Raising the Dad Read online

  Between the ringtone and caller ID, John didn’t always pick up when he knew it was his mother. If she left a message he’d listen to it instantly, and he’d call her right back if it was even remotely urgent, but so many of her calls were just because she was lonely or she had to tell John something that she told him five times before.

  He was falling behind in his work, indulging his mother every time she beckoned. It made him feel shitty, but he felt that he needed to allocate his time better.

  His mother called twice the night before, each message simply, “Call me.” But he hadn’t yet.

  “I’m stepping back,” he said with unconvincing resolve in response to Robin’s disapproving tone. “Mike needs to deal with this stuff. If it was important, she would’ve said. Or he’d have called by now for me to take over with her.”

  “How do you think he’s doing with her?” Robin asked, sipping her wine from the other side of the room.

  “Fine. I guess. But it’s only been a couple weeks. Hopefully this Steve Hoover thing doesn’t come through.”

  “Who’s Steve Hoover?”

  “The next piece of shit who’s going to knock my brother’s life sideways.”

  “The Vasquez guy.”

  “Sí.”

  Robin went to change her clothes, leveling an arching eyebrow of disapproval at her husband as she left the kitchen. “And you’re leaving her to fend for herself with dirtbags like that hanging around.”

  He sighed and tapped the screen of his phone.

  “Hi, Ma.”

  “Where have you been? I called you all last night,” Rose asked.

  “Sorry. I just got caught up in this project that I’m working on, and by the time I heard your message it was too late to call. How are you? Is Mike taking good care of you?”

  “Oh, sure. We’re already like a couple of old roommates.”

  John’s ear was honed to hear hints of unease. Something was bothering her. “You sure? Is something wrong?”

  “Oh, it’s just … He had some friends over last night, they were up later than me. They’re so loud.”

  “You want me to talk to him? It’s your house.”

  “No, don’t make trouble. It’ll be fine. Listen, I called because Walt Bolger wants you to call him.”

  “Walt Bolger? Doctor Bolger?” John asked. “Why?”

  Walt Bolger and John’s father were partners as young doctors at Holt Memorial Hospital. On the day in 1985 when John’s father had his stroke, it was Dr. Bolger who found him on the floor in the office adjacent to his and fought to save him. Nearly a year later, it was Dr. Bolger who sat Mike and John down and told them that their father finally had to be let go, that while his body lingered on there was no chance of him ever regaining consciousness.

  Dr. Bolger had to tell the boys this, because over those ten months their mother pretty much broke down, unable to handle the brutal turn their family had taken.

  Other than bumping into him around town a handful of times since John moved back to his hometown in the mid-nineties, he consigned Walt Bolger to that raw-nerved part of his memory that tapped into that precise moment in time when he knew his family would never be the same.

  “You must’ve misunderstood him,” John said gently to his mother. “He was probably calling to talk to you. Could he have been confused?”

  Dementia, John was learning, was grabbing hold throughout his parents’ generation. The brain misfires, and all of a sudden Walt Bolger’s calling his dead friend Larry to set up a tee time.

  “Why would he be looking for me?” John asked.

  “He says he has something to talk to you about. He wants to meet you for lunch. He was your father’s best friend, so you call him tonight.”

  “Did he give you any idea—”

  John heard the stereo blast to life at his mother’s house. Furious metal. Mike music.

  “What?” she shouted into the phone.

  “Ma, tell Mike to turn that stuff—”

  “Okay, bye.”

  She hung up. John stared at the phone, and then called up a phone book. He was apparently having lunch with the guy who pulled the plug on his old man.

  Three

  They met at Rocky’s, a diner across the street from the hospital that had been around since the fifties. John’s father had been a regular there as a young resident and later as a flourishing internist, when he had both the time and money to have taken lunch somewhere more refined. There were still waitresses working there who had waited on him.

  When John and Mike were young, Larry Husted would bring his sons to Rocky’s when he was on call and needed to stay close to the hospital. “On call” became words John resented, because it meant his father—and the family—was forever tethered to his job. Long after his stature at the hospital would have allowed him to scale back, Larry still took rounds in the emergency room he helped build and made himself available for consultation at all hours.

  As an adult, John wondered if his father always declared himself available whether the hospital actually needed him or not. He knew his father loved his job, but as Larry’s marriage stretched on and his sons grew more troublesome, maybe work provided him an escape.

  Families weren’t always easy, John knew.

  Almost nothing ever changed at Rocky’s. A shadow of a decal for Squirt, the lemony soda that still made John’s mouth pucker just thinking about it, scarred the front door. The gumball machine just inside still raised money for the Lion’s Club. After all this time, John wondered what kind of empire they must’ve amassed, a penny at a time. It took quarters now.

  The counter where John and Mike spent hours when their father ran across the street to consult on some quick emergency remained. Their mother had been involved with community work on the weekends, so when the hospital intruded on Larry’s day off, the diner’s owner had been happy to watch the boys. The waitresses doted on them—every kid in school knew Mike and John got free sundaes at Rocky’s any time they wanted. Mike was still young then, years away from the misbehavior that would tear him and his father apart.

