10. The Last Escapade

"I'm ashamed to talk about it, even to you," his sister Naomi said. "But I'm at my wit's end about what I'm going to do with him. I had to phone you to come."

When he'd received her urgent message, he imagined it concerned their father, who was seventy-four and widowed six years since the death of his mother. He lived alone in an apartment a few miles from where Naomi lived with her husband and children. Several earlier conversations with his sister had hinted of his father's involvement with a girl. He had avoided talking to Naomi about it in the past but now he asked her if that was the problem.

"Not just a girl!" Naomi exclaimed. "A child! Keith, she's barely twenty years old! He met her ... ," she lowered her voice so the children playing in another room would not hear, " ... in a massage parlor!"

"Maybe he just wanted a massage," Keith said.

"Oh for God's sake, Keith, spare me your academic wit! This is the most dreadful crisis we have ever had with him!"

"After all, he's in pretty good health," Keith said. "Maybe he still has an active sex drive."

"I don't want to hear about his sex drive," she said. "I don't even want to think about what they do together! It's too disgusting! I'm sure he's giving her money and she hasn't any shame about cheating a senile old man."

"Are you sure he's giving her money?"

"He admitted it! A few times when I tried to talk to him about the danger of what he was doing, he grew impatient and snapped at me and told me unashamedly, he was paying her rent, gas and light!"

"That means she's not living with him."

"Oh God, don't even mention that possibility! If he did anything as stupid and outrageous as that I wouldn't let the children visit him again!"

"All right, Naomi," Keith tried to speak patiently. "He's seventy-four years old and he's involved with a twenty-year-old girl he met in a massage parlor. The whole business is a little immoral, I admit, but it seems to have been going on for some time. You mentioned it to me when I was here at Christmas. What makes it a crisis now?"

She rose from her chair and went to peer nervously into the dining room. The children had gone outside and she returned and sat down, leaning closer to speak to Keith in a shaken whisper. "The girl had a baby two weeks ago."

"Is he the father?" Keith asked.

"Don't be ridiculous!" Naomi said.

Keith couldn't become as agitated as Naomi but he understood her concern. His father lived on a pension from the Colony Insurance Company and his Social Security and didn't have to touch the money he'd received from the sale of their house when his mother died. Some of that money had gone to Naomi when she and Bruce bought their house and his father had given Keith ten thousand dollars while he studied for his doctoral degree. But there had to be seventy to eighty thousand dollars still in the bank. The money belonged to his father to do with as he wished, but they had a responsibility to make sure the girl didn't cheat him out of it.

"What do you think we should do?" Keith asked.

"You should go and talk to him," Naomi said sternly. "You are his son and maybe you men understand this kind of unnatural behavior. Try to make him understand that what he is doing is shameful, abnormal and unacceptable."

He phoned his father, who seemed delighted that Keith was in town and agreed to see him at once. He left Naomi's house after promising her he would return that evening to report to her exactly what his father had said.

"You know, son," his father said quietly, "I don't want to make excuses but the whole thing came about because of loneliness. I am not blaming your sister or you. You live four hundred miles away and she has her life with Bruce and her children. But when a man is alone as he grows older, you have to understand that his days and nights are different. He doesn't have the expectations he had when he was young, or the dreams, or planning for the things he hopes to do. He wakes up in the silence of the dark room and can't help thinking that it's just another night moving him closer to death. Oh, I know, there is the senior center nearby and movies and television. But I find that gathering of old people depressing and television is full of idiotic comedies and the movies show films that have nothing to do with the life I lived. I am grateful when you and Naomi and the children and I enjoy holidays and birthdays. But those celebrations pass quickly and then there are empty, lonely weeks again." His father shrugged. "I said I didn't want to make excuses but I guess I just did."