Memoirs, Ink

The Narrative Voice

by Emily Gambone

Sometimes, I almost remember my birth.  Of course I know my memory is an illusion, but I've heard the story so often, it's hard not to picture the scene.  The doctor holds me up, I cry.  He says I'm bright-eyed.  And my dad takes me from him, dances around the room, laughs with happiness.  And relief.  My parents are relieved, but I don't know this until many years later.  The relief, almost a decade after their second daughter was born, malformed and dying, almost a decade after they decided my oldest sister would be their only living child; the relief was never part of the story, not in the beginning.  Just the happiness.

And so began my life of stories, with my dad as the narrative voice.  He spent his days buried in books and papers in his office, emerging for dinner only after the third or fourth call up the stairs.  But then he was ours, and we listened to his stories.  And after dinner, he tucked me in, sitting on the edge of my bed, and he told me tales of Willifred Raccoon.  Every night a new one, year after year.  Willifred grew as I grew, had first day of school jitters with me, suffered through chicken pox as I did, had the younger siblings I always so desired.  He comforted me, encouraged me, fulfilled my wishes and reflected my joys and pains.

And I listened to the stories about me, about my own adventures and experiences, told again and again until memory and story blurred.  I see the old man in the attic apartment two houses down who lowered pretzels and chocolate to me on a string, and I remember because a child remembers these things.  But I also see the apple blossoms against the blue sky as I lie in my bassinet, guarded by our fox-colored dog Hexe, and I know, this is part of my dad's narrative.  I couldn't possibly remember my infancy.  And lying in my bassinet, I couldn't have seen my guardian lying below me in the grass.  I remember picking blackberries in the garden, covered in juice, pricked by thorns, I remember crawling through the snowy tunnels built by my sister and the other older children, lit by candlelight.  I remember lying lizard-like on the wall separating our neighbors' house from our own, the sun warming my back.  Or do I just remember his stories?

And as I grew out of the selfishness of my childhood, I remember the other stories -- those not directly about me, but still a part of my history.  Stories about my parents as newlyweds in New York, scraping together pennies for the theater.  And how after one such night out, my dad had to beg on the corner for subway fare, dressed in his best clothes, every cent spent on stories, none left for reality.  Stories about their early days in Germany as grad students, about my mother setting fire to their landlady's curtains, about their failed attempt to rescue mice from an empty pool in a small German village, about their once weekly baths at the public bath house.  Stories about their adventures peering behind the iron curtain into Bulgaria and the terrible car crash there that separated them from their friends.  How in the lobby of a hotel, an old Bulgarian man slapped my dad's hand away as he tried to brush broken glass out of my mother's face, instead smearing her skin with a honey salve that healed her wounds and left no scars.

Sometimes I begged for a certain story, but mostly I just watched and listened, as everyone in my dad's presence did.  He captivated a room with his storytelling.  Even after I'd been sent off to bed during a dinner party, I'd hear the peals of laughter and smile to myself, wondering which story, so artfully told, had brought them such joy.

My dad never missed a chance to tell a story, not even if it was as simple as making up trivial pursuit questions.  But most of all, he loved April Fool's day.  The narrative voice took a completely implausible story and somehow made it convincing.  He kept my mother from walking Hexe along the banks of the stream in front of our house out of fear over a lion he told her escaped from a traveling circus.  He had his philosophy of religion students spend hours analyzing a recently-discovered ancient scroll about the desert hermit Jai Soif.  In all their attempts to decipher the meaning of the scroll, no one ever noticed j'ai soif is French for "I'm thirsty."  

I was convinced my dad hung the moon, so it was no surprise to me when he was given a teaching award and asked to deliver the convocation address at his college.  And of course he told a story.  A fable of his own invention about the importance of a liberal arts education.  As I sat on the stone steps of the dell, where almost a decade later I would get married, I surveyed the crowd.  I caught my breath with pride, watching these people, their attention focused on my dad, his words, his narrative voice.  I knew they caught a glimpse of his brilliance.  I knew, and I felt proud, and most of all lucky.

And so of course it was natural for my dad to be the one to tell me.  He started it off as I would.  "It could be worse," he'd said.  "I could have had a brain tumor."  I could feel my heart pounding, could see myself watching him, in the driver's seat of the car, mustering his courage, about to reveal he was not the master of his own story.  

