A Good Death (11 page)

“Or maybe you’d run.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that. I may not be a good son, but I don’t hide from her.”

FROM UPSTAIRS COMES A SOUND LIKE
ALL THE FURIES OF HELL HAVE BEEN LET
LOOSE. OOHS AND AAHS, BABBLED SHOUTS IN
which words are lost in intense discussion that dissolves into bouts of nervous laughter from several other adolescents. I hear Penelope, Sam’s sister, with her piercing voice:

“Grandpa!”

“Couldn’t… sleep… uhh!… too… noisy…”

He’s back.

He’s standing in the kitchen doorway, looking dazed, naked from the waist up, the skin on his breasts and stomach sagging in pools of flab. He weaves a bit on his feet and smiles beatifically. The adults have gone quiet. Silence reigns, mixed with terror. It’s the first time we’ve seen our father as he really is. We only know his face and his symptoms, the diagnoses, the signs, we’ve never seen him looking so diminished, so naked, so ugly. We knew about his wobbling, the slurred speech, the fact that he falls regularly, belches, sleeps in his chair and drools in his soup. We’ve seen all that. We are familiar with his illness, but not with his ugliness, or his exposed feebleness. “You should get dressed,” my mother says. She isn’t worried about how he looks or what we are thinking. She knows all about how he smells, his folds and wrinkles, his flaking skin, the liver spots that make him look like a pale leopard, and the idiotic smile he makes when he’s not quite sure what he’s doing. She has borne ten children and sees him now as nothing more than the eleventh, who has to be told to put something on so he won’t catch cold. That’s all she’s worried about at the moment, a draft of cold air, a sudden chill. But she’s no longer of child-bearing age, an age of worrying about a draft that could get into a child’s lungs, or even an age of having a husband who nibbles away at the last few happinesses of her life and who, like a baby, shrieks when the bottle isn’t warm enough. It’s his health she worries about. While we worry about our own terror. When I see him, I’m afraid of my own old age.

Sam is the only one who doesn’t share our thinly veiled disgust. I see the Commander, who comes on stage at the end of
Don Juan.
Is he going to take me by the hand and lead me into the flames of hell? No, my father is not Death as he appears on stage, or on the screen—he is ridiculous death, a statue lacking lustre, ordinary death showing itself unselfconsciously on Christmas Eve. Sam and my mother move towards him at the same time, drawn by the same compassion, the thoughtless generosity of those who are never held back by pity or commiseration. Sam has taken off his pullover. My mother takes my father’s hand and leads him away. Someone tries to say something funny: “Are you trying to frighten us, like you did when we were little?” Yes, he says. Sam puts his sweater over my father’s shoulders and my mother ties the sleeves around his neck to make a cape. On the television, which has been turned down, a priest is lifting the sacrament above his head. The camera pans across the crèche and slowly zooms in on the Baby Jesus. Cut to the priest lifting the chalice to his lips and drinking the blood of the child he has just displayed to us.

My mother and Sam help him sit in his chair at the head of the table, facing the
TV
, and he asks for the sound and more bread. The Agnus Dei fills the room and stops both adults and children in their tracks. My father taps his fingers on the table while waiting for his bread. For years before we moved into this house, he sold bread for a living. He’s not proud of that time, especially since he was working for Weston Bakeries, but bread is the security of the poor, the staff of life. It fills the stomach cheaply. He was poor and so he became hooked on bread. At least that’s what I think when I see him grab a crust that has fallen onto the tablecloth as though he has dug up a black tru±e. He’ll eat any kind of bread, no discriminating. The crustiest baguette, American white bread, the olive-and-sun-dried-tomato bread served in all the trendy restaurants, hard-as-a-rock organic bread that the Homeopath brings over, cheese bread, round loaves that we used to call bum bread, rye bread, ten-grain bread. He eats it dry or soft, stale or fresh, buttered, smothered with jam or cheese or melted pork fat, margarine or pâté de campagne. But now that he’s sick, the chances are good that bread will kill him.

