The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “That’s three-fifty.”

  “What?”

  “For the coffee. Three-fifty.”

  “Oh, yeah. If I drink it here do I get refills?”

  “No, sorry, we’re closing.”

  “We are?”

  “I am.”

  You stuck your good hand into your coat pocket and took out the rolled-up five-dollar bill.

  “Keep the change,” you said. “I’ll just use the bathroom, then I need to go outside to check my friend’s phone number. It’s on his van. Do I have time to do that?”

  “I guess.”

  Coffee Guy put the money in the till still rolled up, as though he expected he’d need to produce it as evidence. You took your coffee to a table at the back, away from the windows, and sat with it for a while, enjoying your invisibility. You needed to be nice to Coffee Guy. If he threw you out, Paul would find you and take you back to the land of by-catch, clear-cuts and pipelines. What to do? First, let’s kill all the lawyers. After that, go to the bathroom. Then out to the van to get Wendell’s phone number. Then back here to call him to come and get you. So much depended on Coffee Guy. From where you sat, you could see him cleaning the espresso machine. Beyond him, through the front windows, snow swirled in a darkening gyre.

  Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind.

  Harry

  NOVEMBER 25–DECEMBER 1, 2009

  On Wednesday morning, Harry wakes up feeling stiff and sore, as he always does the day after basketball. The room is still dark. He lies awake for a while, imitating sleep, holding imaginary conversations with the various people with whom he is having difficulties. A long speech delivered to Daphne, for example, who is actually listening, even taking notes, in which he persuades her to stay in school, call him every Sunday morning, and generally stop being angry with him all the time. He has almost exactly the same conversation with Elinor. Indifference, he tells her, is a form of anger. He tears a strip off a cringing Rupert Kronkman, and has Gaspard begging him to hold his wine tasting at Lutello’s. He must begin organizing that. When his cell phone rings, he opens his eyes. The darkness has receded and the day has begun. Sunlight peers around the edges of the curtains. He picks up the phone, thinking it’s either Daphne or Elinor calling to apologize, as if his imaginings have miraculously borne fruit. But it isn’t Daphne or Elinor, it’s Simon.

  “I’m calling to tell you that Bernie is dead.”

  “What?” he says, sitting up. His book slides off the bed and, by the sound of it, doesn’t land well. “What did you say?”

  “Bernie’s dead. He died last night.” A pause on the line. “Probably an aneurism. Dorothy woke up at two in the morning and heard him breathing oddly, thought he was having a bad dream or something, then he gets up to get a glass of water and just drops. She called 911, but it was too late. They told her he was dead before he hit the floor.”

  “Jesus.” Harry looks uncomprehendingly around the room, the telephone hurting his ear. He remembers Bernie collapsing at the Y, dropping like a stone, his long arms and thin legs bouncing and then lying unnaturally still, as though he were rehearsing for his grand finale later that night. A practice aneurism.

  “Did it have anything to do with what happened at the gym?” he asks. He tries to recall the exact sequence of events leading up to the collapse. Bernie catching Simon’s pass, his breakaway layup, coming down clutching his chest. Then his inert body on the gym floor.

  “How should I know?” Simon says. “Probably. He didn’t look too good after running the length of the court.”

  “What happens now?”

  “The funeral’s tomorrow,” says Simon.

  “Tomorrow? So soon?”

  “Yeah, Jewish custom,” Simon says. “But they just want the family. I’m going over on Sunday. Dorothy’s sitting shiva. Want me to pick you up on the way?”

  Harry still isn’t taking it in. He can’t have heard right. Sitting shiva? Isn’t Shiva a kind of Hindu god, the all-knowing, all-powerful one who metes out his own version of arbitrary justice, a sort of Homeland Security of the soul? He imagines Dorothy sitting cross-legged on the floor in a yoga position, smiling enigmatically and holding up three fingers of one hand, like a kindergarten teacher showing a book to her class. Only, no book.

  “I’ll be here,” he says. “What time?”

