The Sun Keeps Setting

Copyright © 2000 by William Doreski.

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Contents

PREFACE

July 15

July 16

July 17

July 18

July 19

July 20.

July 21

July 22

July 23

July 24

July 25

July 26

July 27

July 28

July 29

July 30

July 31

August 1

August 2

August 3

August 4

August 5

August 6

August 7

August 8

August 9

August 10

August 11

August 12

August 13

August 14

August 15

August 16

August 17

August 18

August 19

August 20

August 21

August 22

August 23

August 24

August 25

August 26

August 27

August 28

August 29

August 30

August 31

September 1

September 2

September 3

September 4

September 5

September 6

September 7

September 8

September 9

September 10

September 11

September 12

September 13

September 14

September 15

AFTERWORD

The Sun kept setting—setting—still

No Hue of Afternoon—

Upon the village I perceived—

From House to House ‘twas Noon—

—Emily Dickinson

PREFACE

My parents have lived unremarkable American lives, comfortable working-class New England people surrounded by family and friends, but in old age the ironies Thomas Hardy found at the center of innocence have afflicted them. Lawrence Doreski, my father and the subject of this journal, was born into a large immigrant family in 1915, the first full year of the first Great War. He might have become cannon fodder for the next Great War if fate hadn’t intervened. In 1920 he contracted polio, which left him with a useless left arm. All his life, until old age struck, he safely ignored that lack of articulation. He became an excellent, tournament-quality tennis player. His serve, accomplished by tossing the ball up with his racket hand, thrilled the crowd, while his ability to paint the upper part of the house on a ladder with no discernible difficulty impressed me, since I usually spilled paint on myself and everything below me. My mother could always determine which parts of the house my father had painted and which areas were mine by the amount of paint on the grass. He couldn’t legally drive, but he could do anything else, including toting heavy cases of canned goods up the stairs from the stockroom of E. C. Allens’ General Store. My mother recently pointed to a kitchen window, a contemporary swing-in window, which he installed just a couple of years ago, and remarked on what a fine job of carpentry he’d done.

Born in Suffield, Connecticut, to farming parents of simultaneous German-Russian-Polish origin, my father finished high school with excellent grades, but Connecticut people from such backgrounds rarely went to college before the Second World War. The Great Depression intervened, anyway, and my father found more interesting ways of spending time than slouching in classrooms. He rode freights across the country, halting memorably at dawn by a water tower in Ogden, Utah and observing the sunrise over the Wasatch Mountains. For several months he lived in San Francisco in a low-rent building that also housed a brothel. Then after a stint working in Burlingame he grew bored with the West and hopped a freight headed east. Back in Enfield, Connecticut, where his family had moved to manage the Haas Tobacco plantation, he learned surveying and worked for the WPA laying out roads and a small hydroelectric plant in the Powder Hollow, the wooded valley of the Scantic River, site of the defunct Hazard Powder Company, that would become the focus of my childhood.

The Depression and Roosevelt’s First and Second New Deals shaped the political and social viewpoints of much of working-class America in the Thirties, and my father in some respects characterizes the attitudes of that generation. Able and willing to adopt the jingoism of the America First movement to any international situation, in the domestic social sphere he adheres to the modest revolutionary fantasies and working-class romanticism that characterized the ‘Thirties labor movement. He never belonged to a union, as far as I know, and never did anything that challenged the status quo. Yet like others of his era he thrilled to the words of the Democratic Party platform of 1936:

We hold this truth to be self-evident—that the test of a representative government is its ability to promote the safety and happiness of the people … that this three year recovery in all the basic values of life and the re-establishment of the American way of living has been brought about by humanizing the policies of the Federal Government as they affect the personal, financial, industrial, and agricultural well-being of the American people … that government in a modern civilization has certain inescapable obligations to its citizens, among which are:

(1) Protection of the family and home.

(2) Establishment of a democracy of opportunity for all people.

