BEING SO GOOD

     My dad got married late in life; he was 45, my mom 38.  I
think they were both surprised that they weren't going to be single
forever, and they wasted no time in starting the family.  I
appeared on the scene exactly eight months and thirty days after
their wedding, and my brother arrived not much later.
     My dad was living with his sister back then, whom he adored
and worshipped.  She was really his only friend growing up in the
small Ohio town where he was born, and they were inseparable until
he met my mom.  
     My dad is a good, decent man.  He learned early on that, in
the workplace, it is essential not to make waves.  He is a writer--
a journalist, and he lost one of his very first jobs for writing
a story, not in the usual sports-page style, but in a wildly
outlandish, creative style that he had picked up from one of his
college English classes(Joyce, Lawrence, Woolf, etc.)  After that,
he wrote exactly as he was supposed to, expected to, and he has
kept his next job(on a local magazine) to this day.
     I know it hurt him to see other, younger, more flamboyant
writers(some of whom he'd actually interviewed and hired) pass him
by, especially when he handed out checks on payday and saw that
many of theirs were larger.  But any gripes or frustrations he may
have had disappeared when he sat down at his desk and looked at
that picture of my mom and her two boys that stood right next to
his IBM Selectric.  
     He ended up writing stories about unsung local heroes,
personalities, and eccentrics, and his stories are always voted the
most-read items in the magazine each year during the annual
reader's poll.  Once, he wrote a story about a local kid who had
somehow beaten childhood leukemia(through bone marrow transplants
from a sibling), and had gone on to represent the country in the
steeplechase at the Olympics that year.  For that piece, he placed
an honorable mention in the Pulitzer awards for magazine
journalism, and that certificate still hangs, dusty, proud in the
den, alongside all my scholastic awards and my brother's athletic
ones.  And my mom's trophy, which she won for being on the
championship bowling team at our local synagogue.

     But what I want to tell you about now is what happened one day
when I was in junior high school, my brother still in elementary. 
My dad's sister lay in a hospital bed--throat cancer.  We visited
her almost daily and my dad was always shaken when we left.
     I remember we were in the waiting room because a nurse was
giving my aunt a sponge-bath when we saw a woman and her young
daughter.  The mother's face was pretty, but at the moment it was
contorted into a scowl, and the fact that her daughter was bopping
around noisily, playing 'Got your nose' with me and my brother
wasn't helping.  Finally, the girl's mother rose and yanked her
hard by the arm, dragging her away.
     "But I'm being good, Mommy.  I'm being *good*."
     "No.  You.  Are.  Not.  We're leaving."  And we heard the girl
scream as they left the hospital.
     They allowed us to go up to my aunt's room.  My mother had
stayed at home.  She'd lost her own father to cancer two years
before, and the memories of that were still too fresh and painful
for her to join us.  
     I remember vividly that hospital room:  The ever-present beeps
and IV bag.  The awful smell.  My aunt's voice, raspy and hoarse
from the cancer that had ravaged her larynx.  Her hair thin and
crackly from the massive doses of chemo. It seemed incredible to my
brother and myself that such a horrid whisper could come from
someone whose face was still soft and beautiful.  She was too weak
to even raise her arms and my dad sat on the edge of the bed and
held her hand between his on his lap and leaned close so he could
hear her.  My brother and I were in charge of rubbing her feet and
legs.  They always hurt.  
     The visits were very hard for my dad, who is one of the last
of the great optimists.  Though my aunt could have refused those
huge doses of chemotherapy, both she and my father agreed
that where there was life there was hope.  But when the cancer
spread to her lungs and she would cough so hard that we were
constantly buzzing for the nurse, we knew that there wasn't any.  
     One day, near the end, my dad leaned in close and we heard her
whisper to him, "It shouldn't be like this.  No one should be like
this.  What was ever so bad that it should be like this?  What one
thing?"
     When we left the hospital, we saw that it was a beautiful,
warm spring day.  But for us there was no joy in the clear sky, the
pure, clean air, the shouts from the girls in the courtyard behind
our apartment.
     Dinner was especially difficult that night.  Despite the news
that my brother had finally pulled all A's on a report card, we
both knew it would only make things worse to mention it.  My mom
padded around the kitchen, getting up often to bring things back
from the refrigerator that we didn't really need.  She touched my
father's hand as he picked at his food.  It was his favorite, but
flavorless tonight.  My brother and I both went to bed after
dinner, both secretly hoping, in that area behind our thoughts
where the truth is found, that she would just stop fighting and go
to sleep and not awaken, and that we could have our father back.
     At about two in the morning I woke up and couldn't fall back
to sleep.  I made my way into the kitchen and drank some milk.  On
the way back I heard some sounds from my parents' room. The door
was open a crack and father was kneeling at the side of the bed,
hands together.  I heard his voice crack as he said, "Oh God, God,
please.  I'm being good.  I'm being *so* good.  Oh God oh oh God,
*please*?"  Then I couldn't listen anymore.
     I slipped back into my room and yanked my brother out of bed.
     "W-what is it?  I'm asleep."
      I pulled him onto the floor.  "No, How, listen.  We have to,
we have to *pray*."