  * * *

  —

  He spends the day tidying up. He’s not sure why, just that he feels things around him need to be in some kind of order. The word “catharsis” comes to mind. A cleansing. Elinor must feel that way all the time, the need to keep the madness at bay. He changes the bed, does a load of laundry, cleans the kitchen, throws out a lot of limp greenery from the fridge. The phone rings in the afternoon, a telemarketer, and it reminds him that he hasn’t phoned Daphne. In a fit of forward-moving entropy, as though wanting to put not just Bernie’s death but every bad thing in his life behind him, he calls her number and, when he’s sent to voicemail, leaves the same short message—“Hi, it’s me, call when you get this.” He calls her two or three more times over the course of the day, it always goes to voicemail, and he always leaves the same message. It feels like vengeance, like striking back, even though he knows she never listens to her messages.

  That night, when he checks his email, he finds a message from Elinor. The hotel’s Wi-Fi has been down, she writes. The Internet in Cape Town is notoriously unreliable. And they’re in one of those hotels that advertises Wi-Fi but their bandwidth is so low it’s useless for anything. Whatever that means, Harry thinks. She says she’s leaving the following Monday, arriving in Toronto on Tuesday afternoon, and gives him the flight number and arrival time. He detects a certain detached tone in the wording of her message, or maybe it’s the way he reads it; a reluctant nod to having to check in with him, a courtesy, not a duty, no apology for keeping him in despair for a week. She knows how his mind works, that he would worry, assume she’s been having too good a time to be thinking about him and decided to let him stew for a while, to forestall further discussion until she gets home, if then. Maybe his emails to her have been sharp, especially the more recent ones, but they all went unanswered, like his messages to Daphne. Because it was like writing to no one, he was able to be honest about his feelings.

  She and Sandra are going on a tour of the wine region south of Cape Town, she says, now that the conference is over. She’ll bring him back lots of ideas for future wine trips so he won’t have to go to the States again. So she has been reading his emails, and she has been thinking of him. He wrote to her about Rupert Kronkman, keeping his tone light in case Homeland Security was monitoring his emails. Now he allows a wave of relief to wash over him, as though connecting with Elinor means none of his worries were valid. No amnesia, no partially buried corpse, Daphne is fine, his business will pick up, his colonoscopy was negative. He is sorry he doubted her. He writes that there are excellent wines in South Africa, and almost no one in Toronto is importing them, as though there’s still a kind of mental embargo on apartheid. He tells her about Bernie without going into details about what happened at the gym. He tells her how much he misses her, how he is looking forward to seeing her, so much has happened he wants to tell her about. In short, he writes the email to Elinor he should be writing to Daphne, and feels as though he actually is. He is looking forward to Tuesday—wait! Tuesday? He’ll have to miss basketball. He doesn’t write that. He’ll miss basketball. A small sacrifice, family comes first, Bernie would agree. The other guys might not show up anyway. No, they’ll show up. He reads the last line of her email: “Have you called Daphne?”

  “Yes,” he writes, “and left several messages.” Or rather the same message several times. “She hasn’t called back. I’ll keep trying.”

  He looks at the time: ten o’clock. Daphne must be home and have seen his messages by now. Maybe she has a late class. Maybe she has a part-time
job in her boyfriend’s law office. He pictures her looking like her mother when they first met: competent, confident, in control.

  Why would a competent, confident, in-control young woman not return his calls?

  * * *

  —

  Early Friday morning he calls Daphne again, hoping to catch her before she goes off to school, and still there’s no answer. Pacing the kitchen at the end of his phone’s invisible tether, he leaves a longer, calmer message asking her if she needs anything, tells her it’s snowing in Toronto, adding that he hopes the snowstorm in Vancouver he’s been reading about hasn’t kept her from getting to her classes, or work, or wherever it is she goes. He feels uneasy about that last line, but all in all he’s pleased with himself. He thinks Elinor will be pleased, too. He’s getting over his anger. Despite the evidence, he still feels he has a special relationship with his daughter, that she’ll intuit his need to hear from her and call him back.