(3) Aid to those overtaken by disaster.

This platform offered a revolutionary expansion of the purposes and procedures of federalist democracy, and working-class America embraced it. Though deprived by economic circumstance, my father’s generation heard Roosevelt’s stirring oratory, applauded the success of unions in difficult circumstance, projected an uncynical faith in the American way of life, and believed in a brilliant future for themselves and their children. My generation, rejecting the sentimentality of such a vision while accustomed to the affluence of the postwar era, has seen the envisioned future fade. Our skepticism has interposed itself between us and the future. We have accepted as fact the failure of Roosevelt’s and Lyndon Johnson’s federalism, which was as much a matter of faith as of economic substance. The contemporary family is notoriously unprotected; the democracy of opportunity is a sick joke; and as for aid to those overtaken by disaster, my father may stand as a test-case. Differences between our generations distinguish my father from me, yet one purpose of this story is to determine if and how the complexities of evolving generations may obscure the human qualities that link us.

I speak of my father’s generation because he seems to embody it in so many ways, while my mother stands apart, and could be a person of almost any era. Almost a year older than my father, she also comes from a large family, half Irish (by way of Nova Scotia) and half old-stock English. She grew up as Mildred McGuire in Hazardville, a village within Enfield, and never left except for a few miserable days in the 1930s working as a housekeeper for a Hartford physician. Her brothers and sisters and their children rather than my father’s relatives would become my extended family. Her most impressive brother was Bill, who had served in the Second World War and in 1943 was captured by the Germans in Italy.

The Red Cross first found then lost him, and he was reported as missing in action. His father, my grandfather, died of stomach cancer in 1944. Bill had spent a year in a prison camp. When released by the Allied advance he was sent home on leave. Unaware of his father’s death, which occurred while he was crossing the Atlantic, he entered the house and found it vacant. A neighbor told him the whole family was attending his father’s funeral. Bill was a laconic, ironically witty man who when I was very young loved to tease me with his imperturbable silences. A heavy smoker (like so many GIs he’d become addicted to Lucky Strikes in the army), he died at fifty of lung cancer, leaving Louise, his wife, occupying half of the house in which he had been born and in which my elderly McGuire grandmother still lived. A few months later one of my mother’s sisters lost her husband to a heart attack following a kidney transplant, and the family then had two widows in their forties.

My mother and father married in 1941, and my father began work at E. C. Allens’ Sons, an old-fashioned full-service general dry goods, grocery, and hardware store. There he would spent the rest of his work life—more than forty years—a five-minute walk from home. After a couple of years in two rented houses, my parents bought the house at Three Cooper Street, Hazardville, where so far they’ve spent the rest of their lives. My father’s parents, too, would live out their lives in the other half of his two-family house, as would my Uncle Chet, my father’s closest brother, who like Bill McGuire was a veteran of the war. Chet served as a marine in the Pacific, and fought the entire Japanese campaign. His alcoholism produced heartbreak and difficulty for everyone around him until he died of bladder cancer in 1986.

The house became an important part of the family story. My parents bought it from Dr. Shepherd, who lived next door, for $4500. My grandparents paid half the price, while my father assumed a three percent mortgage for the rest. At the time he made $21 per week. Much of the rest of his life consists of the protracted labor required to modernize the house and keep it in first-class repair, something I think he relished partly because he could do everything—carpentry, painting, wallpapering, installing a furnace, much of the plumbing—with one good arm.

Still, he found time for other things. For many years he played tennis every other Sunday morning, weather permitting, defying his Catholic upbringing. The other Sundays in spring and summer he took me fishing in the Hollow, where we caught strings of bluegill, catfish, and perch. Sometimes my mother would drive us further afield, to the Somersville Mill Pond, to Shenipsit Lake, or some other interesting and occasionally fish-rich location. For vacations we fell into the habit of renting a cottage at Hamilton Lake, in Holland, Massachusetts, about twenty-five miles away, where we trolled for bass and pickerel and quite often caught them. Later we grew more adventuresome and spent vacations at Lake Winnipesaukee or Lake Champlain, but we always recalled the summers at Hamilton Lake with sentimental fondness.

