Then Again - Diane Keaton [68]
One afternoon I talked to Dad about all the times we drove under the Avenue 55 overpass onto the Pasadena Freeway, until we made a left at the Pacific Coast Highway. It took us all the way to Palos Verdes. Once there, he and his friend Bob Blandin checked their lobster traps before diving off the cliffs into the ocean. Palos Verdes was famous for Lloyd Wright’s all-glass Wayfarers Chapel. Mom said people wanted to get married with an ocean view. I asked Dad if he remembered how every wedding was called off after a house slid down a hill one Sunday. Did he remember how we continued driving to Palos Verdes, landslide or not, and how we kept waiting for him in the backseat of our first and only woody station wagon as we ate Mom’s better-than-McDonald’s homemade hamburgers wrapped in tinfoil, with cheese and mayo and dill pickles too? Did he remember coming over the cliffs every weekend, singing, “Who stole the ding-dong, who stole the bell? I know who stole it, Dorrie Bell.” Did he remember how he’d always lean down to kiss little Robin Redbreast, then me, his Di-annie Oh Hall-ie? Dad tilted his head back and forth, trying to think it through. It was an awful lot of questions for a dying man to answer.
I told him the story about the time I spied on him through the crack of his bedroom door as he slipped coins into nickel-, dime-, and quarter-size candy-striped wrappers he got from the Bank of America. After he filled them, he opened a drawer and put the new wrappers on top of a mound of others. Seeing the outline of his profile as he reflected on the cumulative results of his undertaking made me smile. There he was, Mary Alice Hall’s son, happily engaged in realizing a portion of his dream, the acquisition of money. I told Dad I wanted him to be sure and be proud of all the other dreams he’d realized too, big dreams, dreams he never thought he could have accomplished. I told him I hoped to pass on the memory of his accomplishments to a child of my own someday, even though I knew I was a little long in the tooth. Dad didn’t respond. After that, I didn’t tell him any more stories.
The fat man in the black suit came from the coroner’s office. He put on rubber gloves to examine the body. It was brief. He wrapped a wire tag around my father’s big toe. No more Jack Hall’s right shoe, Jack Hall’s left shoe. Robin, Dorrie, and I went outside and sat on the Jacuzzi cover. I looked through Dad’s picture window as two men from the Neptune Society strapped him onto a gurney. Covered in a royal-blue cloth, Dad was rolled out of the living room, through the kitchen, into the garage, out the garage door, and onto the driveway. I followed the little procession from a distance. After they shut the windowed door to the van, all I could make out was the royal-blue blanket stretched across my father’s body. At least he was wrapped in the color of the ocean at sunset.
What Remains
Two months after Dad died, Al admitted in the safety of the therapist’s office what I must have always known: He never had any intention of marrying me. What he wanted was out. And that’s what he got. He got out. I watched him walk into the light of the California sun without so much as a glance back. Later the same day, he flew to the safety of New York, the George Washington Bridge, his driver, Luke, and his dog, Lucky, waiting at Snedens Landing.
This is what remains of Al Pacino.
1. Eight pink slips from the Shangri-La Hotel in 1987, saying, “Call from Al.”
2. A page ripped out of a book with the sheet music to “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” inscribed “To Di” at the top of the page, “Love Al” at the bottom.
3. One happy-birthday note card, with “Love Al” written on it.
4. A handwritten letter from December 1989: “Dear Di, I am feeling uncomfortably lonely more than I have in many, many moons. I don’t know why this is so. It’s perhaps being in a foreign country and not being able to speak the language; you could say that’s one of the reasons. But mainly it’s being away from you and