  After breakfast, he calls a few clients to sound them out about the wine tasting, saying he’ll get back to them next week when he has a definite time and place. With Bernie dead and Brian Bigelow still unconfirmed, his attendee list has no one on it. By five o’clock, however, he has three yeses and half a dozen maybes, and all things considered he feels professional, and somehow fatherly, again. But still out of sorts. Elinor is back in his life, but Daphne is not, and now Bernie is gone, too. Plus he suspects Gaspard will pull out of the wine tasting, perhaps even cancel his existing wine orders. And Millie is still missing. As he told Daphne, a light dusting of snow fell overnight, enough to show a cat’s pawprints. He puts on his coat and walks up and down the alley behind the house looking for her, or her remains, thinking he might have had to do this for Elinor in Cape Town. Every shapeless heap on the pavement, an old coat, a black plastic bag, makes his heart race. At this time of evening, everything looks like a corpse. His stomach cramps return. He’ll try to avoid carbonated liquids and rich foods. He’ll cut down on champagne and caviar. Why hasn’t his doctor called? Or Daphne? What knowledge are they sparing him? What truths do they think he is better off not knowing?

  Suddenly, he sees Millie perched Sphinx-like on a stack of newspapers two garages down. He calls her. She jumps down and runs towards him. Then, realizing it’s him, she stops, and when he bends over and holds his hand out to her, she turns and runs into the neighbour’s hedge.

  * * *

  —

  Simon, wearing a tight-fitting black suit that makes him look even seedier than usual, picks him up at two on Sunday, and they drive along Bloor, over the viaduct, and east to Scarborough, where Simon turns up a narrow street that, three blocks north of the Danforth, runs alongside a graveyard. An arched wrought-iron gate bears the words “Pineview Cemetery,” which reminds Harry of a summer camp he took Daphne to once. Wasn’t it also called Pineview? No, Pinehurst. Daphne hated it. She called it Pine Hearse.

  “Is that where Bernie’s buried?” Harry asks.

  “No,” says Simon, “he’s in the Jewish cemetery. Family plot.”

  “How well do you know Dorothy?”

  “Pretty well,” Simon says, driving slowly. “One of my exes was friends with her. She and Bernie came to our daughter’s bat mitzvah.”

  “Is she going to be all right? Does she work?”

  “Who? My ex?”

  “No, Dorothy.”

  “Of course she works,” Simon says. “She works at the ROM, head of research or something.”

  He used to take Daphne to the Royal Ontario Museum when she came to Toronto. They would sit in the planetarium and look up at the night sky. He’d point out the Big Dipper and Arcturus, Cassiopeia and Orion, the full extent of his knowledge of the universe. He feels a sudden choking in his throat, as if Bernie’s death is only now hitting him.

  Bernie’s house looks over the north corner of the cemetery, a low, brown-brick bungalow with a covered porch. A dozen cars are parked up and down the street, some inside the cemetery itself, but the driveway is clear and Simon pulls proprietarily into it and parks behind Bernie’s car. At the door, they are met by a woman in her twenties whose unruly hair is tied loosely behind her head with a black scrunchie that seems about to release its hold and let her hair fly off where it will. Harry follows her past the living room, where Dorothy is perched on a low stool, not quite cross-legged but close, surrounded by an assortment of relatives, neighbours, and friends, some looking down at their plates, others speaking quietly to one another. She looks up as Harry and Simon go into the kitchen. Simon mimes putting food on a plate and coming back, and she nods and smiles.

  The frizzy-haired woman leaves them in the kitchen and goes back to the living room. The countertop is covered with casseroles and salads of every description. At one end is a stack of dinner plates and a wicker basket of plastic forks and knives wrapped in black paper napkins.

  “Should I have brought something?” Harry asks Simon, who shrugs, which Harry interprets as yes, he should have brought something. What could he have brought with Elinor away? He could have picked up a quiche from Lutello’s or some bun thjt nuong from the Vietnamese place, which is what he and Elinor usually order, except that it could have shrimp in it. He tries to remember if Bernie ever ordered seafood when they had lunch. Such a simple, basic thing it would have been to have noticed. He looks down at the row of ceramic bowls and sees nothing that looks like takeout, nothing steaming in Styrofoam or soaking through cardboard. Simon, he notes, didn’t bring anything either.

