By Pam Munter
Fifty-two years ago today, on a cloudless, sunny afternoon, my father died suddenly of a heart attack. He was in his car in a remote canyon in Los Angeles with my mother’s best friend.
My boyfriend and I were in our two-bedroom apartment an hour away, getting ready to go out for an informal dinner. Our volatile relationship was coming to an end, as I prepared to travel to a distant university for graduate school. The dashed hopes for a future with this funny, often thoughtful man were to be replaced by a different kind of future, one that would ensure my independence, as well as my self-esteem.
As soon as the phone rang, I had a momentary feeling something was wrong. Like a middle-of-the-night call, it never rang at that hour, and I wondered who it could be. He answered and slowly walked into the room, somber and soft-spoken.
“That was Grace. Your father’s dead.”
Was he on his way home? Did it happen as he walked in the door? Sat down to dinner? Why didn’t Grace, my favorite aunt, ask to speak with me, rather than him? I told the boyfriend I wanted to go there alone. The emotional intensity would be sufficient without having to deal with the concurrent burden of this dying relationship.
As I navigated the winding, rush-hour congestion on Sunset Boulevard, my adrenaline was powering up. The lack of sadness was nearly as stunning as the unexpected news. My father and I had not been close since I was a young girl. He had pulled away and it was only as an adult that I understood it had nothing to do with me. Likely out of her own sense of violation, my mother had blurted out the news of his many affairs and that they had separated for a short time when I was about seven, soon after the birth of my brother. Over the years, my father had morphed from generic anger to sullen withdrawal. A friend had labeled him the Grey Ghost. He and I had little to say to each other on my visits to my childhood home. What interaction we had was perfunctory, neutral, and brief.
Driving past UCLA, my cryptic takeaway was that his engine had just stopped, that motor that had kept him going through what appeared to me to be a colorless life. There seemed to be little humanity in him, no points of connectivity between us. Nothing personal.
I walked in the door of the house, almost felled by the heavy aroma of flowers. Already, I wondered? Then I recognized it to be the oppressive, funereal scent of my mother’s Royal Secret cologne. Though the living room was full of friends and neighbors, the lack of emotion was uncanny. I hugged my tearless mother and walked with her to the kitchen where there were more hovering women. One of them was Zora, my mother’s best friend. For some curious reason, she had been washing dishes. Later, I would see that as symbolic cleansing.
“What happened?” I wanted the details. Was my dad still lying dead here in the house somewhere?
One of the neighbors spoke up, “He was driving through Topanga Canyon, and I guess had a heart attack. They called 911 but it was too late. Died instantly. I’m so sorry.”
The circumstances seemed odd.
“He was driving around alone, in the middle of the workday?”
Zora turned around and dried her hands, avoiding eye contact.
“I was with him.”
It took a minute. She didn’t wait.
“Tom and I have been having problems. I thought your father could help. We were just talking then he collapsed in the driver’s seat.”
The absurdity of every aspect of this almost made me laugh. I glared at her in disbelief and accusation. But I could tell she knew that I knew.
As the women prepared food, I called the boyfriend to fill him in. My brother had been notified by the same aunt and was on his way home from his college up north. I met him at the airport and delivered the news. He didn’t have much of a reaction, either. He had been closer to our father because of their mutual activities — building projects in the garage, long my father’s sanctuary. Apparently, the time didn’t include much emotional bonding.
Most of the mourners had left by the time we walked into the house. Zora was still there, and I wondered why. I found her alone in the kitchen, an irresistible opportunity.
“A deserted canyon in the middle of the day, huh?” I was hoping she’d confess.
“Your father has been helping me. It was nothing like that.”
Like a hardened criminal sticking to the transparently bogus alibi, I thought.
I nodded but the implication on my end was clear.
Now more than five decades have passed. The boyfriend is history, my mother and all her friends are dead. The subsequently divorced Zora apparently died of a stroke a few years later. Sometimes I think of the few good times with him, sitting on his lap as he read me the “funnies” before I could do it myself, playing catch with him in the backyard. In the phalanx of memories, though, most vivid in my mind are the manner and circumstances of his death. In search of secret pleasures, he was disconnected from his family right to the very end.