Читать книгу The Map of True Places - Brunonia Barry - Страница 15

Chapter 7

Finch practiced touching his thumb to his middle finger as rapidly and accurately as he could. He had succeeded fairly well with his right hand but was slower and clumsier with his left.

“There’s usually one side that’s weaker than the other,” the doctor said, taking notes.

“I’m aware of that,” Zee said. They’d been through the routine at least a dozen times. “We’re here about his medication.”

“Unfortunate,” he said. “But we did know that this one might not work. This particular medication came with warnings. It causes hallucinations in some people.”

“And clearly he’s one of those people. He thought he was Nathaniel Hawthorne.”

The doctor’s eyebrows raised. “Creative. Of course, considering his background . . .”

Zee fired him a look.

“Often men believe they’re working for the CIA, some covert-ops kind of thing. Women’s hallucinations often tend to be more sexual in nature,” he said, grinning at her.

Zee ignored his remark.

Neurologists have a rather warped sense of humor, Mattei had told her more than once.

“We’ll take him off it.”

“I’ve already done that,” she said. When she hadn’t been able to reach the doctor by phone, she had checked the PDR and had called a friend of Michael’s who was also a neurologist. There was no danger from sudden withdrawal, no weaning period.

“Don’t talk about me as if I’m not here,” Finch said. His voice, once loud enough to be heard unmiked in lecture halls of a hundred or more students, was now barely audible.

“Sorry, Dad,” she said.

“The hallucinations are not usually unpleasant. They’re generally more alarming for the family than for the patient.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, ending any possibility of continuing the meds. It seemed astounding to Zee when she thought of the side effects some doctors expected their patients to contend with. Any television ad for pharmaceuticals these days came with a list of contraindications so long it sometimes seemed amazing to Zee that people would dare to take so much as an aspirin.

The doctor stood up. “Can you walk for me, Professor Finch?”

Finch stood shakily. Her first impulse was to help him, but she willed her hands to stay at her sides.

With great effort Finch shuffled fifteen feet across the doctor’s office. Zee could tell how difficult his effort was only by his breathing. His face was masked, a classic sign of Parkinson’s.

Once a reserved New England Yankee, Finch had become more emotional with the progression of his disease. But his emotion showed neither on his face nor in any vocal inflection. It was a more subtle energy that told Zee how frustrating and impossible this short walk had become for her father.

She had often wondered at the fact that Finch didn’t have the shaking so common to Parkinson’s. Ten years into the disease, he had only recently developed any kind of resting tremor, and even that was so slight that anyone who was not looking for it would never notice.

Curiously, none of these symptoms had been the first signs of Finch’s illness. The first cause for concern had happened in a restaurant in Boston, the night Finch had taken them all out to dinner to celebrate the release of his new book based on Melville’s letters to Hawthorne. The book was aptly titled: An Intervening Hedge, after a review that Melville once wrote for one of Hawthorne’s books.

Finch had been working on the book for the better part of ten years. The fact that he had finished it at all was cause enough for celebration; the fact that someone had actually published it represented job security. Finch didn’t need to work. His family had left him money. But teaching was something he loved, and teaching Hawthorne and the American Romantic writers was his greatest joy in life.

Finch presented a copy to both Zee and Melville, the name of the man for whom Finch had left Zee’s mother. That’s what Zee often told people who asked, though neither statement was very accurate. Actually, Finch never left Maureen, though he had met Melville for the first time during one of Maureen’s extended hospitalizations. And Melville’s name was really Charles Thompson. Melville was a nickname Finch had given him, one that stuck.

Zee opened her book to the title page, which he had inscribed to her. To my sweet Hepzibah, he had written in a hand that was much diminished from the one she remembered. A million thank-yous. Zee was contemplating just what those thank-yous might be for when she caught the dedication that was printed on the following page: FROM HAWTHORNE TO MELVILLE WITH UNDYING AFFECTION.

Zee had always had mixed feelings about the book, which hinted at a more intimate relationship between Hawthorne and Melville than had previously been suspected. Though even Finch admitted that the men of the times had been far more accustomed to intimacy than those of today, often writing detailed letters of their affection for each other and even sharing beds, the fact that Finch had tried to prove that there was something deeper there bothered Zee more than she liked to admit. In espousing this theory, it seemed to Zee that Finch was attempting some strange form of justification for his own life choices, justification that was, in Zee’s opinion, both far-fetched and unnecessary.

