My October (19 page)

“You need an assessment, is that it?” Mandelbaum continued.

Hannah had to make an effort to marshal her thoughts and recall what Manny Mandelbaum was talking about. “Oh,” she said. “Yes. The school telephoned this morning requesting it. Hugo's back in class, but with conditions. They told me there's a test you can administer.”

The scratchy voice did not answer her directly. “Did they actually use the term
psychopathology
?”

“Yes,” said Hannah, collapsing into her chair and staring at the marigolds she'd cut from Lyse's garden. The blooms were a little bedraggled, but their smell was still pungent and earthy. An orange ladybug was crouching, camouflaged, on the biggest one. “In French, of course.
Psychopathologie.
”

“Well,” said Mandelbaum. “I can't assess for that, per se. We use another term these days. Anti-social personality disorder. There's a checklist of symptoms put together by the World Health Organization. We could take a look at that, if you wish.”

Besides being scratchy, Manny Mandelbaum's voice was calm and reasonable. He could have been offering to clean her carpets rather than investigate whether her only son was a menace to the civilized world.

“Anti-social personality disorder,” she repeated slowly.

“It's an umbrella term describing people who show a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights of others and the general rules of society. There are usually signs in childhood and early adolescence.”

The ladybug was crawling now, trying to hide among the folds of the marigold blossom.

“What kinds of signs?”

“Can you hang on for a moment?” Manny asked.

Hannah heard his chair creak and a muffled sound as he put down the receiver. She watched the ladybug, whose efforts to hide had been futile. It crouched at the flower's centre, totally exposed.

“I'm back,” said Manny Mandelbaum, who must have run to a bookshelf. “Here's the list of symptoms. ‘Callous unconcern for the feelings of others,'” he read. “‘Gross and persistent attitude of irresponsibility and disregard for social norms. Low
tolerance for frustration. Low threshold for aggression. Inability to feel guilt for one's actions. Markedly prone to blame others or to rationalize one's behaviour.'”

Almost every symptom was familiar.

“Hannah?” said Mandelbaum after a few seconds of silence. “Look, Hannah, this portrait can sound like any of us on a bad day. Especially any teenager interacting with an authority figure. Psychology is a terrible field, full of arbitrary, limiting labels. Personally, I don't put much stock in them. They tend to hurt more often than they help.”

“But he does show callous unconcern for feelings,” said Hannah softly. “And he has been irresponsible. Grossly irresponsible.”

“Is he there now?” asked Mandelbaum.

“No.”

“Good. Because he must never hear you say anything like that. Words have a huge impact, Hannah. That's the problem with labels like these. We slap them on someone, and suddenly they become solid and real. Promise me you won't get hung up on any of this. If the school wants it, we can do it. But you have got to get a grip on this. Hugo's a kid. Things like this can make you think you know who's in front of you. They can replace the person standing there, you know what I mean? They can shut you down. Close your eyes and ears.”

“When can we see you?” said Hannah, only half listening.

“When's good for you?”

“Tomorrow,” she said. “If you're okay. Not too sick, I mean. He has to meet with a supervisor after school as part of his punishment. We could be at your office around five. Is that too late?”

He said it would be fine. She said goodbye in a regular voice,
but when she got off the phone, her hand was trembling. Her son was a complete and utter mystery to her. He had not given the slightest hint of what he was thinking or why he'd bought the gun. She had asked him directly. So had his father. More than once. But so far there'd been no answer. Just his opaque and dull-eyed stare.

Maybe it wasn't just a phase. Maybe something was deeply and dangerously wrong with him. Hannah grabbed the rag hanging over the kitchen sink and began scrubbing the countertops. Frantically. There seemed to be spots everywhere. How had she not noticed them when she was cooking? A grease stain here, black smears there where she had sliced the mushroom caps.

Hannah's hand slowed. On the counter was the book Manny Mandelbaum had given her. It had been sitting there all day where she'd deposited it after returning from his office.
Nonviolent Communication
. She picked it up and opened it.