  Simon takes a plate and begins piling food onto it as though he were in his own kitchen. He seems to know what’s under each lid before lifting it. He hums as he stabs at chicken legs, scoops pasta salad, takes an egg salad sandwich from a platter. Harry follows his lead. Simon says do this. There are bottles of wine at the end of the counter, Australian shirazes, mostly, twist caps with the caps twisted back on, as though the wine might evaporate or go flat if left open. He pours a glass, then screws the cap back on. Maybe it’s a funeral rite, no uncorked wine bottles.

  Wine, he thinks suddenly. Christ, he has a whole basement full of it. He could have brought wine.

  “Don’t speak to Dorothy until she speaks to you,” Simon says as they carry their plates into the living room. “That’s how shiva works. We respect the widow’s silent grief.”

  “All right, thanks.”

  He has never thought of Simon as a mentor before, rather as a somewhat clownish basketball player who doesn’t work in a conventional law firm but represents people who can’t afford a real lawyer. There has always been a messianic fire burning behind Simon’s eyes, but he thought it came from having done a lot of drugs in the seventies. He has thickly bearded cheeks, dresses in denim and plaid, and wears deeply scuffed shoes, like someone who may at any moment be called upon to drop what he’s doing and go tree planting. Conversing with him has never been easy for Harry. He finds himself agreeing a lot, nodding and frowning, which apparently has encouraged Simon to have a high opinion of Harry’s intelligence, an impression Harry has not been in a hurry to correct because, for all he knows, he really does agree with Simon. Simon is the kind of guy Harry feels he would agree with if only he understood half of what Simon was talking about. The unfairness of the judiciary system, the evils of mandatory sentencing, the drug markets that modern prisons have become, racist immigration laws, random forensic audits are topics that Harry can hardly argue with but that convince him that Simon must lose the majority of his cases. Do successful lawyers complain about the unfairness of the judiciary system?

  And yet here Simon is, in Dorothy’s living room, taking Harry from one circle of guests to another and introducing him not as Hairball but as Harry Bowes, of Bowes’ Wines and Spirits, a long-time pal of Bernie’s, and if you ever want a good price on a case of wine, Harry’s your man. The cousins smile and make room for him. Harry tells them he dropped spirits from his business long ago. He did at
one time dabble in high-end Scotch, he says, but then everyone got into it and he didn’t know enough about single malts to fend them off. This information is absorbed with polite but slightly nonplussed nods, and the men go back to talking about Bernie. When Dorothy signals Simon to join her, he’s left with a quiet couple and their daughter, the frizzy-haired woman who met them at the door. Her name is Sophie. Her parents are Bernie’s older brother, Nathan, who owns a hardware store in Regina, and Gloria, a kindergarten teacher. Sophie works in a feminist bookstore on Harbord Street. She begins a disquisition on the many perfidious uses to which alcohol has been put throughout the ages, the incalculable hours of work lost to drunkenness, the vast number of people killed each year in car accidents caused by impaired drivers, the countless women who have been abused and abandoned by drunkards. Has she heard that he and Bernie had two glasses of wine before Tuesday’s game? he wonders.

  “Have you known Bernie long?” Nathan asks him.

  “He was my accountant,” Harry says. “And we’ve been playing basketball together every week for years now. Simon, too.” He nods in Simon’s direction, suddenly realizing he doesn’t know Simon’s last name. Simon Says. “I didn’t know much about Bernie’s life off-court. He always talked about his family.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, I had the impression it was a close one. And big.”

  “Big, but scattered. We live in Regina. Our other brother, who isn’t here, is in Edmonton. And we have a sister who moved to Israel. We were never a close family. Bernie and I were estranged.”

  “But you’re here,” Harry says.

  “Death settles a lot of old scores,” Nathan says. “We hadn’t spoken in years.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Harry says. The word “estranged” makes him think of Daphne. Is that what they are?