“He said, ‘It is for my father. I want to bring my father.” Beverly, the secretary, was crying so hard that she had to stop and take a breath. “Mrs. Fisher, I have worked for him for nineteen years, and I did not even know his father was alive. He has told everyone his father died in 1989. And on Friday morning, he came into my office and said, ‘Book a room for two. I am going to get him out of the care home in Harrisburg and bring him to the christening. He has not met his great granddaughter. He is ninety one years old. This might be the last chance.”
I sat down on the edge of the bathtub, where I had been giving the baby her bath. My daughter had gone downstairs to answer the door, and I could hear her voice drifting up through the vent, bright and brittle, thanking a neighbor for a casserole. I held the phone against my chest for a moment. For thirty one years I had been married to a man who told me his father was a drunk, a rotten man who abandoned the family in 1962 and drove into the Susquehanna River. Frank had said it so many times that it had hardened into a fact. I had never questioned him, because the subject made him go quiet in a way that frightened me.
“Is he in the care home?” I asked. Beverly said yes. She gave me the name, Susquehanna Manor, and the address, and she said she had called them herself that afternoon. “His father is not well, Mrs. Fisher. He has dementia. The nurse told me he does not always know who people are. But on good days, he talks about a son named Frankie, who used to sit on the porch with him and count the barges.” I closed my eyes. He must have been planning the whole thing for weeks. And then, the night before, he must have lost his nerve.
A teddy bear sent at nine at night hid the fact that a man had been planning to bring his own father to the church.
I did not confront Frank. For two days I thought about what to do, and in the end I did what I do with any difficult thing, which is bake. I made a pan of brownies and a thermos of coffee, and I drove to Harrisburg on Sunday afternoon with my daughter and the baby in the back seat. She looked at the address on the dashboard and said, “Mom, that is a nursing home,” and I said, “Yes, dear,” and kept driving.
The nurse at the desk was a big, kind woman named Rosalind. She walked us down a long hallway that smelled of lemon polish and old soup. Outside Room 114, she stopped and put a hand on my arm. “He has been asking for the baby,” she said. “Your husband came Friday, Mrs. Fisher. He sat with him all afternoon. He told him about the baby. I think it was the first time he had been here in a very long while.” I felt the floor tilt slightly. Frank had been there. He had gone, alone, and sat with his father, and then he had gone home, and he had not said a word.
The old man was sitting in a chair by the window, in a gray cardigan with a button missing. His hair was white and wispy, and his hands were enormous, spotted, and folded over a cane. When he saw the baby, his whole face changed. He held out his arms. Emily looked at me, startled, and I nodded, and she carefully laid little Hazel across his lap. He did not say a word. He just looked down into her face, and the tears ran straight down the creases of his cheeks, into the collar of his cardigan. “Frankie,” he whispered. “Frankie, look. She has your chin.”
That was when the door opened behind us. I knew who it was before I turned around. Frank was standing in the doorway in his Sunday coat, with a paper bag in one hand and his hat in the other. He had come to bring his father an orange, because that is what he had always brought, he told me later. He looked at the three of us, at his daughter, his wife, his ninety one year old father holding his granddaughter, and he could not move. Then he took one step, and another, and knelt down on the linoleum beside the chair like a boy of six.
“Dad,” he said. “I am sorry I did not come sooner.” The old man looked at him with cloudy eyes. For a long moment, I did not think he would know him. Then a smile broke slowly over his face, a crooked, trembling smile. “Frankie,” he said again. “You grew.” He lifted one big hand from the baby and laid it on the gray head of Frank. “You did good, boy,” he said. “You did real good.” My husband put his forehead against the knee of his father and wept without making a sound, and my daughter turned to me with her hand over her mouth, and I took her in my arms.
We stayed all afternoon. The old man nodded and drifted and came back, and each time he came back, he looked at the baby again. As the light went gold on the river, I took out my phone and asked a passing aide to take a picture, and she lined us up. Four generations, an old man in a cardigan, a gray haired son, a daughter in a wool coat, and an infant in a pink blanket. In the photograph, no one is looking at the camera.
The christening was held again, three weeks later, in the chapel of the care home. Father Brennan came from St. Mary, with the water and the book, and the residents gathered in their wheelchairs along the wall. Frank carried his father in his arms from the chair to the font, because the old man wanted to stand, and he held him upright while the priest poured the water on the head of little Hazel. Afterward, the aides served cake. Frank sat by the window with his father and fed him bites with a plastic fork. I watched them from across the room, and for the first time in thirty one years, I felt I knew the man I married.