BRENDA SEROTTE

From the memoir-in-stories, "Wedding in Peru," a collection of personal histories, just completed:

READING FRENCH

Nobody loved movies more than my father. I inherited this affinity, but he was extreme; he could see a movie every day, even in the middle of the day. After betting on the horses, it was his favorite pastime. We went together whenever we could.

Early one Thursday morning, a few days before his seventy-fourth birthday, he called to ask if I’d go with him to see Hard to Kill, playing at the Allerton, in my Bronx neighborhood. Steven Seagal, an über-cop, whose martial arts and rough, stone-faced stare—handsome, but not in a pretty-boy way—was my dad’s ideal, what he had always dreamed of becoming.

“I just love that guy,” he said, chucking a whole box of Goobers down in a gulp, as the credits rolled.

The year before, when he’d been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, we’d gone to see, eerily, Marked for Death, at the same theater. “I’m gonna beat this thing,” he said. Then he turned and asked me, “Do you think I’ll beat this lung cancer shit?”

I had not hesitated a second. “Would Steven Seagal beat it?”

And he did, surviving despite all medical predictions for an entire year, instead of the six months, tops, they gave him. It seemed the radiation treatments worked, and all the bottles of Aloe Vera he drank for his burned throat healed the hoarseness. His heavy exhaustion passed. Within four months of the diagnosis he was Big Vic, the Turk, again, taking his morning walks to get rolls and the paper, and, of course, going to the track. Stronger than cancer. “When it’s time to go, I’ll go,” he’d say. Like his favorite movie hero, my father, too, was hard to kill.

And then he wasn’t.

Two days after the movie, as Mother prepared dinner in the kitchen, he coughed up blood in the bathroom, came out and told her to forget cooking. “I have to go to the hospital—now.” She called me and I rushed over, disbelieving. But his face was gray and he was gasping for air.

“Here we go,” he said, peering into the mirror to adjust the brim of his hat, an act I’d seen him perform hundreds of times in my life.

“But just yesterday you were fine,” I said, stupidly. He had looked fit and ate well at the Pelham Parkway Diner, joking around, as usual, with Sophocles, his favorite waiter.

“That was yesterday, hija. Dinguno vates el dia d’antes.” Nobody dies the day before.

Mother stood with her back to us, their dinner cold on the stove. She had stopped speaking to him, furious with him for dying. For months, the better he looked the further from reality his prognosis had seemed, so none of us believed he was really that ill. Some days his face showed that he was in pain—no doubt, wracked with it—but in the year of his lung cancer my father barely changed, physically. A bull of a man, he remained stoic and uncomplaining; on the bad days he’d snort at the picadors and run wild around the pen a few times, mad as hell, but everyone got out of his way and he never once fell.

I almost told him to sit down and think it through before going to hospice. I had tried to prepare myself for this moment, knowing that, with my brother an ocean away in Peru, I’d be the one to decide what to do when the time came. But when I saw his set jaw and the look in his dark, no-discussion eyes, I realized I’d been fooling myself; it was impossible to “get ready” for something like this. It unfolds beyond your will, even as you think you’re in control.

I was only pretending to accept the inevitable death of someone I cherished. A fellow student in my Romantic Poets class had commented once that “all of life is loss,” and I made a face when she said it, finding her judgment simplistic and irritating. Now it made sense.

“Vamos,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
It was dusk, a cold windy night in March, when we left for Calvary Hospice, a twenty-minute ride from their apartment. Dad dressed his best, as always, in a dark suit and tie, a white shirt, a hat, of course, and his good black cashmere overcoat. Anyone watching him stride toward my car with giant, impossible-to-keep-up-with steps, would not have guessed he was so sick. A bit thinner, perhaps, but otherwise as handsome and fit as ever. We could have been going to the theater.

His wish was that I take him, alone, no ambulance and no Mother. That year, I was driving an ’83 Chrysler New Yorker, and it played recorded messages which my husband and kids got a kick out of, but which infuriated Dad and I:

Your door is ajar! it said, when we got in.

"Can't you shut it up?"

“I wish I could; I hate it, too.”

Your headlights are on!

“Oh my God! Of course they’re on—it’s nighttime. You gotta find a way to disconnect that.”

“Don’t be upset, Dad; it’ll stop now, I promise.”

Your battery is low!

He stared at the dashboard, agonized. “Is it?”

“No! It’s all done talking, I promise.”

“I hope you get a better car one day. You deserve it.”

Suddenly, he was overcome by a fit of coughing. I held my breath until it passed, and we rode for the next ten minutes in silence. Purposely, I drove slower than I normally would have, and lead-foot that he was, at any other time he would have yelled at me for going forty-five. But this night, neither of us were eager to arrive at our destination.

“You can put your music on,” he said, “I don’t mind.”

“That’s okay.”

“Or the news.”

Quickly, I found 1010 WINS. The newscaster’s drone was familiar and it successfully diverted me from thinking about crying. I took a few deep breaths. Even with the awful coughing I’d been okay, but when he told me to put my music on, it shook me up; I was catapulted back to other car-trip disasters, like when I was seventeen and he tried to teach me how to drive. I had stopped the car so abruptly at a red light that his head bumped the roof and his precious fedora got a little crushed. “Jesus Christ! Didn’t I tell you—”

After that, everything went wrong. A song I loved came on and I reached over to make the radio louder. “Pay attention!” he yelled. “I am,” I shot back. The song, Blue Moon, by the Marcels, incensed him. “I’m gonna rip this damn radio out of the dashboard,” he said, switching it off. Naturally, I should have kept my mouth shut. But I was seventeen. “I love that song!” I wailed. “I can’t drive without it!”

I asked him if he remembered that fight, when I was learning to drive.

“I remember the song, Blue Moon. Beautiful; at Roseland, a million years ago, we danced to it.”

“But you hated the jazzed-up be-bop version, the one my boyfriend Julie—Jules Sapowitz, remember him?—gave me. I played the 45 so many times you threatened to smash the record.”

“Oh, that song. Jesus, whoever sang it killed it. Sounded like crap.”

“And after you turned it off in the car, I refused to drive. I got out and walked home, with you following the whole way.”

He shook his head, smiling. “Ke vida, eh, Chika? What a life it’s been!”
* * *
When we got to the hospice I stalled, driving around the lot pretending to look for parking, though there were plenty of spots. “Park over there,” he said, finally, and I had no choice but to stop the car.
“Wait a minute.” He dug into his pants pocket, took out a bill, and pressed it into my
hand. “Here. And don’t tell your mother.”

I knew what it was before I looked at it; he’d been slipping me fifty-dollar bills for years,always with the warning not to tell Mother. Never two twenties and a ten, or fives; always a crisp fifty. I couldn’t help thinking, This is the last fifty from my father.

“You’re saving these, I hope?”

“I try. I have a bunch of them,” I lied.

“Next week I’ll get you another.”

But I’ll never break this one, not if my life depends on it.

“Thanks,” I whispered. “And I’m sorry I played my music so loud all the time.”

He pinched my cheek before he got out. “Nah, you were a good kid.”

####