It used to be a quadrilateral. Erica was living then with this guy, Peter Stone, unhappily it turned out, for Peter had become increasingly critical over the years. She told me this on a later occasion (I started picking Richie up regularly), the time she came with us to the high school where I take Richie to shoot baskets. She would only see me if Richie was there, because she was still with Peter. I resented Richie for this condition, as well as his taunting cumulus of brown curls. (Is there a more distancing wedge that can be driven between two brothers than one balding while the other prodigiously keeps his hair?) That was five years ago. Erica’s layup: three balletic leaps, an arabesque, the ball soaring in an arc and missing.
Erica offers Richie the Twizzlers. “He’s going to be all right.”
“I like Nibs.”
My mother hisses at me, “He might well lose his leg. He has gangrene.”
I’m confused now.
“It wasn’t a stroke. He blacked out.”
Insulin shock.
“No,” she tells me, because she probably thought the same thing. “Now they say he has an ulcerated foot. The bone’s infected. He’s been walking around for God knows how long with a tack stuck in his heel.”
She looks so old without her makeup. I can’t imagine her leaving the house without her face; probably the crisis washed it off. Her bob is grey, her complexion grey. Around her lined neck are her pearls. She’s like an opened oyster, vulnerable, yet sympathy recoils from her. “Go and talk to him,” she says.
“Where is he?”
“Second door on the right.”
My father is going to live. Erica may have turned the ringer off, but I listened to all the hospital dispatches. That being the case, I could have not come. The last time I saw my father I vowed never to speak to him again.
“He did ask me to come, right?”
My mother glances at my knees. “It’s winter, Lachlan. I wish you would wear long pants.”
A private room, naturally. Beside the door, scrawled on a strip of cardboard and slid into a clear plastic track, is our name, the “Mr. Justice” dropped. I knock and, receiving no reply, nudge the door. The sight of him in a bed instead of behind a desk or at the head of the dinner table, in a straining hospital gown instead of suit-and-tied, is nothing short of shocking.
“Hey.”
Slowly, he turns. He uses two handleless brushes on his hair. When I was a boy I used to sit on the edge of the tub and, in awe, watch him curry himself, both sides simultaneously. Now, sticky with Brylcreem, his hair stands on end, grey. Surgical tape spans the bridge of his nose, dotted in the centre an ignominious red. His dewlap sags.
“How are you feeling?”
He stares, the way he does when he considers a question too imbecilic to warrant a reply. To evade his terrible eye, I look around for a chair. It’s right there. I sit and, still seeking refuge, scan the rest of the room. There’s a window, the ledge bare. No one has sent flowers. Surely his cronies at the Court of Appeal could pitch in for a fruit basket. Yet I, his first-born son, have been equally remiss. My father is not a man who inspires the giving of gifts.
I try again at conversation. “What happened?”
He releases me to stare at the blank wall beyond the end of the bed. “Your mother told you all about it, I’m sure.”
“She said something about a tack.”
“She’s trying to make me look like a fool.”
“She’s not. Didn’t you feel it?”
“I heard it. I didn’t know what the hell it was.”
He works his mouth as though his tongue is restless. I wait for him to say something else. He doesn’t. I wait for him to mention our argument a few days ago. To get it off his chest. He doesn’t. I even wait for his usual barb, “How’s Canada Post treating you?” The sounds of the hospital—cart rattlings, elevator pings—insinuate themselves. I hear his laboured respiration.
“Do you need anything?” I break down and ask.
“No.”
“Mother and Richie are in the waiting room. Do you want me to tell them to come in?”
“Tell them to go home.”
I’m so angry when I leave, I nearly punch the wall.
He never asked for me at all.
Four days later, my mother phones and asks us to come over. “You don’t have to,” I tell Erica, but uncomplaining, she accompanies me to Connaught Drive. She does it for Richie.
