Worthy Of This Great City Read online

  “Yeah, come on!” Frank would scoff in agreement, like we all know you’re really some kind of lying promiscuous truant bitch.

  Those low-level Democrats, unlike their more elite brethren, were human and liable to err, and accordingly honest about themselves. In Philadelphia as elsewhere that comfortable honesty still reverberates down the neighborhood generations.

  Frank himself often eyed that next step up the political ladder to ward leader, except he was continually delaying his pursuit of that prize until the right moment. He had Ruth to worry about, for one thing, and a business to run. You had to understand, there was no time as it was.

  Frank was actually a fairly interesting human being in a lot of ways, and that wasn’t something you could say about anyone else in the family. Not Kate, who never read books, nor Pat who considered Post-Impressionism unnatural modern stuff and implicitly discouraged too much learning unless you were talking about a business or technical degree. Nor his sons, Ruth’s privileged cousins.

  But Frank inspired Ruth’s sporadic crazes with his own sudden enthusiasms, passions for archeology or painting or astronomy, each one abandoned at its peak with myriad excuses when he fell back into a mindset that valued safety above dreams, shrewdness above wisdom. Back to the shifty Frank of easy lies and secret shames and imprecations.

  He had an unquenchable eagerness about him, a potential for living that showed in his dramatic storytelling, his willingness to embrace physical adventures, his talent for sheer silliness, games and nonsense. He appreciated Joyce and Shaw and Yeats, proud of his excellent taste but driven primarily by real delight. Getting hold of Fanny and Zooey somewhere and insisting Ruth listen to him read it aloud, the two of them halfway up the stairs, not because it was literature but because it was funny.

  Or he was buried in one of his histories of the Holocaust, marveling aloud at such suffering. “You can’t imagine what people go through.” Maybe it was Elie Wiesel’s Night he’d be holding on his lap, his face suffused with a higher purpose, and he’d raise his chin so you could see he was personally identifying with these people, sharing in their agony and terror. You had to respect him for that. “Boy, it makes you appreciate how lucky you are.” Or maybe that was more of an accusation.

  Conversely Kate never bothered to question anything. Like Frank, she loved excuses, loved sitting Ruth down to count them out aloud with something approaching awe, her precious rosary beads. Kate who during a trip to the Art Museum when Ruth was still moving slowly after ovarian surgery kept tugging at her niece’s hand and talking over her mumbled remonstrances. Sympathy was her prerogative and she didn’t like people infringing, not even her Ruthie.

  Although I think this incident actually belongs to a later time. It’s hard to tell, because Ruth’s invective is often wrapped in opportune vagueness, but I recall her once telling me this surgery came after college. And it’s prudent to remember that she’s describing people much admired in their various professional and social communities. Kind, reliable people always there for their families, good parents with children who love and stand up for them, normal people leading satisfying lives. People I know nothing about. People who came through for Frank whenever he needed cash, which was often. Or maybe Ruth was right but these genuinely nice people behaved negligently towards her out of spiritual thrift, because there was only so much generosity of spirit to go around. Maybe they had to keep their viewpoints narrow in order to not see.

  “This is about me,” Ruth said.

  There were breaking points, of course. Especially once Ruth had it worked out, once she could speak her feelings. “Parents kill their own children every day,” she informed Kate, knowing nothing less melodramatic would penetrate that protective placidity.

  “Just stop that.” Turning her stony profile.

  “Yeah look the other way so you can go on pretending to be Saint Kate of Philadelphia but never get your fucking hands dirty!” Running off in hysterics, instigating much adult fuss and conversation until finally Kate phoned Ruth to demand in a deeply hurt, preposterously adult tone: “First of all, how dare you say that to me?”

  So as a relevant result of all this solitude and stress, Ruth developed very original ideas about God and her own destined place in the universe. Frank was no advocate of the church; he was terribly thin-skinned for one thing, and just educated enough to enjoy ridiculing any unlikely dogma like virgin birth and Immaculate Conception or gleefully speculate about whether Jesus was schizophrenic. Enough that he’d endured a church wedding at Sharon’s insistence, not that she didn’t really know better herself but she retained a superstitious loyalty to romantic Catholicism, to saints and mysteries and stigmata and all those numinous sources of power over fate, and for some reason she associated all this magic with marriage.

  So naturally the child Ruth was horribly jealous of her churchgoing peers who were privy to this secure fount of glory, and developed a taste for those same romantic concepts, internalizing a reliance on myths and miracles, reading books on Bernadette and Fatima, making novenas. Gradually accumulating her own idiosyncratic canon, realigning this and that tenet or concept or ritual as emotion dictated. Discarding it all when it got too ridiculously weighty but then starting all over again.

  “I found this children’s book in the back of the basement closet, it must have been my Mom’s: Paradise Lost or something like that where in the end God destroys the world. The Armageddon page had this drawing of a city with skyscrapers crashing down and people trying to shield their heads and fleeing in terror. Right then I absolutely rejected that whole notion. Not my city.”

