CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dear Dad,
I’m writing to let you know that I’ve been diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease). Both of my arms are paralyzed, I’m having difficulty breathing and talking and swallowing. I can no longer safely eat food, so I have a feeding tube in my stomach. I can still walk, but this, too, will go. Despite all of these losses, I’m mainly in good spirits. Because I could no longer manage living alone, I’ve moved back in with Karina, where she and a wonderful team of caregivers help me get through the days and nights. Just wanted you to know.
Your son,
Richard
This is the simplest of the nine letters he’s composed, saved, and not sent to his father. He reads it again. Nothing but straightforward information. Just the facts, ma’am. He wrote the first draft of this letter back when he still had use of his left arm, when he still lived alone on Comm Ave. and spent his days and nights obsessively playing Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. That was this past summer. He can’t decide if August was a lifetime ago or yesterday.
After Bill leaves him showered and dressed and fed, he spends his mornings at the computer. He’ll scan the news, but he’s conscious not to spend too much time surfing these treacherous global waters. War, terrorism, nasty politics, racial tensions, murders, ignorance, blame—the news either frustrates, angers, or depresses him. He has enough to be frustrated, angry, and depressed about.
He invariably finds himself using this time every day to write and reread the letters he’s written to his father. Periodically, he edits his “coming out” letter, updating the list of losses to keep it current, just in case he should decide to send it someday. He added the part about the feeding tube just after Christmas.
He reads the letter again. Pointing the tip of his nose to FILE, he pulls down the menu, then points his nose to PRINT and hovers there just shy of long enough for the computer to register a click before turning his head to the right, his nose aimed at the window, disconnecting the cursor from his mouse target. A game of printing chicken.
He has no idea if his eighty-two-year-old father has an email account, so sending him anything would require actual paper, an envelope, and a stamp. If Richard’s ever going to print and mail any of the letters he’s written, this would be the one. Unlike the other eight letters he’s composed, this disclosure contains no blame or indignant rants. He’s almost printed it many times, flirted with the fantasy of his father holding the envelope in his hands before opening it, but Richard’s heart gets all twisted as he hovers the cursor over PRINT, and he bails.
Part of him doesn’t want his father to know. Keeping his diagnosis from his father fills Richard with an exhilarating sense of winning. He was born into a father-son game he never wanted to play, the rules still cruel and incomprehensible to him, but damn it, he’s going to win. He’s living with a disease that shaves off another layer of control every single day. Possessing control of whether his father knows or not puts a sword in Richard’s hand, a power that’s too seductive to resist. He’s going to prove, in an ultimate and final test, that he doesn’t want or need his father for anything and wouldn’t turn to him for help or love even in the most dire circumstances. He won’t give his father the satisfaction of knowing he’ll soon be rid of the son he never wanted.
But when Richard’s bombastic offense tires of wielding its sword and takes a seat, his defense is clearly visible, cowering in the corner. More than anything, he’s afraid of his father’s indifference. He wonders if his father already knows, if word of mouth has spread north to cow country, and Walt Evans is the one doing the snubbing.
Or his father doesn’t know and wouldn’t respond if he did. Richard imagines his father opening the envelope, reading the letter through once, crumpling the paper in his fist, and tossing it into the trash. Or he reads it, refolds it, and slides the letter into his coat pocket, where it will be forgotten along with some lint and a gas receipt. In all the fantasies Richard entertains about his father’s potential reaction to this letter, Richard’s mind won’t allow for the possibility of his father picking up the phone or showing up at the door. The father Richard knows would offer no words of shock, horror, empathy, sympathy, or love for his youngest son.
This is why Richard doesn’t print the letter.
He knows he’ll never send the others. He’ll never get what he wants from his father. What does he want? He wants his father to admit that he was wrong for making Richard feel as if he weren’t good enough to be in the family. He wants his father to tell him that he’s okay exactly as he is. He wants his father to say that he’s proud of him. He wants his father to say he’s sorry for showing no interest in his piano career, his wife, his daughter. In him. He wants a big fat heartfelt apology.
But Walt Evans is an old dog, and he’s not going to change, and he’s certainly never going to apologize. And it doesn’t matter now. Sorry won’t do Richard any good. What’s done cannot be undone.
Yet, Richard continues to write to his father. It feels good to get the words out—words Richard felt when he was six but didn’t have the vocabulary to articulate, words he wanted to yell when he was sixteen but didn’t have the courage, words he wanted to argue when he was twenty-six but didn’t have the composure, words he wanted to speak when he was forty-six but literally no longer had the voice. The letters he writes communicate what he could never say, every typed word carrying an ancient scar on its back, every typed sentence fracking a bevy of silenced wounds stored in his deepest, darkest core, releasing a lifetime of outrage and resentment. But it seems no matter how many sentences he writes, the injustices buried within him are never fully mined.
He considers writing another letter, but he lacks the energy. His neck muscles tire faster when sitting up at the desk versus reclined in his chair or propped against the back of his bed. It’s becoming conscious work to hold up his ten-pound head. His accuracy declines after typing only a few minutes, the cursor drifting down the screen as his head drops forward. He’s probably ready for one of those neck braces, the standard soft white collars people wear when they’ve been injured in an accident.
He opens the second letter instead. It begins as a résumé, a list of Richard’s achievements, appearances, and critical reviews (only the good ones). If he never sends it to his father, maybe Trevor can use it for Richard’s obituary.
