Pappy’s Cough
Susan Morgan
Word Count 816
My father’s cough would start with a hard thump to the right lung, rattling his chest and kicking his shoulders forward. The force of his cough built slowly like the low sputtering rumble of a dormant furnace fired up on the first cold day; his breath would catch suddenly and then race roughshod through his windpipe. Each cough would rise, fall, and spin in an exasperating, inconclusive cycle. He would wince, his handsome, affable features tightening into a hard little fist of a face. He’d snap his head back, annoyed enough to spit.
“That’s some cough you’ve got there Pappy,” I’d say, like a character from the funny papers of my childhood, hoping not to sound too fretful. “Maybe you’ve caught some bug that’s flying around here.” I was keen to blame the insufferable humidity, a record-breaking ice storm, whatever excuse the current season had to offer.
“Agh, it’s not anything,” my father would say. “Just the cigarettes.”
He’d started smoking when he was a teenager and then blithely fumed his way through World War II while stationed in the Aleutian Islands, lighting up free cartons of Lucky Strikes. By 1961, when he was commuting from Connecticut to Manhattan, he was getting his Brooks Brothers shirts professionally laundered and had switched to Kents with the Micronite filter. He’d be on his way to the railroad station each morning before the rest of the family had made it down to the kitchen for breakfast, but I could always track his scent to the oxblood leather chair where he read his evening paper: I knew his distinctive blend of light starch, Dial soap, and cigarette smoke.
My father was 72 when he had his first stroke, and he claimed that was the day that he smoked his last cigarette. “I didn’t smoke while I was in the hospital,” he declared. “And I didn’t smoke again once I got out.” He bought a pair of Reeboks and started to take walks around the high school track.
“What do you think of these things?” he’d ask me, incredulously holding up a synthetic shoe as plump and white as a marshmallow. “Made in Korea, for crying out loud,” he’d scoff and start to guffaw hesitantly. Even the slightest chortle could unravel helplessly into a cough.
During his walks, he tried to recalculate the number of years he’d spent smoking. “I never smoked on the train,” he reasoned. “And when I stopped commuting, I broke the habit of lighting up as soon as I came out of the subway, so I wasn’t really smoking as much after I stopped going into the city. Those years don’t really add up to full years.”
He tried out different versions of this formula— multiplying the weeks of summer vacations or subtracting cigarette-free bouts of bronchitis—but it added up the same: he’d been smoking for over 50 years. Smoke was one of his essential elements, it permeated his very being. “Kippered!” was what my Glaswegian mother-in-law would proclaim when she gave her house a rip-snorting scrub after an otherwise convivial weekend visit from her chain-smoking friends. “Absolutely kippered! “ she’d trill, stripping beds, pulling down curtains, and launching into a 24 hour laundry marathon.
My father, I had to admit, was kippered. Ten years after the first stroke, he was diagnosed with lung cancer.
*
Nancy, the pretty nurse with the wavy hair and a pale scattering of freckles, holds up a bag of Cisplatin. Examining the bag at arm’s length, like a fisherman with a prize catch, she checks the dosage and deftly suspends the bag from an IV pole. She settles my father into a chair, securing him with pillows, the TV remote, and a side table set-up of ice and water.
“Comfortable?” she asks.
“Comfortable?” he replies, turning to me, widening his eyes, and smiling. It is the first day of his first round of treatments, and he is trying to find some pattern, some sense to everything that is happening. Downstairs, when he was being positioned by the radiation oncologist, the same considerate albeit rehearsed question had been raised: “Comfortable?” I had watched my father’s face suffused with terrible anxiety.
“Hey,” I said, wanting to take him somewhere, anywhere else. “Remember that old Henny Youngman joke about the garmento knocked down while wheeling a rack of clothes across Sixth Avenue? The guy gets hit by a speeding taxi, and people come running. The emergency medical service is called. The guy is lying in the street, waiting for an ambulance, when someone suddenly folds up his jacket and places it under the garmento’s head. The good samaritan asks if he’s comfortable. ‘Comfortable? responds the garmento. ‘Eh? I make a living…’ “
My father had taken the deepest breath he could and laughed, relaxing after that on the gurney.
Upstairs now, he looks at Nancy, the pretty nurse.
“Comfortable? Eh,” he shrugs. “I make a living.”
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.