  And she sat invoking a half-sensed presence of God on her narrow bed, begging for assistance, and thus coerced the first of her light-struck epiphanies, physical words from nowhere bearing privileged spiritual insights personally delivered to the pleading adolescent. Not visions, you understand, not hallucinations, but simply breakthroughs of comprehension that left her breathless, reassured, and certain.

  Memorializing that initial experience in watercolors on pale blue construction paper and pasting the result above her crammed student’s desk: Necessity = Philosophy. Meaning that reasons were secondary, the product of mostly unconscious desires or needs. And that was the crucial first step towards her great escape.

  So Ruth became the girl who knew God considered her worthy of special enlightenment, which changed everything. Also note: Ruth’s God was male, no question, end of story. Very, very uncomfortable with the notion of a female deity, and you could see this reflected in how she defined God, all that progressive separation away from everything whole and nourishing. Yet her overall approach to that male philosophy was adamantly feminine: intuitive, emotive, illogical.

  Thus set apart she entered her teen years bopping down school corridors safely laminated inside her music, moving at her characteristic disjointed tempo, endlessly reprising the cherished song collection that filled the emptiness with meaning. Superstitious tunes¸ some specifically dedicated to marching off in the mornings, others for homecoming, a certain few saved for a special reward or in jubilation. Incorporating words and rhythms into her physical self, connecting to her synchronized and highly sentient universe. Juvenile pop anthems transmuted into movement along filthy sidewalks past intimidating glass doors, unblinking faces, mottled tree bark, amazing handkerchief gardens, across intersections of glaring afternoon traffic.

  All through those years Frank smoked trashy menthol filters, less dangerous he claimed, part of his plan to cut back. But suggest he really quit and he exploded. “I can’t!” Never anything except that blank refusal, and worse after Ruth married and had little time for him. When the cancer started in his bladder his first response was a furious indictment: “I’ve got cancer!”

  Then his lungs were involved, and almost immediately after his brain. The doctors were reassuring: the progression was perfectly normal. By this time Frank had sold the bar out of the family and retired from neighborhood politics; he wasn’t exact
ly struggling financially, but maintained only a tenuous, mandated holiday connection with any family except for Ruth. He’d lost interest, is what happened, because he had nothing to gain, so he wrapped himself up in a plaid bathrobe and his routine, balancing out the hard emptiness, scrupulously avoiding any meeting or even phone conversation with Pat unless provided adequate warning and frequently not even then. Despite all his best impulsive efforts, life never delivered enough in return, but he remained stalwart in his shabby wool overcoat that afternoon as, diagnosis in hand, he commenced his march towards eternity. What else was there to do? And there’s the planet’s trash disposal system, letting the redundant self-medicate themselves out of existence.

  We’re up to the current era now, when seeing Ruth was a fairly rare delight for Frank, but they were both aware of a severe shift in consciousness between them, as if they’d reached some kind of tacit agreement with Ruth the virtuous victor and Frank uniformly conceding her unspoken accusations.

  He sat raised up by his hospital bed and Ruth pressed her forehead against his, wordless in his embrace because she could count on one hand the times he’d hugged her unless for public benefit. Now his arms were starved for her, completely loving. He’d become strangely subservient, a skeletal figure with sparse hair and flickering eyes sucking Ensure though a straw, listening raptly to her inconsequential patter, sometimes openly crying out in pain.

  Once I met her there, at Jefferson; I and a few of my colleagues were trailing along a ground floor corridor in the wake of the mayor’s crony, Tim Baylor, and several other self-important and vaguely recognizable people in buoyant mood. Baylor was busily lauding the achievements of a non-profit called PhillyCares; the occasion marks my first encounter with that esteemed organization.

  PhillyCares was the brainchild of Mimi Norton, one of Philadelphia’s most determined community angels and some kind of business or family connection of the Baylors although, sorry, clearly from a different class. That day she was clad in a regulation blue pantsuit and wire-rimmed glasses, a businesslike facade that underlined her authority but did nothing to lighten her habitually defensive expression: the tight lips, the proud shoulders.

  According to its slick literature, PhillyCares aimed to provide hospital patients those things insurance or family circumstances could not, things like transportation, toys for sick children, home help and cleaning services, even wigs for cancer patients. They mentioned all that and much more, a suspiciously broad mandate, boasting that their endeavor gained acclaim and gratitude every day, acquiring ever more of those desirable corporate and individual contributors.

  Ruth was in with Frank, but of course she was drawn to the media fuss. And I guess the encounter conveniently met some secret ambition because she took it as another sign from Heaven and thereafter pursued PhillyCares as if it were her destiny. I watched her pull aside a tallish organization flunky, offering him that frank hand, speaking confidentially. Norton joined their conclave after concluding an announcement about increased city funding, the obligatory congratulatory smiles, and accepting Baylor’s personal commendation which included his brief reiteration of the mayor’s special initiative in support of such outstanding charitable and volunteer efforts.

  And whatever Ruth really thought anymore, she stopped seasoning her broadcast chatter with those scathing condemnations of easy virtue: “All this well-publicized involvement in universally applauded humanitarian activities, this cowardly method of washing souls; it’s a kind of moral masturbation. Not that these proven virtues don’t have to be maintained, of course, but that’s just drudgework, it’s nothing to do with moral courage. Not when there’s absolutely no possibility of censure because everyone you know agrees you’re being generous, even brave. So yeah, you have the gall to look down and blush modestly while you recite accepted opinions. Fine.”