My mother is house-proud in the extreme. Not only does she not want anything dirtied or damaged, she wants the people who come into her home to match the decor. She doesn’t approve of Erica’s thrift-store style yet always has a ready compliment, thereby tainting everything she says with insincerity. Erica is from Saskatchewan. I think she reminds my mother that she hasn’t always lived on Connaught Drive.
For our wedding four years ago Erica’s mother sewed her a simple, pale blue dress. My mother took me aside after seeing it on a hanger. “No,” she said.
“Her mother made it.”
“It only goes to the knee.”
“She doesn’t want a long dress. That’s not her.”
“She doesn’t shave, Lachlan.” She gave me a cheque for three thousand dollars that she’d got my father to write. “You’ve got eighteen days.” Already she’d declared that the wedding would be in a church, Holy Rosary Cathedral no less. Potluck? She’d shuddered. She invited two hundred people. We invited twenty.
At Value Village we picked out the most outrageous dress. It had dirigible sleeves and a yellow tag and as it happened to be a yellow day, we got forty percent off the thirty-five dollars. We had it dry cleaned and altered and no one guessed it had already been in the embrace of hundreds of well-wishing Greeks. Erica gleefully donated the balance of my father’s money to various left-wing charities.
I worried about how Erica would get along with my mother after this, though I needn’t have. My mother’s devotion to Richie redeems her in Erica’s eyes. Erica spends her working days in the company of the “mentally challenged.” In her view her clients actually have more sense than the average person because they are trained to think through the consequences of their behaviour, to consider others as well as themselves, to be moral, while the rest of us, receiving no such instruction, act out of self-interest most of the time. She expects intelligent people to behave stupidly. It’s not like her to hold a grudge either. She even invited her old boyfriend to the wedding, the same Peter Stone who used to ridicule her for taking the trouble to put toilet-paper tubes in the recycling and who once inflicted on her the indignity of gonorrhea.
When we arrive, Richie answers the door. He wants Erica to watch a video with him. “It’s The Greatest Story Ever Told!”
“Is it? What’s it about?”
“Jesus.”
If Erica had made the movie this would be the story-line: a man and a woman go for a walk around the block pushing a baby carriage.
“Go watch your show, Richie,” my mother tells him.
Erica says, “I don’t mind.”
“No. I want you to hear this too.”
Erica and I wait in the living room while my mother prepares the drinks. Every few years she has the sofa and chairs reupholstered; she moves things around. I can never quite put my finger on what’s different. Some of the furniture came with the house, the billiard table for example, which the house was built around. A portrait of my father looking severe and judgmental in his robes hangs above the fireplace. Down the hall, the video starts up mid-score just as my mother carries in the tray.
“That’s a pretty scarf.” She hands Erica her soda water. “Please. A coaster. Pass her one, Lachlan.” She leans back in the armchair that used to be another colour and, fingering her pearls, sighs. “The leg’s coming off tomorrow.”
“They warned you that would probably happen.”
“There’s a fifty percent chance he’ll lose the other leg within five years. But that’s not why I asked you to come.”
“What’s go
ing on?”
“He’s stepped down.”
A cough explodes from Erica. “A coaster!” my mother practically shouts when Erica sets down her drink.
Bent forward hacking, Erica manages to shove the disc under the glass. “Sorry,” she says, slapping her chest. “You said the leg was coming off, then that he—” She giggles. “—stepped down.”
“From the bench,” my mother says coldly.
“I understand. It just sounded funny.”
“He’s retiring.” She turns to me, imploring. “What am I going to do?”
“He’s sixty-eight. It’s time.”
“I can’t have him home all day long, Lachlan! What do you think life around here is going to be like for us? He’s not going to change.”
He’s not going to change. This is what we think. Neither can we conceive of our own lives being different. Everything we do has always been in relation to him.
Erica looks up and smiles at Richie filling the entire doorway. “What is it?” my mother snaps.
“My favourite part is coming up.”
Erica makes her escape. As soon as she’s out of the room, my mother leans forward in her chair. “What was it you spoke to your father about that night, Lachlan? You fought. Tell me what it was about.”
