Big Money

On the afternoon my father was scheduled to come out of surgery I was sitting in traffic, less than a mile away from Wrigley Field. I was supposed to be at the hospital with my mother and sister when the doctor came out, but a call had come in at the last second and with Karl already away on another delivery, it was mine to handle. I had turned on to the wrong highway (I should have taken the local streets instead) and now found myself in lurching gridlock traffic that made it impossible to arrive on time. I say this only by way of measuring the sometimes stark divides between our competing desires. Part of why I had returned to Chicago was to be there in that moment when the doctor stepped out and announced to my family that either all was well or that there was still more bad news to come. I had steeled myself for the latter and even though all was expected to turn out well, my father and I had even briefly tried to discuss how, should anything go wrong, it would be up to me now to see my mother and sister through.

There may not have been much truth in what we said – my mother is more resilient and capable than both of us combined – but we indulged in our old-world fantasies of men as protectors and providers nonetheless. When it was clear I would never make it back in time, and when my mother called to say the surgeon was waiting to see her and that she would go in and talk to him alone, I felt that separation acutely in ways my father must have felt a dozen times before when his obligation to a business that he had forged more out of necessity than desire kept him away. It was never so much that he was called from our lives at critical points, although of course this certainly must have happened, but that more often than not he was unable to do or say anything other than respond affirmatively when his cellphone, always perched nearby, rang. His drivers often rejected his calls, especially those that came late at night just after they had finally settled home and had finished dinner and were sleeping away some of their exhaustion in front of the television. If no other driver picked up, he would rise and occasionally he would ask me to come along for company. He made sacrifices to his body and, just as critically, to his time in ways that, despite my efforts to understand him, had always eluded me, until now.

I remember briefly pressing down furiously on the horn after I spoke to my mother, even though that would change nothing, and then turning up the music loud so as to not be able to hear the other drivers doing the same. I let my mind wander into worst-case scenarios in which the strict, towering surgeon with the slight German accent told my mother in the same dispassionate voice in which he said everything; that despite their best efforts, my father had failed to make it through, or that he had made it through, but really to no good purpose since the cancer had indeed spread and was now clearly in his lymph nodes running rampant through other parts of his body.

Such fantasies either serve to prove our own helplessness against the body’s steady march towards death, or they reward us with our own images of how we would stand courageous in the face of that fact. Not being there meant imagining the worst and quickly I began to pile on the indignities. I was twenty-three, an aspiring writer with multiple degrees, and until a few weeks before had been employed by a well-known writer, and yet I was now spending my days in mail rooms across the city, picking up boxes and being told that I was running late. My father was lying in the hospital and my mother and sister were in a waiting room, and whatever pleasure I may have previously found in the honesty of my labour evaporated. I hated where I was and what I had to do and, by extension, what my father had always done to play his role in keeping us afloat, in part for the work itself, but more importantly because in order for it continue, it had to come before everything else.

When I spoke to my mother less than an hour later she told me rather calmly that all had gone well. They had removed a significant portion of my father’s left lung. The surgery had been a success and there was ample reason to believe that they had caught all of the cancer. It was exactly what we had been told to expect. I can trace the break with my fantasies about real work and real life to that day. After that I tried to spend less time in the office and more in the hospital, even if that meant a few calls had to initially go unanswered or a couple of packages had to be delivered late. As my father recovered I read to him Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, employing some of the same theatrical techniques he had once used when he invented stories for my sister and me when we were children. There was something about the escape into literature that we both found comforting and edifying, and if there had been no business to worry about I would have spent every afternoon doing only that. Now when I was called away to make a delivery I hated it. I could find nothing redeeming in the work, except that it was important to my father. While picking up a stack of boxes late one night from a law firm, I found myself wanting to explain to the young lawyers that this was not really me they were seeing, a thought which, despite its honesty, I still find contemptible.