Dementia Z.Z. Boone

Dementia

Z.Z. BOONE

She tells me to come right away, that my father has “fnally come unwired.” I’ve gotten calls like this from Mother before— some coming in the middle of the night, many following my father’s ability to fnd his way into the locked liquor cabinet—but none where she seemed this frantic. “I’m afraid he could hurt himself,” she’d say, or “He’s on another bender.” Now she says, “Please! I think he might kill me!”

It’s two-thirty in the afternoon and I’m in my offce at the university preparing to administer a fnal examination in forty-fve minutes. The course: “British Folk Figures: Real and Imagined.” I can leave afterward, at 4:30, but something tells me I need to go now. I get Justine, the department secretary, to cover for me, get in my car and drive the forty minutes toward their house in Brampton. It’s April, 1976. Darryl Sittler has recently scored an NHL record of ten goals for our Maple Leafs, people are abuzz about the coming summer Olympics in Montreal, and in the U.S. folks are preparing for the 200th birthday of their nation. Virtually no one owns a mobile phone, contact lenses aren’t disposable, and most people have to actually leave their lounge chairs to change television channels.

My father—who has always insisted that everyone, his only son included, call him “Willie”—began losing touch a few years earlier. Little things. Has anybody seen my slippers? and he’d be wearing them. Gradually it got more serious. He’d be driving and forget where he was going or even where he was. I suggested to Mother that maybe we needed to consider the possibility of

placing him in a treatment facility. “We’re a family,” she reminded me. “Not a bunch of Polynesians who drop their unwanted into a volcano.”

That was around the time his wandering began. In the early morning hours Mother would get a call from a neighbor saying, “Don’t worry, Willie’s over here with us eating toast.” Once a patrolman picked him up, the moon still out and Willie still dressed in pajamas, walking up the street away from the house. He claimed he was on his way to the airport. After that, Mother—in clear violation of local fre codes—had a key-operated deadbolt installed on the inside of the front door. She hid the key in the pocket of her terrycloth robe, which she religiously hung from a hook on their bedroom door.

When I get to the house, she’s sitting on the porch swing waiting. It’s mild, but she’s wearing a pea-green, ankle-length winter coat that looks like it swallowed her whole. I park by the curb, but the woman is apparently in no mood to waste time. Before I’ve even taken the keys from the ignition, she’s standing outside my car, hands plunged in her deep coat pockets, lips already moving as if she’s warming them up.

“How is he?” I ask.

“Who knows?” she shrugs. “He’s off somewhere.”

By “off somewhere,” she means his mind is in a different place. He’s currently not among the living. In fact, my father has almost never been “off somewhere,” not in the literal sense, unless you count going to work or maybe driving down to Florida for two endless weeks every summer when we had the money.

We sit on the porch swing, its red cushions worn and faded, while a TV laugh- track blasts from inside.

“He’s starting to become violent,” she tells me.

It seems the story is this: Mother, ffteen years younger than Willie, had just made them both tea. He was sitting in the living room watching the television when she brought in the tray.

“You know who’d get a kick out of this?” he said, pointing

to the television. “Dell. Why don’t you call him up and ask him over?”

My mother reminded him—very calmly, very patiently, according to her—that Dell no longer lived in our neighborhood and hadn’t for years.

“Your father turned into a madman,” she says. “Called me a liar, and slapped my hand as I was trying to serve him. Burned my wrist and broke one of my best Royal Doulton cups.” She takes her left hand out of her coat pocket and shows me her wrist, which she’s bandaged to great dramatic effect. “Then he started crying like an infant. I thought I was going to have to call the police.”

I suggest going inside, but Mother says she’s more comfortable waiting out here. “Give me a hoot when you have him calmed down,” she tells me, and I can’t help but think of that alligator wrestler we all saw in Orlando when I was a kid.

I fnd him in the living room, sitting in his leather-seated rocker, eyes trained on the TV. There’s a tea stain on the beige carpet, but all other signs of his alleged outburst have been cleaned up.

“Hey, Dell,” he calls happily.

“It’s me, Willie. Trevor.”

