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  At the moment he appeared all out of defenses. He’d removed his legs from my lap and curled them into his body. Half sitting up, propped on his elbow with a cushion wedged under his arm at the far end of the couch, he looked uncomfortable and cornered. If he were stronger, if he were as he used to be, he would have just gotten up and left the room, saying he wasn’t going to talk about it, end of discussion.

  He told us he didn’t believe that we really wanted to know him. If we did, he wondered, why didn’t we read more of his writing?

  Todd laughed sourly. “I’m supposed to understand my father by knowing his opinion on the latest Philip Roth novel.”

  “I read your writing, Dad,” I broke in. “And you wrote that the most important thing for a dying man is to be understood.” He looked at me and nodded faintly. Yes, he did write that. I continued: “But how can I understand you without knowing where you came from? You’ve never talked about your parents or your sisters. We barely know anything about them.”

  All these years later, I can still recall the feeling of control I had over my father as he listened to me, perhaps because it was so unusual. All my life he’d appeared a powerful and assured figure. Of course many children are inclined to see their father as an important man in the world, but my dad’s job as a daily book critic for the Times caused some other people to see him that way too. In Fairfield, or in the summer on Martha’s Vineyard, people would recognize his name and further ratify his authority in my eyes.

  “You’ve got to give me something to write about,” I said reflexively to lighten the moment.

  Now his expression changed again, flashing with understanding: that I would write about this day on Martha’s Vineyard, that this secret—whatever it was—wouldn’t remain secret forever, that his story would continue after he wasn’t around to narrate it.

  “I will tell you, but I’m not going to talk about it today,” he said more firmly. “I need to think about how to present things. I want to order my vulnerabilities so they don’t get magnified during the discussion.”

  Todd and I argued that a father shouldn’t need a prepared text to speak to his children, but no amount of cajoling would convince him to change his mind. And he was so beleaguered and exhausted that it began to seem unkind to continue. We set a date a few weeks later to meet at my parents’ house in Cambridge to try the discussion again. Then my mother helped my father upstairs, because he wanted to lie down. I wonder now what he was thinking as he lay in his bed alone. His children said that they wanted to know him. Was he considering what he might say when we met again? Was he worrying about how a single conversation might accomplish what being our father for more than twenty years apparently had not?

  At the time, though, I was too occupied with the question of what the secret was to consider my father’s experience of revealing it. Todd and I both guessed that it had something to do with sex or death, but neither of us had any specific ideas. Years later Todd confided that he felt very apprehensive about what we might discover: that our father had been abused as a child or been involved in some horrible crime.

  For my part the existence of a secret made me feel strangely elated. My childhood suspicions were confirmed, and I welcomed the new variation in the routine of my father’s illness—the chance to feel something else. For the past twelve months, my family’s life had been filled with decisions about hormone treatments and radiation, midnight trips to the hospital because of huge blood clots in my father’s urine, coffee enemas, incontinence, and diapers. I muddled through this world of corporeal intimacy, feeling embarrassed and clumsy, and fretted that there was never going to be energy or time for a familial closeness of any other type.

  Here was at last our chance for true intimacy, the kind that confessions and forgiveness might bring. Besides, I could do secrets much better than I could do scared-daughter-standing-by-her-father’s-hospital-bed. The betrayals and danger they involved, the mix of self-interest, protection, and cowardice at their core—for these dramas, I felt much better equipped.

  Before we had our family meeting, another emergency sent my father back to Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston. Over Labor Day weekend, he was transferred into Dana-Farber Cancer Institute across the street, where, the doctors said, they were better prepared to treat cases like his. What kind were they? I wondered. Hopeless ones?

  Any talk of alternative treatments was forgotten. The focus now was on what work my father could accomplish in the time he had left. There was no mention of the secret.

  My twenty-fourth birthday was a few days later. My best friend, Chinita, came up from New York, and we had a small celebration in my father’s hospital room. But my dad couldn’t stay awake. My mother kept having to rouse him, saying, “Honey, Blissy’s blowing out the candles now,” and “Look, she’s unwrapping her present.”

  On the weekend, Todd came up from Hartford, where he was living at the time, and met my mother and me at Dana-Farber. Michael Vincent Miller—Mike to us—my father’s closest friend, was there too. My dad was particularly energized. This hospital stay was nearing the end of its second week, and he couldn’t get enough news about the outside world. He seemed desperate for distraction, asking us over and over, “What else is going on? Tell me something else.” Then he began to shake.

  “Shit, Sandy. Shit. It’s starting again.”

  I looked at my mother for a clue about what was happening. My dad only swore blasphemously—goddamn it and Jesus Christ.

  “Okay, Anatole, breathe,” my mother said. She explained that he’d been having these waves of pain all morning. “Stay focused on us.”

  I was sitting in a chair by the head of his bed. I took his hand and told him to squeeze my fingers.

  Todd stood at the end of the bed and began to talk. “I made a big sale this week, Dad.”

  “Yes?” My father locked eyes on his son. I could see his jaw muscle trembling.