The foreword, she saw with surprise, was written by a man called Gandhi. His first name was Arun. The grandson of Mohandas. Hannah skimmed the first paragraph, then leaned against the counter to read more.

Arun Gandhi had grown up in the 1940s in apartheid South Africa, a profoundly violent time and place, especially for a boy of colour, as he called himself. At the age of thirteen, after being beaten by white youths for being too black, and by black ones for being too white, Arun Gandhi himself had begun to turn violent. His worried parents sent him to India, to the household of his grandfather, who just happened to be the world's most famous proponent of peace.

One of the many things he learned from his grandfather, he wrote years later, when he himself had grown old, was how
pervasive violence was, and how everyone committed violent acts pretty much every day. What was needed was not a quantitative shift in human attitudes to violence, but a qualitative one.

Hannah had to reread this section to make sure she hadn't misunderstood. Everyone was violent. She read on.

His thesis was that people failed to acknowledge their own violence largely through ignorance. They thought they weren't violent because they didn't kill, or make war, or beat other people up. Their definition of violence was limited to the grossest acts of physical aggression.

In the 1940s, Mohandas Gandhi had asked his grandson to draw a tree and to paste it on his bedroom wall. Every evening, they reviewed the day's events together—everything that the boy had experienced, said, seen, or read about. Arun Gandhi was asked to write these things on slips of paper and to paste each of them on his tree under one of two categories: physical violence or passive violence. Within a couple of months, the wall of Arun's bedroom was plastered with acts of violence of the latter kind. These acts (taunts, bullying, refusals of recognition), his grandfather explained, generated anger in victims, who then responded explosively with the first kind of violence. Passive violence always engendered a consequence. It was the fuel.

The phone rang. Hannah put the book down on the counter and ran to answer.

“Hello?” she said, in a small, breathless voice.

It wasn't Hugo, which confused her, because his presence had been so strong while she was reading Arun Gandhi's words. It was Connie.

“I've been calling and calling,” Connie said. “Didn't you get my messages?”

“I'm sorry,” said Hannah. Over the past three days Connie had left five rambling messages. None of them were frantic. None had announced her father's impending death or even a downturn in his health. This did not justify silence, Hannah knew, but it showed she wasn't totally callous. At least she had checked. She just hadn't answered.

“Is everything okay?” Connie said.

The temptation to talk was great, but Hannah resisted it.

“Hannah?”

“I'm here.”

There was a long silence. She felt her reluctance giving way, felt the words coming, when Connie spoke. “Well, I'm glad you finally picked up. I was beginning to think there was a real catastrophe down there. How is Hugo?”

“Hugo?”

“I've been worrying all week about him, and when you didn't answer …”

“Oh,” said Hannah. Mononucleosis. Her excuse. How could she have forgotten? She thought guiltily about all the times she'd let the phone ring, knowing exactly who it was. “I'm sorry. He's doing much better.”

“Well, that's a relief.”

“It's been incredibly busy around here. We were so worried. He had to have all these tests.” Hannah winced. There was a tiny kernel of truth in there, but not enough to absolve her. Lying was violence. Arun Gandhi said so.

“And Father?” Hannah said, shifting away from the uncomfortable subject. “How is he?”

“He's coming home.”

“Home?” The word dropped out of Hannah's mouth before
she fully registered it. She pictured her father strapped to the surfboard-like stretcher the nurses had used to bathe him. “But he can't even walk.”

“Yes he can.”

“He can?”

“When the orderly's there,” said Connie. “He walked today. Two full steps.”

“Mother,” she said, leaning on the stove for support, trying not to look at the congealed mess of her dinner. She couldn't say more. Her parents' house with its long flight of stairs flashed before her. The only full bathrooms were on the second floor, none of them adapted to the needs of a man in Alfred Stern's condition. There was no way he could go home.

“He's walking, I said. Two full steps.”

“Yes, I heard you,” said Hannah. Had her mother come unhinged?

“They can't keep him at the hospital any longer. Two days ago, Dr. Ufitsky said it's time for him to move on.”

