Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  Just before he met Patricia, he’d been surprised to meet her at a party, grown-up suddenly, with long legs, ankle-strap platform shoes and Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes in an old ivory holder.

  “I had the biggest crush on you when I was a kid,” she said. “I wrote Mrs. Marion Adamson in the back of my social studies book.”

  She left no doubt that she’d got over her infatuation.

  They’d got re-acquainted when she came with Doc to have lunch with Vivian and Gerry, their last visit together. Gerry told her he’d been trading on having babysat Granny Porcupine.

  “But everything changes, young rodent,” she said, putting on Granny’s voice and screwing up her face. “Sure as acorns, everything changes.”

  Gerry blows the morning away, eating at a diner and driving aimlessly around town. He heads in-town, to his old neighbourhood. He hasn’t spent much time there since his mother moved into the home in what had once been the suburbs. He drives past his old house and notices that it’s got a couple of pretentious urns on the front porch. The paint has been updated to a fashionable cheddar-cheese shade. The old greens, browns and riverboat whites have yielded to the yuppie palette. On previous visits, he has offered to take his mother by the house to see it. She wasn’t interested.

  “I’ve moved and I’m settled and that’s all there is to it,” she’d said, and apparently that was that.

  The neighbourhood is full of four-way stop signs now and Gerry finds he drives through it not much quicker than he used to bicycle. He passes a horse chestnut tree, the ground under it littered with broken twigs and browning nut husks. A warning against climbing it had been read in his school when he was in third grade. He’s pleased it’s still attracting nut thieves fifty years on.

  Gerry drives to the hospital at lunchtime and finds that parking is not a problem on a Sunday. The lot is full but parking meters along the street are not in service. He parks his rental and takes himself to lunch in the hospital cafeteria. He decides he’s been overdoing The Jade Gate and diner breakfasts with home fries. He takes a bowl of soup, builds himself a salad plate and takes a pot of tea to a corner table. He has his Chinese notebook in his jacket pocket and pulls it out as he drinks his tea.

  The young nurses are wolfing down poutine, he writes and runs dry. He goes back through the line for another pot of tea and takes a sticky cinnamon bun as well.

  Upstairs on the ward, little seems to have changed since the day before. His mother has her eyes closed. Her breathing is noisy and laboured but regular. Her head is thrown back on the pillow. Her various support systems hum and gurgle.

  Chairs are at a premium in the room today. In the night, another bed has acquired an occupant, a little stick-figure woman. A fat blonde woman in a lemon jogging suit is feeding her custard from a Tupperware container.

  “Come on, Mom,” she says, over and over.

  A couple in matching green barn coats and Blundstone boots are visiting the big woman diagonally across the room. The man has grey, longish hair over his collar and heavy glasses. He says nothing. His wife has a scouring pad of grey curls and is upset with somebody.

  “The least they could have done was call,” she says at intervals. “It’s not like they had to come.”

  The woman who was moaning the first day Gerry arrived is quiet today. He sees that she’s the shrunken double of her visitor, an erect, white-haired little woman in a navy suit.

  “My sister,” she says, nodding politely to Gerry. “She had a stroke.”

  The visitors fill the room’s ordinary chairs and a complicated reclining wheelchair which appears to belong to the big woman. Gerry, feeling spry and virtuous after his salad, hoists himself onto the broad, low windowsill and leans against the sash. He can reach his mother’s hand on the bed. Her breath rasps regularly. Occasionally she twitches and mouths something like a distant shout.

  “Hey,” she breathes into the clear mask. “Hey.”

  The afternoon passes slowly. Gerry discovers yesterday’s crossword in his jacket pocket and tackles it again.

  In mid-afternoon, a couple of technicians wheel in an X-ray machine and he’s sent out while they pull the curtains and position his mother for their shots. By the time they go, the rest of the visitors are starting to leave as well. Gerry now has a chair to himself.

