I did not believe in God or Heaven the summer that my father got sick, so I had no one to pray to, and my family was not about to start talking about “it” so I was pretty much on my own when it came to comfort, courage and crying.

My mother simply went into action, making plans for my father’s recovery. She decided that a country house would be good therapy, especially one with a swimming pool and some sort of a nice view, other than 70th Street and Fifth Avenue where my parents lived the rest of the year. Oh, happiness, when she learned that Helen Hayes wanted to rent us Pretty Penny, her 17-room Victorian mansion that sat on a hillside overlooking the Hudson River outside Nyack. Miss Hayes did not want the house empty and welcomed us as good custodians of her lifetime of Broadway treasures and family memories: the wheelchair from Victoria Regina, the Tony Awards and the stage sets which she used as wallpaper for the octagonal dining room.

Walking through the house there was an air of sadness about it – her daughter, Mary, had died of polio there at 18, which when mixed with the legends of gay parties with Noel Coward, made for a strange atmospheric cocktail. My favorite part of the house was the back porch which stretched end to end. It had gingerbread trim (a nod to its Victorian roots), a generous overhang made by the second floor, and a black and white terrazzo floor that in its heyday must have been glorious for dancing the foxtrot and the quickstep. It was cool even on the hottest summer days. Beds of heirloom roses festooned the rolling lawn: Duchess de Brabant, Madame Antoine Marie, and the dark Crepuscule all gave off a heady perfume. There were over 300 rose bushes, and I’d clip a few flowers early in the morning and stick them willy-nilly in vases on the porch and in the enormous living room with its overstuffed slipcovered chairs. Beyond the porch was a heated, Olympic-size swimming pool and cabana. The tennis court had gone to seed, but my father, usually craving a competitive game with one of his pals, wasn’t playing tennis that summer.

At dusk I’d sit on the porch with a book in my hand waiting for my father to come home from work. In the background “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” played over and over again on the record player: “Picture yourself in a boat on a river / With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.” And then I’d hear the tires on the graveled driveway. I’d run through the house, throw my arms around my father, kiss him, so happy that he was home. He looked tired, but he was still tall, dark and handsome. My girlfriends all had a crush on him. I guess that I did, too, although he was often aloof and preoccupied with worries about work and this mysterious illness that the doctors called encephalitis, a swelling of the brain caused by a virus. He refused to stay home, and so every day my cousin, Doug, would drive him to his factory in Hoboken. I wasn’t there, but I could imagine him in his laboratory checking the batches of paint, or fielding telephone calls from customers, all the while winnowing down a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. The doctors did not tell him to stop smoking, but after all, it was 1967 and he needed the nicotine to keep going.

One day (representative of so many of those summer days) as I grabbed his heavy briefcase, I asked, “How was your day, Dad?”

“Great news,” he said. “The Pergamans [his new partners] and I have signed a lease on the factory in Lodi.

“It’s really something – all on one floor,” he continued. “I won’t have to take that creaky old elevator another day. And everything is automated.”

He was really looking forward to all these changes.

“And best of all,” he added. “I’ll get to spend more time with your mother. There will be someone else to share the headaches of the business.”

He then changed into his bathing suit and walked down to the pool. I watched him from the porch. His muscles remembered the years of competitive swimming in college, and whatever imbalance he suffered vanished in the warm water. He glided effortlessly across the length of the pool – back and forth, back and forth. Good therapy, I thought.   Overhead, birds swooped down into the elm trees, grabbing the last insects before darkness fell.

Afterward, he put on a loose-fitting madras shirt and khaki pants, and we sat on the porch, sipping cool drinks served to us on a silver platter by our summertime maid. I chattered on about my job at an advertising agency, trying to engage him in conversation.

“The creative director thinks that I would make a good copywriter,” I said. “I just did a radio spot for Art Linkletter for Handi-Wrap.”

He wasn’t really listening to me.

“I know that the doctors think I’m going to be fine,” he said. “But I just feel strange. I’m here but I’m not.”

He imagined that he had a brain tumor. I was scared that he might be right. And then he’d change the subject.

“Gin and tonic in the summer,” he said. “When fall comes, it’s back to scotch and soda.”

