Telephonophobia: When Death Calls
The phone rings. Someone answers it. Someone dies.
The sound I heard that morning was from one of those Bell telephones, still in common use in the 1970s, with a rotary dial and an actual bell with a mechanical clapper. It jangled its urgent ding-a-ling-a-ling, demanding attention. I sometimes recall one ring only, an unusually long ring, as if announcing its significance. Other times I remember it as two rings, or as many as four. The memory of the sound changes from one recollection to the next.
I was home alone with my father on a mid-summer Saturday morning when I was twelve. I was an only child. My mother was at the drapery shop where she worked. The phone rang. My father answered it and, being a man of few words, said, Yep or Fine, and you? — I’m not sure exactly which, but I remember clearly that he ended with, Okay, see you soon.
After he hung up, he stepped out the back door. The sky was flat-matte clear, reminiscent of Easter mornings when my mother, father, and I, stiff in our once-a-year clothes, stood in front of the fuchsia rhododendrons that hedged our house while a neighbor snapped our picture with my father’s Polaroid. The intense warmth and brightness of the sun would have been just right for daylong romping in the backyard pool. But that…
