White light, white masks, white sheets. Superhuman intensities burn in our eyes like life like light like need. Donald, look at me. Donald can you see? Tell me what you see. Can you see her yet? Is she breathing? Is it alright? Donald talk to me. Are you crying? Let me see. Let me see you. Look at me. She is ours. She is between you and me. Let me see your face, don’t turn away.
A miracle, unbidden. Then elation, post-catastrophe. The hurricane met and weathered. Aftermath. A giddy relief on wobbly knees carries you clear of the wrecked carnival ride, and the exhilaration leaves you undone. If only for an hour.
Few men, through millennia, had been admitted to this wilderness. Now we’re reserved a front-row seat beneath the arc lamps, just when the savage run of nature is elsewhere all but done. I’m no poet, certainly, but no words can capture a thing so raw. I am left fumbling with clichés. Madonna and child. Madeleine and child. Catherine Rose. Mop-head dolls. Catherine Rose. Hummingbird mobiles. Catherine Rose. Clichés.
Pietà.
I could have loved my wife again. We had a chance.
She loved me. It took a lot of things to make her stop, finally. The worst was watching me retreat from this new beachhead, back again to the arid safety of my own sea of tranquillity: stale and dead and drained. My airless desert of inner space. I called it making sense of things, getting my bearings, regaining perspective.
But in that delivery room, dazed and chastened, I swore on my daughter’s eyes, on Catherine’s eyes, no more infidelities. I will always be father to this child. I will do what it takes. I will keep her out of harm’s way. Something in me needed to promise Madeleine I would keep our child safe, though I know I can’t, have begun to fail. A whole lifetime of failing lies still ahead of me.
How will I protect her from here?
For the record: I did keep that first chastened oath. Though when news of the scandal broke, Madeleine wouldn’t let herself believe it. In body, at least, I was faithful. Though not in dreams, not in memories.
A view I miss is from the nursery. Catherine Rose.
This Mexican idea of time fills me with anguish tonight. With a terrible clarity I see my past, our present, Catherine’s future moving along different loops of the same fatal arc. Just enough variety in the details to obscure the pattern and—mercifully, most days—the path ahead. So supremely sure of having buried my own childhood, the sludge of its toxic waste, I see this thing, now—seeping up out of my past, staining her future …
Calgary Star, Friday, March 25th, 1995
QUIET FLEES THE DON
by Tarah Tinsell
… the daughter of one of this country’s finest heart surgeons still lies in intensive care at the Foothills Hospital. Yesterday crime reporter Vijay Seth covered the growing mystery surrounding the case.
And now surfacing in this affair is the name of a certain mainstay of our academic community, once voted in these pages one of Calgary’s ten sexiest men—one of those university dons widely available for in-depth consultations with certain of his students at any hour of the day or night.
Yes ladies, many of us alumnae know this man, having studied directly under him. Think ponytail, think twinkling blue eyes, think close-trimmed beard à la George Michael …
More on Monday.
In other society news, which avant-garde playwright with the initials B.B. showed up three sheets to the wind to speak at the Mayor’s charity fundraiser? …
JEWEL
LATELY, ABOUT ALL I CARE TO TAKE of the outside world is walking the dog. Each time I come up to stay, Relkoff lends me Jewel, a Blue Heeler pup. For company, he says, though I’m generally assured of company of another sort, were I to want it. To keep from trespassing, my media entourage has to stop at the property line, out of sight below the evergreens. Jewel and I like to walk the other way, over through the cottonwoods. She’s crouching outside the screen door now, her whole body trembling with play. Pausing, in the tirelessness that’s in her breed, to coax me out. One end of the stick is clasped lightly in her jaws to remind me she plays fetch perfectly, dropping the stick daintily each time at my feet. I have always liked dogs, had talked about getting one much like this for our Catherine when she was old enough to care for it. I may even have told this to Beulah.
I stand in the living room, at the bottom of the stairs leading up to the loft. On each side of the main window all the louvers are open though the main drapes are closed. The weather is good. You might swear it was summer but our hopes for May have changed. Spring comes earlier, stays longer, cedes more reluctantly. Summer rarely puts down roots before late July.
Today the fields to the east have a verdancy that is almost painful to see.
On the property’s northwest corner a stand of fir has been left as a windbreak. Just south of the house a fringe of leafless trees follows a creek bed. A small arbour of willow, apple, and European birch stands at the foot of what was once a substantial garden, now overgrown with wildflowers.
From somewhere out in the yard comes the three-toned ratcheting of magpies … ric-kric-rick. A little breeze sways through the cotton-woods, temptingly. Scents of apple blossoms, and sap like bitter wax. From branches bent low with overstuffed catkins, chutes of fluff billow on the wind. Not drifting like snow but pinwheeling weightless in the sun, like blizzards in gift-shop paperweights.
Jewel’s eager yelps dart at me through the flyscreen like the creaking of little springs.
Not just now, Jewel. A little later. Soon. I have a little work left to do.