  Holding his mother’s hand, he feels its chill. He remembers somebody saying an elderly relative’s feet had been cold before he died. He reaches under the blankets and touches the dry, bony feet. They feel cold, but relative to what? He takes her hand again.

  The window by the bed looks out across the fields of the experimental farm across the road. Gerry watches the sky get darker blue, and then redden as the shadows lengthen. In the angles of the old hospital building it is already dusk. The room has a deepening gold-red glow. He doesn’t bother to turn on the light at the head of the bed. He sits and watches the dusk. He thinks that he’ll have nothing to report to Vivian again tonight.

  A sudden intake of his mother’s breath surprises him. It’s a gasp rather than the gurgle he’s become accustomed to. He looks at his mother. Her eyes are open. Her head lifts from the pillow. Then she relaxes. The noise from the oxygen apparatus is gone. There is no movement of bedclothes.

  Gerry places his knuckles to the side of her neck and feels nothing. He takes her wrist and feels for a pulse.

  Fingers on the wrist and not the thumb, or you’re taking your own pulse, he thinks, recalling some long-gone first-aid lecture. He feels nothing. He sits for a moment in the gathering twilight. He looks at the quiet forms in the other beds, gets slowly out of his chair and walks down the hall to the nursing station.

  The male nurse he met on the first day is on duty when he goes to the desk. He’s got his mauve sweater on. In the last day or so, Gerry has noticed that the sweater is there even when he’s not. Gerry has seen it hung on the back of an ergonomic chair.

  “Excuse me,” Gerry says. “I think my mother has just died. She’s Adamson, in thirty-twenty.”

  The nurse looks sceptical, as if amateurs might not know death when they see it. Still, he comes around the desk and follows him back to the room. He goes to the bed and places a hand on Gerry’s mother’s wrist.

  “Mrs. Adamson,” he says. Then, a little louder, he repeats, “Mrs. Adamson.”

  Gerry stands aside as the man plugs a stethoscope into his ears and moves it quickly from place to place, as though life might be hiding, playing hard to get. He gives a little sigh and straightens. His demeanour softens.

  “Yes,” he says. “I’m afraid you’re right. She’s gone. I’m very sorry.”

  “Thank you,” Gerry says. His eyes are prickly and he feels his lip tremble. The nurse shakes his hand and then draws the curtains around their quarter of the room.

  “Are you all right?” he asks. “It’s always a shock, I know, even when it’s expected. I know. My mom died two years ago. She was just seventy-five.”

  “No. No, I’m fine,” Gerry says. He feels he’s looking down from some vantage point on himself and the nurse having this conversation. “She was ninety-six. It’s not unexpected.”

  The plump nurse is efficient. He explains how the body will be held and released to the undertaker. He says “funeral director.”

  “Do you want her rings?” he asks.

  “The engagement ring, I guess,” Gerry says. “I think we’ll leave her wedding band with her.”

  “I think that’s a nice idea,” says the nurse and manages to get the engagement ring over the arthritic, swollen knuckle with less difficulty than Gerry would have imagined possible. He wraps the ring in tissue and tucks it in the pocket of his wallet where he normally stashes lottery tickets. The nurse assures him that the hospital will handle all the details and bustles away. Gerry stands alone inside the curtain by the bed for a minute. He finds he’s holding his mother’s hand again. He bends, kisses her forehead and goes down the hall and calls Vivian.

  Vivian picks up on the
second ring. “How are you?”

  “Okay, I guess, sport, but the old lady’s gone. She died about fifteen minutes ago. She just faded out with the sunset.” Gerry’s eyes prickle again. He hears a sniff from Vivian. Vivian is kind-hearted.

  “I’m sorry, Gerry.”

  “I know, sport.”

  “So I guess I’d better come up,” Vivian says. “I’ll book tonight.”

  “Call Krista at the travel agent’s. I told her you might need to travel in a hurry. She gave me her cell number. I left it on the pad on the fridge.” Gerry is starting to feel efficient, glad to be doing something.

