their eating to stare at me as I passed their open doors.
In Moonlight Bay, I am a reluctant celebrity. Of the twelve thousand
full-time residents and the nearly three thousand students at Ashdon
College, a private liberal-arts institution that sits on the highest
land in town, I am perhaps the only one whose name is known to all.
Because of my nocturnal life, however, not every one of my fellow
townspeople has seen me.
As I moved along the hall, most of the nurses and nurses’ aides spoke
my name or reached out to touch me.
I think they felt close to me not because there was anything especially
winning about my personality, not because they loved my father-as,
indeed, everyone who knew him loved him-but because they were devoted
healers and because I was the ultimate oh’ect of their heartfelt desire
to nurture and make well. I have been in need of healing all my life,
but I am beyond their-or anyone’s-power to cure.
My father was in a semiprivate room. At the moment no patient occupied
the second bed.
I hesitated on the threshold. Then with a deep breath that did not
fortify me, I went inside, closing the door behind me.
The slats of the venetian blinds were tightly shut. At the periphery
of each blind, the glossy white window casings glowed orange with the
distilled sunlight of the day’s last half hour.
On the bed nearest the entrance, my father was a shadowy shape. I
heard his shallow breathing. When I spoke, he didn’t answer.
He was monitored solely by an electrocardiograph. In order not to
disturb him, the audio signal had been silenced; his heartbeat was
traced only by a spiking green line of light on a cathode-ray tube.
His pulse was rapid and weak. As I watched, it went through a brief
period of arrhythmia, alarming me, before stabilizing again.
In the lower of the two drawers in his nightstand were a butane lighter
and a pair of three-inch-diameter bayberry candles in glass cups. The
medical staff pretended to be unaware of the presence of these items.
I put the candles on the nightstand.
Because of my limitations, I am granted this dispensation from hospital
rules. Otherwise, I would have to sit in utter darkness.
In violation of fire laws, I thumbed the lighter and touched the flame
to one wick. Then to the other.
Perhaps my strange celebrity wins me license also. You cannot
overestimate the power of celebrity in modern America.
In the flutter of soothing light, my father’s face resolved out of the
darkness. His eyes were closed. He was breathing through his open
mouth.
At his direction, no heroic efforts were being taken to sustain his
life. His breathing was not even assisted by an inhalator.
I took off my jacket and the Mystery Train cap, putting them on a chair
provided for visitors.
Standing at his bed, on the side more distant from the candles, I took
one of his hands in one of mine. His skin was cool, as thin as
parchment. Bony hands. His fingernails were yellow, cracked, as they
had never been before.
His name was Steven Snow, and he was a great man. He had never won a
war, never made a law, never composed a symphony, never written a
famous novel as in his youth he had hoped to do, but he was greater
than any general, politic’ lan, composer, or prizeiv winning novelist
who had ever lived.
He was great because he was kind. He was great because he was humble,
gentle, full of laughter. He had been married to my mother for thirty
years, and during that long span of temptation, he had remained
faithful to her. His love for her had been so luminous that our house,
by necessity dimly lighted in most rooms, was bright in all the ways
that mattered. A professor of literature at Ashdon-where Mom had been
a professor in the science department-Dad was so beloved by his
students that many remained in touch with him decades after leaving his
classroom.
Although my affliction had severely circumscribed him socially from the
day that I was born, when he himself was twenty-eight, he had never