One April day a few years ago, my husband and I went to see a David Hockney retrospective at the Tate Britain. My father had died of Alzheimer’s that February in Los Angeles. He was 91, an oncologist who at the very end of his life became an artist.
It was raining heavily that Saturday. We drove from Hammersmith, and came in to the main hall, shaking off umbrellas. On my first trip to the Tate, as a young American girlfriend visiting my English boyfriend, I had pushed through the heavy doors and been surprised at the high windows and cathedral-like hush of the cavernous hallway. I was from California, the future-facing land of quick desert blooms, and I felt a bit awed by the weight of Europe, where history and culture seemed heavy and pale as whale bones.
Then we had been equally dishevelled and bewildered graduate students, falling in love across the Atlantic. Now my husband and I were parents in late middle age, and we blended in with the other Londoners in their spring cashmere jumpers and fashionable black boots.
The Hockney exhibit started in a small room full of early paintings that were abstract and drab: the palette was black, white, red, grey. We stopped in front of one set of lines that looked like broken trainlines or a set of prison bars pried open.
My husband commented that the art seemed more like tortured Frances Bacon than what we expected from Hockney. My imagined post-war London was full of rubble and austerity, and I said it must have been hard to be the artist he would become as a young man down from Yorkshire in that constrained and darkened world.
Through an archway we followed Hockney to California. The space expanded; the colours exploded. There were the large canvases full of LA light; there was his naked young lover, gliding through diamonds of sunshine in a blue pool, and the red tile roofs covered in sprays of purple bougainvillea, the golden roads winding through spiky yucca blooms, from edge to edge the happy surprise of being alive in a body. We went through room after room, from LA back to Yorkshire, his eyes undimmed.
My husband rushed through the final multi-media room, but I slowed down. On the walls were projected finger paintings Hockney made on his iPad while lying in bed, ill for nearly a year. A film of him showed an old man with a young smile, fashioning his cosmos month after month from the view out of a single window.
Many rooms before, he had launched his art out of an iron cage. Here he was, still flowering. I started to cry, at first gently, and then as I reached my husband in the gift room, uncontrollably.
“Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine,” I tried to steady myself. “It was all so great,” trying and failing to catch my breath.
He hugged me close, but the tears were still spilling down my cheeks when we got stuck in traffic outside Earl’s Court.
My husband looked at me: “What’s going on? I don’t understand. Was it the Hockney?”
“It’s not the art.” I did not know how to explain to my husband the tenderness I felt at that moment, a mix of sweetness and sadness that was nearly unbearable. “I think it’s my Dad.”
*
When my father was a young boy, his father threw him into a lake to teach him to swim. That was the anecdote we heard growing up and it is a scene I have imagined many times.
My grandfather on my father’s side was the oldest of seven sons born in America. His father, the patriarch, had arrived as a peddler from Lithuania, jumping ship at Baltimore, an escapee from the Tsar’s recruitment of young Jewish men, sent as fodder to the front lines. At Ellis Island, he gave his unpronounceable name. “What was your father’s name?” they asked him. When he said David, they said, “Welcome to America, Mr. Davidson,”
My grandfather, Ben David Davidson, was put in a shoebox as a baby, kept warm in a drawer in a crowded tenement. BD was a physically strong, the confident first of seven sons. When he was 14, he stopped a horse who ran amok with a carriage on its back, chasing after it through the streets and wrestling it still with his bare hands. Later, he became an ambulance driver in the First World War. He and the patriarch did not get along, but when BD married my headstrong grandmother in the glamorous 1920’s, he joined the family firm and helped build a local transportation business into a national moving company with a fleet of trucks.
My grandmother’s father was a former Yeshiva student from a village in Poland, who came to the New World with his wife and two sons. In the old photographs, he looks dreamy and impractical, but somehow, he became a baker. In America, the baker had five daughters, each a beauty, hair the colour of different shades of wheat, from russet-bronze to white-blond.
