Susan Morgan

Word Count 431

I was standing by my father’s hospital bed when my brother phoned from prison. 

My father brightened at the call, listening carefully and sometimes stumbling over his responses. While he struggled to find words, he’d raise his free hand and shake it by his face, wincing when he failed to jumpstart a stalled phrase. His upbeat expression evaporated, replaced by the determined focus of an impatient crapshooter. Exasperated, he handed the phone to me. My brother was still holding forth, confidently opining about our father’s latest diagnoses and the shoddy reputation of this particular hospital. He boasted that he’d convened his own advisory team, topnotch medical experts all currently on the inside. My brother, an inveterate name-dropper and convicted felon, was serving federal time for bank fraud. Who were his cohorts, esteemed physicians, and surgeons caught harvesting organs for sale or swindling Medicare? I didn’t want to ask, I quickly changed the subject. 

“I’ve been clearing out the house,” I said. The house we’d grown up in was now semi-derelict, our own small suburban Grey Gardens. “I found your Howdy Doody doll.” To be honest, the doll was actually a 1950s ventriloquist dummy, a soft stuffed toy topped with a hard head, its hinged mouth operated by a string pulled through its neck. 

“You know, that’s really worth a lot of money,” my brother tersely informed me.

“You know,” I drawled back, aiming to dismantle his top-down executive attitude. “Howdy doesn’t look so good.”

“You could take him to the doll hospital,” he ordered, unrelenting and fixed on profit motive. “He’s worth a lot.”

I couldn’t quite piece together a reply. Our father had suffered a series of strokes, and the cancer that had been found in his lungs was spreading to his brain. My brother, with his prestigious MBA, had managed to fleece his investors, mortgage our parents’ home, default on the loan, and still owed the federal government $1.8 million. I tried to picture his prison uniform or who might be standing nearby waiting to use the phone, restlessly eavesdropping on a ludicrous conversation about a distant TV character toy. 

I moved away from the bed toward the clanging, beeping hush of the hospital corridor. 

“I have to go now,” I finally said. “The nurse is about to come in, and we have some questions for her. We need to go. Bye.” 

I walked back to our father’s bed and hung up the phone. “He’ll call back in a couple of days, soon as he can,” I reassured him, just the two of us alone in the room.

*

Susan has written extensively about art, design, and cultural biography. Her work has been featured in specialist journals, mainstream magazines, artist catalogues, and literary anthologies. A former contributing editor at Interview, Mirabella, Elle, Metropolitan Home, and Aperture, she now serves as a contributing editor for East of Borneo, the online magazine of contemporary art, and its history, as considered from Los Angeles.