Room 112 was at the end of a long, quiet hall with a bulletin board of paper snowflakes. The door was half open. A radio was playing low, a ball game from last century on the oldies station. I stood outside it with the Sunday Bangor Daily under my arm, and my hand on the cold brass of the knob. A nurse with a kind face nodded at me from the desk. I went in. In a recliner by the window sat an old man in a wool cardigan, thin as a bird, with a blanket on his lap and a white cloud of hair.
He turned his head when he heard me. His eyes were pale, almost without color, clouded by cataracts. They found my shape in the doorway, and his whole face lit up. “Alice?” he said. Then he saw the coat, the height, the gray mustache. He sagged a little. “Oh. You are not my girl.” I said, “No, sir. I am her husband. Walter Tuck. Alice passed in January.” He nodded slowly, as if he had known. He said, in a voice like paper, “I wondered. She did not come for ten weeks. I thought she was angry with me.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed. I put the paper on the table. “Mr. Pettengill, I am sorry. She was not angry. She would never have missed a Sunday.” He turned his clouded eyes toward the window. “She was a good girl,” he said. “She came every Sunday for sixteen years. Read me the obituaries first, to see who I outlived. Then the Red Sox. Then the funnies.” His hands shook on the blanket. “She told me her name was Alice Tuck. She said she lived over the river. I asked her once if she was my daughter. She said, Yes, Daddy.”
The room tilted. He reached into the pocket of his cardigan and took out a thin gold chain with a medal on it. A saint, worn smooth. He pressed it into my hand. “She gave me this. It was hers. It was from her mother. She said, Daddy, you keep it, I want you to have the one thing Mama had of yours.” I turned the medal over. On the back was engraved a date, June 14, 1941, and the initials A.P. and M.L. I knew the second set. M.L. was Margaret Lund, the maiden name of her mother.
A child can forgive a father she never met more easily than a mother who kept him from her, and still spend a lifetime loving them both.
The nurse, who had followed me to the door, told me the rest gently. Asa Pettengill had been a young soldier in the war, wounded at Anzio. When he came home in 1946, he was not well in his mind. He wandered. He raged at night. He was committed to the state hospital in Bangor for six years. His young wife Margaret, with a baby girl at home, was told he would likely never recover. She took the child back to Millinocket and told her family he had died. After a time she told the child as well, because it was easier.
He did recover, after a fashion. He was released in 1952 and lived quietly in boarding houses. He never went to look for them. He believed that his wife had been right. He wrote one letter in 1957, which came back unopened. Then he did not write again. In 2010, he was moved to Pine Haven when his sight began to fail. And in the autumn of that year, a woman of fifty seven stood in the door of Room 112 holding a folder of old state records, and said, “Mr. Pettengill, I think you are my father.”
“She told me I might not understand,” the old man said, “and she was right, at first. I thought I was dreaming.” He smiled. “She asked if she could come back. I said I would like it very much. And she did, every Sunday, and she never missed, and she never once asked me for a thing.” I sat on the bed and wept. The nurse went to get a box of tissues. Asa did not say anything. He just patted my hand, the way a father does, with the back of his own, slowly, over and over.
I should say that I was angry with Alice for about five minutes. I had spent fifty two years married to a woman who kept a father in a nursing home on the other side of the river and never told me. But the anger passed like a cloud over the Penobscot. I understood. She had been given a story by her mother, and she could not bear to make Margaret into a liar. She kept her promise to the dead and also visited the living. That is a kind of integrity that I had no word for.
Asa asked me to read to him. I opened the paper and started with the obituaries, because he said that was the way it was done. I read slowly. I read the names of people from Millinocket and Orono. At one, he said, “I knew him,” and at another, “That one owed me ten dollars.” We got to the sports page. I read about the Patriots. He did not care much for the Patriots. He said it was a poor imitation of baseball. And I laughed, for the first time since January, in a room that smelled of lavender and old books.
I come every Sunday now. I bring the paper, and a thermos of hot cider. My children have met their grandfather, who holds each of their faces with careful fingers. He told my daughter she has the same ears. At the end of every visit, I stand up and put the medal back in his hand, and he says the same thing. “Come back, son.” I say, “I will, Asa. I will come every Sunday, for as long as you want me.” It is the promise she made, and I intend to keep it.