He graduated with honors from Curtis. He was an associate professor at New England Conservatory. He’s played with the Chicago and Boston Symphony Orchestras; the New York, Cleveland, Berlin, and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestras. He’s played at Boston Symphony Hall, Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, London’s Royal Albert Hall, Tanglewood, Aspen, and many more. His playing has been hailed as “inspirational,” “spellbinding,” and “possessing great virtuosity.”
I was a great pianist. Audiences all over the world applauded me. They gave me standing ovations. They loved me. Why couldn’t you applaud me, Dad? Why couldn’t you love me? Richard has never found a satisfying answer to either of these questions, but staring at his bio on the computer screen, he’s proven, at least to himself, that he’s worthy of a father’s love. There is something wrong with him, not me. It took Richard forty-six years and ALS to get that far, which feels like progress but is probably just shifting blame, the pea transferred to another shell under deft sleight of hand, the truth still hidden from everyone.
Maybe if he’d loved to play something more accessible to his father, if he’d been into playing Billy Joel or the Beatles, if he’d wanted to play in a rock ’n’ roll band in a pub instead of classical piano in a recital hall, if he’d also played football and baseball like Mikey and Tommy, his father would’ve approved. Walt hated classical music. They lived in a one-hundred-year-old three-bedroom farmhouse with thin rugs and thinner walls. Whenever Richard practiced, which was all the time, there was nowhere in the house that didn’t fill with sound. If Richard was playing Bach, the entire house was listening to Bach.
Walt Evans hated Bach. Ten minutes was about all he could tolerate before he either stormed out of the house to do yard work or got in his pickup and drove to Moe’s, the local bar. If for some reason he wasn’t allowed to leave the house, if Richard’s mother told them supper would be ready in a few minutes, and Walt was forced to endure a few more minutes of Richard’s practicing, he’d explode. “Would you stop with all the goddamn noise?!”
Richard opens another letter, and every familiar sentence, every ancient accusation, is a bugle call to his oldest, darkest suffering, summoning an army of resentment and hatred to rise up within him. You called me a pansy for playing piano instead of football. . . . You called me a fag for loving Mozart. . . . You threatened to hack my piano to pieces with an ax and use the wood for kindling. . . . You never came to my recitals. . . . You never accepted me. . . . You never even knew me. . . . You never loved me, Karina, or Grace.
Grace. An electric ripple runs through him, decimating the tortured battlefield within, leaving him hollowed out, staring in helpless horror at his computer screen, seeing history repeated. The letters on the screen blur as he imagines a similar letter addressed to him, written by Grace.
You picked piano over me. You never came to my games. And now you have ALS, and you’ll never know me. You never loved Mom or me.
Tears roll down his face. Please don’t think that. He can’t stand the thought of this kind of letter, penned by her hand, of this legacy of pain he’s leaving her. Maybe what’s done can be undone. Maybe that’s what apology is for.
After a quick knock on his door Karina enters the room without pausing. It irritates him that she doesn’t even allow him to respond, for the possibility that he might not want her to enter. He’s still upset, his face wet with tears. He can’t wipe them away.
“It’s Tommy.” She’s holding Richard’s cell phone, faceup.
“Who?”
“Your brother,” a voice says from the phone on speaker. “Hey, Ricky, I’m sorry I’m not calling with better news. But, well . . .” Tommy’s voice thins out and disappears. He sighs and clears his throat. “Dad died last night.”
Richard stares at Karina. The puddle of agony he was just knee-deep in over Grace’s imagined letter evaporates. He waits for what replaces it. He feels nothing.
“Mikey found him early this morning. He was in his chair with the TV on. We think he died in his sleep. Probably a heart attack. . . .You there?”
“Yah.”
“I’m so sorry,” says Karina.
“Thank you. The wake is Thursday at Knight’s Funeral Home and the funeral is Friday at St. Jude’s.”
“O-kay,” says Richard.
“I know. I’m having trouble talking, too. He lived a good life. Almost eighty-three. And dying in your own home in your sleep, no hospitals or long, drawn-out disease, you can’t ask for better than that, right?”
Richard and Karina trade a silent conversation about ALS and death with their eyes before Richard realizes that Tommy is waiting for an answer.
“No.”
“Hey, I know we haven’t seen you in a long time, but you’re welcome to stay with Mikey or at Dad’s house. I’d have you here, but we literally got kids sleeping in closets and don’t have any room.”
Richard looks up at Karina. She nods. She’ll go with him to New Hampshire.
“Thaks-Tom-my. We’ll-be-there.”
“You okay, man?”
“Yeah.”
“All right. We’ll see you Thursday then.”
Tommy doesn’t know that Richard has ALS. Neither does Mikey. None of them knows. They’re about to find out.
Karina hangs up the phone and eyes Richard’s impassive-yet-already-tear-strewn face. “I’m sorry. Are you really okay?”
“Fine.” He swivels his chair toward the computer and away from her, showing her the back of his head.
He hears her leave the room without a word. He swivels the chair to be sure that she’s gone, then returns to his computer. He takes a deep breath, or at least a deep shallow breath. He points his nose at the screen, holding the position of his heavy head steady, focused on the folder labeled Letters to My Father. The folder opens. One by one, he selects each of the nine files and drags them to the trash. He studies the screen. The folder remains. The cursor darts and shimmies and his heart pounds hard in his throat as he works to select and then direct the folder to the trash bin.
There.
In an instant, his father and any possibility of apology are dead and gone.