My grandmother’s hair was bright red, and her Hebrew name was subsumed in her nickname, Redzi. She was smart and driven, gaining a scholarship from a Jewish women’s charity to go to college, but instead she took a man’s job at the start of the First World War, earning money for her whole family as an accountant at a local Jewish Hospital. In a short time, she became the first woman and the youngest ever manager. That was where she met my grandfather, ill with flu. The story we were always told was that he looked up at her from his sick bed and pronounced that he was going to marry her.
They nearly did not make it. BD wanted a big wedding; Redzi wanted a small inexpensive ceremony in the rabbi’s office. She got her way, but he invited all his relatives anyway, to line up along the sidewalk afterwards, dressed in their finest, pelting them with rice.
His father was strong; his mother fiery. They were both good-looking and they dressed well. Neither of his modern, ambitious parents expected a son like my Dad Bill. According to his two sisters, he was a bit of a sanctimonious Torah true believer as a boy, a throw-back to his Yeshiva-attending ancestors. But I think that when he was born on the shortest day of the year, 11 months after his sister because his modern mother still believed that breast-feeding women could not get pregnant, he brought something with him that followed him all his life. He was tuned into the wounds of the world.
On the day he taught Bill to swim, I imagine BD did not tell him what he had planned. They would have taken one of my grandfather’s shining new cars. BD loved fast cars – he was open to anything but a Ford, because Ford was an anti-Semite. Sunday drives to the country were regular family outings. Maybe my grandfather told my father they were going out to a lake; among his other qualities, my father loved nature.
I imagine the weather was warm; I imagine my father, his skinny seven-year-old body, feeling the wind in his hair, the sun on his skin. The water was sparkling and they walked together out to the edge of a wooden dock. Then my grandfather lifted up his son and threw him in. My father sank into the cold as the water closed over his head, waiting for rescue. Or maybe he knew by then, no rescue was coming, and he found his way to the surface, spluttering, kicking and flailing while his father watched from above.
My father learned to swim. In fact, he became a great swimmer. He loved water all of his life.
Despite his early religious dedication, as a teenager, my father walked away from Judaism. It was the early years of the Second World War. He told me he had heard a visiting rabbi lecture his Temple that American Jews were responsible for what was happening to their cousins in Europe, that it was God’s punishment for their liberal, loose and rebellious ways. “I couldn’t believe in a God like that,” he said. But he did believe in something.
As the oldest son of the oldest son, not only his parents, but his entire extended community expected my father to grow up to become a certain kind of man. His last name was the name on the side of the gleaming, silver trucks that carried freight up and down the country. When he died, we found letters he had kept from his teenage years, flirtations with the daughters of the wealthy Baltimore Jewish immigrant community. His parents sent him to summer camp where he learned to sail and ride horses and play tennis. Norman William Davidson was supposed to be a kind of prince, expected to marry one of the local princesses.
Instead, at 17, he enlisted in the navy and drove across the country to get his training on Treasure Island in the San Francisco Bay. In the last year of the war, he sailed as a radiographer to Japan. He entered Nagasaki Harbour shortly after the bomb was dropped. Bodies were stacked like logs in the harbour. On shore, he befriended a Japanese family. We have a photograph of him standing on a veranda with a young couple, sun in their eyes, his navy pea-coat buttoned, all of them smiling for the camera.
When he returned, he went to medical school and did his residency at Bellevue in New York, America’s oldest public hospital. He had a car – a used VW with broken locks. One morning he was driving back from an early shift and did not notice a homeless man had fallen asleep in the back; he said they were both equally startled when he hit the brakes at a stoplight.
After Bellevue, he tried to run a private practice in Greenwich Village, but he was not good at billing his patients. As my mother used to say when we were growing up in California, “there are still taxi drivers in New York who owe your father money!”
My mother was not a princess. She was the daughter of Greek immigrants from Thessaly. She grew up in Queens, a street-wise brawler who had to physically fight the school bullies for her lunch money as a kid. Her father lost his grocery store in the Depression; her mother kept the family going through piece work, her nimble flowers trained as a girl in her mountain village. My mother was a voracious reader who got herself into her local community college at only 16. By the time she met my father, she was living in Manhattan as a reporter, a drinker and a smoker, gap-toothed, full of curves, witty and worldly, but not the upwardly mobile Jewish helpmate my grandparents were expecting, not at all.