  “Okay. I’ll call you at Doc’s later on and tell you how I get on,” Viv says. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Yeah, kid, I’m fine. Call me later,” Gerry says. “Love you.”

  Going down the elevator, Gerry feels strangely light-headed. He has rehearsed his mother’s death in his head hundreds of times. He has braced himself on flights up from Newfoundland a couple of times for false alarms. The reality has been so much simpler than anything he’d imagined that he feels unreal, floating.

  Shock, he thinks. Give warm sweet liquids. You’re getting old. Go sit and have a cup of tea and make sure you’re not going to have some kind of anxiety attack trying to drive.

  He goes to the hospital cafeteria, buys a mug of tea and dumps two envelopes of sugar in it. He sits and drinks it, watching himself for shakes. Nothing happens. He wonders what should happen. A ninety-six-year epoch has passed. A chapter of his life, nearly sixty years long has closed. A guilty thought insinuates itself that he feels lighter, the way he used to when he left the retirement home at the end of a long visit. Whatever he does or doesn’t do with his life now, there’s one less person to answer to. He hikes his jacket collar up under his ears and walks briskly out of the hospital. He collects the rental car and drives slowly back to Doc’s.

  Mort is at Doc’s when Gerry arrives. He and Doc are leaned back in overstuffed chairs, drinking Doc’s homemade beer.

  “How’s the hospital?”

  “It’s all over. She just slipped away. I was sitting there and she just stopped.”

  “Oh shit, Gerry, I’m sorry,” says Doc.

  “Yeah. That’s tough. Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I mean she just stopped. No fuss really. She wasn’t a fussy sort of person, I guess. At least I was there. That’s about all you can say.”

  “Yeah, that’s something.”

  Mort and Doc sit and talk quietly while Gerry takes the phone to the table in the kitchen part of the loft. He’s filled pages of his notebook with the family numbers. He sits down and starts punching numbers, passing the word.

  Telling the bees, he thinks. I read somewhere that that’s an old Irish custom. Go around to the hives and tell them so and so is gone. Hey bees, Katherine Florence Adamson is dead. She hated “Florence” or “Flo.” She said it was a name for a cow. Dad always called her Kit.

  It all takes a surprisingly short time. Some people volunteer to call other people. Some people aren’t home and he leaves his short message on their answering machines. Duane and Gretchen are among the not-at-homes. They go to evening church. He calls his friend Bob, his mother’s lawyer.

  “Oh gosh, Gerry, that’s a shame,” Bob says. Bob is one of the very few people Gerry knows who say “gosh.” “Land o’ Goshen” floats into his head, but he can’t remember if he ever heard anybody say it for real or if it came from a hillbilly movie. Bob says the paperwork should be straightforward. He’ll get started on it. They agree to get together.

  By eight o’clock he has finished. Vivian rings from St. John’s to say she’s booked a flight. She’ll get in the next night about nine-thirty.

  “I’m going to Toronto first and then coming back to Ottawa,” she says. “Isn’t that weird? They say it’s an hour quicker than going by Halifax.”

  “The new geography,” Gerry says. “I’ll be there to meet you. I miss you.”

  He wonders as he says it if he’s assuring her or himself. When he’s away from Vivian, he finds he wants to call, but he’s also guiltily glad to hang up.

  When Gerry gets off the phone, he pours himself a mineral water and joins Doc and Mort.

  “Is anybody hungry?” Doc asks.

  Gerry realizes that he is...ravenously hungry. The hospital soup and salad didn’t last. It seems days since he ate. He wonders if this is why some people binge-eat in times of stress.

  Bullshit. I’m just hungry. Stop looking for symptoms.

  They drive downtown to a pizza joint, legendary for the cheesiness of its pizzas. They wind up ordering a medium to back up their original large pizza. Doc complains about the general sleaziness of garage-door opener fittings. Mort provides amusing backroom political gossip. Gerry feeds his face and feels strangely light.

  It’s a crisp Monday morning and Gerry is busy on the phone again. He starts off with Bob. Bob is earning his money as family lawyer. He says he has the file on his desk when Gerry calls.

