"Joe who?" my mother asked without guile from her hospital bed. She'd just read a card that had been tucked into a glorious bouquet of freshly delivered flowers.
"Joe Heller," I told her. I was flabbergasted that she didn't know or couldn't guess, but then we were in Sloan-Kettering. It was 1995, she was dying, and although my parents had been married for thirty-eight years, they had had a particularly acrimonious divorce twelve years before and had not spoken since. So perhaps the fact that she was scouring her brain for non-Hellerian Joes she might know was not really all that startling. I reached over for the card and read aloud: "My darling Shirley," it began, "I am so sorry. Joe." I handed it back to her.
When I told her who'd sent the flowers, she spoke slowly and without rancor. "Well, he is a sorry soul," she pronounced wearily, crumpling up the card and dropping it into the yellow plastic trash bin on the floor beside her bed. "But he sent you flowers," I pushed, somehow hoping for more. "Th ey're from Dad. Don't you think they're nice?" I pestered, leading the witness. She stared at me, unruffled and unimpressed. "I get it. I understand," she said. "But really, how wildly would you like me to celebrate this? Should I hire jugglers?" Then she muttered something that I made her repeat twice because it was said so faintly, she closed her eyes and we never spoke of the flowers or of my father again.
By then my mother was bald and terribly frail. After her initial diagnosis a year and a half earlier, I'd moved back in with her at the Apthorp, the apartment building where I'd grown up, decamping from the Upper East Side to properly care for her for as long as was needed.
From the day I moved back in, whether my mother was home or, as she was with increasing frequency, in the hospital, my father was too stubborn and too shaken by the gravity of her illness to call or speak to her. Instead, he called me. Night after night he inquired about her with an array of questions that never varied: Had she eaten? Had she gotten fresh air that day? Was she able to sleep? What were the doctors saying? Had she taken all of her medications and had I remembered to give her all of her vitamins? What was her mood? Every night I answered him, increasingly baffled by his persistent interest and concern, but not, I suspect, as baffled as he himself may have been.
As my mother got sicker, had brain surgery, lung surgery, chemo, and radiation, I could hear how much more difficult it was for him to keep the fear from creeping into his voice. He knew we were going to lose her. It was only a question of when. Officially, they had lost each other many years before, of course, but it was obvious how deeply he was tied to her. They were still uncannily connected.
Even after years of silence, the truth remained that there'd never been anyone who'd known or understood each of them better than the other. There never would be. With Mom's death, this aspect of my father's life would be obliterated, and I sensed that fact very strongly during that time. To me, it could easily be seen lurking just beneath the surface—a surface customarily guarded and closed and, for the most part, ineluctably indecipherable.
Heller (center) in Corsica, 1944
When my father called me those nights he was not the blustery, famous author; the gruff, arrogant big shot; the smug, cocky fellow who sometimes showed up to friends' cocktail parties for the sheer fun of insulting them. He wasn't the caustic, clever master of the verbal arabesque who for years had answered the question "How come you've never written a book as good as Catch-22?" with the sly, Talmudic response to put any other to shame: "Who has?" he'd ask, genuinely wanting to know. He was not bombastic or self-satisfied during those nightly calls. He was only sad. He just wanted to talk, and I let him.
Then, about a month before my mother died, when she had gone into Sloan-Kettering for what seemed as if it might be the last time, one night when Dad called I was simply too exhausted to hold everything back that I'd been wanting to say to him ever since she'd first been diagnosed. I had never found the courage or the proper words to use with him before.
I blurted out that he simply had to communicate with her again now, or he would never forgive himself. "How will you live with yourself if you don't? How will you sleep at night?" I asked in an uncustomarily loud tone. He listened silently, and I could picture him sitting in his lemon-yellow study out in East Hampton where he lived, seething at the very notion of being scolded by his daughter. "Call. Write to her. Send flowers. Do something. There isn't much time left, and if you don't, I think you'll always be sorry," I fumbled, suddenly aware of and horrified by my own stridence. Now, understandably, there was angry silence. When Dad finally spoke, he was petulant, childlike. "I don't need you to tell me what to do," he growled, hanging up before I could respond.
It was the very next day when, sitting in my mother's hospital room, there had been a knock at the door, and an orderly had entered with the exquisite bouquet of flowers for Mom. From Dad.
When I arrived home that night the phone was already ringing. He wanted to know if she'd gotten the flowers and if so, had she liked them. I assured him that they'd arrived and had been magnificent. "Well, what did she say?" he asked with some urgency, and then it was my turn to be silent.
Yossarian Slept Here: When Joseph Heller Was Dad, The Apthorp Was Home, and Life Was a Catch-22 by Erica Heller is published next week by Simon & Schuster. Photo from the Wall Street Journal by Everett B. Thomas and courtesy Dan Setzer.
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