Seizing my arm firmly, but smiling patiently, he said, "You don't understand. If you want me to save my life, that's very nice of you. I appreciate it and I thank you very much. But you've got to let me save it my way."
I tore my arm away. "I know what you're up to," I said, "but you're not going to pin this on me—"
"Pin what? What're you talking about?"
"I'm wise to your little game. You want me to feel guilty about all this, don't you? Look at dear old Dad, everyone—standing there in that lousy basement gift-wrapping all those precious goodies for his little boy to inherit someday, and look at his little boy sitting in the meantime on his ass on the Riviera, sunning himself. I get the whole picture. It's the old Frederic Chopin routine again."
"Frederic who?"
"Chopin. In that movie A Song to Remember? He's supposed to be dying of t.b. but he insists on playing one last concert to raise money for Polish freedom. They even show him coughing blood all over the goddam keyboard. But good old Fred keeps right on playing to the very last drop, and at the end of the number—when he gets up from the piano—he makes a point of falling on his ass so the whole of Poland will feel good and guilty. And that's exactly what you're doing now—leaving me a basement full of guilt!"
"I thought you said a minute ago you weren't going to let me pin my sickness on you."
"That's right, I'm not going to accept any guilt in this matter."
"Then what the hell are you worried about?"
"I'm worried that you're going to die and neither of us will really have understood each other. Yes, I suppose that's it. I simply cannot understand any man whose priorities in this world are so screwed up."
"And I can't understand any man who doesn't have the slightest idea of what it means to have things, to own things, to start with nothing and end with something, to buy, pay off mortgages, to say this is mine and some day it'll be my son's. You don't understand me, and I don't understand you. But that's alright with me. You don't have to understand me. Just live your life and remember me. I don't give a damn how; you can light a candle once a year, blow your car horn, turn on the furnace, any way you want is okay by me. To remember is necessary; to understand isn't."
Later that day the plane carrying me back to Toronto flew along the shoreline of the St. Mary's River before veering southeast toward Lake Huron. In the distance to my left I could just barely make out the intersection of Queen and Bruce Streets and—a little to the east of it—my father's building. At that very moment I knew that he was in the bedroom I had occupied the night before. I saw him smoothing the creases in the bedspread, puffing the pillow where my head had left an indentation, picking up bits of lint from the rug where I had stood, running a finger along the bureau where I'd spilled some talc. Each lamp was being repositioned to within a fraction of an inch of where it had stood prior to my arrival. Each picture on the wall was rearranged dead level with the floor.
I had checked out of his house for the last time.
Within a year of the local Fire inspector's report, my father was dead of cancer. And these are what he left me: a basement full of "things"; many puzzles (some of which I have managed to solve and some of which I haven't); and—every day, every night—car horns blowing, furnaces turning on, and candles burning in my mind.
A Good Place to Come From Page 17