Getting It Right

Getting it Right

Julia Owens

My mother was the nurse supervisor on the obstetrics floor of Bluefield Sanatorium in West Virginia. It was a bustling railroad town, which is how she met my father, a locomotive engineer. They married and I was born in 1935. Father traveled a good bit with the railroad and Mother worked the night shift to be home for me after school. We were a family of few words.

I was at home on leave from the Air Force when my Father took that opportunity to commit suicide. In the basement, he had laid down several layers of newspaper, laid on top of the papers and slit both of his wrists. I found my father. I made the funeral arrangements and cleaned the basement floor. A year after his death, an aunt told me he had been fired from the railroad 3 weeks before he died. Drinking on the job. My Mother was a strong personality who had high expectations of those around her.

I was 23 when I married in 1956. My first daughter was born in Bluefield in 1958. I was glad she was healthy, and I postured as a jubilant first-time father. In 1959, we moved to my wife’s hometown in SC. It was the dinkiest town I had ever seen, but we lived rent free in a home of her parents’. Working at a gas station for several years was not the trajectory of the stellar career I had promised my wife. Eventually, I moved into paint sales and was a salesman for the rest of my life. It provided the essentials for a basic life but not much more. We bought our first home in 1968, and the second daughter was born later that year.

I was eight when my  sister was born. He took me to the hospital to see the new baby and promised to take me to see “Cinderella” after the hospital visit. He bought me a soda and small popcorn and sat with me through the entire movie. Every now and then I could see him reach inside of his coat, pull out his flask, take a sip and slip it back into the pocket. I remember thinking, “Why did he have to do that now?” He didn’t think I noticed. I always noticed.

On the way home, a policeman pulled him over. I could hear some of their words through the glass: alcohol, new baby, “Cinderella”, bedtime. Back in the car, he hadn’t bothered to bluff his way out of the run in. She had caught on about him not always telling the truth. He did not think she noticed. She noticed.

It didn’t much concern me what my daughter thought of me being pulled over. I was glad she was in the car, so I didn’t have to go to jail for DUI.

I was not the faithful husband. For whatever reason, I did not feel shame for the character flaw. Nature of the beast? Was it a family trait? I had heard arguments between them for weeks. I was eight at the time, and I quickly picked up on my Mother’s questioning: “Who was she?” ”How long?” I kind of felt bad for my Father, even if he had cheated on my Mother. A week after the revelation, Mother and I spent a year in Cuba with her brother and his family.

As a family, we did not go out to dinner often. So, when he asked me if I wanted to go get a burger, I was stunned. “Sure?” I said. After driving  30 minutes, he pulled into the driveway of a house I did not know. He parked the car, turned off the ignition and was six inches from my face when he told me, “You’re getting ready to meet Shirley. Do NOT tell your mother. If Shirley asks, your mother and I have been separated for months, and I’m living in an apartment at the beach. Do you understand?” “Yes, sir,” I answered, tucking my long hair behind my ears.

I  did not understand what was going on and why I couldn’t tell momma. I was so glad when Shirley offered me cookies.

I did not concern myself  about what my thirteen-year-old daughter may have thought of me. I knew I had a role to play to pull at the heartstrings of this moderately wealthy woman. A year later, Shirley and I married. I packed my bags one night and left my divorced wife. I did not say goodbye to either child. Only a crappy father would leave his children without a word. I guess I was kind of a crappy father. Parenting was not something I had thoughts of very often. Actually, quite rarely.

He was just….gone. One day he was there, the next day, not. I knew they had gotten a divorce. It was nasty and they fought constantly about child support, which I knew meant they were fighting over money. I was fourteen then and getting wise to the ways of the world. By then, I had been wise of my father for several years. I saw little of him after he left. In all honesty, I can’t say I missed him.

In ninth grade I enrolled in French class, and a dozen sophomore boys made up half the class. Mrs. Dubois had unnatural blonde hair, she was young and one of the boys said she was “built like a brick shithouse.” I had no idea what that meant, but they were forever talking about her boobs. She told us at the end of the year the class would take a bus trip to New Orleans so we could use our French with the locals.

The total cost  had to be paid two weeks before the trip. My mother worked nights for the county, and I knew she would not have the money. Hell, I had one pair of jeans for the entire school year. Several days before the full payment deadline, I called my father and asked for the money to go on the trip. “I don’t have the money,  so you can’t go.” The call was over. I was so shocked I was numb. I didn’t even cry.

Life’s lessons aren’t always easy. His daughter would just have to grow up and accept the hard knocks. Between child support and, as an unconscious act of generosity, I way paying for ballet lessons for my wife’s youngest daughter. Several days after the phone call, it occurred to me that my daughter had not cried or screamed in protest. She was learning.

