The Story of My Father Read Free

father said yes. But when the moment came for that part of the service, something seemed to go wrong in him. He held the paper in front of him, but he didn’t seem to be able to read it. I tried to indicate to him that it was all right—I leaned forward, I think I touched his arm. After a moment, his voice shaking, he spoke a few improvised words in place of the homily and then pronounced his blessing on us.

Chapter Two
    ON A JUNE morning in 1986, I was sleeping late in the bright sunshine pouring into my bedroom. This gift for sleep has left me in the seventeen years or so since these events took place, but on that day I’d been enjoying it—rising up to consciousness, then diving down again for a little while—when I heard the door to the bedroom open. Someone came in. There was a touch on my shoulder and I opened my eyes. My husband was bending over me. His lower face was covered in shaving foam and I was suddenly engulfed in that lathery scent. There were one or two broad dark stripes in the white on his cheek, marking the path of the razor where he’d started to shave and had been interrupted. He looked strange—partly on that account, of course, but partly because there was fear in his face.
    He was speaking to me in a deliberately controlled voice, slowly and carefully, but what he was saying made no sense. It was about my father. The police and my father. The police had him. My father. He was somewhere in western Massachusetts. The police were on the phone; they wanted to talk to me.
    I was almost instantly up, grabbing for clothing, incoherently asking questions
—What
do you mean? what police? western Massachusetts?
I thundered down the stairs to the kitchen, where the only phone was; we had none upstairs because Ben, my son, was seventeen then, and his friends could be counted on, several times a week, to call him after eleven, after twelve— long past the time my husband and I went to bed, in any case. The receiver dangled on the cord from its wall base, almost touching the floor. I picked it up and said hello, said my name, and then stood there, staring out at the start of this beautiful sunny day, trying to make some sense of what the man’s voice on the other end of the line was talking about.
    What I remember most clearly now is that he said the person they had in custody, James Nichols—they’d picked him up between three and four in the morning in semirural territory when he’d knocked on someone’s door, announcing he was lost—“claimed” to be my father.
    I was indignant. Of course he was my father. James Nichols? He
was
my father. He
said
so, didn’t he? What was their problem?
    I didn’t know then any of the other claims he’d made: that he’d encountered a number of small strange people in his nighttime wandering, that he’d been driving a van, which seemed to have utterly disappeared (they’d scanned the area for it, to no avail). In that context, probably other things he told them—that he was a retired professor from Princeton Theological Seminary, for instance—seemed unlikely too.
    But for now it was the word itself,
claimed,
that struck me, in its distrust and dismissal of my father’s perspective. It was a word I would come to hear more and more often as Dad descended into illness: well, he claimed he did this; he claimed he saw that; he claimed he thought it was
his
room. But here, this first time with a stranger, it was startling and offensive.
    I asked to speak with him. The officer wouldn’t let me. He wanted me to come out there. They would release him to me once I arrived.
    He wanted to know how long I’d be. I didn’t know. Where were they exactly? He gave me general directions and I made a guess.
    I got off the phone, and now it was my husband’s turn to ask the futile questions. Together, though, as I quickly got ready to go—brushing my teeth, drinking coffee, washing my face—we constructed a story that made a kind of sense.
    Under pressure from us, his