“But not home, surely?” Hannah took the wooden spoon from the spoon rest and gave the stroganoff a hard stir. There was sour cream in it. She should probably put it in the fridge.

“Look. I'm doing the best I can.”

“I know you are, Mother,” Hannah said, suddenly weary. “I didn't mean …” She returned the spoon to the spoon rest, abandoning the stroganoff to its bacterial fate. Either Ufitsky was nuts or Connie was wilfully misunderstanding what he'd said. “Aren't there rehab centres?” she said. “Longer-term places where he can receive proper care?”

“He doesn't want that.”

Hannah's eyes widened. “He's talking?”

“No,” said Connie. “But he doesn't need to.” There was a brief silence. “Would you want to be packed off to one of those places?”

For some reason, perhaps because of the conversation she'd just had with Manny Mandelbaum, Hannah pictured a boy in short pants clutching a battered suitcase.

“Well?” said her mother. “Would you?” She didn't leave a space for Hannah to answer, but began almost immediately to talk about Benjamin. “He's very caught up with his work,” Connie said. “I just got off the phone with him. He's in court all next week.”

So that was it. Her mother would never state a need simply or ask directly for help. Instead, there were hints. Seemingly random facts, finding their mark in your neck.

“Hannah?”

But Hannah remained silent, her fallback position. In silence was safety. She shifted the telephone to her right hand to change ears. Her neck was hurting. She pressed tentatively into the stiff ridge of her trapezius muscle and winced.

“Benjamin can't fly here every other week. He's come once this month already. Vancouver's so far away.”

“It is,” said Hannah. She leaned her back against the counter and slid down the cupboard door into a squat. “The other end of the continent.” She was still working her neck muscle. The pain fanned down her left shoulder and arm. She regretted telling Connie that Hugo had recovered. Her mind began to scramble. “There must be a decent rehab place in Toronto. It would just take a little research.”

“No, Hannah.”

“What do you mean, no? Have you even looked into it?”

“Your father doesn't want to go. The doctor talked to him about rehab. He said he could get him a spot in a good centre. The very next day, your father stopped eating.”

“What?” Hannah sat down heavily on the floor.

“It's been two days.”

Hannah felt sick. The guilt was doing its work.

“Dr. Ufitsky says he sees it a lot. People go on strike.”

Hannah pictured her thin, wasted father. “Maybe it's a physical thing,” she said desperately. “Is he having trouble swallowing?”

“No,” said Connie. “Until that talk with the doctor, he was eating fine. He's had enough, Hannah. It's perfectly clear. He doesn't want to be cooped up anymore. He wants out.”

Hannah stared up at the ceiling. A shadow darkened the centre of the frosted glass ceiling light. It looked fairly large. Had some insect gotten trapped in there? Or was it just dirt? “It'll never work,” said Hannah. “He's sick, Mother. You'll need round-the-clock nursing care. Not to mention physiotherapy, speech therapy, God knows what else. And where will you put him? He can't handle the stairs. You'll need a hospital bed.”

“All that can be arranged.”

“This is nuts,” Hannah said. It was like a bad dream in which everyone was unaccountably blind to looming danger. Everyone but her.

“He's been in hospital almost a month, Hannah. He's had enough.”

“And what about you?” Hannah asked before she could stop herself. If her mother was exhausted now, how would she be as her husband's full-time nurse?

“Me? You think I enjoy it there?”

Hannah took a deep breath. “Think about it a minute, Mum. At least now you can go home and sleep. There are nurses to help. Orderlies to bathe him. This is a huge undertaking. Way too big to manage.”

“Alone, yes. That's why I've been telephoning.”

Hannah held her breath. The kitchen seemed stark and painfully bright as she sat there for several seconds, legs splayed on the wooden floorboards, gazing at the light.

“They can keep him a little bit longer at Sunnybrook while I fix the bathroom and get a bed installed downstairs. This is the issue. I'll need someone to oversee the workmen while I'm at his bedside. The housekeeper is there Tuesdays and Fridays, but it will take someone with authority.”