What my father said to me about my mother once, after I was complaining to him in the wake of one of my big teenage fights with her, was this: “your mother has the biggest heart of anyone I know, and she wears it on her sleeve.” She never held herself back, and he fell in love with that.
My father’s parents were not pleased with his choice. Redzi threatened to boycott his wedding, and only attended after my aunt told her mother she would never speak to her again if they stayed home. Redzi’s brothers sat Shiva, covering the mirrors in black cloth.
By then, he had already moved to California. He and my mother broke up when he took up a job at Kaiser Hospital in LA; Kaiser was America’s first insurance-based hospital system. At Kaiser, healthcare was like the NHS, free at the point of delivery, equal for all – factory workers or accountants, immigrants and locals. It attracted a range of idealistic doctors from all over the country – multi-ethnic, if mostly white and male, in those early years. My father was willing to do anything to work there, even risk love. After they were reconciled, my mother left New York to be with him, 3,000 miles from everyone she knew.
My mother never really took to California, but my father loved it. He never lost his pessimistic belief that the world was full of darkness and that things could easily get worse (weather, countries) but growing up, I experienced him as cheerful, calm – happy, maybe, to be doing the work he loved in a place he loved, surrounded by his growing, anarchic children.
In California, my father drank orange juice every morning of his life. He taught us to body surf and took us hiking in the Santa Monica mountains on the weekends, starting from a very early age. He knew many canyons with their waterfalls and creeks, their wild chaparral and deer paths: Franklin, Temescal, Topanga.
My New York mother used to send us out the door on Saturday mornings with a warning to watch out for rattle snakes: “the babies are the worst!” He was not afraid in nature, and so we weren’t. He would walk at a steady pace on sandy trails lined with wild sage and blue ceanothus. Around him, the turbulence of childhood grew peaceful. You could say anything to him, and I shudder to think now that I did. Periods, boyfriends, fights with my mother – he never tried to fix us; he was a receptive listener.
His temperament made him an excellent cancer doctor, a vocation he took up at Kaiser. He used to tell his patients not to think about how much time they had left. Firstly, we are all going to die, sooner if not later, and all we ever have is this one moment of being alive. Secondly, you never know. And that was true. One of his patients was diagnosed with only weeks left to live. She survived, and her husband, who owned a local delicatessan, was convinced it was down to my Dad; he vowed to give him free lox, for the rest of his life. We ate that lox on our weekend bagels for many years. It was the miracle fish.
My mother used to call my father “Ferdinand the Bull.” She said it affectionately, but I know she often found my father’s pacifism infuriating. She would not have sat smelling the flowers; she would have been the first to charge the Toreador.
When we were kids, my mother would sometimes try to get my father to perform what she considered his paternal duty. I remember once her holding me by the arm, and marching me in front of him – telling him he had to spank me for my own good. I followed him into another room, and he closed the door. Then he winked at me and whispered to follow his instructions. He took down a book and said I should shout “ouch” every time he smacked it. I sat next to him, my arms around his neck, collaborating in a theatre of cruelty he could not inflict. He had been regularly beaten with a belt by his own father. He would rather hit himself; even as a child, I knew that.
When I was in my early 20’s, armed with what felt like a useless degree in English literature, I had some vague idea that I wanted to follow his path and do good in the world. Though I had hated maths and science, he told me that it was not that hard to learn medicine. Anyone could do it. He invited me to come into work with him one weekend; he got me a lab coat and introduced me as a first-year medical student.
We went into a room where a young mother in her mid-thirties was lying in a bed. I remember how her long, black hair fell thickly around her head; she did not look ill. My father asked me to wait at the back of the room while he explained the results of a recent test. Later, he told she was dying of a rare form of cancer that chemotherapy could not cure. In places her skin was so thin, her blood leaked through, as if it were a piece of fabric riddled with holes. I remember the holy quiet of that room, his gentle voice and her trust in him. Standing there, I felt a helpless mix of heartbreak and horror. I told my father medicine was not for me.