  Remarkable to think of all that ensued from that purely accidental encounter! As the PhillyCares people dispersed I went over to say hello to her, and that was when I first suggested doing a profile; that was the moment I became her official biographer, her intimate companion on some obscure journey of discovery. She accepted with only a passing second’s rational hesitation, fully accepting me as a fundamental component of her magnificent predestined life. Partly she was already in an exalted state that day, breathless. “It’s good because as it happens I’m reviewing so much in my life right now; when you go through something like this with a parent you look at what you’ve done with your own life.”

  I asked about the conversation with Norton. “Are you turning humanitarian?”

  A comically reproachful glance. “Just sharing my own very limited expertise, giving back. They need publicity and I can help them get it.” And in fact she did an entire broadcast from that hospital, a modestly successful, perfectly standard affair that cemented my impression that she and Mimi Norton hated each other like poison and both of them knew it but neither had any intention of letting personal animosity overrule their purposes. You could almost hear an entirely different conversation going on, paralleling their polite compliments and sympathetic pleasantries.

  Frank continued to fail. Kate dutifully tottered in unannounced to say good-by to her brother-in-law, all wrapped up in her own deep grief, leaning heavily on Ruth, staring at the patient with anguished eyes. Pat would be coming too, she promised, but the idea of such a visit threw Frank into such obvious agitation Ruth felt forced to forbid it.

  “Oh honey, how am I supposed to tell him that!”

  But Ruth couldn’t tell him either; she’d been infected with her father’s phobia and had an illogical but very real horror of her uncle’s presence, an excruciating terror even of being seen by him. Which desperate abhorrence reflected their shared need to avoid the mortification of Pat’s confident condescension. That kind of reversion to the old sick dynamic would surely annihilate Frank’s weakened soul and profoundly undermine Ruth’s fragile psyche.

  So Kate was forced to act as intermediary. “I told him,” Kate reported by phone, self-important. “Ruthie, he was almost crying. You don’t realize how hurt he is! His own twin.”

  Thom was leaning in the doorway of the Askews’ sunlit Chestnut Hill kitchen, listening to Ruth’s half of this exchange. Her habit was to present her family as an irritating but ordinary joke, but I suspect Thom, who surely knew better, was bleeding for her.

  She set down the phone and shrugged. “Oh crap! Never mind, at least I made Kate come through for once. But my God, these people! It’s hard to believe!”

  Just heading to lunch one early afternoon, exhausted as usual those days, she phoned Frank’s room to have Pat pick up, his voice as unctuous and instructive as ever since he for one was doing the right thing.

  “Your father can’t talk to you right now, Ruth Marie. He’s having his lunch.” She could just make out Frank’s low tones in the background, recognized the artificial inflection he adopted to impress important people.

  “I was so outraged I just hung up. I literally couldn’t believe the gall, talking to me like I was a child and he had the right to correct my manners. And never any apology because I don’t have any feelings anyway, I’m an ill-mannered heathen so why should he apologize?” Relating this with a voice literally shaking with fury and humiliation. “And all chirpy, too, and oh so patient. He just loves to feel sorry for me while he makes clear he thinks I don’t have any feelings or decency.”

  Those final days Frank’s emaciated torso would arch in agony and he’d scream without restraint, watching her and pleading. Ruth found herself cosseted by various professionals eager to dispel her intermittent guilt, highly unintelligent people certain they’d reduced the final mystery to a clear set of rules. She stared into Frank’s now cleanly beautiful face while he patted her hand in reassurance.

  An assured young women requested her attention, ushering her into a seat in a tiny downstairs office. “Unfortunately your father’s not responding well to treatment.”

  No shit. Ruth just w
aited.

  “The priority now is to alleviate the pain.” And there followed an explanation of sufficient morphine.

  “So you believe in an afterlife?”

  Confusion, but then a practiced recovery and an apologetic shake of the head. Please explain?

  “Because you’re saying that death is a better choice than any life, even a life of intolerable pain, and that only makes sense if you believe there’s someone to experience relief. Otherwise you’re just not making sense.”

  The woman relaxed, nodded to herself, and rose without bothering to dispute any category mistake. “I’ll let you think about it.”

  Think about what? Later that day they transferred Frank to the hospice floor and increased his morphine, expertly engineering a painless death. Ruth took the call at work.

  Bob, the usual recipient of her anecdotes about Frank the colorful neighborhood character, surprised her with an instinctive hug the day she returned from bereavement leave.

  “So no more stories about old Frank?”

  But said with an unmistakable undertone of secret satisfaction. Maybe if she could cry, but she could never cry except for happiness. Probably Bob was disillusioned because he’d attended the funeral and she hadn’t, although she’d explained how she was repelled by the idea of an embalmed Frank out on display in accordance with his stubborn Irish notions. Because how admit the physical terror she felt at the thought of meeting Pat, of being annihilated by his mere presence?