newspaper in bed when I arrived, his eyes magnified enormously by thick spectacles. Those owl eyes focused on me with alarm as I approached Phineas.
‘You’re not going to wake him, are you?’ he asked. ‘The only peace I get is when that man is asleep.’
I apologized, and said it was important that I spoke with Phineas.
‘Well, on your head be it,’ he said. ‘Just permit me to get my gown on before you go rousing David Copperfield over there.’
I waited while he got out of bed, put on his gown and slippers, and prepared to find somewhere to read undisturbed. I said that I was sorry for a second time, and the old man replied, ‘I swear, when that man dies God Himself will move out of heaven and join the devil in hell to get a break from his yammering.’ He paused at the door. ‘Don’t tell him I said that, will you? God knows, I’m fond of the old coot.’
And away he went.
I remembered Phineas as a big man with a gray-brown beard, but the years had picked the meat from his bones just as the fall wind will denude a tree of its leaves before the coming of winter, and Phineas’s eternal winter could not be far off. His mouth had collapsed in on itself with the loss of his teeth, and his head was entirely bald, although a little of his beard remained. His skin was transparent, so that I could count the veins and capillaries beneath it, and I thought I could discern not just the shape of his skull, but the skull itself. According to the nursing assistant who had shown me to his room, there was nothing wrong with Phineas: he had no major illnesses beyond an assortment of the various ailments that beset so many at the end of their lives, and his mind was still clear. He was simply dying because it was his time to die. He was dying because he was old.
I pulled up a chair and tapped him lightly on the arm. He woke suddenly, squinted at me, then found his spectacles on his lap and held them to the bridge of his nose without putting them on, like a dowager duchess examining a suspect piece of china.
‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘You look familiar.’
‘My name is Charlie Parker. You and my grandfather were friends.’
His face unclouded, and his smile shone. His hand reached out and shook mine, and his grip was still strong.
‘It’s good to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’
His left hand came out and joined the right, like a man being saved from drowning.
‘You too, Phineas.’
‘You’re a damned liar. Give me a scythe and a hood, and I could play Death himself. If I stumble by a mirror when I’m up to take a piss at night, I think that’s the grim old bastard come for me at last.’
He took a brief coughing fit then, and sipped from a can of soda that stood by his chair.
‘I was sorry to hear about your wife and your little girl,’ he said, when he had recovered. ‘I know you maybe don’t like folk reminding you about it, but it has to be said.’
He took my hand in his again, there was a final tightening, and the hands withdrew.
I had a box of candy under my arm. He looked at it bemusedly.
‘I got no teeth left,’ he explained, ‘and candy plays hell with my dentures.’
‘That’s okay,’ I told him. ‘I didn’t bring you any candy.’
I opened the box. Inside were five Cohiba Churchill cigars. Cigars had always been his vice, I knew. My grandfather would share one with him at Christmas, then complain about the smell for weeks after.
‘If you can’t have Cuban, I figure the best Dominicans will have to do,’ I said.
Phineas took one from the box, held it beneath his nose, and sniffed it. I thought he might be about to cry.
‘God bless you,’ he said. ‘You mind taking an old man for a walk?’
I said that I didn’t mind at all. I helped him to put on an extra sweater, and a muffler, then his coat and gloves and a bright red woolen hat that made him look like a marooned buoy. I found a wheelchair, and together we set off for a stroll around those dull grounds. He lit up once we were out of sight of the main building, and happily talked and puffed his way to a small ornamental