“Dell,” I might mention, refers to Delray Kilgore, this kid who used to live across the street from us. The boy Willie wished was his. Delray Kilgore, a year younger than I and about the same size, was a natural athlete, a terrifc student, and a handsome guy despite a reddish-brown birthmark the size of an oak leaf on the left side of his face. He and my dad, the latter a former standout in high school track, would go to sporting events together (including a father/son golf tournament sponsored by the church) while I—with no regrets—would sit in my room, read Dick Turpin, Highwayman, help my mother clean house, and listen to rock on WKBW from Buffalo, New York.

Delray’s own father was an out-of-work tool and dye maker who was drunk most nights. During the day he was a hard

working guy who did odd jobs for anybody who needed him. He’d shovel walks and rake leaves and repair broken windows. He was remarkably timid and seldom spoke to anyone unless it was necessary. Rumor had it that before his wife “made the choice to move on,” Mr. Kilgore (a title even the adults used to refer to him) had beaten his wife into a coma.

I knew Delray Kilgore—the real Delray Kilgore—better than either of my parents did. He was a snake. He would use his charm to suck up to teachers, then disparage them—to the joy of his friends—behind their backs. He would coerce girls into doing things they hadn’t really planned on. He would borrow your only suit jacket, return it with some unidentifable stain on the sleeve, and inform you it was like that when he put it on.

The summer Delray graduated from high school, his father landed a decent job in Ottawa. Even though they were less than fve hours away, we never heard from either of them again.

In the winter of 1973, Willie retired from his job as a roofer. Actually, “retired” may not be the right word. No one would hire him. His mind was pretty into playing tricks at that point, and he’d show up at the wrong home, or forget his tools, or arrive wearing his polished wingtip shoes. For almost forty years prior he had worked for someone else, always on hourly wage. He had good years with overtime and bad years with little work. It was Mother, head receptionist at St. Mary’s Presbyterian for twenty hours a week, who kept our domestic lives fowing somewhat smoothly.

This past November, she sold their car, worried that he would search the house, fnd the keys, and try to drive. “Besides,” she told me, “there’s nowhere I can’t walk to.”

Our living room remains virtually unchanged. Perhaps a pink lace doily has replaced the white one under the lamp on the sideboard, but that’s pretty much the extent.

“Mother says you had a bit of a blowup,” I say.

His eyes never stray from the television screen. “She’s just mad because I wanted to go fshing with Andy and Barney. She thought I should go into Floyd’s and get a haircut.”

He’s referring to The Andy Griffth Show, an American sitcom, which he watches daily in rerun. In fact, his entire life at this point seems centered around this nonsense: The Partridge Family, I Dream of Jeannie, and Car 54, Where Are You? All past their prime, and all being shown in what seems like an endless loop on some station pulled in from the States.

Most people living in 1976 are unfamiliar with the term “Alzheimer’s disease.” This is especially true of our family physician, Dr. Robert “Buffalo Bob” Fleming, whom I take my dad to see that following weekend. Buffalo Bob is easily 300 pounds and smells like wet woolen sweater. He takes my father’s blood pressure and asks him a series of questions: “Do you know where you are?” (To which my father answers, “With you.”), “How old are you?” (My father tells him he’s one hundred, and then laughs aloud.), “Can you name three cities?” (My father offers Bedrock, Mayberry, and Hooterville.)

“He’s got some age-related dementia,” Buffalo Bob tells me as Dad fips through Humpty Dumpty magazine in the waiting room. “He’s stuck in what we know as ‘second childhood.’”

“What can we do for him?”

“Think of him like a sleepwalker,” Buffalo Bob says. “Nothing abrupt. Nothing shocking. But you do want to try and ease him back into reality.”

“How?”

“Anytime he starts moving into Fantasyland, make it your job to lead him out of there.”

“In other words...?”

“In other words,” Buffalo Bob says as he lights a cigarette, “don’t let him get away with that happy horseshit.”

When we get outside, Dad becomes uneasy. These days he’s not usually out of the house, away from the TV, for this long. He looks around the parking lot, looks at me, and fnally says, “I don’t see where I parked the car.”

He laughs at this. “You drove,” he says. “That’s a rich one. A thirteen-year old driving.”

I persuade him into the passenger side and he goes along like one teenage boy taking a dare from another. I close his door and get in on the driver’s side.