That Finch and Melville were the real thing, Zee had never doubted. Not only were they clearly in love, but because they were so happy and devoted to each other, they had provided for Zee the kind of stability that Finch and Maureen never could. So despite any damage their love might have caused to the family, Zee would always be grateful for that stability.

But the relationship between Hawthorne and Sophia was a legendary love story, the kind Maureen had always wished she could find for herself. The fact that it was a true story, and one her mother had loved so much, made it sacred for Zee. Although her father was one of the country’s preeminent Hawthorne scholars and, as such, had more intimate knowledge of Hawthorne than Zee would ever have, that didn’t make it any easier for Zee to handle. From the time she was little, Finch’s love of Hawthorne had made the writer’s life almost as real to her as her own, but until recently she had never heard Finch’s theory about Hawthorne and Melville. Maybe it was some kind of misplaced loyalty to her mother, or the desperate hope that The Great Love really did exist, but Zee hated the idea that Finch was messing with the story of Hawthorne and Sophia.

She felt her face getting hot. She could see Melville watching her. Not wanting to ruin the evening, she excused herself from the table. “I forgot to feed the meter,” she said, standing too quickly, almost knocking over her glass of wine. “I’ll be right back.”

She walked out the front door and onto the street. The truth was, she had parked in the lot and not at a meter. She walked halfway down the block before she stopped.

It was Melville finally, and not Finch, who caught up with her. She could feel him standing behind her on the corner. He didn’t speak, but she could sense his presence. At last she turned around.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

She just stared at him.

“I had no idea he was going to write that dedication.”

“Right,” she said. She realized as she looked at him that it was probably true. She had noticed the expression on his face when he opened the book, the quick glance that passed between them. Finch loved him. That was the truth of it. They loved each other.

“Hawthorne adored his wife,” she said to him. “There are volumes dedicated to that fact.”

“I don’t think anyone is disputing that,” Melville said.

“His whole book is disputing that.”

“I’ve read it,” Melville said. “It isn’t.”

They stood together on the sidewalk. People walked around them.

“It’s possible to truly love more than one person in this life,” Melville said. “Believe me, I know.”

She regarded him strangely. It was the first time she’d ever heard Melville say anything so revealing about his past.

She had no idea what to say.

“This night means so much to him,” Melville said.

He wasn’t telling her how to feel; he was just telling her what was true.

She felt stupid standing here, like a kid who had just thrown a tantrum. It surprised her. “I don’t know why that got to me.”

“I think it’s fairly obvious,” Melville said.

“You know that I believe you two belong together.”

“Of course,” Melville said.

“It’s just the way he does things sometimes. It brought everything back.”

“I know,” Melville said, putting his hand on her shoulder. “Come on inside with me.”

They walked back together. Finch was sitting alone at the table, looking confused. She kissed his cheek.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “My car was about to be ticketed. Lucky for me Melville had quarters.”

Finch looked so relieved that Zee almost cried. The book sat on the table where she had left it. She picked it up and turned it over, reading the blurbs on the back. A picture of a younger-looking Finch stared out at her from the jacket cover. He was standing in front of the House of the Seven Gables. “To those hedges,” she said, raising her glass.

She could see Melville’s amusement at her toast. As much as she resented him sometimes, Melville was one of the only people in the world who truly got her.

They ordered dinner and drank several glasses of wine.

Since the celebration was in Finch’s honor, Melville had planned to pick up the tab. But Finch wouldn’t hear of it and insisted on paying. The bill came to $150, but Finch laid down $240 in cash, unusual for him, as a frugal Yankee. Melville reached over and retrieved three twenties. “I think these bills were stuck together,” he said, handing them back to Finch. “Damned ATMs.”

Finch looked surprised and then slightly embarrassed. He stuffed the returned bills into his pocket.

Zee could see that he was genuinely confused.

“What’s the matter with my father?” she called to ask Melville the next morning. She was moving between classes, and the reception on her cell phone kept cutting in and out.

“He had a lot of wine,” Melville said.

“He always has a lot of wine.”

“Maybe the bills really did get stuck together.”

“Right,” Zee said.