The circumstances of my mother’s life—looking after a son who, like in some Lewis Carroll nightmare, grows and grows while remaining perpetually six; serving (for that is what she does, thanklessly) my father, a difficult man to say the least—have forced her to seek refuge in faith. She’s a daily communicant. Even if she were the kind of mother a grown son confides in, given the Church’s stand, how could I tell her what had happened?
Before Erica and I got married we discussed having children. Erica wanted them, but wasn’t in any hurry. “Let’s just stop with the pill and see what happens.”
What happened was she woke one night in agony. It was an ectopic pregnancy and Erica lost her tube on the left side. Then she got serious. She got us organized. Charts went up. First thing every morning she fellated the thermometer. She slowly drew apart a thumb and forefinger moistened with vaginal secretions, hoping for that wondrous string, clear and elastic, that signals ovulation. I had to stay in bed just in case. Lying there, I thought of my father’s most scathing verdict: Richie and I were useless. For the first time in my life I felt essential.
Eight months later Erica underwent a procedure to flush her reproductive organs with dye. We saw for ourselves on the X-ray the clot of scars that blocked the remaining tube.
And so we went to see my father in his chambers downtown. At the Court Registry, I explained that I was the judge’s son and shouldn’t require an appointment. The clerk rang my father. “Your son. Yes. He says he’s your son.” She cupped a hand over the receiver. “What did you say your name was?”
Twenty minutes later a uniformed sheriff came to escort us up. He was armed.
My father takes great pride in the fact that he’s “self-made.” He might have stayed in Alberta; he was expected to take over the ranch. Instead he put himself through university by working in the oil patch during the summer. In the fifties, after graduating from law school, he married my mother and brought her to the coast where he’d joined a firm. My mother didn’t want the nice new house in West Vancouver he offered to build her, but the one the realtor had shown them in Shaughnessy, subdivided during the war and allowed to fall to near ruin. There was a tree growing up through the foundation, bursting into leaf in the billiard room. While my mother pretends to be an English Lady, my father considers himself superior to his neighbours because hard work brought him to Connaught Drive, not privilege. He means his Caucasian neighbours. He feels superior to his Chinese neighbours for other reasons.
“I’m in court in an hour,” he told us as we came in. “Couldn’t you have come to see me at the house?”
“Not with Mother there.” I took the chair on the other side of the massive desk. Erica stood with her back to us, pretending to examine the provincial crest.
I’d never asked him for money before. He’d paid for my undergraduate degree and would’ve paid for law school too, as well as helped me set up a practice. I’d known this my whole life, but had forfeited it. “We need a loan.”
“What? Your good union wage isn’t enough?”
“Ten thousand. Not all at once.”
“What for?”
I told him about the ectopic pregnancy, our subsequent difficulties, the private clinic where we hoped to have the treatments. It had cost two hundred dollars just to attend an information session. We were still paying for the new vapour barrier in the condo. Erica has a student loan. He stared at his hands folded on the desk as he listened. I’ve never seen him in court but imagine that this is the pose he strikes on the bench.
His sole question: “What do you want children for?”
Erica held her tongue until the sheriff had escorted us back out. “That was the cruellest thing I have ever heard anyone say. How could he say that to his own child? He wishes he’d never had you? It’s bad enough how he treats you and Richie, but to say that to your face. Oh, my God!”
I wasn’t offended. He’d said far worse. What struck me was the way he met my eye to ask me. I realized he hadn’t actually looked at me in years. Or I hadn’t looked at him.
“Do you ever imagine your funeral,” Erica went on, crimson in my defence, “and wonder who’ll come and what they’ll say? When your father dies no one will even cry.”
I thought of Erica’s funeral, pews overflowing with the bobbing and drooling lives she’s touched. I could afford to laugh. He’d written us a cheque.