  Todd nodded vigorously. “Yeah, a big sale, so it looks like I’ll make my quota and then I’ll start earning commission on top of my salary.”

  “That’s great. Good work. Oh Christ, it’s getting worse. Keep talking.” His fingers tightened around mine.

  “And, uh, I’ve got another race coming up on the Vineyard.”

  “Shit. Fucking Christ.” Under the blanket, his legs bounced against the mattress.

  “This one’s a 10K, about a thousand runners.”

  The tremor moved up his body, and his shoulders shook. “Good, Todd. You in shape for it?” The pitch of his voice shot up. “Oh God, please. I can’t stand another one.”

  He tried to pull his hand away from mine. “I’m going to hurt you, Bliss.”

  “I’m fine. It’s fine.” I put my other hand on top of his and pressed down.

  “I’m going to squeeze too hard.” He jerked free of my grasp. His head quivered and his pupils narrowed.

  “Hold on, honey.” My mother crouched at my father’s side.

  “Come on, Buddy.” Mike reached a hand forward toward the bed.

  My father struggled to sit up. He began to yell: “Help! Someone. Help me! Please, help.”

  I remember that we all froze for a moment, pinned down into ourselves by the terror of this anguish. Then Todd was moving toward the door, and I thought that he intended to close it, an impulse, it’s strange to admit now, that made sense to me. What was happening in that hospital room felt too raw and private. It seemed wrong for strangers to overhear us.

  But Todd was going out the door. He was running down the hallway, calling for a nurse, and he quickly returned with one in tow. My mother’s calm demeanor was rapidly fading. She’d been engaged in an ongoing battle with the hospital staff because they wouldn’t give my father enough painkillers to actually kill his pain for fear that he would become addicted to them. Which forced my mother to point out the obvious: given the imminence of my father’s death, what did it matter? Now she turned on the nurse, spittle gathered in the corners of her mouth. “For God’s
sake, can’t you see this level of morphine is not enough? Give him more!”

  The nurse mumbled something about needing to get the pain management team back in there, but she fiddled with the morphine drip and upped the dosage. Then, as suddenly as the episode of pain had begun, it stopped. My father lay back in the bed, panting shallow breaths. His face was white, and his eyes were very wide. He seemed to be staring at nothing, or everything. Then he closed his eyes and he was asleep, or more likely the narcotic had knocked him out.

  We headed outside to get some fresh air. Mike left for home, and Todd, my mother, and I sat on a stone wall across the street. With my eyes I counted the floors of the building and the windows in from the corner until I located my father’s room. I wondered if other families were engaged in similar dramas behind the drawn curtains of the neighboring windows. During the six weeks that I regularly visited the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, I looked for people who were going through the same ordeal as we were. But it always seemed like we were the only ones crying in the hallway, the only ones struggling to talk in calm voices as the doctors asked us to make decisions so vital to another person’s well-being as to feel ludicrous and wrong, the only ones who walked around with shocked and stricken faces because the knowledge that all people must die one day had in no way prepared us for the death of this man. Our spot on the stone wall was in the sunshine, but I was shivering with cold. I rubbed my hands up and down my arms.

  “I think I better tell you what this secret is,” my mother said. She was sitting between Todd and me. We caught eyes behind her back. Inexplicably we both began to grin.

  “Well.” She took a breath and let it out. “Your father’s part black.”

  I burst out with a laugh. “That’s the secret? Daddy’s part black?”

  “That’s all?” Todd asked.

  “That’s it,” my mother said, allowing herself a smile.

  We asked a few questions: How black was he? After all, he didn’t look black. Neither did his sister Lorraine or his mother, whom we’d seen once or twice when we were little. My mother explained that my father had “mixed blood,” and his parents were both light-skinned Creoles from New Orleans, where race-mixing had been common. She said that his parents had to pass for white in order to get work in 1930s New York, which confused my father about what their family was, or was supposed to be. He was the lightest child out of the three siblings, and the fact that his two sisters lived as black was one of the reasons that we never saw them. My mother said that when my father was growing up in Brooklyn, where his family had moved when he was six, he’d been ostracized by both white and black kids alike. The black kids picked on him because he looked white, and the white kids rejected him because they knew his family was black. He’d come home from school with his jacket torn, and his parents wouldn’t ask what happened. My mother said that he didn’t tell us about his racial background because he wanted to spare his own children from going through what he did.

  “So this means that we’re part black too,” I said, taking in the news. I had always bought into the idea of the American “melting pot,” and now I was an example of it. The idea thrilled me, as though I’d been reading a fascinating history book and then discovered my own name in the index. I felt like I mattered in a way that I hadn’t before.

  Todd was pleased too. “What a great pickup line,” he said. “‘I may look white, but I’m really Afro-American where it counts.’ The guys in my office are always giving me such a hard time about being so white-bread.”

  “Todd,” my mother said, alarmed. “This isn’t something you should be telling everyone. Anyway, you kids aren’t black. You’re white.”

  Two days later a tumor burst through the wall of my father’s bladder, although the doctors didn’t realize it until they got him into the operating room. All my mother understood when she called me at work was that there was an unexpected crisis and the nurses told her to tell her children to come to the hospital as quickly as they could.

