'Not a Good Bid at All'

“It was as if a lifetime of restraint were only the rind of a wicked impatience.”

Dr. Cahn is ninety-one. His wife, hospitalized with cancer, is eighty. Their son brings his father for a visit, perhaps the last. The old man was on the hospital’s staff for half a century and remembers none of it. The narrator of Richard Stern’s short (four-and-a-half-page) story, “Dr. Cahn’s Visit” (Almonds to Zhoof: Collected Stories, 2005), tells us “his mind had slipped its moorings years ago.” The sentence quoted at the top suggests how “the most gentlemanly of men” can turn into an unmannerly tyrant. The story is heartbreaking and occasionally amusing. The doctor is a dedicated bridge player who scrambles his words: “‘I need some clubs’ might mean ‘I’m hungry.’” The old lady, though younger, is dying. She refuses further chemotherapy:

“An unspoken decision had been made after a five-hour barium treatment which usurped the last of her strength. . . It had launched her last moments of eloquence, a frightening jeremiad about life dark beyond belief, nothing left, nothing right. It was the last complaint of an old champion of complaint, and after it, she’d made up her mind to go.”

The doctor has a lucid moment in the hospital room: “The old man’s pounding heart must have driven blood through the clogged vessels. There was no talk of trumps.” Then dementia lowers its curtain and memory dissolves. The story is as vivid a literary depiction of Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia as I know. At the story’s end, when the son asks Dr. Cahn if he is happy to have seen his wife, the old man replies: “Of course I’m happy. But it’s not a good day. It’s a very poor day. Not a good bid at all.”

We used to call it senility and kept it in the family. Now “Alzheimer’s” is the punch line to a thousand jokes. That suggests how fearful we are. Every song title and old friend’s face forgotten stabs us with fear. On this date, August 19, in 1985, Anthony Hecht writes in a letter to the poet J.D. McClatchy:

“At my age [sixty-three] my greatest fear seems not to be death itself, nor physical enfeeblement, but mental deterioration . . . But however much I try to console myself with the assertion that this anxiety is merely a hang-up of my own, every time I forget a name, or grope helplessly for a word that refuses to come, I think of Alzheimer’s disease, and imagine that I will shortly be disabled as a teacher, and will slip quickly into an ungainly dotage, a burden to everyone and to Helen [Hecht’s wife] especially.”  

For years we console ourselves with the certainty that we are still young, still healthy, still safe. It seems that all of us are immune until we no longer are. Hecht continues:

“The consequence of this fear  is that every time I write anything that indicates complexity as well as clarity of thought I rejoice (briefly) at what I take to be an index that my mind has not yet rotted away completely.”

[See The Selected Letters of Anthony Hecht, ed. Jonathan F.S. Post, 2013.]