My father’s left leg is amputated just below the knee. Because of the danger of complications he’s kept in the hospital until his transfer to the rehabilitation centre. When this happens, my mother presents me with a cellphone.
“It’s to carry while you’re at work. So I’ll be able to get a hold of you.”
“No,” I tell her.
“Please. I’ll only use it in case of emergency.”
I don’t believe she’s capable of such restraint, but to her credit, my mother abides by the rules. She and Richie go to see my father every day. She waits until evening to call me at home and report his condition.
For years my route has been in Kerrisdale, the neighbourhood to the west of Shaughnessy, where I grew up. Like Shaughnessy, it’s affluent. The streets are pretty and tree-lined, with many of the original stucco and shingle houses. This makes Kerrisdale an unusual neighbourhood in a city with a propensity for destroying and remaking itself. Because I grew up in an old house, and because I live now in Fairview Slopes where in the eighties virtually all of the original homes were demolished and replaced with leaky condos, I feel protective of the houses that remain. It’s the houses I deliver the mail to, not the people, whom I hardly ever see. It’s happening here too now. The dismay I feel climbing the steps to an Arts and Crafts bungalow, depositing The New Yorker and the Architectural Digest in the box, then turning and glimpsing from the corner of my eye an orange fence halfway down the block. Did I process a Change of Address? This was when I might have taken warning.
The cellphone rings and I answer to sobbing.
“He says he won’t come home!”
It’s my mother.
“Has he been discharged?”
“Ever! He says he’s not coming back. He says he’s going to move to Bowen. Go and talk to him. Please! I think he’s lost his mind.”
I stand on the sidewalk staring at a massive crater in the ground. A meteor might have crashed here, precisely in the centre of the lot. For the life of me I can’t recall the vanished house.
I don’t actually speak to my father when I go to see him in rehab that afternoon. He’s not in his room. There’s a plant on the sill (brought by my mother, no doubt) and his insulin kit on the bedside table. Pamphlets: Choosing Your Prostheses, Wrapping Your Residual Limb. A nurse stops in the doorway to tell me my fat
her has just gone for physio. “Drop in,” she says. “Cheer him on.”
I find the room. My father, barely contained by the wheelchair, has his broad back to the open door. His hair is longer than I’ve ever seen it and, spared the sight of his meaty nape, I have to look twice to recognize him. The physio, a middle-aged, pearshaped woman in a track suit, asks questions off a clipboard. “How’s the pain today, Gerry?”
Gerry?
I freeze in the doorway. My father the judge, Gerry? I can’t make out his reply. I doubt he condescends to offer one. He must be staring at her, the way he stares at store clerks who have the temerity to ask, “How are you today?” The way he stares at us. The oblivious physio tosses the clipboard on the desk behind her and, smiling witlessly, holds out her arms for her comeuppance. My father fumbles for the crutches that are leaning against the wall. When he has succeeded in hoisting himself out of the chair, he pauses to rest. My sense of foreboding mounts. As soon as he gets within a crutch’s length of her, he’s going to let her know just who isn’t Gerry. I don’t think I can bear to watch.
“Wonderful, Gerry. That’s just great.”
My father takes a step.
“Beautiful!”
With his every lurch forward, the physio takes a step back. Nothing else happens. I’m confused for the moment it takes me to recognize what is actually going on. Erica too is in a helping profession. She treats my brother Richie, who was once partially in her care, with this same seemingly selfless loving-kindness. “Gerry” responds as Richie does with Erica, eager to please, to reciprocate, crutching toward the open-armed physio. He’s wearing a navy pullover and, now that the wheelchair no longer blocks my view, I see the incongruity of pale blue cotton hospital pants. On the right side, his thick black-socked ankle rides in the huge boat of his slipper. I’m completely unprepared for the empty space between the hem of the left pant leg and the floor, the nothingness. I stare as though at the desecrated statue of a deposed tyrant, as though I am seeing through some part of him. I can hardly believe that some piece of my monumental father is missing.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 11