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PARTISAN REVIEW
Barbara Grizzuti Harrison
IN THE NAME OF THE FATHER
All hospitals, she had thought, were alike; but in some re–
spects this was not so. In this hospital, the one in which he lay dying,
the wall behind her father's head was bright orange. This wall he
could not see, tied, as he was, to his bed - to what remained of his
life - by bottles and tubes that were indeed like all the other bottles
and tubes that had bound him precariously to his life in all the other
hospitals. The door to his room was bright yellow.
The nursery-room colors reminded Clara of a playground she
had seen somewhere in the South long ago: orange slides and yellow
swings and green monkey bars next to an old church in the middle of
a graveyard . Clara had cherished that image of life in the midst of
death, children sailing high above the tombstones on their yellow
swings into the clean blue sky; what could be, if you thought about
it, more natural? Of course the smell in this room was awful, hot–
house flowers and something else - something swampy, rancid. The
playground must have been connected to a school, she thought idly,
a church school. And the kneebone is connected to the ankle bone,
the ankle bone.... What nonsense one thought in the presence of
the dying. Silly rhymes kept coming into her head. In this room they
talked neither of life nor of death. They hardly talked at all. Occa–
sionally someone murmured, "It's a sin"; voices murmured in assent:
"It's a sin ."
The old man, who was stubborn, had not allowed the nurses to
remove his contact lenses - what a fuss there had been when Clara's
mother found out - and now there was a milky film over his eyes.
Under the film, his caged pupils burned bright with fever. When
Clara's son was in the hospital after his skiing accident, wrapped like
a mummy in a body cast, he'd had to wear a loin cloth . But he
always managed to take it off. One day she'd come in to find him
crying; his loin cloth was on. "The nurse said, 'Where's your mod–
esty?' the child said , "so I have to wear my modesty now." Old
enough to have a skiing accident and not old enough to know the
word
modesty,
imagine. One is never old enough, Clara thought, and
then she thought, old enough for what?