Around this time, my sister and I told my father we were going to take him to movies for his birthday. We were both living and working in LA with starter jobs and second-hand cars. It was going to be our treat. My father was born on December 21st, the shortest day of the year, but this was LA and the weather was mild and sunny. We had in mind something silly and frivolous; going to the movies was a family tradition. We told him he could choose the film: anything he wanted. He scoured the paper and said it was down to two choices: An adaptation of James Joyce’s The Dead or Burnt by the Sun, the story of a Stalinist-era summer idyl that ends in violence.
While we were waiting at the entrance to see the Russian film, my father started talking to the couple in front of him. They were a handsome, older pair – tall and tanned, their blond hair still thick as it turned silver. Somehow my father started to elicit the story of their lives: how they had been passionately in love as teenagers in their Hollywood High School, how they had been separated by their parents, how they had married other people, and how in their 60’s, they had found each other again and discovered the flame was alive as ever. A happy story – but my father waited, as if he knew.
“Of course, now that makes us appreciate the little time we have left,” the man told my father, patting the hand of his lover. The diagnosis had been given – she was terminal. My father nodded with sympathy, as if this was just as he had expected. My sister and I listened, appalled. How did he do it? We were standing outside the soaring glass futurism of the Century City Multiplex; the couple around us looked like the aging California dream – and they were smiling, optimistic as an orange grove. My father had the ability to tune into people’s secret sadness, and let them know it was safe in his hands.
The line started moving. The couple was there to see a romantic comedy. They asked what we were seeing and when my father told them, they shook their heads and laughed. “Too heavy for us!”
After the film, we stumbled out into the warm LA night.
“God, Dad, that was harrowing.”
He smiled at us, his two daughters. “Thank you for taking me out for my birthday.” He seemed truly delighted. Then we went for an ice cream. He seemed happy to let us pull him into our orbit, brutally alive as we were.
*
Unlike his parents, but like many of his relatives, at the end of his life, my father developed Alzheimer’s. Most of his aunts and uncles got it in their 50’s and 60’s, but his healthy California life-style and the sheer physical energy beaming off my mother may have kept the family curse away until his early 80’s, a few years after he finally retired from Kaiser at 75.
One of the first signs was on a family holiday with my siblings and our kids. We were staying near the Russian River, and we all went down to the stony shore for a splash. The water was warm and clear and shallow, but for the first time in his life, my father refused to swim.
Mild cognitive decline soon grew to the point where he could not drive, then could not go out on his own. My mother cried, raged and then, found a way to cope. She joined a support group, and connected with an imaginative and innovative day centre where she drove him daily. That was where he started making art.
On one of my visits from London, we drove him to the centre together. You had to leave him at the door, where a hunched, shaggy haired young man would collect him and bring him in. My mother called him “the door Nazi” because he was short with the patients, sometimes even cruel.
“I hate thinking of anyone being mean to him, Mom.”
“I know. I have tried to complain, but it’s only a few minutes until he gets in the door. Everyone else who works there is so nice! And your father forgets it anyway.”
Free from time, my father was truly living in the moment. He flourished in his art class, painting for hours. His art teacher was a kind and enthusiastic woman from the UK who loved my father as much as he loved her. When we came back to get him, she followed him out and told us my father had found a friend in his class: Irv, a retired History professor.
“They were chatting up a storm after lunch. They even held hands!”
My father’s paintings were often a tribute to his wife. In many of his works, a large and buxom female figure stands next to a much smaller man. He titled these paintings Sky of Love.
The first time I ever saw my parents kiss in public was after he got ill. I noticed that even as his world constricted, they could still make each other laugh. My mother gave him chocolate cake for breakfast sometimes, just because he enjoyed it so much.
When I went back to London, she wrote to me that one of his paintings had been selected for an art exhibit in Venice Beach. She sent pictures from the opening; my father’s work had won a commendation. Later, she made colour copies of the work she sent all of us. I framed mine and hung it over my desk. It is there now, a bright yellow, winged body outlined against a deep sea-blue background; to me, clearly an angel.
