Dorothy Gallagher - How I Came Into My Inheritance

HOW I CAME INTO MY INHERITANCE

A fter my mother broke her hip, I put her in a nursing home.

You want to put me here? she said.

The woman was certified senile, but she still knew how to push my buttons. Not that she didnt have reason to worry; had I listened when shed begged me Darling, please, please dont do anything to hurt Daddy. It will kill him...?

I swear, what I did, it wasnt just for the money.

You know that tone people take about old age? The stuff about dignity and wisdom and how old people (pardon me for saying old) should be allowed to make their own decisions. Allowed! My father treated nicely reasoned arguments like mosquitoes. As for dignity, lets pass over the question of bodily wastes for the moment; lets suppose that the chronologically challenged father of one such pious person decided to torture and starve his or her chronologically challenged mother. (So she falls! Shell lie there till she gets up!... What does she need orange juice for? If shes thirsty shell drink water!) And not only that, but also gives away practically all that persons inheritance to a crook. Do you think you might see any revisionism in attitude then?

Until the day I took him to court and the judge laid down the law, nobody, but nobody, interfered with my father. I mean, he was awesome. For instance, he owned this slum building. It was filled with some characters you wouldnt want to meet in broad daylight on a busy street. The tenants didnt pay rent, welfare paid the rent. But welfare didnt pay exactly as much as my father was legally entitled to. So every month, even when he was up in his late eighties, hed get in his car and drive over to that building, haul himself up the stairs, bang his cane on every door, and demand his five or ten dollars. He got it. Nobody laid a finger on him. Nobody even slammed the door in his face. And the only way you could tell he might be even a little bit nervous was that he left his motor running. And the car was never stolen!

It wasnt easy to tell when my father began to lose his marbles, because hed always been such a headstrong summabitch, as he called everyone who had a slightly different idea. But the winter he was ninety he took out the water heater. That was a clue. I went up there one daythey lived about sixty miles upstate in this house theyd lived in forever. Now, the house should have been my first clue. I knew that house. I grew up there. If ever there was a homemade house, that was it. My father built it all around us. First we were living in two rooms, then three; nine by the time he got finished, the rooms all stuck on in unexpected places, connected by closets you walked through to get to other rooms, short dark corridors and twisting staircases. He never got tired of making new rooms. When I was a kid I thought he had made the world. Like once, we needed a shovel for the woodstove. My father took a metal ice tray, cut off one end, rounded it, put a hole in the other end, and stuck a bit of pipe in. Voil! I idolized that man.

And now the house was a wreck: jury-rigged electrical cords you tripped over, water dripping from the roof, buckets on the floor, smells of accumulated filth. Id piss in my pants before Id go into the bathroom. But the thing is, I still believed in my father; hed always taken care of everything. So when Id say, Daddy, theres a leak over Mamas bed. Let me find someone to fix the roof, and hed say, Dont you do anything, Ill take care of it, Id think, Okay, I guess he knows what hes doing.

Or I might say, Ill get somebody to clean the house.

Its clean! Mama cleans!

So I say, Mama, when did you clean the house? She says, dementedly, You saw, I just swept out. You know it doesnt get so dirty in the country.

I say, But it smells bad, and my father says, It doesnt smell! Id think: He seems sure. I guess its not so bad. And everything happened so gradually.

Anyway, Id go up to see them once a week or so, and this one time I find my father is hacking up pieces of scrap wood.

Daddy, I say. What are you doing?

He cackles. Hee hee hee. Im not making fun of him. Thats the way he sounds. I took out the water heater, he says, and hes rubbing his hands together in glee. Im putting in a wood-fired heater.

Why, Daddy?

Well heat with wood. Its cheaper.

But, Daddy! I say, and thats all I say. I dont mention that the outside stairs to the basement are icy in winter. I dont remind him that hes ninety years old and he can hardly get up and down the stairs in good weather. I dont say that my mothers hands will crack and bleed doing dishes in cold water, or that bathing, which is a once-a-month affair at best now, will occur never. I say, But, Daddy! because I know if I say any more, hell say, Its not your business! And Id think: Well, I guess its not my business. And the truth is Im still scared of him.

My father is really something. Everybody says so: That Izzy. Hes really something. They mean hes a force of nature; he takes his course no matter what. If he doesnt know it, its not worth knowing; if its not done his way, its done wrong; what he doesnt like reading isnt worth the paper. One time I gave him a book by this Nobel Prize winner. Tell him to get another trade! my father said, no discussion.

About a year after he took out the water heater, he was in the hospital for a month. How he made it out alive, Ill never know. Ninety-one, the nurses said. God bless him. He comes home with tubes sticking out of everything. A tube out of you-know-where for his urine, a tube from his gallbladder. I get a nurse to take care of him. Two days later he calls me up: Get her out of here! Get her out! So I tell the nurse shed better leave and I run up on the train to empty his pee bag and his bile bag. I got his bile on my hands!

My mother is no help, of course. She can hardly keep on her own feet. Shes falling down every five minutes. I say, Daddy, we have to have help. You dont want a nurse, okay. But for Mama. She falls. I think maybe Ill get around him that way.

She doesnt fall!

I dont fall, my mother says. When do I fall?

Mama! I just picked you up! Daddy, you saw! I just picked her up.

So Ill pick her up.

Were sitting on the porch. My mother gets up. She thinks shes going to the kitchen to make lunch. She hasnt cooked anything for two years. I bring the food. She takes two steps, and falls down. My father says, Watch! He inches his chair closer to her and sticks out his cane.

Belle! Grab the cane!

The woman doesnt know whats going on, she only knows the master of the universe has spoken. She grabs the cane. Get up! he orders, and she tries to haul herself up. It takes about five minutes, with him desperately trying to hold the cane steady against her weight without falling out of his chair.

Shes up! My father looks triumphant: See!

Right away she falls down again. This time he pretends he doesnt notice. He thinks he can get away with it because, on top of everything else, hes just about blind.

By now Im really frantic. What am I supposed to do about this situation? I go to see some social-service people: Look, I say, my fathers blind, hes been in the hospital three times with congestive heart failure and kidney failure, my mothers in really bad shape. Im rushing up there every five minutes because theres another crisis, my fathers a regular Collier brother, hes got plenty of money but he wont spend money for food, I got Meals-on-Wheels to come and he starts waving his cane around and yelling at them to get off his property, he wont have a nurse or even someone to clean up, he fires everybody I hire, they have no hot water, he keeps the thermostat below sixty in winter. If they die therell be a headline in the paper: STARVING OLD COUPLE EATEN BY RATS: MILLION DOLLARS FOUND IN MATTRESS .