Sam has come back from the kitchen looking serious and thoughtful. My father is smiling. My mother is looking sad or resigned or exhausted, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Santa has taken up his role as gift giver again, and my father gets a loaf of bread. Sam puts his hands on my father’s shoulders and whispers in his ear.

“Eat, Grandpa,” I think I hear him say. “Eat your present.”

“Good… pres… ent… thank… you…”

And he stuffs bread into his mouth without looking up from his plate.

“Sam, I don’t know why you want us to keep calling you Sam. You’ll be a man, my nephew.” He doesn’t know Kipling, but if he’d been my son…

“William is too serious. Sam sounds more like me.”

The diffuse family murmur resumes like a rumour passing through a village. My father eats, grunting with pleasure. Sam turns off the television.

At the far end of the table the Homeopath stamps her foot. She’s not a bit happy. You’d think she was the one being pushed into an early grave by being force-fed bread and cheese. I watch her blanch when I pour some wine into my father’s pewter cup. In desperation, she tries catching my mother’s eye, but my mother has withdrawn into some secret place located somewhere on the tablecloth, at which she stares without looking up, gently nodding her head. She is out of service. She has too many children tonight. The queen of natural health stands up brusquely and wraps her seventies scarf around her shoulders. Eyes firm, back straight, step determined. I steel myself for intemperate declarations, moral lessons. I try closing my ears. Isabelle says this is going to go badly. How has she learned to read my own family so well? The Homeopath doesn’t waste time chewing out Sam, who is the object of all her resentment, nor does she rebuke my mother. She goes straight for my father and takes his plate.

“That’s enough! This is unacceptable! It’s not good for you, you must understand that.”

“No!” my father shouts as though someone were trying to hang him. With a hand that is suddenly strong and sure, he grabs the pewter cup. Both cup and wine sail out into the air.

“Dad!”

A spontaneous cry from the adults in the audience.

“My beautiful shawl!”

I’m not sorry to see it go; it was one of those old-fashioned shawls with bulging fringes, like sideburns. I almost laugh at her anger, at the way she spreads the shawl over the seat of her chair and starts shaking salt on it, impatiently, because the salt runs so slowly. “Christ!” she says, unscrewing the lid of the shaker and emptying it onto her precious accessory. And I learn a few more things. That the shawl came from Boston, where she bought it in a fit of amorous delirium when she and her American boyfriend were demonstrating against the draft, and that this seemingly reserved woman is capable of swearing and even of being carried away. I’ve always thought of her as an obligatory homeopath, incapable of anger and blushing and passion. Anyone can make a mistake. We make mistakes all the time.

Who, then, is she? The sour-tempered woman who lectures my father about slices of bread, or the one who’s in tears over a souvenir of a vanished America, or maybe of smoking a joint in the nude on a beach in Cape Cod? The one who always says Excuse me before speaking, or the one who spits Christ! because her father stained her shawl with a glassful of forbidden wine?

I know the answer now; she is all those women, and I apologize to her for having always seen her as a caricature. Flat, no depth to her at all, not structured like the earth that is built up in layers so as always to be evolving and hiding its secret origins, and into which you have to dig, penetrate, if you want to understand it. In despair now that her shawl is soaked with wine, like all the other old things that are brought back to life, she gets up, goes over to my father and accuses him of having destroyed one of her most precious memories. All because of a love that no one could have guessed existed. An absurd love for what once was but which surely can no longer be. A beach. A fire, a joint for him, a glass of wine for her. A night. A shawl. My father smiles. He always smiles when he can’t hear what’s being said but senses it’s about him. He who never smiled at anything we said now resorts to this dolphin’s rictus as his ultimate defence. She lowers her head, withdraws from the fray, having realized that despite the brouhaha no one is interested in her shawl. She retreats to the kitchen, where she tries to soak a stain out of a part of her life. This is how memories, which are layers, get installed and never leave us. I will always remember her Boston, she will always remember our indifference to it. Who is right? No one.

The flying wine cup ended its trajectory in my mother’s face, and her eyebrow is bleeding profusely—a real boxer’s cut, not dangerous but a wound from which blood pours as from a faucet. While my sister dies a little over her ruined shawl, the rest of us bend over our mother. The Banker says we have to call 911, others respond that it’s not that serious. My mother takes her napkin from her lap, pushes off the apprentice doctors and presses the napkin to her cut. My father puts his hand over hers.