*
All my life I felt protective of my sensitive father. Somehow, even though I was a child and he was adult, I felt his quality of modest kindness seemed out of step with the lime-light self-glorifying era I had been born into. In a reverse of the usual parent/child dynamic, I considered myself worldly while he seemed innocent. Growing up, I watched bad TV while he listened to Mahler, consumed junk fiction while he read thick histories of the Civil War or the Russian Revolution. I was an LA fast-food kid; my father seemed tuned into another longer, time-line, where it was clear not every story had a happy ending. He was born with an umbrella full of holes, but he was willing to share his small shelter with friends and strangers.
Now time has passed, I see him differently, especially in the years since he died, when my own post-war, greedy American world has taken a turn to a very dark side. My father was not like the other men in his extended family or most of his culture. To offer empathy and solidarity in the face of a cruel and indifferent universe takes courage and strength. Not the strength to shape, compete, strive, dominate or wrestle that my mother had, but the power to receive, to bend down, to stand as witness. As a man, my father inherited his bar in an iron cage, but he turned it into a flower, one of those California poppies that emerge after rain, pliant, thin-stemmed, a wash of colour in a brown landscape.
*
Until the Hockney exhibit, it felt as if I had hardly cried after my father’s death. His last few months had been brutal, and I had spent a lot of tears in the years I went back and forth to California, waiting for him to die. Every time I left Los Angeles to go back to London, I used my anonymous rental car drive to the airport to let myself be wracked by the sobs I did not share with my mother or siblings.
The last visit was when he was in his hospice bed in their living room. He had had a bout of pneumonia, and developed complications, and even though my sister, a doctor, and his hospital colleagues had told my mother it was time to let go, my mother insisted he be given life-saving surgery. All heroic measures, she insisted, even though my sister told her Dad had said every doctor should have DNR tattooed across their chests.
He survived the surgery but he never spoke again.
While I was there, I slept on a blow-up mattress next to him. In the night, I heard him moaning. I went to hold his hand. His grip was strong.
“Thank you, Dad, for doing this for Mom. I am sorry you have to go through all this pain. She needed this time to get used to letting you go.”
I spoke into the void, but I told myself somewhere he could hear me.
In the morning, I went to say goodbye. I looked into his eyes, expecting the familiar vacancy. I will believe to the end of my life that on that final parting, I saw swimming to the surface something I cannot explain: a clear communication from his presence, a full and wordless message of deep and unselfish love.
A month later, back in London, the phone woke me and I heard my sister’s voice.
“He’s gone.”
His nurse, a gentle man from the Philippines who carved statues of the Virgin Mary out of balsam wood, had sung him to sleep earlier in the evening. Then he went outside for a smoke. My father had slipped away between one breath and the next while my mother was sitting at the dining room table next to his hospice bed, doing the New York Times crossword puzzle.
“That’s so like him,” I told her. “To go like that.”
I had come out into the landing outside my bedroom. After I put down the phone, I looked out the window facing west. The sun was just rising behind my back, and in the gloaming, the slate roofs and chimneys of my neighbour’s houses looked abstracted into stacks of triangles and squares. My father was not in this world. The planet had shifted on its axis, and would never be the same.
It had been a stormy night, and a black cloud loomed in the sky, leaving a pale gap at the horizon line. A skirt of white ran along the bottom edge, lit up from the first rays of the sun. The result was a glow, a pulsing band of shadow and light. It looked as still as a painting.
Then I saw a movement in the early dawn: one lone, pale seagull gliding north to south, steady, bright as a beam, its wings outstretched.
Catherine Davidson is a dual UK/US citizen who grew up in LA and lives in London. Her novel based on stories about Greek mother and grandmother, The Priest Fainted was a New York and LA Times notable book of the year. She has won awards for her poetry in both countries. She teaches Creative Writing at Regent’s University and is on the board of Exiled Writers Ink, an organisation the supports the voices of refugee writers. In 2018, she published The Orchard with Gemma Media, a novel about genocide, family and apricot jam. She has won awards for her poetry in the UK & US, published two poetry pamphlets, and two translation collaborations with Iraqi British writer Anba Jawi: The Utopians of Tahrir Square and Please Don’t Kill All the Poets.
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