The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  He’s known a few serious alcoholics, and he isn’t like them. At the paper, he knew a copy editor who used to take proofs home with him to read overnight, and then wake up in the morning not knowing how he’d got home or where he’d left the proofs. They’d spend half the morning retracing the editor’s movements, picking up pages of proofread and discarded copy at various bars and taverns around town. Alcoholics don’t lose things, they throw them away. Harry may have lost a few things, including his daughter, but he hasn’t thrown anything away.

  Because of the ScourPrep, he hasn’t been able to take his blood pressure medication. He feels light-headed, a little giddy. Hypertense. His ears are ringing and his eyes play tricks on him, especially when he reads; the words blur and jump on the page as though there’s a short circuit in his optic nerve, or his brain is getting only half an image and makes up the rest by repeating the half, only slightly out of register. He’s not a drunk, and he’s not a hypochondriac. He mentioned the acid reflux to his doctor, but only in an offhanded way, as though he regretted having to mention it, and she hadn’t responded. She told him to check his blood pressure regularly, maybe cut down on salt and high-cholesterol foods. Daphne would say he should avoid gluten and red meat. No, Daphne would say he should go on a vision quest. No, Daphne would say she couldn’t care less what he did.

  Not until he’s in bed, reading news on his iPad about a record snowstorm expected to cover half of British Columbia, does he remember he hasn’t called his daughter again. He looks at the bedside clock. Too late, he tells himself, she’ll have gone out. He’ll call her in the morning.

  * * *

  —

  The waiting area outside Day Surgery consists of a line of chairs beneath a row of prints that seem to represent what ferns might look like to a person with advanced macular degeneration. Is a colonoscopy considered day surgery? It isn’t even surgery, is it? When he was writing a piece for a seniors’ magazine, he’d asked a gastroenterologist to describe a colonoscopy: they bend you over a pommel horse, the doctor said, and shove a flexible tube with a fibre-optic camera at the end of it up your rectum. The camera sends images of the colon wall to a computer screen, they check it for irregular lumps on the prostate, peculiar lesions on the intestinal wall, discoloration. “It can be very painful,” said the gastroenterologist, “especially if you clench.”

  On his way to the hospital he stopped at a Shoppers Drug Mart to test his blood pressure. One-sixty-five over one-thirty, not too bad. Though those things are never accurate. When the nurse leads him, johnny-shirted and paper-slippered, into the operating room, there is no pommel horse: that must have been a doctor’s joke. There’s an ordinary operating table covered with what looks like butcher’s paper. Okay, that’s a macabre touch. Several masked men and women are standing around the bed looking at him; one of them, after telling him to lie on his back on the table, begins prepping him for an anaesthetic.

  “An anaesthetic for a colonoscopy?” he asks with the lightness of mild hysteria.

  A young man, surely a student, possibly a high-school student, looks at a chart. “Says here we’re doing a gastroscopy, too,” he says. “You’re Harrison Bowes, right? Your GP is Dr. Beattie? Any problem with us doing both procedures today, Mr. Bowes?”

  “No, I guess not,” he says. Did Beattie order a gastroscopy? At his father’s memorial service, the pastor said that his father’s death had been quick and painless. How had the pastor known it was painless? Or even quick? His father never complained about anything. Death came quickly after the diagnosis because the diagnosis was late. Let them do the gastroscopy.

  The anaesthetist, one of those in green, taps the back of his left hand and frowns. “Funny,” she says. She sticks a needle into his loose skin and moves it around. “I can’t seem to get a good vein here. Do you mind if I go in at the elbow?”

  “No, I guess not,” he says again. Why can’t she find a good vein? What is a bad vein?

  There’s something he wants to tell the doctor, something important, but he doesn’t know which masked figure is the doctor and he can’t remember what he wanted to say. Something about who they should call if anything happens. He wrote Elinor’s name on the release form, but she’s in South Africa and, he suddenly realizes, didn’t email him to say she got there. And don’t bother calling his daughter, she won’t pick up. Who else is there? He closes his eyes to think, and when he opens them again he’s in the recovery room, where the attendants wear brightly patterned scrubs with flowers on them, their side pockets jammed with cigarette packs, Bic lighters, and plastic tubing. They are cheerful; their patients are recovering. His clothes and cell phone and car keys are in a paper bag at his feet. No messages.