  “It’s just the way I remember it,” Bob says. “Nothing complicated. You’re the sole heir, so do what you like with the stuff in her room. Make any arrangements you want and send the bills to me.”

  “You guys have the deed for the cemetery plot?”

  “Do I ever. It’s a little leather-covered book that would cost you a small car to produce now. A family plot for eight in Cedar Glen Cemetery, sold to Samuel Donald Adamson in June 1935. That’s your grandfather, right?”

  “That’s him. I never met him. He was the first tenant in ’38.”

  “I bet those Cedar Glen guys thought they were smart, selling off un-farmable land as burial plots,” Bob says. “God, if they’d held onto that land until the suburbs caught up in the ’50s, they’d have made a killing. Can you imagine what that great big island of trees and dead people is worth now?”

  “Anyway, we’ve got a spot on that island?”

  “Damn right. I’ll call and tell the funeral home to call Cedar Glen and they open the grave. We do it all the time. No sweat.”

  Gerry makes an appointment with the funeral home for that afternoon. He calls the nursing home and tells them his mother is dead. They say they’ll lock the room until he and Vivian can come and sort things out.

  “There’s no rush. The rent is paid for a month.”

  Then he calls his usual time-warp motel to get a room for Vivian and him. He tells the clerk he’ll check in around noon. He spends the rest of the morning doing his little bit of packing, drinking coffee and playing Space Rocks on Doc’s computer. He finally manages a score that’s recordable in the top ten. He checks into the motel at a quarter to twelve, dumps his luggage in the room and goes to a mall for lunch. The food court at this mall offers Greek. He dines on a kebab platter and watches people. He has his notebook out, partially to check his to-do list and partially to try to write something.

  Everyone looks familiar, he writes. But nobody is.

  Underhill Funeral Directors have been around as long as Gerry can remember.

  Underhill, under valley, underground, let us bury you. Gerry remembers the jokes from public school. We’re the last people to let you down. What we undertake we carry out. There was even a joke song: Under hill, under dale, we are happy when you’re pale and the hearses go rolling along...

  The funeral home looks much churchier than most churches do these days. It’s grey stone with wrought-iron lanterns outside and high, arched windows with leaded glass. The chapel is 1920s Gothic. Only a discreet sign and the row of soberly painted garage doors for hearses and limousines betray that this is a business.

  Gerry is met by an actual Underhill. He’s the latest generation in the business, a man in his early thirties, with buzz-cut hair slightly at odds with the dark jacket, waistcoat and striped trousers. Underhill’s is defiantly old-fashioned. His first name is Frank.

  They sit in an office like a high-tech monk’s cell while they work out the announcement. When it comes
to the “leaving to mourn” part, Gerry realizes he’s either going to have to do all sorts of homework or get his ducks in a row. They settle on him and Vivian “and family in St. John’s,” his Aunt Carmen “and husband Charles, Ottawa, and a large circle of relatives and friends.” The hospital staff is remembered by ward number and there’s a thank-you to the people at the nursing home.

  Frank is good at what he does. He tells Gerry that Bob has been on the phone and the family plot is being opened. He calls the minister at the church that Gerry’s mother hasn’t attended in nearly two decades, sets a funeral date for the day after tomorrow and arranges a meeting for Gerry and the clergyman. They agree that Vivian will pick out clothes for his mother tomorrow and Gerry will drop them off. Then it’s time to select a casket.

  The display coffins are kept behind a locked door.

  Do people steal them? Gerry wonders. Hey buddy, want a real deal on a hot box?

  Frank stops him for a moment at the door.

  “Some people find this upsetting.”

  “I’m fine,” Gerry says. “It’s really sort of looking at furniture, isn’t it?”

  Looking at furniture is exactly what it is and Gerry has never been very good at it. The selection ranges from a white pine box that reminds him of a magazine rack he made in seventh grade to shiny metal, mobster specials. Underhill’s starchy haute wasp-ness slips in the casket department.