  I was at Scudder, Stevens & Clark, a mutual funds company, where I worked answering letters from shareholders with complaints or questions. I sat in an open room the size of a football field, lined with rows and rows of low-walled cubicles filled with hundreds of other customer service representatives, also answering calls and letters from shareholders. It took me a moment to understand what my mother was actually saying. After I hung up the phone, I closed out all the documents open on my computer and shut it down. I straightened up the letters and papers on my desk and then gathered together my things and put them in my purse. I got up, put on my sweater, and slowly walked around the row of cubicles to my boss’s cubicle. Sheila looked up and raised her eyebrows.

  “Hi, uh, I’ve got to go, um, my mother called from the hospital, and—”

  Sheila had lost her brother to brain cancer a few years earlier. She knew better than I did what kind of phone call I’d just received. She stood up and took me in her arms briefly. I was shaking. I wasn’t ready for this to happen yet.

  She called another customer service rep up to her desk, gave her twenty dollars, and told her to take me in a taxicab over to the hospital. I resisted briefly, saying I could take the subway, I’d be fine on my own. Their fussing underlined the direness of the situation, and I didn’t want to understand, in fact I couldn’t understand, what was happening.

  When I arrived at Dana-Farber, my mother was talking with the oncologist and urologist in my father’s room about scheduling an emergency surgery. He’d been moved to the room in front of the nurses’ station reserved for crisis patients. The doctors had some forms for my mother to complete, and as she left with them, I started to follow, but she pointed behind her and told me, “Stay with your father.” I turned and headed back into his room. At the moment, my father was terrifying to me.

  He was laid out flat except for his head, which was propped up at an unnatural angle by too many pillows. A blanket covered him completely, pulled up to his chin. But underneath I could see that his body was motionless, rigid, as though he were in shock. His expression looked shocked too. His eyebrows were raised, and his eyes were unblinking. His mouth was opened in a small “O,” and his breath panted in and out fast, like a dog’s. He hadn’t acknowledged me yet.

  His gaze was focused on an invisible spot before him. I thought perhaps that he was staring down a tunnel to the end of his life and that I should try to ease his mind by reassuring him that he’d arrived there valiantly. I pulled a chair to the head of his bed and leaned in close and whispered to my father that I loved him, that he’d been a great dad, that because of him, I’d never be able to lead an ordinary life. These words were true, but saying them made me feel uncomfortable, following as I was some borrowed notion of how to act at a loved one’s deathbed. I chose not to mention the secret. It wasn’t a subject we had any history with, and I didn’t want to say anything that might upset him.

  His eyes glanced in my direction, which encouraged me to continue. I told him that I was proud of him, of all that he’d accomplished, and that he’d had a successful life. He looked at me again and spoke in a hoarse whisper: “Blissy, enough with your bromides. I’m trying to concentrate. You have no idea how difficult this is.”

  Many times since, I’ve chastised myself for resorting to such conventional language. I should have spoken of his favorite poet, Wallace Stevens, or offered an observation about the world—something quirky and funny and true—to wrap him more firmly in humanity’s grip.

  Less frequently I’ve wondered how my father could have rebuked me for trying to tell him, as clumsy as it might have been, that I loved him and that he hadn’t lived in vain.

  His surgery would take place over at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. While he was transported in an ambulance the short distance between the two buildings, my mother did her best to answer his questions about what was happening. But she didn’t know much beyond what the surgeon told her when they were deciding whether to operate: Your husband’s chances of su
rviving a lengthy surgery are slim.

  Just as he was going into the operating room, my father called out, “What’s happened to my voice? Listen. It’s lost its timbre. What’s happened to my voice?” Then the doors swung closed behind him.

  My father did survive to live another month, but for the first time in my life, he didn’t make sense. After he came out of intensive care, he moved in and out of lucidity, and never regained it completely.

  In his journal, my father wrote that a sick person needs to guard against the disfigurement of illness because “at the end, you’re posing for eternity.” Throughout my father’s writing ran the theme that a person’s identity was an act of will and style. In a review of Ernest Becker’s Denial of Death, a book that my father greatly admired, he wrote about Becker’s idea that we can defend ourselves against the fear of death “by becoming so insistently and inimitably ourselves, or by producing something so indelibly our own, that we may be said, as a poet put it, to have added forever to the sum of reality.” Achieving this kind of immortality, in Becker and my father’s view, was not a passive act.

  After the surgery my dad was stunned to realize, despite his cloudy mind, that he’d almost died. He told my mother in a childlike voice: “I’m not the golden boy anymore. I’m not that beautiful boy. I have to find a new way to think of myself.” With bags to collect his waste hanging from his body, tubes and machinery crowding his bedside, his brain short-circuited and unreliable, he needed to find some aspect of himself to latch onto so that he might remain “insistently and inimitably” Anatole. This was necessary both for him and for those who loved him, because, as he also wrote in his journal, “the final view for survivors, the family and friends, would be, in the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s phrase, ‘love at last sight.’”