  “Take your time, Mr. Bowes,” says his nurse. “Is your wife coming to pick you up?”

  “No.”

  “Well, there’s no rush. You can leave whenever you’re ready.”

  “Will I be able to walk home?”

  “Well, that depends,” she says. “Do you live in Toronto?”

  Harry laughs. Hospital humour. “When will I get the results?”

  “Your doctor will phone you.”

  * * *

  —

  Mildred jumps up onto the kitchen counter, next to where Harry is filling a bowl with soup. He looks through the kitchen window into the backyard. It’s good to be eating solid food again, if soup can be said to be solid. There are solid bits in it. Elinor made the soup and left it in the fridge for him, four sealed glass jars that once contained French mustard. He had no idea how they went through so much mustard, since they hardly eat meat anymore. His wooden stepladder is leaning against the garage, and has been since his unsuccessful attempt in the summer at repairing a leak in the garage roof with a can of Driveway Patch. He’ll put it away before Elinor gets back. Mildred wrinkles her nose at the soup, follows the spoon with her eyes as he lifts it to his mouth, purrs when he pushes her off the counter. Her feet make a padded bony sound when they hit the tile floor, but she doesn’t seem to bear him a grudge.

  “This is mine,” he tells her. “Go catch a mouse or something.” He opens the basement door and the cat scissors down the stairs. Knowing she’ll want back up in a minute, he leaves the door ajar.

  He is, he has to admit, fond of the cat. He enjoys not having to walk her, or pick up her poop. He and El found her one winter’s night curled up on the hood of their car when they came out of a restaurant. The hood was warm, or had been. The restaurant was called Mildred Pierce, after the old Joan Crawford film. Elinor decided the cat was Joan Crawford’s resurrected spirit and named her Mildred. Millie. He’d wanted to call her Lily Merlot, since the car had been parked under a lamp post. The restaurant disappeared shortly afterwards (taking Harry’s wine account with it), but Mildred and her name both stuck.

  Like cats, restaurants come and go. Maybe he should worry less about his restaurant accounts and check on some of his private clients. Someone like Brian Bigelow, senior partner of a law firm on Queen West that’s trying to work its way up to Bay Street. The firm entertains a lot; last year they bought more than a hundred cases of Entre-Deux-Mers, a not bad Bordeaux, and, for their Christmas party, forty cases of a thirty-dollar Oregon pinot noir and ten of a pinot grigio he’d got in for someone else. He needs only a few clients like that to make up for the onslaught of restaurant makeovers, and their Christmas party must be coming up soon. He picks out their number from the client list on his phone and, as it rings, stares out the back window at the ladder leaning against the garage. Daphne is dating a lawyer. What does “dating” mean these days? Seeing? Going out with? As in, having dinner in a restaurant and then taking in a movie? Maybe going bowling?

  “Hey, Harry,” says Brian. “Been meaning to call.”

  “How are things, Brian?” The firm’s Christmas party had been held at the Carlu, the top floor of the old Eaton’s building at College and Yonge. He and E
linor went, but didn’t know anyone there and left early.

  “So-so,” Brian says. “Bankruptcies are levelling off, unfortunately. They were saving our asses. You ready to file yet?”

  “Not just yet.” Harry paces the kitchen in tight laps, a habit from the days when televisions had rabbit ears and phones were attached to their cradles by a cord.

  “The only people benefiting from this recession,” says Brian, “are lawyers and shrinks.”

  “Ah,” he says. Elinor isn’t a shrink, she’s a psychologist. And she doesn’t practise, she teaches, although on the way to the airport she said something about quitting the university and starting a private clinic. He’d filed that one away as something to worry about later.

  “And wine merchants,” he says to Brian. “People are never too broke to drink wine, I find. How’s your cellar situation.”

  “Mine or the firm’s?”

  “Well, both.”