“He’s not gonna be very happy,” he smiles.

“Who?”

“Whoever owns this car.”

I tell him the car belongs to me, and as further proof I slide my driver’s license from my wallet and hand it across to him. He studies it a moment, the smile still on his face, then he indicates the photo.

“Who’s this?”

“That’s me,” I tell him.

He laughs. “Good one, Dell,” he says. “Except this guy is as old as I am.”

“Look at me,” I say, and he does. “I’m Trevor. Your son.”

His lips part, but he says nothing. I twist my rearview mirror in his direction.

“Now look up here,” I tell him. “The person in the mirror? That’s you.”

He looks at his refection, turns his head, and adjusts the mirror up and down. His smile is gone now, and he slumps into his seat like a child who’s just been scolded. I take my license and return it, fx my mirror, pull out of the parking lot.

Neither of us says another word for the entire ride home.

Mother doubts many things, but not the word of a physician. She’s found a red crayon and she’s cut up a bunch of the cardboard boxes she keeps in the basement. After dinner, with Dad again in watching TV, she sits at the kitchen table while I wash dishes and begins to make signs to hang around the house.

One reads: YOU ARE A 70+ YEAR OLD MAN!!! Another reads: I AM YOUR WIFE, NOT YOUR MOTHER!!! The one she’s just fnished reads: DO NOT ASK ME ABOUT DELL KILGORE!!! HE MOVED AWAY!!!

She looks up at me. “Should I add, ‘For all I know, he’s dead?’”

“Why would you do that?” I ask, as I put away the gravy boat.

She shrugs. “Reality is reality.”

A minute later, when I begin to clean the stovetop, she says, “You bear a certain amount of the blame for this.”

I look over at her. She’s lettering another sign, not looking over, not making eye contact.

“I mean, here you are. Thirty years old. Still unmarried and with no prospects as far as I know. Maybe if you’d have given him a grandchild or two he’d have somebody to invest in.”

“Unbelievable,” I say, mostly to myself.

“And then you move away, leaving the entire burden on my back.”

“I’m less than an hour away.”

“An hour’s an eternity to a hanging man,” she says. Then she holds up another sign and asks what I think. It says: THE PEOPLE ON TV ARE NOT REAL!!! WE ARE!!!

Back in my apartment in Toronto the call comes through. I left Brampton on Monday morning—now it’s Thursday night around eight. Justine, the department secretary, is in the kitchen making spaghetti. We’ve been an item now for the past two months and, according to Justine, her husband is having a simultaneous affair with his dental hygienist. She’s ten years older than I, not particularly attractive, a pound or two overweight. But she’s warm and responsive and discrete and when she’s not here I wish she was.

I’ve got one more day of offce hours, a stack of fnals to grade, a pot of coffee on perc, and a bottle of white wine chilling for later on.

On the phone, Mother is in tears. She tells me she’s in the hospital emergency room and that my father is in jail.

“Just calm down,” I say, “and tell me what you’re talking about.”

“He hit me,” she sobs. “Bloodied my nose. I had no choice but to call the police.”

Mother is being dramatic—I’m sure her bloody nose can be treated with a few tissues and a tilted-back head—but the thought of my father sitting in a jail cell without a clue as to what’s going on is too much to fathom.

“I’m on my way,” I tell her.

“Your father?” Justine asks after I hang up. I nod. She smiles, grabs her pocketbook. “Remember to turn off the stove and dump the spaghetti before you leave,” she tells me.

My father is being held at the 22nd Division Police Station on Hurontario Street. But he’s not in a holding cell. Like a lost child, he’s behind the desk, seated next to the offcer on duty. I almost expect to see him eating ice cream and wearing the policeman’s hat. When I identify myself to the offcer, my dad whispers, “He’s lying. Lock him up.”

I ask the police offcer what I need to do to gain my father’s release. He tells me it’s all been taken care of. While I was racing here, Mother had called and dropped the charges.

After something of a struggle and with the help of a second offcer, I get Willie into my car. I call home from a phone booth on the street and talk to Mother.

“I just now walked through the door,” she tells me. “Do you have any idea what cab fare cost these days?”

