Page 103 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

Maryanne to fly to Florida, get him out of the hospital, and bring him back to New York. It would be my father’s last trip north. After three years in Florida, he was going home.
In New York, doctors discovered that Dad had a faulty mitral valve and his heart had become dangerously enlarged. He needed to undergo an experimental procedure to replace it with a healthy valve from a pig’s heart.
When Mom and I got to the House to see Dad the day before his surgery, Elizabeth was already there, sitting with him in his tiny childhood bedroom, which we called “the Cell.” He lay in his cot, and I kissed him on the cheek but didn’t sit next to him for fear of breaking him. I’d seen Dad sick before —with pneumonia, with jaundice, with drunkenness, with despair—but his condition now was shocking. Not yet forty, he looked like a worn-out eighty-year-old man. He told us about the procedure and the pig valve, and Mom said, “Freddy, it’s a good thing you’re not kosher.” We all laughed.
It was a long recovery, and Dad stayed at the House to recuperate. A year after the surgery, he was better than he had been, but he would never be well enough to live on his own again. Part of the obstacle to that may have been financial. He started working for my grandfather again but this time on a maintenance crew. It wasn’t surprising that apart from a few stints in rehab to dry out, he had never stopped drinking. He told me once that one of his doctors had warned him, “If you have another drink, it’s going to kill you.” Even open-heart surgery wasn’t enough to stop him.
That Thanksgiving, Dad joined us for the first time since he’d moved back to New York. He sat with me at Gam’s end of the table, pale and thin as a specter.
Halfway through the meal, Gam started choking. “You okay, Mom?” Dad asked. Nobody else seemed to notice. As she continued to struggle, a couple of people at the other end of the table looked up to see what was going on but then looked down at their plates and continued eating.
“Come on,” Dad said as he put a hand under Gam’s elbow and gently helped her to her feet. He led her to the kitchen, where we heard some shuffling and the distressing sound of my grandmother’s grunts as Dad performed the Heimlich maneuver; he’d learned it when he had been a volunteer ambulance driver in the late 1960s and early ’70s.