Her father is hanging on the inside of the bathroom door. The door is opened into the bedroom, and his hanging figure is the first thing she sees when she enters the room. She does not scream. Instead, she backs away and collides with the wall, and then turns and starts to leave again, actually steps out of the bedroom and into the corridor beyond, but the mute figure hanging there calls her back, and she steps into the bedroom again, and moves across the room toward the figure hanging on the inside of the bathroom door, a step at a time, stopping before each step to catch her breath and recapture her courage, looking up at the man hanging there and then looking down again to take another step, watching her inching feet, moving closer and closer to the door and the grotesque figure hanging there.
There is something blue wrapped around his neck. His head is tilted to one side, as if it had dropped that way when he fell asleep. The hook is close to the top of the door, and the blue-scarf, is it? a tie?-is looped over the hook so that her father’s toes are an inch or so off the floor. She notices that he is barefoot and that his feet are blue, a blue darker and more purplish than the fabric knotted around his throat. His hands are blue as well, the same dark purplish-blue that resembles an angry bruise all over the palms and the fingers and the backs of the hands, open as if in supplication. He is wearing a white shirt and gray flannel trousers. His tongue is protruding from his mouth. It appears almost black.
She steps up close to his body hanging there.
She looks up into his face.
“Dad?” she says, disbelievingly, expecting him to stick his tongue out farther, perhaps make a razzing sound, break into a grin, she doesn’t know what, something, anything that will tell her he’s playing a game, the way he used to play games with her when she was a little girl, before he got old… and boring… and dead. Dead, yes. He does not move. He is dead. He is really and truly dead and he will never grin at her again. She stares into his wide-open eyes, as green as her own, but flecked with pinpricks of blood, her own eyes squinched almost shut, her face contorted not in pain, she feels no pain, she doesn’t even feel any sense of loss or abandonment, she has not known this man for too long a time now. She feels only horror and shock, and anger, yes, inexplicable anger, sudden and fierce, why did he do this, why didn’t he call somebody, what the fuck is the matter with him? “I never use such language,” she tells the five men listening to her, and the room goes silent again.
The police, she thinks. I have to call the police. A man has hanged himself, my father has hanged himself, I have to notify the police. She looks around the room. The phone. Where’s the phone? He should have a phone by the bed, he has a heart problem, a phone should always be withinShe spots the phone, not alongside the bed but across the room on the dresser, would it have cost him a fortune to install another jack? Her mind is whirling with things she will have to do now, unexpected tasks to perform.
She will have to call her husband first, “Bob, honey, my father’s dead,” they will have to make funeral arrangements, buy a casket, notify all his friends, who the hell are his friends? Her mother, too, she’ll have to call her, divorced five years, she’ll say, “Good, I’m glad!” But first the police, she is sure the police have to be notified in a suicide, she has read someplace or seen someplace that you have to call the police when you find your father hanging from a hook with his tongue sticking out. She is suddenly laughing hysterically. She covers her mouth with her hand, and looks over it like a child, and listens wide-eyed, fearful that someone will come in and find her with a dead man.
She waits several moments, her heart beating wildly in her chest, and then she walks to the telephone and is about to dial 911 when something occurs to her. Something just pops into her mind unbidden. She remembers the key to the safe deposit box in the little black leather purse, and she remembers her father telling her that among other things like his silver high school track medal there is an insurance policy in that box. It isn’t much, her father told her, but you and Bob are the beneficiaries, so don’t forget it’s there. She also remembers hearing somewhere, or reading somewhere, or seeing somewhere on television or in the movies-there is so much information out there today-but anyway learning somewhere that if somebody kills himself the insurance company won’t pay on his life insurance policy.