When the fireflies came out, we went inside for dinner with my mother and sister. I turned off the Beatles, and put on Frank Sinatra’s “Come Fly With Me,” Dad’s favorite album.

On typical weekends, boyfriends would drive up from Manhattan, cannonballing into the swimming pool, barbecuing on the lawn, or driving through the streets of Nyack with the tops of their convertibles rolled down. We all carried on as if everything was normal, except that my father would sit alone on the porch. I’d look up from the swimming pool and I could barely make out his figure in the shadows. Sometimes, I shivered seeing him so isolated. I wanted my real father back – the debonair raconteur who loved to engage my friends in witty conversation, always curious to know what they were up to. Instead he said, “It’s great that you and your sister can enjoy this place. I think I’ll just sit here in the shade.”

My mother and father fought a lot that summer. Their voices carried through the house out on to the porch.

“What good is that psychiatrist you’re seeing?” she’d ask him.

He’d try to defend himself, but she’d continue badgering him out of her own frustration. I am sure that my mother came to regret those arguments. I also heard my mother on the telephone.

“If he doesn’t start paying more attention to me, I might just have an affair,” she said.

I was angry and disgusted – it is easy to take sides when you are 22 years old. The Beatles played on, “Will you still need me? / Will you still feed me? / When I’m sixty-four?”

By the end of the summer, my father’s health seemed to improve – not measurably, but enough to raise our hopes and believe that the doctors had accurately diagnosed his illness. But the undiagnosed tumor, which had been spreading unabated, knocked my father to the ground on the lawn of the factory in Lodi. He was rushed to the hospital, and the doctors tried to remove the tumor, but it was too deeply embedded in his brain to risk removing it. So, they left it where it was – thriving among the good cells. The doctors didn’t tell him anything, just that the virus had spread, but that he would eventually get better. The rest of the family, however, had been given the grim news.

My father was confined to a wheelchair, except for the times that Mike, his aide, lifted him into the swimming pool. I’d watch him from the porch as he floated on his back, reaching one arm and then the other over his head, to cross the shallow end of the pool while his legs dangled uselessly underneath him.

Our porch conversations were different now. He’d say, “Read to me,” and I’d find our place in one of the many history books he liked, “Iberia” by James Michener or Herman Wouk’s “Exodus”, but I had trouble getting the words out.

Sometimes, I’d stop.

“Dad, do you remember when I was a little girl, and you used to read “Little Red Riding Hood” to me?”

“Yes, that was always your favorite,” he said. “That and ‘Pinocchio’.”

He’d look at me through his thick glasses which made his eyes so big but didn’t help focus the words on the page. I think that losing his ability to read was one of the most vicious parts of the disease. During the good times, before the cancer, my father devoured six or seven books a week.

After I’d finish a chapter, he’d always thank me. And then he’d say something about the future.

“I bet by next winter, I’ll be skating again,” he’d say. “We’ll go to Rockefeller Center. I’m sure of it.”

And he believed it.

“I’d like that, Daddy.”

Along with everyone else in the family, I pretended that my father was going to be all right. Play-acting at Pretty Penny. In fact, the doctors told us that my father had less than six months to live. But we never told him. Lies filled the air between us like dead rose petals blowing across the terrazzo floor. If my father knew, it was never apparent to me.

I often ask myself if it would have been better had we told him the truth. Sitting on that porch I could have asked him so many questions; I could have thanked him for being a good father; I could have said goodbye; I might even have been able to find words to comfort both of us in our shared grief. Instead, I followed a script called, “Let’s Pretend.”

My father died at 52; my mother put a blanket of heirloom, white roses over his grave, and as we left the cemetery, snowflakes fell gently from the sky.

Forty years later, I still dream of my father; sometimes he is healthy, smashing a tennis ball for the winning point; other times, he is leaning on his crutches, taking one brave step after another across the terrazzo floor at Pretty Penny. In the distance, I see a sailboat traveling upriver. I still cannot pray, but if there is a Heaven, I want to be there with him. And the Beatles play on: “The time will come when you see / We’re all one and life flows on within you and without you.”

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