Richard Ford - Let Me Be Frank With You

Our move to Haddam, a return to streets, housing stocks and turbid memories I thought I’d forever parted with, was like many decisions people my age make: conservative, reflexive, unadventurous, and comfort-hungry — all posing as their opposite: novel, spirited, enlightened, a stride into the mystery of life, a bold move only a reckless few would ever chance. As if I’d decided to move to Nairobi and open a Gino’s. Sadly, we only know well what we’ve already done.

And yet, it’s been fine — with a few surprises. The hurricane. The recession. Nothing, though, Sally or I consider embittering or demoralizing. Ann Dykstra (Ann Dykstra-Fuchs — she and Teddy tied the knot on one of their glaciers, in Greenland) was not in our thinking. She was “someplace” nearby, but out of sight. I couldn’t have said precisely where. In time I knew about Teddy’s departure, the renewed widowhood made somberer by the feeling (I filled this in) that Teddy was the best she’d ever have. Divorcing me decades back, leaving the children stranded, marrying a turd like Charley O’Dell — her second husband — and ending up alone… all that had been prologue to a door opening on a long beautiful corridor and to a much more cleanly lighted place where she’d ever been lucky enough to live, if only for a precious few years. I was happy not to think any of these things. Though I think them now. She was fine — just the way her daughter put it.

But then Ann began to “notice her body” in a way she hadn’t. Athletes, of which Ann is a classic example, notice goings-on in their muscular-skeletal underpinning long before the rest of us, and long before they notice depression, despondency, psychic erosion or anything “soft-tissue” in nature.

“I realized I would only swing one arm when I walked down the fairway,” she said when we went for Mexican lunch at Castillo’s in Trenton. I now see her more, which Sally thinks is “appropriate,” though I have less good feelings about it. “I thought, ‘Well, what in the hell is this about? Did I wrench my arm going to the bathroom at night and forget all about it? I guess I’m losing it.’” She grinned a big, amazed, open-faced June Allyson grin across our two plates of chiles rellenos. Discovering the disease that’s going to kill you can apparently be an exhilarating tale of late-in-life discovery — if only because genuine late-in-life discoveries are fewer and fewer.

There, however, turned out to be “just the slightest tremor,” which was confined to her “ off hand” (she’s a righty), something she attributed to age and the stress of widowhood. Her penmanship (the numbers she penciled onto her scorecard) had grown smaller and less clear. Plus, she wasn’t sleeping well, and sometimes felt more tired the longer she slept. “And I was constipated.” She rolled her eyes, shook her head and looked up. “You know me. I’m never constipated.” When we were married we didn’t talk about this little-known fact.

An entirely scheduled physical proved “concerning.” Abominable “tests” (I’ve had ’em) were performed. “Nothing really conclusive,” she told me. “You can’t diagnose Parkinson’s. You eliminate everything it’s not, and Parkinson’s is what’s left.”

“Surveillance” drugs were administered, which, if successful in eliminating the tremor, the fatigue and the bowel issues, meant (perversely) Parkinson’s was likely the ticket. And Parkinson’s was indeed the ticket. Continuing the drugs, however, would keep the symptoms at bay, though there might be some nausea (she’s had it) and some bp drops. But life as we know it — the elusive gold standard — could be anticipated, she told me, possibly for years, assuming continued exercise and patience with dosage adjustments. For all of which she’s a natural.

“Who knows,” she said the day she told me the whole story at lunch, “in a year they may figure the whole goddamn thing out and I’ll be good as new — for sixty-nine.” In later years, Ann’s begun talking like her late father, Henry, a man I dearly loved long after Ann and I went in the drink. Henry was a feeder-industry magnate for the automotive monolith (he produced a thing that made a metal thing that caused a smaller third thing not to get too hot, and work better; these were days when people still made things and used machines, instead of the opposite). Henry was a tile-back, tough-talking, little banty-rooster Dutchman, not above carrying a loaded pistol onto the shop floor to face down a union steward. Coarse talk, sexual parts, bodily functions were never in his daughter’s repertoire when she and I were experiencing marital bliss in the ’70s. But they seem to be her choices now. I’d be lying, though, if I said I didn’t miss the softer, callow girl Ann was before our son died and everything went flying apart like atoms splitting — our civilized etiquettes along with it.

The other unexpected news come to light since Ann moved to Carnage Hill is that I’ve learned she’s lied about her age the entire time I’ve known her — a long time now. When I met her in New York and we were a pair around town circa 1969, I was a sophisticated (I thought) twenty-four, and Ann Dykstra of Birmingham, Michigan, a winsome, athletic, somewhat skeptical twenty-two. Except in truth, she was a winsome, athletic twenty-five, having run away to Ireland her sophomore year with a boy from Bally O’Hooley who had more distance on his fairway woods than anybody on the men’s squad, and to whom she dedicated eighteen months of less than ideal life, before coming back humiliated to Ann Arbor. When I married her, at City Hall, Gotham, in February 1970, our marriage license clearly stated her age as twenty-three (I was by then twenty-five). I still have the diploma and over the years have had occasions to take it out of its green-leather envelope and to give it good, longing-filled lookings-at. I never saw her birth certificate, and she didn’t show me her passport. But when she asked me to look at her Parkinson’s work-up — she wanted me to know all about things for reasons of her own — there in the fine print at the top of page one was DOB. 1944! “Look,” I said (a dumb-bell), “they made a mistake on your birth date.” “Where?” Ann said. We were at Pete Lorenzo’s. She gave the paper a quick, absent look. “No, they haven’t,” she said impatiently. “It says ‘1944,’ though,” I said (a dumbbell). “You weren’t born in 1944.” “I certainly was. When did you think I was born?” “Nineteen forty-six,” I said, somewhat meekly. “Why did you think that?” “Because that’s what you said when we got married, and that’s what’s on our marriage license. And when I met you, you said you were twenty-two.” “Oh, well.” She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “What difference does it make?” “I don’t know,” I said. “It does.” “Why, exactly,” Ann said dryly. “Have you lost all respect for me now?” “No,” I said. “That’s a relief,” she said. “I don’t think I could stand that.” It was then that she told me about long-driver Donnie O’Herlihy or O’Hanrahan or O’Monagle, or whatever the hell his name was, and of her flight across the sea to Ireland and the ill-starred passions on the Bay of Bally O’Whatever.

Ann was right, of course. Did I lose respect for her (if that’s in fact what I had and have)? No. Does it make any difference to the global price of turnips? No. Is any part of my life different because I now know her legal age thirty years after she divorced me? I don’t think so. But. Something’ s different. Possibly only a poet would know what it is and be able to set it prettily out. But I would say that when the grand inquisitor frowns at me over the top of his ledger and growls, “Bascombe, before I send you where you know you’re going, tell me what it feels like to be divorced. Boil it all down to one emotion, a final assay, something that says it all. And be quick because there’s a line of lost souls behind you and it’s cruel to make them wait…” What I’d say to him (or her) is, “Let me put it this way: I loved my wife, we got divorced, then thirty years later she told me she’d always lied about her age. It’s vital information, Your Honor. Though there’s nothing at all I can do with it.” I can hear the oven doors clanking, feel on my cheek the lick of flame. “Next!”