  “We had a meeting about a month ago, Harry, why I meant to call. I put it to them this way: either we lay off staff or we cut down on the entertaining. Guess how the staff voted. That’s the problem with democracy. You want to know how much we spent on parties last year, for Christ’s sake? They voted to skip the big blowouts where half the guests weren’t clients and never would be. Maybe things’ll pick up in the new year, when people realize their fourth quarter was marginally better than the third. But for now we’re okay for wine. Call me again in January.”

  “So it’s what,” Harry says, “sandwiches and Perrier at the board meetings?”

  “More like Evian.”

  “No problem, Brian. I’ll be here whenever. What about you?”

  “Well, I could maybe use a case or two of something. Christmas coming and all.”

  “I’ve got a 2005 Haut-Brion you’d like.” Brian’s name made him think of it. “I can drop it off this afternoon.”

  “Today’s not good, Harry. And how about a sample first?”

  “Tell you what, I’ll arrange a tasting in a couple of weeks. I’ll let you know the date.”

  “Sounds good. See you then. I’ve got to get back to robbing corpses.”

  Harry sets the phone on the kitchen counter. He can round up a dozen of his best clients; they always buy at least a case after committing to a tasting, and they usually bring friends. He hums tunelessly as he washes the soup bowl, running over what he has in the basement other than the Haut-Brion. A few cases of a nice Okanagan pinot noir, which makes him think of Daphne, which makes him look at his watch. It’s after nine in Vancouver. He could leave another message. Sometimes when he calls, her answering machine is full, and he imagines all his previous messages lined up like supplicants, Daphne staring down at the machine, pressing Delete, Delete, Delete.

  Why would Elinor want to quit teaching and go into private practice now, of all times, when his own business is in the doldrums?

  “I’m just thinking of it,” she said in the car on the way to the airport. “Sandra Hedley asked me if I’d like to go in with her. I’m tempted.”

  “Why now? You haven’t known Sandy that long.”

  “Sandra. She’s decided to start her own clinic in the Beaches, and she asked me if I’d be interested in coming in with her. I said I wasn’t, but now I sort of am.”

  “What’s changed?”

  “Nothing,” she said. Did she look at him? Not look at him? “That’s the problem.”

  “You’d miss teaching,” he said, trying to be circumspect. “I know I do.”

  “I know you do,” she said. “You were good at it.”

  “So are you.”

  “I suppose I’d miss the students,” she said. “Some of them. One or two a year. But I wouldn’t miss the department. It’s become a snakepit since they fired George for sleeping with one of his students.”

  George Cramb, one of the best psychology profs in the business at one time. Popular with his students, liked by his colleagues, well published, a conscientious departmental chair. They’d had him to the house for dinner many times. Unmarried. Harry thought he was gay, and had asked if the student in question was male. Elinor had laughed at that, then looked thoughtful. Harry was still teaching when he met Elinor. She’d been a grad student but not one of his, not even in the same department. Still, they’d been careful about being seen together, even before they were “dating.”

  “In any case,” she said, “Sandra’s coming to the conference and we’ll talk about it. I’m going to give it serious thought.”

  Harry drove without saying anything for a while. “Are there,” he asked, “financial considerations?”

  “Maybe at first,” she said. “Once we’re up and running I’ll make four times what I’m making as a professor. Why? Is that a thing?”

  “No, of course it’s not a thing.”

  “You’re sure it’s not a thing?”

  She was teasing him. He laughed. “I’m sure it’s not a thing.”

  But of course it’s a thing. It was a thing when he left teaching and started his wine business. If Elinor hadn’t been fast-tracked to tenure, they wouldn’t be living in this house. A three-bedroom between High Park and Roncesvalles, they’re living in a gold mine. It was tough for a couple of years. And still, he worries. People won’t always want decent wine, and he hates selling plonk, just as, when he was a journalist, he hated writing the “Pet of the Week” column. He hopes some new fad will come along. High-end Argentine malbecs, that would be good. He should ask Daphne what Paul and his lawyer friends are drinking.

