“Yeah, that, too. But I was thinking, because I’m not going to live long, I might as well speak my mind.”
“You
Ray smiled at something in this. “Not always, Patty. Less than you might think, actually.”
“Name one thing you ever meant to say but didn’t.”
“I was never very good at expressing affection. I know that was hard for you. Hardest for you, probably. You always took everything so seriously, compared to the others. And then you had that terrible luck in high school.”
“I had terrible luck with how you guys handled it!”
At this Ray raised a warning hand, as if to forestall further unreasonableness. “Patty,” he said.
“Well, I did!”
“Patty, just—just—. We all make mistakes. My point is that I do have a, ah. I do have affection for you. A lot of love. It’s just hard for me to show it.”
“Tough luck for me, then, I guess.”
“I’m trying to be serious here, Patty. I’m trying to tell you something.”
“I know you are, Daddy,” she said, breaking down in somewhat bitter tears. And he did his patting thing again, putting his hand on her shoulder and then drawing it away indecisively and letting it hover; and it was clear to her, finally, that he could be no other way.
While he was dying, and a private nurse came and went, and Joyce repeatedly, with contortionate apologies, slipped off to Albany for “important” votes, Patty slept in her childhood bed and reread her favorite childhood books and combated the household’s disorder, not bothering to ask permission to throw away magazines from the 1990s and boxes of literature from the Dukakis campaign. It was the season of seed catalogues, and she and Joyce both gratefully seized on Joyce’s sporadic passion for gardening, which gave them one common interest to talk about, instead of zero. As much as possible, though, Patty sat with her father, held his hand, and allowed herself to love him. She could almost physically feel her emotional organs rearranging themselves, bringing her self-pity plainly into view at last, in its full obscenity, like a hideous purple-red growth in her that needed to be cut out. Spending so much time listening to her father make fun of everything, albeit a little more feebly each day, she was disturbed to see how much like him she was, and why her own children weren’t more amused by her capacity for amusement, and why it would have been better to have forced herself to see more of her parents in the critical years of her own parenthood, so as to better understand her kids’ response to her. Her dream of creating a fresh life, entirely from scratch, entirely independent, had been just that: a dream. She was her father’s daughter. Neither he nor she had ever really wanted to grow up, and now they worked at it together. There’s no point in denying that Patty, who will always be competitive, took satisfaction in being less embarrassed by his sickness, less afraid, than her siblings were. As a girl, she’d wanted to believe that he loved her more than anything, and now, as she squeezed his hand in hers, trying to help him across distances of pain that even morphine could only shorten—could not make disappear—it became true, they made it true, and it changed her.
At the memorial service, which was held in the Unitarian church in Hastings, she was reminded of Walter’s father’s funeral. Here, too, the turnout was enormous—easily five hundred people. Seemingly every lawyer, judge, and current or former prosecutor in Westchester attended, and the ones who eulogized Ray all said the same thing: that he was not only the ablest attorney they’d ever known but also the kindest and hardest-working and most honest. The breadth and height of his professional reputation were dizzying to Patty and a revelation to Jessica, who was sitting beside her; Patty could already anticipate (accurately, it turned out) the reproaches that Jessica would be leveling at her, afterward, and with justice, for having denied her a meaningful relationship with her grandfather. Abigail went to the pulpit and spoke on the family’s behalf, attempted to be funny and came off as inappropriate and self-involved, and then partially redeemed herself by crumbling into sobs of grief.