By this point I had ample evidence that Beulah had been studying me so much more closely than I, her. She knew my tastes and my preferences, my work and my weaknesses, knew much more of my family life than I had ever intended, and things about my past unknown even to my wife. In notes, letters, poems, and in the work itself, I’d seen ample evidence she was baiting me, transmuting certain elements of our shared experiences, knowing I could not help but find touches of myself, of us, in those pages. This is what feeling people do. At first I assumed this was the main challenge, as she saw it—did she really think it would be so difficult for me to feel?
But at some point I could no longer ignore the possibility that the work had a whole other component—plotting, real-world actions. Leading up to the final night there was a lot of this other component. Heroic gestures, deft devices—witness the academic charges, the early press involvement. But after that night? What outcomes could she possibly anticipate, which of my decisions and responses? And what was bothering me more?—how she had counted on me once, or the ways in which she’d been counting on me since. Troubling to contemplate, it made the work into almost the opposite of what it had seemed: not to lose myself in the fiction but to find the fiction in me. In my life, my Lie, the game was to compare my tribulations, always of course in miniature, to those of a great figure, and to find within myself the qualities of a Hawkeye, a Faust, a great conqueror—not, as it were, to identify with Napoleon but the little Corsican with myself. Yes, this felt more like her, the dare, the trap: and agreeing to go along with it, well, this was just asking to be made quixotic, a figure of fun, a Don of the Woeful Figure. It was all but asking to be locked up.
Transcript
Action #: 9504–56893
Judicial District of Calgary
Proceedings
5 April 1995
I’ve heard quite enough. Dr. Gregory, I’ve given you considerable leeway. In connection with this matter, you have already compromised–and may well have forfeited–a prestigious and I’m sure altogether satisfying line of work. Your sexual and professional conduct have been held up to public scrutiny and even ridicule in the national media. You must be under a good deal of stress.
Nevertheless your testimony here today has been evasive and uncooperative in the extreme. I will be forwarding the transcript to the Solicitor-General’s office with instructions that it be examined for evidence of perjury.
At the Discovery last week, your attorney was to have broug
ht in this young woman’s journals, which you do not deny having in your possession. Why they’re in your possession is unclear to me. What’s more, it has come to my attention that these same journals were the subject of a warrant to search your home a few weeks ago.
I find this disturbing. What should have become clear to you by now, Dr. Gregory, is how much trouble you are in. You have just given dubious testimony, under oath, in a Civil proceeding; and I understand there may be criminal charges pending the outcome of a police investigation that you may very well be obstructing. Under normal circumstances I would not hesitate to find you in contempt on the basis of what I have heard today.
Instead, because of conduct that in the absence of anything like a reasonable explanation I can only find bizarre, I’m going to suggest to your counsel that you undergo a psychiatric examination–with a view to reassessing your defence strategy–and another for himself should he continue to work for you in the present circumstances.
I am giving you three days to bring this material forward. Three days to think about your rapidly deteriorating legal position.
No human being of good faith could look into the faces of this agonized family and not feel compassion. If your comportment here today was an attempt to protect someone, perhaps the girl herself, or to protect your own tattered reputation in this community, I suggest that you instead attempt to think about avoiding prosecution. Or about preparing yourself for it, if, when you next come before this court, your attitude has not changed….
DON JUAN
SUNRISE OVER THE PLAINS. The lights of Calgary in the distance. I need to pause for this, a celestial pageant that lifts me, however briefly, up from this place. I would not trade the mornings up here for any in the world. Is it only dust, high-altitude ice crystals? What lends the sunrises this quality that I find so stirring? Strokes of colour fanning out, a childlike reach—how high is the sky?
Shades as beautiful as their own names. Vermilion. Fuchsia. Carnelian. Crimson.
Rearing up before me a scallop shell of cloud—lambent hollows, inky fingers—high-spanned, arcing east to west, splitting like a fruit’s dark skin to reveal a fissured meat of light. Clumsy feet snagged in darkness, I turn to face west, where pressed hard against the western dark the sky distils its colour down from wine to Concord blue to greenish-black above the mountain battlements. Back in the east, a swirling forge of copper, brass—a seething diamondback of coals.
A day is made, but the human eye in its earthbound infancy perceives this red, primal rite as a crisis—of scale, orientation—a breech-birth of interstellar gases propelled up, projected onto still higher clouds of jet. And yet, from far below I can’t shake the impression of looking down, as if over a molten plain … liquid floes of lavender spill over it, fading like a blush.
Day.
Things were not always so cozy between me and Eric Heffner, LL.B. A day or two after the family filed suit to have Beulah’s papers returned, the tonus between client and lawyer was slightly charged. He had a musty smelling office on Kensington Road. Bad shag. A lot of pro bono work. The sort of place where one is grateful not to meet the other clients.
“Counsellor.”
“Sit down—and why didn’t you tell me about her papers? We were almost in the clear.”
“Wasn’t germane.”
“Germane. I’m sure you’ve got some reason to think hanging onto this girl’s personal effects is a noble act. No, no, I don’t wanna know. But I can guarantee you’re the only one who’s gonna see it that way. I see this civil suit bearing down on us like a fucking train. Germane. I mean, the press is already eating you alive, the headline writers are going wild. Quiet Flees the Don—this Don Juan thing is killing us.”