From the late 1950s on, my father’s health presented problems. Around 1958 he developed high blood pressure so severe that it damaged his kidneys. The first physician he visited told him he had the flu. The second, Doctor Siegfried, immediately packed him off to Hartford Hospital for repair, and my father languished there for a couple of weeks on the eighth floor with a memorable view of the city. Katharine Hepburn’s brother, he proudly remembers, surgically patched his kidneys. My mother in those days had no difficulty with city driving, so we visited my father most days after school. However, she suffers from claustrophobia and hates elevators, so we walked up and down the eight flights of stairs. The hospital had recently suffered a serious fire which burnt out one floor—the sixth, I think—and killed nine or ten or a dozen people. Peeping into that burnt-out floor, where repairs had just begun, gave me the creeps. A few years later, in the early 1960s, working in a barn behind Allen’s where deposit bottles and paper goods were stored, my father fell through the rotten old floor and severely injured his knee. Never properly treated, this knee problem would come back to haunt him when his legs weakened with age.

In 1988 he suffered a relatively minor but terrifying heart attack. Treated at the local hospital, Johnson Memorial in Stafford, he refused an angiogram that would have detected the extent of clogging in his cardiac arteries. I didn’t blame him for resisting a procedure that frightened him; after all, he was old enough to decide such matters for himself. After a few days in the hospital he came home, but had grown decidedly weaker than he’d been before the attack. He had been a diabetic for years. He had controlled the disease with careful diet and an oral drug, but suffered from gout and other less definable inflammation in his legs. Gradually he lost the ability to walk without assistance. Much of this, my mother points out, was psychological. After several falls (my mother couldn’t lift him—the police came to pick him up) he had lost his confidence and grown so worrisome that he would walk behind my mother just touching the collar of her blouse. That was enough.

I’ve never been satisfied that my father’s health problems have been managed as well possible. Sometimes I wonder if Doctor Siegfried identifies a little too closely with my father. They’re the same age, have suffered from much the same ailments, and have been doctor and patient for almost forty years now. Doctor Siegfried takes his work personally, which has its drawbacks, and it seems likely that his medical knowledge, regardless of how conscientiously he reads the journals, is dated. When I was a child I had some problem or another that required attention, and Doctor Thayer, my regular physician, was on vacation, so my mother took me to Doctor Siegfried, who was new in town. His office then stood next to the Catholic Church, two blocks from home. The doctor in his then-thick Austro-German accent (it has mellowed considerably since then) suggested a shot of penicillin. I well knew this would be a painful shot and said so, though I was resigned to it. Well, shout as loudly as you like, he said, it will make you feel better. I shouted so loudly that Mrs. Siegfried dashed from the upper regions of the house to see who was being murdered. Doctor Siegfried yelled at her, Get out of here! Go upstairs! but he was amused and I considered him a good sport, though I later learned that he’s amused by anything that flusters his wife

But the way my father’s diabetes had worsened in the past five years worried me. Why wasn’t he on insulin? My father was not the man to cringe at injecting himself. Repeated episodes of badly swollen, and in one case, ulcerated legs, disturbed me, and certainly contributed to his growing immobility. I have reason to worry. My Uncle Freddy, a few years younger than my father, recently lost a leg to gangrene caused by untreated diabetes. 0f course Freddy doesn’t go to doctors. He keeps about thirty cats, and dutifully takes them to the vet for shots and spaying and various other sorts of treatment, but avoids medical treatment for himself, since he correctly notes that many people who go to the doctor die anyway. Gangrene, however, unmistakably requires attention. Everyone in the family thought Freddy would take the loss of his leg very hard, but he has adapted much more quickly and with more good nature than expected. He has even gotten back up on his tractor to look after an acre or two of corn.