I don’t tell what I think: that her efforts to bring the man back around are evidently useless. Instead, I tell her I’m taking

Willie with me, that I’ll bring him back on Saturday.

“He needs to be out of the house for a day or two,” I say. “Maybe a change of scenery will make a difference.”

“You won’t be able to handle the man,” she says. “You’ll destroy one another.”

I insist I have it under control. I’ll keep a steady eye on him and pay a student to watch him when I’m away.

“And when you bring him back you’ll stay the summer?”

“I don’t know about that,” I say, but actually I’m already making plans to pay my next three months rent in advance and pack lots of short-sleeved shirts.

In Toronto, Willie is as nervous as a kidnap victim. Over and over he keeps saying, “This is nice, but we should be getting back.” I tell him to relax, that we’ll be going home in a day or so. I make him some canned tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich which he doesn’t touch.

Then I make the mistake of suggesting a glass of wine, hoping it will relax the man.

“Now we’re talking,” he says.

Halfway through the bottle, he spots the TV in the bedroom and seems to uncoil. It’s late, there’s nothing much on, but even the eleven o’clock news seems to settle him as he sits on the edge of the mattress and watches.

“I wonder if they’ll report on all the trouble in Petticoat Junction,” he says.

“Petticoat Junction is a TV show,” I tell him.

“Doesn’t mean they don’t have their share of problems.”

“Why don’t you get ready for bed?” I suggest.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that, son. I don’t even have pajamas with me.”

I’m heartened by the fact that he calls me “son.” I’m encouraged by the possibility of early progress. It’s a generic term, I realize, but I view it as positive.

He eventually agrees to take a pair of mine, and when he changes into them I’m alarmed by how thin he’s gotten. I lead him to the bathroom and allow him to use my toothbrush while I re-cork the wine and return it to the fridge. Back in the bedroom, while I change into a second pair of pajamas, he gets into my fullsized bed like a person wading into an unfamiliar pond.

“Hey, Willie?” I say as I fold our clothes neatly and place them on top of the wooden linen chest, “You remember that summer when you, me, and Mother drove all the way up to Fushimi Lake to camp? I was how old? Thirteen? It’s a miracle we even got back in one piece.”

When I glance over, his eyes are closed. I say “Willie?” but he doesn’t respond. I worry for a moment, until I notice the slight movement of his chest rising and falling. Although it stops broadcasting soon after midnight, I leave the television on all night.

Some time in the early morning hours, things turn confusing. I’m in a state of what we now refer to as “delta sleep” when I feel an arm snake around my waist. I begin to wake as the elastic band around my pajama bottoms is expanded, and a hand dips inside. I smile, thinking at frst it must be Justine, but I realize within moments that it’s not.

“Willie?”

“Just relax, Dell. I know what I’m doing.” His hand fnds what it’s after, and he begins to stroke me. “It’s fne,” he says. “Athletes do this with each other all the time.”

Instantly, I’m out of bed, and the lamp is turned on. The sun, I can’t fail to notice, has just started to rise outside the window, and on the TV a priest is performing mass. Willie’s pushed himself up on one elbow and lies on his side facing me. His eyes are neither completely open nor completely closed, and I can see his eyelids futter.

He laughs at this and lies back. It’s a laugh I’ve never heard come out of him before, and it makes me nauseous and unbelievably afraid.

I sit at my kitchen table with coffee while Willie—as far as I know—sleeps. At eight o’clock, a time when I know her husband has already left for work, I call Justine and ask if she’ll cover for me one more time. Then I call Bethany, an A-student with no discernable future, and ask if she’d like to baby-sit for a couple of hours.

At the public library I fnd the Ottawa phone book, page through, fnd only “Kilgore Realty.” I fgure it’s worth a shot, so when I get home—with Willie and Bethany off somewhere—I call the number. A woman answers, and when I ask if Mr. Kilgore is there, she tells me he’s busy — is there anything she can do to help? I ask her if she’d mind telling me his frst name, and the strangeness of the question makes her immediately elusive.

“Why do you ask?” she wants to know.

“I think he might be a friend from my childhood,” I tell her.

“What was your friend’s frst name?” she asks.

“Dell.”

“Sorry,” she says. “No ‘Dell’ here.”

