ My father sat surrounded by suspicious relatives.
‘I believe it’s a combination of factors. The new –’
‘What does Bryant believe?’
‘Please, let me finish. The new drugs she’s taking for the Parkinson’s are interacting with the lithium in particular. All the church activities and her artwork. She’s just exhausted.’ My mother wanted to illustrate children’s books and she still paints small watercolours, sweet little cards with families like ours, two boys and a girl. She has a fondness for still life and she paints when she’s well. As he spoke my father held her hands while she sat mutely beside him. Her expression was clouded, her eyes closed as if she were trying to remember herself. None of us bought my father’s explanation. It was clear she hadn’t painted in a long time. All of us feared the cycling return of my mom’s paranoia, her hallucinatory despair.
‘What about church?’ my brother asked. ‘Has she been going? I mean before all of this.’
‘Yes, of course. She was attending a women’s Bible study, which she really enjoyed. I drive her every week or she gets rides.’ Rides, most likely. For the large part, my father’s avoided church ever since he quit preaching. He says the music’s too modern or the preaching’s too basic, but it’s really the people; there are too many people. Without those lifts my mother would never see them, all the people she needs.
‘So what does Bryant say?’
‘The drugs. We’re working together to get the right balance.’
He had reassured no one. My father is known to maintain a significant back stock of medications, many of them psycho-tropic. Trays of multicoloured pills, generations of them, lay open throughout his apartment; he experiments with an almost alchemical zeal. These pills attest to his faith in technology and the clean workings of mechanized flesh, of the impersonal. For my father, salvation works in two spheres, the spiritual and the chemical. Both realms contain great and authoritative mysteries. The former requires prayer; the latter requires pills and then nothing at all – no family discussions, no fifty-minute sessions, no thought.
Ten years ago at my father’s direction I poisoned my mother with lithium. My father’s teaching duties had called him away and my mother was staying with me when her paranoia began. She seemed unsteady when Dad dropped her off but he assured me that her medication had been adjusted and would soon set her straight. Her psychiatrist increased her dosage and my father gave me detailed instructions. I did as I was told and she grew worse, much worse. Her psychiatrist would not return my phone calls. My mother lost the power of speech and wandered the house frightened and lost. Food dropped from her mouth. Finally, after days of trying, I spoke with her doctor. ‘Take her to the hospital’ was all he would say. I asked if it was the lithium, if he had prescribed the new dose. ‘Take her to the hospital.’ He said that three times and hung up. I never spoke with him again. She spent four days in intensive care. Most of us blame the doctor, some my father. I blame myself – for following orders, for crushing the white pills into her applesauce when she began choking on water.
We left the party early. I held my mother and kept her from falling. She looked cold and frail, like a small animal. I threw my coat over her. I didn’t want to talk and turned on the news. But Dad wanted to talk and he turned off the radio. He spoke rapidly on politics and the church, sometimes his boyhood. After an hour I tried the radio again; he switched it off without missing a beat. I was tired and sad and so I stopped listening. Outside Springfield, going seventy on the Mass Pike, a woman ran out in front of the car; she missed our bumper by inches. She disappeared before I hit the brake, out of the black and back into the darkness, just like that. The next day I called my father. He said Mom felt better. I asked to speak with her, but he said she was resting. And the next day I left for Colorado, ignoring the signs.
Now, a week later and back from the mountains, it all crashed into place as I lay on my bed and listened to his rambling messages, the kids laughing in the hall and calling me. Of course. Of course, I knew it. I stopped the messages; they just circled around, making me dizzy. I dialled my parents’ apartment. Their phone was disconnected and I got up to go. Driving down to Northampton it all seemed so obvious: my father’s new manuscripts – two books in two months, the long dinner when my father spoke openly, his new website, the newsletter, and now all of the calls.
Their apartment door was locked. I rapped at it hard with my knuckles. The lights went off. I banged on the door, called out. The lights went back on and my father, through the door, said, ‘Yes?’
‘Dad, it’s David.’
‘David Lovelace?’
‘Yeah. David Lovelace. Can I come in?’
‘No,