My wife Carole and I have viewed the aging of my parents with apprehension for both them and ourselves. Living a hundred miles away we’re too far and too near. Too far to really help, too near to ignore the situation, even if we wanted to. The looming financial disaster can’t be avoided, as far as I can determine. They have no assets but their house, no income but social security, the modest rent paid by a tenant who does most of the yard work, and a pitiful amount of savings. They have Blue Cross but not Blue Shield—who can afford it? Medicare doesn’t cover long-term care, and the state of Connecticut allows no shielding of property through transfer. We have no money, no savings other than a small pension fund (which can’t be cashed in), only my modest salary from the small state college where I teach English. Like the majority of Americans we’re a paycheck away from extinction and can’t possibly assist my parents. Ted Kennedy has warned the nation about the financial destruction wreaked by longevity and the need for social planning to avert it, but no one listens to Ted Kennedy anymore because many Americans hate to hear about the problem of money and find such discussions distasteful and frightening. People want to identify with winners, not losers, and this bifurcated populist view of society has deeply distorted the political and social vision of the age.

When people died at home the expenses included a box and a hole in the ground. No one dies at home anymore other than a fortunate few. Even my Grandma McGuire, who lived a long healthy life and died after a mercifully brief decline, died in the hospital, taxing her estate with a medical bill. My other grandmother, a little more fortunate, died at home, like my Grandpa Doreski, of a heart attack—sudden and decisive. Given the opportunity, though, modern medicine will intervene and prolong life beyond what’s practical or bearable. Yet how can we refuse to live? The tendency to cling to life even when it’s hopeless and miserable seems characteristic of the race. The exceptions—the suicides, the few who refuse medical intervention—leave a faint air of madness. It’s normal to live. As Thoreau wrote in protest of the logging of Maine’s white pines, Everything that lives is better alive than dead. The days and weeks and months of my father’s decline challenge that brave assertion without offering a competing narrative of significance. Disasters suffered by ordinary people rarely seem MDNM tragic even when they evoke a heroic response. When these situations allow no room for grand gestures, or even for dignified acceptance, they become murky and pathetic. Though my father’s life offers no compelling model for the contemporary world its sad medical denouement is something most of us will eventually face. In trying to accept and deal with his misery I’ve had to confront myself as my father’s image and successor and relive my early life and try to catch the faint illumination it casts on him.

July 15

Midsummer in Peterborough. Since my lone summer school course (The American Wilderness) ended a couple of weeks ago I’ve luxuriated in doing nothing special. Nothing special includes writing a paper on the Pennsylvania Railroad for its sesquicentennial conference in 0ctober, a longish piece on Robert Frost for a reference work, a few book reviews, and some poems too strange to publish. I’ve spent many bright days sitting outside reading novels and swatting mosquitoes, blackflies, gnats, deer flies, horseflies. Carole, my wife, has a book to finish writing, but she’s gotten caught up in perennial gardening. She has cleaned out existing plots, dug or roto-tilled several new ones, transplanted tough-minded hosta and yarrow, and added a dozen new species of everything. Divided the blue flag and yellow iris. Moved Jacob’s Ladder into better light. Selected exotic new hosta with blue-green leaves trimmed with yellow and waving heavily hooded burgundy flowers. Mulched with sweet-scented cedar shavings. Cajoled delicate spirea transplants into comfortable states of mind. We’ve made at least twenty trips to The House by the Side of the Road and other local nurseries. To reward ourselves for this horticultural labor we’ve planned a variety of short trips for the rest of the summer: to Newport and Marblehead to examine certain gravestones, to Hanover and the Dartmouth Library, to the Gauguin show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, to Boothbay Harbor to look at the Atlantic and be tourists for a weekend.