"I have Parkinson's Disease."

Not a brain tumor, I thought.  Not a brain tumor.  "Is it fatal?" I asked.

"No," he said.

That's all my fourteen-year-old self needed.  My sister felt dread, but I was relieved.  Everything would be okay.  There would be a cure, sometime in the near future, and everything would be okay.

And for years it was.  For years we lived on hope and the firm belief there would be a cure for my dad.  How could there not be?

As a family, we drove to a little store in Georgetown where we bought pounds and pounds of fava beans, which were alleged to slow the progression of Parkinson's.  My parents slept with magnets under their mattress and my dad took countless supplements in addition to his prescriptions.  We were confident in our hope, as was my dad's neurologist.  A cure, he promised that first year, and every year after, was just 5-10 years away.  

My dad walked with walking poles, and I bristled protectively if I suspected anyone was looking at him with anything less than the utter admiration and devotion he deserved.  Together we traveled, spending our summers in Germany, hiking with friends in Switzerland.  For years, my father strode far ahead of everyone as we walked, leaving us behind out of fear he'd slow us down.  But on my wedding day, he stood tall and proud beside me as he walked me down the grassy aisle of the dell.  

For years I was right.  For years, it was okay.  Mostly.  And as things began to worsen, my parents discovered a Parkinson's exercise program in Germany, in the mountains not far from their beloved German town.  And there they spent weeks that strengthened my father again and again, until the disease caught up to his progress and he returned to the mountains to fight it once more.  One step forward, two steps back.  But better than no steps forward at all.  

Perhaps worse than the stiffening of his limbs was the weakening of my dad's voice.  People often ask him to repeat himself, and in his last year of teaching, his students complained they couldn't hear him and he was forced to wear a microphone.  Just over three years ago, on the eve of my maternal grandfather's funeral, I sat among family, close and distant, at a restaurant.  My dad was at my side, my mother across the table, telling a story.  Quietly, he leaned over to me, and without judgment, but not without regret, he said, "she has taken the narrative voice."  Then he fell silent again.

Looking back now, it's hard to pinpoint when my dad's Parkinson's took such a rapid turn for the worse.  Three years ago he was driving.  Just over two years ago, at my mother's seventieth birthday party, he could hardly move to his seat at the table.  The red laser light of his cane, which tricked his brain into stepping across it when his feet froze, had been replaced by a laser walker.  His movements from room to room were tediously slow.  Another trip to Germany brought little improvement, and then came Christmas 2009.

We had just returned to my parents' home, where we had been living while selling our house.  We had been back in Richmond for the birth of our third child.  Jonah, whose middle name is Carl, after my dad, was two and a half weeks old.  As the midwife examined him after his birth, she laughed.  "He has a dimple in the middle of the top of his cheek," she said.  "I've never seen that before."  Probably close to two thousand babies and she'd never seen it.  But I had.  His granddaddy has one just like it.

And so, with baby Jonah, we had come to celebrate Christmas.  I sat with my dad, who was wearing his purple turtleneck, resting in the armchair in the living room, and we talked.  I asked him if he was in pain, and he said no, there was never really much pain anyway.  But then he said he was sorry.

"For what?" I asked, surprised.  

"That my disease limited you while you were growing up, limited this family."

Through my tears I protested.  How amazing my life had been, what experiences he had given me, given all of us.  My mother found us both crying.  Our lives had not been limited.  But the disease was robbing us all now.  Robbing my children of a grandfather with whom they can play, my mother of a husband with whom she can spend her golden years traveling and exploring as they always dreamed, robbing my father of his dignity, robbing them both of their freedom.  Robbing us all of the hope that there will be a cure.  For him.  

Together, we watched the children open their presents on Christmas, gazed at the tiny new baby in our lives.  Together we sat and talked until it was time for bed.  My father began his painstaking journey up the stairs, as he did every night.  "One last thing I can do for myself," he would tell us if we swooped in to help.  He leaned back heavy against the banister, pulling himself up, step by step, holding not to the top of the banister as my mother always admonished him to, but rather onto the smaller wooden rungs between the banister and the stairs.  And then it happened.  