I’m about to thank her and hang up when she tells me,“Mr. Kilgore’s frst name is Ray.”

“Delray?”

“Just ‘Ray’ as far as I know.”

“Does he have a birthmark on his face?” I ask.

She hesitates as if the answer to this question could decide her fate. “That’s him,” she fnally tells me.

“I might ask that girl out on a date,” Willie tells me at dinner. I’ve taken him out for fsh and chips, his favorite, at a pub down the street from my apartment.

“Her name’s Bethany. She’s ffty years younger than you are.”

“Oh, I get it,” he smiles. “You want her all to yourself.”

A waitress comes over and I immediately ask for a couple of Cokes before Willie can order a beer.

“She took me for a ride,” Willie says. “Drove me out and we took a look at the forest.” Willie leans in to confde. He’s like a pirate telling a crew member the location of some buried chest. “Did you know that there are men who live in the forest and they’re happy all the time and nobody can fnd them?”

“That would be the legend of Robin Hood,” I say. “I taught it last semester when Bethany was one of my students.”

“And they never grow old,” he adds.

“Peter Pan, Willie. You’re getting your stories crossed.”

The waitress brings our Cokes to the table and I notice Willie glaring at her with a lecherous look that embarrasses me. He stares after the woman as she makes her way back into the kitchen.

“Ready to go home tomorrow?” I ask. He turns and looks at me quizzically. “Back to the house. See Mother.”

“My mother’s dead,” he says.

“My mother,” I tell him. “Your wife.”

He looks at me as if it’s his frst time.

“Can I tell you something?” I say.

Silence.

“I know about you and Dell.”

place.

“No. He’s in Ottawa. He’s a grown man now.”

Willie says, “Ottawa.” He says it as if he’s calling it back, as if he hasn’t heard the word in some time.

“I know because I talked to him on the phone today.”

Now it’s my turn to lean in, to confde.

“You know why his dad moved him to Ottawa? Because of you. You wouldn’t leave him alone. You were constantly on him. If they hadn’t moved, Dell told me, one of them would have murdered you in cold blood.”

Two small tossed salads arrive at our table.

“You saw this on TV,” Willie says.

I shake my head.

“No, Willie,” I tell him. “This is real.”

He stares at me. “I want to go home now,” he says.

The next morning Willie listens to the car radio, but says little, which is fne with me. I’ve spent the night on the sofa, sleepless.

At the house, Mother is waiting like a prison warden taking custody of an escapee. It’s only a matter of minutes before she has him back inside in front of the television. She asks if she can give me a hand bringing my stuff in from the car.

“That’s okay,” I tell her. “I won’t be staying.”

When she asks what I’m taking about, I tell her the man needs professional help. I tell her he’s beyond us. She asks where the money will come from, and I tell her from me. I tell her I’ll work two, three goddamn jobs if I have to. When she starts to cry, I kiss her on the cheek and announce that I have to go.

head outside. “Like on the cover on the magazine! All of us happy around the dinner table!”

“Not real,” I say as I open the front door.

“You’re not real!” she screams.

A week after I’d dropped him back home, Willie apparently found the key in Mother’s robe, unlocked the front door, and in the early morning hours, vanished. There was a search—neighbors and police looked everywhere—but no one found a trace.

Mother, not surprisingly, blamed me. She stopped taking my calls, and on those occasions when I drove to the house, she refused to come to the door. Some six months after Willie left, she died. She was found by a neighbor sitting in Willie’s rocker, her right ankle broken, her refrigerator stocked with decaying food. Conjecture was that she’d slipped outside, hobbled back into the house, sat down, and gave up hope.

Today, I’m about the age Willie was. Justine, like a passing set of headlights, long ago disappeared from my life. And I’ve discovered that teaching, a noble profession, is little more than that. So I drive. And often, I forget my destination—if, in fact, I even started out with one.

Often times I’ll stop on the side of some back road. I’ll pull my car safely onto the shoulder, get out, and gaze at the trees that—except for that narrow ribbon of blacktop, or gravel, or compressed dirt—surround me. I’ll sometimes walk to the edge where wilderness and civilization meet, and look into the forest.

“Willie?” I might even say. “It’s me. Your son.”