In late afternoon we walk down Murphy Road to Sand Hill and visit a house under construction. This house will be a fabulous one for Peterborough: a huge neo-shingle-style palace with a swimming pool in a stone-faced annex fenced with Ionic columns. The garage sports at least ten bays to shelter, we understand, an antique car collection. The house has been more than two years in the making. Before construction began, a fellow with a backhoe built a stone wall around the entire property, which consists of at least twenty cleared acres with views to Mount Ascutney, Monadnock, Crotched Mountain, and the distant foothills of the White Mountains. The wall alone must have cost a hundred thousand dollars. The acreage, I know, cost over three hundred thousand, the most expensive house lot sold to date in this town. A glorious piece of property, but a somewhat overstated house. We‘ve enjoyed watching it go up.

Still restless, after dinner we drive to The House by the Side of the Road, twelve miles away in Wilton, and browse awhile among desirable plants. We buy nothing, but mentally file away tentative selections for further consideration. When we reach home the answering machine beckons. The recorded voice is my mother‘s, and that always means bad news since being shy of the machine she normally just hangs up. „This is your mother. Your father‘s in the hospital, is the laconic, edgy message. I return the call and my mother answers immediately. 0f course she wouldn‘t have gone to the hospital at this time of day. She won‘t drive after dark, and given her age that‘s wise of her. „Daddy got so weak, she says, „I called Doctor Siegfried and he came to the house. Daddy fell again, but he‘s so weak he can‘t even sit up. Siegfried called the ambulance."

„Well what is it? Do you know?"

„I think his diabetes is acting up. His legs are really swollen."

„Well, let me know. I‘ll come down on Thursday when you know what‘s going on, OK? I‘ll call tomorrow." Something tells me doom has struck, but we don‘t yet know what‘s wrong and we‘ll have to wait for events to unfold. Inexorably, they will unfold. His heart attack six years ago provoked no particular course of treatment, no change in routine, no therapy, no change in diet.

He already adhered to a sugarless diet to control his diabetes, but his cholesterol intake remained higher, probably, than it should have been. For someone at the age of eighty-one any hospitalization bodes ill. In my experience, people over eighty who enter the hospital leave in the hearse. A few years ago Carole was hospitalized for emergency surgery and ended up in a wing in which almost every patient was over eighty. Within a week all of them, without exception, had died. Some of the deaths were due to obvious neglect or poor nursing skills. 0ne nurse, for example, didn‘t even know how to put a bedpan under a patient. 0thers simply ignored the patients regardless of their needs. But mostly the problem was that these patients were too weak to survive without acute medical intervention, and that doesn‘t occur in a so-called community hospital. Whether such intervention should occur anywhere is an open question, one I don’t look forward to confronting.

July 16

My mother calls to tell me Doctor Siegfried thinks my father has had another heart attack. His electrolytes are wrong and his EKG is irregular. The situation’s too serious to put off until Thursday, so I make plans to drive down tomorrow. This means postponing a meeting with one of my best former students, who’s just completing graduate school at the University of Washington, and whom I haven’t seen for a couple of years. I pack a bag for three days’ stay. Carole won’t remain overnight because we’d have to pay someone to look after the cats, who’d be deprived of fine summer days outside, so I’ll have to brave Hazardville alone. I used to scorn people who thought of the welfare of their cats in situations like this, but now for us, childless in middle age, they’re major presences in our lives, and can’t be ignored.

Before dinner to work off some of our apprehension we cross the road and cut through the woods to a beaver pond about a quarter of a mile away. This pond straddles Bogle Brook at the site of a former grist-mill dam. 0n the stone remains of the old dam sits a metal folding chair, nicely rusted to a single shade of antique brown. When we moved here five years ago I discovered this chair and named it the Poet’s Seat, after the well-known stone overlook above Greenfield, Massachusetts. Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, Greenfield’s poet, was one of the best nineteenth century sonnet-writers. While hardly unknown, his work has been more neglected than most poetry of such high quality. I’m unqualified to identify with Tuckerman, but I like to occasionally sit on that folding chair land look over the brook to the hump of South Pack Mountain rising a couple of miles to the southeast.