  “Johnny Husted!” A zaftig, sixtyish waitress had sneaked up on him. “Where you been keeping yourself?”

  “Hey, Sheila. Ah, you know. Sticking close to home, trying to get some work done.”

  “And your mother?”

  “You’ll see her next week. We have a lunch date.”

  “Good for you!” she smiled as she led him to a table. “I hear Mike is back home.”

  John flinched. Her discretion was admirable, but he was sure small-town gossip had all the dirt on big brother Mike.

  “He is.”

  “Tell him to get his fanny in here,” she said. “I still remember when there was nothing a free sundae couldn’t fix for that boy.”

  John smiled as she handed him a menu. “I’m waiting for someone. Walt Bolger, actually.”

  “How is he?” she asked with a heartsick concern.

  “I don’t know,” John said warily. “I actually haven’t seen him practically since I was a kid. Is something wrong?”

  “Cancer. Or that’s what everyone says. The old poop is as close-mouthed as he’s ever been,” she said with a fond gruffness that went back decades. “We’d hear this and that from his wife, but she died years ago.”

  She took back the second menu. “Well, I can go ahead and get his order in. Walt Bolger hasn’t changed his lunch order in forty years.”

  She winked in that motherly way that has been bred out of our younger waitresses, and John was left with his reveries. Out the front window, beyond the strip mall that had grown in well past his father’s day, he could see “new” Holt Memorial, which remained a monument to his father’s vision and determination. It still towered over the town but no longer appeared like the sleek, modern facility that opened to much local fanfare in 1983.

  It would always shine by comparison, though, so long as the old hospital remained grafted to its replacement. Coming out of the seventies, H
olt City—an hour southwest of Milwaukee—was a dying town, and the doctors and the hospital’s board argued that only a world-class hospital could keep Holt City from falling to dust like so many small Midwestern cities. With the vast tract of land already paid for, they built the new hospital directly adjoining the existing building. They intended to tear down the old hospital just as soon as they found the money for the demolition.

  On the day they broke through the wall between the old hospital and new, there was a ceremony where dignitaries and prime movers got to take a symbolic swing at the edifice with a sledgehammer. John’s father, never a big man, staggered beneath the hammer’s weight, but as he drove it home his pride was clear.

  Chunks of that concrete, encased in Lucite, were still on Larry’s desk the day the stroke brought him down two years later.

  But it was all the new facility could do to keep up with the cutting-edge medical technology required to keep it competitive. The old hospital hung on to rot, affixed to the working building like a tumor.

  * * *

  Memories of Dr. Bolger returned to John when the old doctor finally arrived and sat down across from him. Dr. Bolger had been an imperious name associated with Larry’s career and a dour specter pecking at a cocktail at the dinner parties John’s parents hosted when he was a kid. John stole looks at the old man while he picked at his lunch. He did look frail, perhaps from disease, but definitely older than John figured he was. Dr. Bolger had been younger than his father, but John guessed he was into his seventies. Seeing him so weathered, knowing that he and John’s father were a team back when they were young and vital, made John wonder what Larry would look like had he earned such a long life.

  “How’s your mother?” The old man asked after muted small talk.

  “Oh, you know,” John said. “Not great. I’ve had her in with Dr. Kelly over the past year. He’s pretty sure it’s Alzheimer’s.”

  “I’ve spoken to him,” Dr. Bolger said. “He’s very good, and he won’t sugarcoat anything for you. This is an awful disease and there’s not much he can do for her. You just need to keep her world very quiet and be patient with her as her thinking gets more tangled.”

  He looked John in the eye. “Dr. Kelly tells me you’re doing a great job with her. I’m not surprised.”

  John smiled gratefully.

  But then an awkward silence fell over their lunch that stretched into an air of avoidance. Having dispensed with all the fond and sad talk about the past, it appeared that the old man was avoiding the real reason for this meeting.

  After Sheila cleared their plates and topped off their coffee, Dr. Bolger cleared his throat.

  “John, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about your father. About how he … died,” he said. “There are things you need to know.”

  Going into their lunch, John wondered if this was why his father’s old friend reached out to him after so long. His father died when he was thirteen and that whole period was so emotionally wrenching that there were great holes in his understanding of what happened. With his time on earth dwindling, John figured the old man wanted to tell him what he could about his father and the way he died, just to make sure he knew.

  “You know, your father was a great doctor,” Dr. Bolger continued. “We both were, and we knew it. Everything was changing in medicine, and we saw all the advancements that were on the way. We’d lose a patient and it would haunt us to know that if they had just hung on, if they had just gotten sick a few years later, we maybe could’ve saved them.”

  John was confused by where this was leading, but he felt the old doctor drawing close to the matter at hand. He looked past John through the front window, toward the hospital.

  “Let’s take a walk,” he said.

  Four

  They stood at the crosswalk, Dr. Bolger saying that he never got tired of the view of the hospital from the other side of the street. John realized that he would never care about anything as much as Walt and Larry cared about that building.