“She knew.”
“How’s that?”
“Don Juan—she knew.”
“She planned all this.”
“I’m saying she saw it would go this way.”
“Smart, pretty, psycho—and now psychic, too. You can pick ’em.”
“You’ve never met anyone like this.”
“I don’t know, I’m a lawyer, I meet interesting people. But okay you’re a university don—name’s Don, the press loves puns—let’s say it’s not beyond the realm of imagining. Now about these papers of hers.”
“I wasn’t expecting you to understand.”
“Oh. Well I can’t profess to understand her but I did get a look at this oracle of yours—”
“You saw her—why …?”
“It’s my job, I’m good at it. Good means thorough. You wanna know what I saw in that hospital?—a child, a beautiful child. Or what’s left of one—and that’s how everyone in the courtroom from judge to gallery will look at it. I take it at least you haven’t been to see her.”
“No.”
“So far it’s the one smart thing you’ve done.”
“I go to the lobby sometimes. I talk to a nurse there.”
“You what? Fuck. What does it take to get through to you—stay the hell away. If the family gets even a whiff of this—we’re talking about a top-drawer surgeon, here. Yeah well I don’t care what you see, Professor, the public sees a Great Healer. You seem to have no idea how deep you’re in. Forget the criminal charges for a sec. Start with this civil case—they can wipe you out.
“And then these other little items. Breach of a fiduciary duty—from the Old Court of Equity, pretty creative stuff their counsel’s digging up. And expensive. For them, for you. They’re angry, I get the message. I was surprised the judge found sufficient grounds to entertain an action in negligence. I don’t think she would’ve normally, but she smells a rat here and wants us to know it. If you haven’t stopped to think about your wife and child in all this—baby’s new trust fund, the house, the fat termination settlement I just worked my ass off to get you, your entire estate—I invite you to start….
“So I have your attention. Good. Their guy tells me the family will agree not to press the civil thing. All you have to do is just return the girl’s property—”
“Good of them.”
“It is good. If I were their lawyer I’d wanna go after you anyway. Every time we go in there I promise you it gets worse—what’s the deal with these papers? They’re an irritant, we’ve got bigger worries. Give them back.”
“Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
“About?—and no.”
“Why they’re so keen to get their hands on her diaries, for example.”
“I could give a shit—and why are you so keen that they shouldn’t have them? What is it you don’t want them to see? Call me out of touch, call me behind the curve, but I thought we had put this whole idea of academic theft to bed—this entire business of who maybe stole what from who. We’ve been over this, yes? Because if we haven’t laid it to rest, it speaks to motive. Have we, Doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Because I was beginning to wonder if I could believe you. This is not a good feeling for your lawyer to have. And it is precisely the feeling I did not want a judge to get. Which is why each unnecessary court appearance is so regrettable. But okay, say I’m really trying to understand now, I’m the least bit curious, I’m keen to know. Let’s say you’re protecting her. Why in Christ’s name would you be ready to throw everything away on that, after what she’s done to you?”
“What if I’m protecting myself?”
“Protecting yourself is exactly what you are not doing.”
“Protecting my sources then.”
“You think this is some kind of joke? It’s not a game, you’re not a journalist and this is not a stand on principle—if I’ve missed something, clue me in. You’re walking around in some kind of fog here. I’m not your therapist, I’m your lawyer and it’s my job now to wake you up. We’re not talking about saving your job, like before. You’re about to be crucified—did you know they’ve found at least one student willing to come forward and talk about a past relationship with you?”
“There are p
leasures I’ve never refused myself.”
“No, they’re going to say it’s professional privilege you’ve abused. If this witness decides to say you promised her better marks—”
“Something I’d never do.”
“No?”
“And Beulah wouldn’t have needed it.”
“Fine, great, good for her. But the damage’ll be done anyway. Listen to me. I took you on as a favour to Relkoff. And because I thought we could make things interesting, maybe win. Seems like open season in this country on you professor types lately. This civil thing, obstruction, perjury, okay—but the next stop is contempt. Not a damn thing I can do about contempt—bam, automatic.”
“So I’ve noticed.”
“You do drugs together?
“What?”
“Sexual stimulants maybe?”
“This would be your idea of a joke now.”
“No, literally, did you. I’m talking about the tox report, about the strangest recipe for a drug cocktail I’ve ever laid eyes on. If there’s the slightest hint you two have a history of this kind of activity … She’s half your age—it’ll be way worse than the sex. Christ if the judge gets to hating you right off the bat, it’d be almost better if you’d killed this girl. Sorry, just making a point.”
“And that is …”
“That unless you turn over those papers, I’d just be taking your money. I don’t mind losing, but I hate losing bad. Half these charges the cops threatened you with are chickenshit and they know it—breaking and entering—theft under! for Christ’s sake. So if everything happened that night the way you told me …”
“I told you the truth.”
“But you don’t know the whole truth yourself, do you? Or there’s something you’re not telling me about. Doctor Gregory, is there anything more I have to know? Abortions. Miscarriages—missed periods. Answer me carefully, now. Anything?”
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