Hanging On
By Harry Buschman
"Tell me, Arthur, where are you going
to put him?" I asked him because I knew
that before very long I was going to have a similar problem with my own father.
"We're thinking of building a room out back behind the garage, then we'll connect it to the hall in the main house. Should be okay for him, I guess. That way we won't have to build a separate bathroom." Arthur already had spoken to the contractor and the work was going to begin right after the permit was approved. Arthur Hall and his wife Lucille had two teen-age boys and it looked as though they would now have Lucille's eighty year old father too. They said it would be better for him down here, he couldn't endure those winters all by himself in Merrimac, New Hampshire.
So old Ben Malone was coming to Westlake Village.
His wife died two years ago
in the middle of the haying season, and he hadn't done a lick of work on the
farm since then, Arthur said he lost all interest in it.
"All the life went out of him when Lucille's mother passed away," Arthur said. "She took the kids up there last summer and Ben just never got off the porch. Just sat there looking out over the field. He sold his two horses, got rid of all the chickens and was living on canned beans, coffee and store bought bread."
"So Lucy said, 'that's it Pop, we're getting you out of here.' That's what she said. She said, 'this time next year you'll be living down in Westlake Village with us.' He's a nice old guy, you know. He won't be any trouble."
I had no reason to doubt Arthur. He was a reasonable
man and he seemed far
better prepared and able to cope with serious issues than I was. But in our
youngish and upwardly mobile neighborhood, Arthur was the first of us to be
faced with this problem.
The weather was warm and dry and the construction went quickly. On the week-end before Labor Day, Arthur told me to come over and see the finished project. The work was done and old Ben would be down Labor Day.
Arthur was enthusiastic, "I did the painting and the papering myself, Lucille got a new love seat, a new day bed, and the old easy chair from our living room."
I was impressed, and I was sure the old man
would like it. It was really more than one room -- more like a room and a half.
You just walked down a sort of
breeze-way between the house and the garage and there was a separate, sort of
pantry entrance into the spare room. By turning one way you walked into the
spare room and by turning the other way you found yourself in a short corridor
leading to the bath room.
The old house and property in Merrimac was sold to an agent who was assembling a parcel for a sub-division. Ben really didn't want to take anything with him, Lucille said he didn't want anything to remind him of the eighty years he left behind; just wanted his clothes and some papers and boxes of pictures .... things like that. He also wanted his car, an '84 Century; he drove down in that.
I met him that Labor Day weekend. He seemed
no older than my father. He had that dried apple, leathery look that old men
get when they spend their lives
working in the sun. His conversational voice was leathery too, but it rang out
loud and clear whenever he spoke up. He smoked a twisty black tobacco in a round
bellied pipe that had a metal screen on the top. He spat a lot while he smoked
-- I guess he did all his smoking outdoors. The smell of the smoke was not something
you'd want to live with inside.
"You all been here long?" he asked me.
I had to think back, then I said, "Yes,
nearly ten years now. All of us came here about that time."
"It's a nigh-zy place, yer Westlake Village." I thought he meant 'nice',
but he meant 'noisy'. Maybe to him it was noisy, I mean cars passed the house
every minute or so. You could hear a lawn mower somewhere down the street, a
child's voice and the distant braking of a jet engine on its approach to LaGuardia.
They were sounds I no longer heard -- without them I would wonder what was wrong.
"Oh, it's a holiday," I said. "The kids go back to school next
week -- people only mow their lawns on weekends; sometimes you can hear a pin
drop."
He spat again, and relit his round bellied pipe. This time there was a hint
of bitterness in the smoke.
My father was reaching a critical period in
his life. He was living alone in a two room apartment in Oyster Cove. He seemed
comfortable, but every now and
then I'd wonder if he wouldn't be better off living with us. Old folks deteriorate
very quickly, they can be rolling along in the best of health and suddenly something
happens. Overnight they're shadows of what they were the day before. So for
selfish reasons, I kept my eye on Ben Malone.
***
"How's your father-in-law, Arthur?"
"What do you mean?"
That should have warned me. He could have said, "fine," or "really
great, he's loving it here." But no, he said, "What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean .... how's he taking to Westlake Village?"
He let his wind out slowly and haltingly, like a man who's made an error in
judgment and finds it difficult to own up to it.
"He's a nice guy .... really he is. I mean, he was a great father to Lucille,
running the farm and all. You wouldn't believe how tough it was to run a farm
back in those days .... and he didn't have any boys you know He had to run this
damn farm all by himself -- and then I came along and took Lucille away. Then
Lucinda died, Lucinda was his wife, you know?'
We were sitting in Arthur's back yard, and
from where I sat, I was able to see the back door of Ben's room. He was sitting
by himself in a small area concealed by a trellis which hid all but the brim
of his straw hat and the smoking end of his round bellied pipe.
"Then there's that Goddamn smelly pipe of his." Arthur continued with
surprising vehemence. "You can smell that damn thing from our bedroom.
What
the hell does he put in his pipe?" He paused for breath. "We should
have put in a separate bathroom. He needs his own. I can tell he uses our towels,
and you should smell the place when he's through .... and his broken down Buick
dripping oil all over my driveway..."
I got up to leave.
"No," Arthur looked up at me. "I don't want to give you the wrong
impression.
Ben's okay, you know. It's probably our fault. It might have been better if
we'd left him up there in Merrimac. The winter's aren't all that bad."
There was nothing to do but leave. We looked at each other knowing that neither of us had an answer. I left without saying goodbye to Ben -- I noticed my palms were sweaty.
© Harry Buschman 1998
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