  They entered through the main lobby to a complicated mix of smells: flowers from the gift shop, bland, utilitarian food from the cafeteria, and the medicines that dangled hope before all who entered. Until he had begun escorting his mother to her appointments, John hadn’t been in the building since Katie was born.

  The old doctor strolled in regally and marched straight toward the private administration offices.

  “Excuse me. Can I help you?” a receptionist asked.

  “Yes, dear. I’m Walter Bolger. Doctor Walter Bolger.” He gestured to a wall opposite her, where portraits of the hospital’s founders were on sober display.

  The receptionist saw his portrait and squirmed as he smiled unctuously. John got the feeling this wasn’t the first time the old man pulled this.

  “I’m so sorry, sir. I’m new here.”

  “Quite all right; we were all new here once. When I was new here, here was a cornfield!” He spread his arms wide for effect.

  He walked John to the wall of founders and stood him before the image of his father. John remembered being in the hospital lobby for the unveiling of the portrait, within a year of his father’s death. Mike was a no-show that day; by that point, he would’ve been somewhere getting high, or working out with his band.

  Larry Husted was no older than forty-five when the photograph was taken in the early eighties. The ghastly remnants of seventies fashion had lost most its grip, but his sideburns were still a bit too long, his glasses still had that racy sort of aviator style that were all the rage back then. Larry had on a vibrant blue suit jacket that his peers might have considered just a bit radical, given his age and status.

  The same photo of his father sat eternally beneath a hazing of dust in the family home where his mother lived. The man in the photo was dynamic. Whenever John noticed the picture, he sometimes convinced himself that his old man was sporting a loose perm.

  John nodded toward the portrait. “Did he do something? With his hair?”

  “What?” Dr. Bolger asked with surprise.

  “Nothing.”

  They stood in silence, until it became uncomfortable. The old man finally broke the reverie by leading John farther into the building.

  They passed what had been Dr. Bolger’s office for decades. Obligatory pictures of his late wife and assorted family members personalized a space that was otherwise efficiently all business.

  John stared into the room next door, his father’s old office. This was where the stroke got him. That was the floor where he fell. One morning a lifetime ago, Larry Husted walked through the doorframe where his son now stood, and he never walked out again.

  At the moment the father passed through this space one final time, the son was across town, at school, not seeing anything coming.

  Dr. Bolger stood with his hand on John’s shoulder, understanding where his thoughts were. They moved on.

  * * *

  Rounding a corner, they nearly collided with a man in his mid-forties wearing a jacket and tie and an unmistakable air of anxiety.

  “Ah, Dean. Good!” Dr. Bolger smiled. “This is John Husted, Lawrence Husted’s son. John, this is Dean Durning, our hospital administrator.”

  Durning shook John’s hand as the old man seemed to be forcing them together.

  “Hey, John. Good to meet you. I was five years ahead of you, all through school. My sister Peggy was in your class. Peggy Durning?”

  “Right, sure,” John said. He had no idea who Peggy Durning was, but her brother was trying way too hard.

  “I was just giving John a tour of the place,” Dr. Bolger said.

  “A tour! Great!” He grabbed John’s hand again. “Your father is a legend around here. A legend. If there’s ever anything any of us can do for you…”

  “Thanks,” John said, unsettled by the guy’s fidgeting. Durning popped back into his office as Dr. Bolger and John continued on.

  “Dean is a good man, he’s really taking good care of this place,” the old man told John.
“You’ll like him.”

  * * *

  They walked on, seemingly without purpose, until Dr. Bolger stopped at a door marked HOSPITAL STAFF ONLY. The old man punched in a code and as he opened the locked door, John saw stairs leading down and heard the throbbing pound of heavy machinery. “Come on,” the old doctor said, ignoring John’s skeptical look.

  John followed him down the stairs and along rows of generators and boilers echoing through the vast basement. Dr. Bolger shouted to him above the noise.

  “This is the guts of this place! This whole building, it’s like a living organism, and here is where its life comes from!”

  John imagined Walt Bolger and his father as young men decades ago, poking around here throughout construction like a couple of kids. He pictured lunch-bucket guys in hard hats shooing the two of them off, only to have them slip back down the next day to check on progress. Rather than take John back to the terrible day his best friend died, maybe the old man simply wanted to show John the secret corners of what he and his father had built together.

  They pressed on, Dr. Bolger navigating a maze of corridors and vast industrial spaces without slowing. At what had to have been the farthest reach of the basement, in the corner of a cluttered storage room filled with ancient hospital beds and bulky, decommissioned machinery, the old man stood before an exit door.

  “How’d you like to have a look inside the old hospital?” he asked with a strangely constricted smile. “Your father put in a lot of hours there, a lot more than he got to see in the new building. When he was just about your age, that old place was his everything.”

  John hesitated. Old Holt Memorial held strong memories for him. It was the monolithic taskmaster that kept John’s father away from him throughout his childhood, but it was also a tangible place where by all accounts Larry Husted helped an awful lot of people get better.