My mother was just coming out of the kitchen, I was sitting with my baby in a chair in the living room.  We saw the rung snap, and my father, who had been leaning his full weight backwards as he pulled himself up, flew through the air.  He crashed against the floor with a sickening thud and slid into the bench in the hall.  Screaming, we rushed to his side.  My mother spoke to him gently, asking where he was hurt, as he pushed himself around on the floor, legs flailing, moaning eerily and repetitively.  My husband had come running when he heard the fall, and I shoved my baby into his arms.  I ran to the phone and called 911, shaking, crying.  My father was unresponsive, moaning, but not focusing his eyes, and growing cold.  Very cold.

Where was the ambulance, I demanded of the 911 operator, over and over and over again.  It should have arrived already; I insisted.  I couldn't even hear sirens.  I ran out in front of the house, scanning the road, the cold snow soaking through my socks. Where was it?  I scanned again and again, shaking, cold.

And then, finally, after what felt like an eternity, there it was.  I led the paramedics inside, and Tony told me, it was okay, he was responsive.  I knelt down by my father, cold on the floor, though one of us, I can't remember now who, had covered him with a blanket.  My mom talked to him non-stop, comforting and falsely calm, I could hear the panic and love in her voice.  The paramedics bent over him, shown a penlight in his eyes, asked him where he was.  "Chesapeake," he responded.  "Portsmouth General Hospital."  His hometown.  Not our home.  

He winced in obvious agony as the paramedics lifted him onto the stretcher.  But then he turned his head and winked at me.  I followed them out to the ambulance.  Watched my mother climb into the back, over the snow drifts in front of the house. Watched the doors close on my poor parents.

Back in the house, I threw things.  "Fucking Christmas!" I cried, tears streaming down my face.  My poor parents, tired, at the end of the day, should have been going to bed, should have been reminiscing about Christmas, their grandson's first.  They should not have been in pain and in fear and cold in the back of an ambulance.  

I lay awake for hours until my mom finally called.  She doesn't like to give news until she knows as much information as possible and can give it a wash with some rose-tinted coloring.  My dad's body temperature had been very low, but they managed to get it back up.  He had a bad concussion and a broken collar bone.  When were they coming home I asked.  "Oh, they're going to keep your dad here for now," my mom replied.  

My dad didn't come home for three and a half months.  From the hospital, he went to acute rehab, from there to long-term rehab.  A broken collar bone on a healthy person is a painful inconvenience.  On someone with Parkinson's disease, who pulls himself along with his arms, whose wife helps him in and out of chairs and bed by his arms, it is far more devastating.  

But even more devastating than the collar bone break was the concussion.  My dad came home, three and a half months later, but he had lost something.  In rehab, he accused his caretakers of nailing his feet to his wheelchair, of preventing him from moving. My kind father flew into rages, directed at everyone around him, even my mother.  My mother, who spent all day every day by his side.  Who left after breakfast and returned home after we had put the two older children to bed.  My mother, who summoned her strength holding her littlest grandson each night, sharing a glass of wine with us before she went to bed and back to rehab, every day.

And then when he came home, he turned his anger towards my mother and me.  He accused us of keeping him from walking.  He looked at me and spat his words, "I don't know why you are using this oblique language with me that I cannot understand."  I was horrified.  And hurt.  And then, thank God, his anger stopped.  Suddenly it was gone.  We were no longer his enemies, we were his family again.  

But despite another very difficult trip to Germany, despite the visits of his friends, the physical therapy at home, the installation of a lift, my father remains mostly quiet.  He is there, he listens to us as we talk, to my mother as she reads aloud to him and to the television, which has sadly replaced the ever present book in his hand.  But he doesn't tell stories any more.  And when I look at him, sitting in his wheelchair in front of the television, I find my hope has faltered.  My faith that everything will be okay is gone. And more than anything, more than giving him back his ability to walk, I want to give him back his voice.  

 

Emily Gambone grew up among stories in Germany and in Virginia.  A European Studies major at William and Mary, she went on to receive her MS in Animals and Public Policy from Tufts with a concentration in animal sheltering and pit bull issues.  She now lives in an old house in Richmond with her husband, three young children and an ever-changing assortment of rescue and foster animals.  She spends her time with her family, helps others discover their own family stories through translating old letters with her socially-conscious translation agency, and writes -- late at night, in parking lots, and during other stolen moments.  Right now, she is working on a book about a year spent in Berlin, ten years after the fall of the wall, with the man who would become her husband and the shelter pit bull they couldn't leave behind.