This evening the beavers are working on their dam and too busy to worry about our presence. We watch for awhile as they paddle about pushing sticks into place, occasionally slapping their tails with loud deep water-thuds. Contrary to what I’ve often heard, this slap doesn’t seem to be an alarm—no fellow beavers dive or retreat at the sound—but rather a simple expression of the pleasure of work and life. Animals take great pleasure in their lives. They spend more time playing than people do, and live more sensuous existences, more intimate with the texture of the world. 0f course they happily devour each other, fall prey to numberless parasites and diseases, and like all inhabitants of primitive societies are probably haunted by superstitions and taboos. But this describes the current primitive society of America, too.

0n our way home we hear a rustling ahead and stop to watch a porcupine amble out of the brush, pause in the path and stare at us, then waddle forth to whatever destination it has in mind. The nervous-looking porcupine has nothing to fear from most carnivores but makes an easy meal for a fisher, which knows how to attack its face, bewilder it, turn it on its back and feast on its belly. Black quills rattling, heavy awkward steps, pitifully graceless, the porcupine nevertheless brims with determination and purpose. We reach home in a better state of mind. This was a good short walk—beaver and porcupine sightings within a few rods of each other—to close a bad day.

July 17

Though she’ll return to New Hampshire this afternoon, Carole drives down to Hazardville with me. We take the back route, through Jaffrey and Winchendon, down Route 32 through Ware, Palmer, and Monson to Stafford, then west on 190 to the hospital. I was born in the old Johnson Memorial, in a building still extant on Route 19 in Stafford Springs. The new structure, erected a decade ago on the town line between Stafford and Somers, looks more like an airport terminal than a hospital. It serves three or four towns, including Enfield. Inside, the lobby’s almost deserted. At the desk we get directions to Intensive Care, which is located on the second floor with a pleasant view of rolling wooded hills. At the corridor entrance to the unit we note that visitors are supposed to call from a lobby phone before entering. I don’t recall this touch of seriousness from six years ago. We later learn that actually using the phone, though not exactly discouraged, is unnecessary and surprises the staff. In spite of the depressing antiseptic odor this hardly looks or sounds like an ICU, at least by medical center standards. The nurses crowd around the desk, gossiping and laughing, and most of the beds stand unoccupied. Nobody’s busy with caretaking. My father, who occupies a bed directly opposite the nursing station, does not look good. His skin is grayish, his heartbeat, as the monitor shows, irregular. His heavy Slavic features look too large for his slackened body. The large bald dome of his head has lost its healthy shine. His spirits aren’t as low as they were right after his first heart attack, but he’s terribly weak. Bill, what are you doing here? he asks, as though I’d dropped in from the moon. He’s too weak for conversation but I try to distract him with small talk. I tell him about the garden, the cats, Carole’s book.

But why did you drive all the way down here? he insists.

I don’t want to tell him that I was afraid that if we didn’t I’d never see him alive again, so I reply, Mom called and said you were sick so we had to come down and see for ourselves. It’s summer—we don’t have to teach or anything. Why shouldn’t we come?

We visit my parents more or less regularly. The two hour drive isn’t especially burdensome, and we make it ten or a dozen times a year. But what my father’s really asking is, What’s wrong with me? Am I going to die? Is that why you’re here?

Carole glances at the monitoring apparatus, and her years of nursing experience tell her more than she necessarily wants to know. The alarms, she later tells me, are turned off, which says something about the quality of care in this ICU and something about my father’s projected future. Furthermore, his heartbeat is dramatically arrhythmic, every third beat clumsy and irregular, his pulse abnormally fast, and his blood pressure very low.

The first time I visited my father in this unit, six years ago, he burst into tears with the despair of someone unused and unreconciled to illness. This time he seems resigned, even grimly humorous. Following that earlier visit I wrote a poem