  Through the kitchen window the sky looks dark and threatening, and wind has begun to stir the bare branches on the big maple in the corner, behind the garage. Snow on the way. He really should go out and put that ladder in the garage. Elinor set a plastic flower pot on the lower rung in August, the remains of a spider plant that had baked to a crisp in the sunroom, and he was supposed to have dumped the plant onto the compost pile and got rid of the pot ages ago. Now the dead tendrils trail into ankle-length grass, which he was also supposed to have cut, but during the summer he ran over the electric lawnmower cord with the electric lawnmower. He could have been electrocuted. “You were lucky,” El said, with what he imagined was an edge of disappointment.

  He finishes cleaning up and goes down the three short steps to the back door. He’ll deal with the spider plant, at least, and put the ladder away. Elinor will be impressed. Peace will settle over the land. He opens the door and is about to step onto the deck when the phone rings. As he hurries back to the counter, leaving the door open, he sees Millie out of the corner of his eye making the three-metre dash from the basement to the deck in Olympic time.

  “Shit! Millie!” he calls, running after her. “Come back here!” As if cats ever do. He reaches the door in time to see her standing under the ladder, looking at him for a second over her shoulder as though faintly irritated by a memory of having seen him before. Then she disappears behind the garage. He makes a half-hearted attempt to run after her, but knows that once she reaches the hedge, she’s gone. He watches her tail slip into the shrubbery, sighs, and returns to the kitchen.

  The phone has stopped ringing and his voicemail icon is blinking. He punches in his code and listens, hoping to hear Daphne’s voice. Instead, it’s a man’s.

  “Mr. Bowes.” High-pitched, authoritative, somehow managing to make Harry’s name sound like a threat. “My name is Rupert Kronkman and I’m with the US Department of Homeland Security here at Pearson International Airport.” Harry feels the anaesthetic wearing off in the vicinity of his colon. “There’s a couple of items that have come to our attention that we’d like to clear up with you, if you have a few minutes.” The man repeats his name and leaves his number.

  A joke. Someone playing a trick on him, one of his basketball buddies. “Very funny, Bernie,” he says into the phone. He pulls a chair from the table and sits down, re
sumes his inspection of the backyard, the dead spider plant, the rotting ladder, the bent grass, without registering any of it. His heart is racing. His heart doesn’t believe the caller was Bernie. And Elinor would not be pleased about Millie. He goes to the back door and looks onto the deck, but the cat is not there. His breath fogs the glass. The sky is getting darker. Homeland Security doesn’t leave voicemail messages, it would be like saying you’ve got until tomorrow morning to place the bomb and get back to Afghanistan. He notices that something has been digging into the compost pile, something large, probably raccoons. There was a family of them living in the garage last winter, up in the rafters, shitting down on the roof of his car, as if for points. He wonders where they went. Obviously, not far.

  He locks the back door and, still hungry, does what Elinor calls his fridge thing, which is to open the refrigerator and stand in front of it for two minutes before deciding there’s nothing to eat. Of course there is, she would say. There’s salad, and fruit, and look, there’s a container of plain yogurt, never mind the best-before date, you can mix some dill in it and put that on some sliced cucumber, it’ll be delicious. But he wonders, Whatever happened to salami? Do they still even make it? He used to like salami before the nitrate police got their anemic little hands on it. Does Homeland Security have microchips in everyone’s refrigerators, reporting on whether or not they have falafels and baba ghanouj hidden behind the yogurt and blueberries? Do they track the movements of everyone who travels from Canada into the States? Do Canadian security forces dutifully hand over information to the Americans? Of course they do. He doesn’t want a cold, healthful salad. It isn’t healthy anyway, unless it’s part of a balanced diet that contains protein and carbohydrates. There are good carbs and bad carbs, at least that’s what Daphne tells him.

  Daphne. He looks at his watch. Noon. He could leave another message. He doesn’t want to leave another message. Does she even check her messages? What he wants is to open a bottle of merlot and have some salami and a bit of cheese on slices of warm baguette, let Homeland Security make of it what they will, and sit out in the sunroom and look at the perfect composition of ladder and garage while waiting for Millie to come back. Maybe call Daphne then. The only thing the discharge nurse told him not to do for twenty-four hours was operate heavy machinery. A corkscrew isn’t heavy machinery, except in the mind of his first wife.