At Melville’s insistence Finch had already made an appointment with his primary-care physician. Zee said she would prefer for him to see a neurologist in Boston.

She felt relief for about sixty seconds when the neurologist said it wasn’t Alzheimer’s.

“It’s Parkinson’s,” the doctor told them.

Now, almost ten years later, it took Finch more than a minute to shuffle to the other side of the doctor’s office.

“Good,” the neurologist said. “Though you really should be using your walker. Any falls since your last visit?”

“No,” Finch said.

“What about freezing?”

“No,” Finch said. “No freezing.”

The doctor pulled out a piece of graph paper and once again drew the wavy curves he’d drawn for them at every appointment they’d been to for the last ten years. He drew a straight line through the middle, the ideal spot indicating normal dopamine levels, the one that meant the meds were working. The waves seemed larger and farther apart in this new drawing, the periods of normalcy much shorter.

“The idea is to try to keep him in the middle,” the doctor said.

She knew well what the idea was. At the high point of the wave, there was too much dopamine and Finch’s limbs and head moved on their own, a slow, loopy movement that made him look almost as if he were swimming. At the low point on the wave, Finch was rigid and anxious. All he wanted to do then was to pace, but his stiffness made any movement almost impossible, and he was likely to fall.

“It’s a pity he didn’t respond to the time-release when we tried that,” the doctor said. “And the agonists clearly aren’t working for him. As you were informed, they do cause hallucinations in some patients.” He turned to Finch. “We can’t have you living as Nathaniel Hawthorne forever, now, can we, Professor?”

Finch looked helplessly at Zee.

“So what’s our next step?” she asked.

“There really isn’t a next step, other than upping the levels of dopamine.”

He took Finch’s hand and looked at it, then placed it lightly in Finch’s lap and watched for signs of tremor. “The surgery only seems to help with the tremor, and you really don’t have much of that, lucky for you.”

Zee had a difficult time finding anything lucky about the disease that was slowly killing her father.

“We’ll keep the timing of his Sinemet the same. But with an extra half pill added here”—he pointed to the chart—“and here.”

“So basically he still gets a dose every three hours,” Zee repeated, to be certain she was correct. “Though two of those doses will increase.”

“That’s right,” the doctor said. “Every three hours except when he’s asleep. There’s no need to give him a pill if he’s sleeping.”

“He nods off all the time. If I don’t wake him to give him his pills, he’ll only get one every six hours.”

“Wake him during the day, but don’t give him anything at night,” he instructed. “You have any trouble sleeping at night, Professor Finch?”

“Some,” Finch said.

The doctor reached for his prescription pad and wrote a prescription for trazodone. “This is to help you sleep,” he said to Finch. To Zee he said, “It should help with the sundowning as well, which should stop his wandering. And give him his first dose of Sinemet about an hour before he rises. He’ll want to move, but he’ll be too stiff. We see some nasty falls in the mornings.”

Zee looked at Finch.

“Your daughter will have to keep a close eye on you in the morning,” the doctor kidded.

She wanted to tell the doctor that she didn’t live with her father, that it was Melville he should be telling all this to, but Melville hadn’t come home last night, and she had no idea where he was. When she had asked Finch where he was, all he would say was that Melville was gone.

The doctor started to the door and turned back. “Do you have ramps and grab bars?”

“He has one grab bar,” she said. “In the shower.”

“I’m going to send over an occupational therapist to check the house. The OT can tell you what you’re missing.”

The doctor extended his hand for Finch to shake. “Nice to see you again, Professor,” he said too loudly, as if he were talking to a deaf person and not someone with what Zee had just now come to realize was advanced Parkinson’s. She wasn’t certain how Finch and Melville had kept that fact from her.

“I’m sorry the meds didn’t work out,” the doctor said. “Not so bad to be Nathaniel Hawthorne for a day or two, though, all things considered.”

Finch didn’t smile back. He took Zee’s arm as they left the office together.

“You lied to the doctor about the freezing thing,” Zee said. “I’ve seen you freeze.” She remembered the last time Finch had come to Boston for one of his checkups. As they were leaving the restaurant, he’d frozen on his way out the front door. He couldn’t move forward and he couldn’t move back. They had all stood helplessly waiting for the freeze to break, freeing Finch to step out the door.

“Not for a while,” he lied. “I haven’t frozen once since the last time he asked me that damned question.”