On the last day I saw my father, I arrived early to meet the hospice nurse. She was sitting next to his hospital bed reading his chart, taking notes. She was in her fifties, had brown hair with grey roots, burgundy scrubs and projected a soothing patience, a don’t-worry-about-it empathy. We had told him he was going to get extra care, extra nurses, special visits, whatever he wanted. He liked that idea a lot. Whether he registered the meaning of hospice, he didn’t betray it. But now he was alert. Anxious. He seemed relieved to see me.
“There he is,” he said.
“Hey, dad.”
I took his hand and squeezed it. It was hard to see him so thin, so shrunken. He had whisps of grey hair matted on his head and a thin white stubble across his face. His skin had a yellowish tint. His left leg ended at the knee. I took off my jacket and put on the chair, where I sat next to him.
Sensitive about talking over him, the nurse asked him if he wanted to answer health questions himself or have me do it. He said ask me. I told her what I knew. He had liver disease, congestive heart failure, diabetes, hypertension, something about his blood levels, liquid restrictions to combat water retention and swelling… a soup of sickness, each morbidity exacerbating the other.
“He’s an alcoholic,” I said, finally, naming the real disease that was destroying him. He seemed to flinch when I said the word, as if I’d said it to shame him. I’m not sure I didn’t, but it seemed important to speak the truth. She nodded and marked his chart, the list of abbreviations that meant he was dying.
I put a CD of Mozart sonatas on the new boom-box I had brought a weekend before, the day he couldn’t wake up, the day he almost went into a coma. Warm strings filled the room.
“Oh, that’s wonderful” he said like a man getting his first warm shower in months.
“Do you love classical music, Mr. Murphy?” the nurse asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“He’s a musicologist,” I offered, aware that I was exaggerating for his benefit.
“Really!” She said, “Did you teach?”
“Yes. I taught at the University of Birmingham, Alabama,” he said and went on to recite his autobiography, the life of Professor Bill Murphy.
About four years earlier – after the radio stations were sold; after the money was gone; after the house double mortgaged; between binges – my father bought a Steinway baby grand and hired my old piano teacher, Gil Castle, to teach him classical piano. It was amazing to watch his clumsy fingers maul the keys in deep concentration as he played a few bars of the Moonlight Sonata. But in time, since Dad was never serious about learning piano, and Gil was never serious about teaching, they spent his lessons talking about classical music. Eventually they collaborated on a book: The World of Music and Ideas, A Self-Help Guide to the Enjoyment and Understanding of Classical Music. Dad decided that being a radio broadcaster would not be enough, so he invented a new biography.
William Murphy, Philosopher, came from a family of musicians and became an amateur musician on piano and guitar.
So far, so true. His mother played and taught piano professionally. Her grandfather started the first symphony orchestra in Birmingham.
He graduated with honors from Williams College and continued graduate work at the NYU Graduate School of Philosophy. However, his most important studies were during his association the late great Dimitri Metropolis, Conductor of the New York Philharmonic, and a keen believer in the relationship of music and ideas for which this little book is dedicated.
It went on: lectures, publications, professorships, accolades galore. There was almost no truth in it, except that he graduated from Williams in 1954 and dropped out of NYU a year later. He explained to me, enthusiastically, how he came up with the his phony Ph.D. It seems his mother did teach at a college in Birmingham, which burnt down some years later. Dad figured that he could claim to have gotten his doctorate there and that there would be no way for anyone to check. So, instant Ph.D. There was absolutely no irony in his voice, no sense of right or wrong: it was convenient. It would sell books.
And now, he was selling it to the nurse. And she believed him.
“That’s fascinating, Mr. Murphy. Or should I call you Professor Murphy?”
He smiled and waved his hand. “Call be Bill,” he said warmly.
“He was actually in the radio business,” I said.
“Really?” She asked. “That, too?”
He shot me an impatient look; one I had seen a million times. It still had the power to shut me down.
“He was very successful,” I said.
“You have a lot to be proud of, Professor Murphy,” she said. “I’ll be back to check in on you this afternoon.”
She left the room.
Mozart’s strings completed a phrase and rested before beginning again, slowly, more pensively. My father blinked and looked down. I wondered what he heard in the music – certainly more than I ever could – the motifs, the sonata form, the changes in keys. He knew his stuff. That, at least, was true. I watched him settle, breathing in sync with the music, his eyes resting as it washed over him.
I looked out the window, at the growing traffic on Central Avenue. It was already growing dark under a steely December sky. I tried to sort through my soup of emotions, but there was no separating sadness from anger; embarrassment from guilt that I nearly betrayed his lies. The gut punch of his stare. I looked back at him, breathing in, wheezing out, and felt a kind of strange admiration. Because the truth was, once upon a time, my father had everything: successful career, wife, three children, home, money, music…. And he fucked it up. So, he invented a new Bill Murphy, a Professor Bill Murphy who accomplished everything that he wished he had; who lived in the world of classical music and philosophy; who was a published author, tops in his field; who bestowed his gifts of insight to thousands through lectures and books. Professor Bill Murphy was not a drunk. Did not lose his family. Did not lose his money. Did not kill himself through three decades of abuse. On his deathbed, he was never going to have to prove otherwise, so that’s who he became. Who was I to deny him that?
The CD ended. I looked down on his sleeping face and brushed his cheek softly with the back of my hand. I picked up my jacket and left for the long drive back to Brooklyn. I did not know that was the last time I would see my father alive. But whoever knows such a thing?