Over the years, I was in and out of the lives of both daughters. Not around long enough to form any attachment that might require my giving them money but just enough to enlist a few tears of sympathy for their “poor old dad.” Shirley and I had divorced, and I no longer had a cushion. God, I hated getting the call from my ex-wife about child support being late again. I was doing what I could. She was working, why did the financial burden of children fall to me? Jack had a way of calming me down and lulling me to sleep.

The years of alcohol and drugs made him even more outrageous. He would phone and call me a “bitch” for some perceived wrong. A day later, he would call me, crying to say how sorry he was. This, I knew. He said I was a liar. Then he would call and say it was the drugs the doctors had prescribed for him that made him say such horrible things. It was only when he was really drunk and slurring his words that he made these calls. I think it was the only time he thought of me. He promised, with the help of his minister, he was going to get “right with God.” He never did. I was not surprised that I had no expectation of him “getting right.”

After I turned 70, I was living alone after my third wife left me.  I had fallen twice and had to call EMS to help me get up. They would take me to the hospital, and it felt good being the center of attention again. Just as my Mother had done. I fell several more times but would refuse the hospital stay. Money was tight. I knew the EMTs would call my daughter and make a big deal of my not going to the hospital. She would practically beg me to go with them. A few minutes of her justifying why I should go, I finally agreed. After I hung up, I would tell the guys to get the hell out. I knew the next time I fell; they would tell her I had not gone to the hospital. So? I didn’t have to think about it for the next couple of weeks.

EMS started calling me once or twice a week. He had fallen and needed help getting up. He wouldn’t go to the hospital as was EMS protocol. After the fourth call and not being able to convince him to go to the hospital, I told EMS to just leave him there, he would be fine. They suggested he needed to go to assistive living. This had already occurred to me several times. There was no way in hell he was staying at my house.

She took me to the VA hospital three times within a month to get me qualified as an applicant for the VA funded nursing home. I was not having that. I told her she was bitch for trying to get me into a nursing home. She told me to never call her again. I knew she hadn’t meant it. I was even more pissed that she had gotten MY doctor to sign off on my not driving anymore. She was four hours away. How would she know?

It was another three months of biweekly calls from EMS when he was accepted as a patient. My husband and I  spent two and a half days cleaning out his filthy apartment, washing his clothes, packing his bags, buying him new underwear and undershirts and providing meals for him. It was the new low by which I measured other lows. This was the lowest of the low.

The drive to the nursing home with her and her husband was interminable. I was not much for chit chat knowing my destination. I did say I should have just stayed in the Air Force and never gotten married. She said, “Thanks, a lot.” Her voice sounded small. They bought me a TV for ‘my’ room. I remember telling them “thank you for leaving me here,” as they walked through the door.

I lived there for six years. I gave the nurses hell. Once every month or so I would take a bath. I knew my name had become synonymous with “old bastard.” It got me the attention and notoriety I needed to get things done my way. Everyone in the home, and I mean everyone, knew who the “old bastard” was in room 202 on Albert Hall.

My husband and I would visit with him at Christmas. He would go on and on how wonderful Becky was, the wife of a fellow vet. After visiting with her husband, she visited with him. She brought him homemade meals and treats and would pray for him. They would talk about the sunken submarine, “The Hunley,” politics, sports and nursing home gossip. Becky was a delight. I wondered if he repeated to her his story of being a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. Hell, he would get sick riding in a damn fishing boat.

I wrote to him four times a year, per my psychiatrist’s suggestion, as though I were talking to my stockbroker;  “Emily got married last month. Her husband is so nice.” “It has rained here for almost a week.” “I got my hair cut, I spent too much at the grocery store, I volunteered at the PTA carnival, etc.”

Near the end of his six-year stay, I received a call from the charge nurse. “I’m sorry to tell you, but he is at the end of his life.”

I knew I was at the end of my life. Years ago, I had signed my DNR and given my oldest daughter power of attorney. I knew when the nurse called her, she would come. She was just that way.

I spent two nights with him, read him verses from the bible, gave him sips of water and ice chips, put Vaseline on his parched lips. The last day I was there, I told him I loved him. I felt it was proper, this small allowance. His last words to me were, “Love you.”

He died two days later. I had him cremated and picked up his ashes. I did not put a death notice in the newspaper. I called exactly three people to tell them of his passing. While cleaning out his room, I found one letter from me he had kept through the six years. There were cards from Becky for the six Christmases he had been there, six birthdays, six Easter cards and four or five ‘just because’ cards. I knew my father cheated on my mother, I knew he had left her with a ton of debt when he made his getaway, I knew he was a pathological liar—he would never tell the truth when a lie could be embellished that either made him the hero or perceived him as the one who was wronged.  In the end, those cards told me everything I needed to know. He didn’t want to be with the people who understood him. Those who had survived his dishonesty, his  lack of integrity, his alcoholism. He wanted to be with the people who knew him as he wanted to be remembered.

Gotta miss a man who could spin a web out of thin air. Best dad ever!