“Press… press… hard…”

He keeps his hand on hers and repeats: Press, press. He is not smiling. He is concentrating. I hear a voice almost telling him to leave her alone, and from its tone comes the sense that he is too old to help his wife, too impotent and infirm, and that in any case it’s his fault that she’s bleeding. But he no longer hears the nasty comments. He may hear the words, but he can’t possibly imagine that he is the object of some reproach. He never does anything wrong. He only tries to assume his responsibilities.

Now he puts his other hand on my mother’s hand holding the napkin, which she removes from time to time to see if the blood is still flowing. Press, press, he says, and I don’t know quite how but he manages to get up and stand behind her and press her forehead with both his hands.

“Band… aid… band… aid… Christ…”

A murmur spreads through the room, a murmur of shame keeping its voice down. We call to one another, our eyes darting everywhere. Band-aids, where are they, do you know? We thought of everything except band-aids. I can feel humiliation rising like vapour from the Banker, the Homeopath and the Geographer. Even though they have no feelings in common, they know that when it comes to their mother’s and father’s health they are part of the clan. They’re the ones responsible. They look tentatively at one another, discussing what to do, but no one moves. Including me. I look at my father, still pressing my mother’s forehead with his two hands, staunching the flow of blood.

I THINK IT WAS
my Uncle Bertrand who used to own a cottage in Bois-des-Filion. An old tumbledown shack on a dirt road that led to a small patch of beach. On summer weekends, families would install themselves along the sand in the same way they lived in the city. Shoved up against one another like the houses they inhabited. My father couldn’t stand the closeness of it. If he had to leave the city he wanted room, he wanted to be able to contemplate the river without being disturbed. He would leave early in the morning, when all the other shacks along the road were still reeking of bacon and eggs, the children still getting cleaned up and the parents yawning or belching up their beer from the night before, and he would secure our position at the far end of the beach, beside a thin, dead pine, all that remained of nature, but enough to symbolically separate his few square metres of sand from the Ideal Beach Dance Hall, which is what this particular stretch of beach area was called. He would mark off his territory, our territory, by tracing a large border in the sand with his heel, placing the cooler and two folding lounge chairs in the centre of it under a large beach umbrella, spreading out a few towels and then, satisfied with his arrangement, wait for the rest of us to arrive, led by our mother. He would wait standing up, scornfully eyeing the other families bunching up on top of one another, not daring to come near this scowling figure with the face of a cop or a bandit. Once Mother arrived and the children were gathered, he would take his book, sit in a chair and forget about us. If one of us seemed in danger of drowning, it was our mother who ran into the water to save us. If we fought with the kids next to us on the beach who had no notion of territoriality, it was my mother who settled the dispute. My father would indicate his displeasure, multiply his decrees, grunt a few times, but he would take no part in the life of the beach except to keep watch over our own square of sand.

One Sunday we were returning from Ideal Beach with Uncle Marcel, who sold used cars. There were five of us in the back seat of his blue Chevrolet with the Monarch fenders and the Chrysler steering wheel and the window cranks serving as door handles. Uncle Marcel made his living doing a little bit of this and that. When my father told me to open the window wider because it was too hot in the car, I obeyed like the good little soldier I was, without thinking or looking at what I was doing. I turned the window crank and the door opened; out I tumbled, onto the shoulder of the road and into the ditch. It was my mother who leapt out of the car and ran to save me. Blood was pouring out of my head like water from a hydrant. My father never lost control. He waited calmly in the car until my mother brought me back, then got into the back seat, held my head on his lap, pressed some sort of cloth to my wound and held it there with his two large hands for the thirty minutes it took us to get to the hospital. I was moaning, my brothers and sisters were crying, my mother was trembling. He never said a word the whole way, just sat there pressing on my head, squeezing it tight, blocking the flow of blood. He was in control of the situation. My mother said I was lucky. A fractured skull. Still my father said nothing, not even when I came home from hospital, my head wrapped in bandages but otherwise saved at last.