Charity Read online

  Also by Keath Fraser

  fiction

  Taking Cover

  Foreign Affairs

  Popular Anatomy

  Telling My Love Lies

  13 Ways of Listening to a Stranger

  Damages: Selected Stories, 1982-2012

  non-fiction

  As for Me and My Body: A Memoir of Sinclair Ross

  The Voice Gallery: Travels with a Glass Throat

  anthologies

  Bad Trips

  Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travels

  1

  it seemed as unlikely as the venerable Shakespeare actor once dating a Supreme. Never having heard of him Greta was certain she had heard one or two Supremes songs. “Baby love, my baby love . . .” Teasing us, she laughed in her unruly way. “Is that the one?” I felt it better to say nothing more in case idle talk increased her willful attraction to this man four times her age and half her weight. If they were more than friends, neither Patrick nor I really wanted to know. A liaison like theirs might be plausible in a celebrity world of relaxed shack-ups, but to us it felt ridiculous.

  “He’s peacocking!” said Patrick.

  We liked Rudy, it wasn’t that we didn’t. Even my parents had enjoyed his company, and we trusted him once to babysit Greta when our regular sitter had had a conflict. He melted her cheese bagel and dusted the den. At musical chairs she’d made him lift the needle off Baby Beluga so many times he cricked his wrist. He waggled it, that evening upon our return, punctuating his account of their time together getting acquainted. Like a house on fire? Stop, I didn’t ask. Before bed came Princess Mouseskin—but he confessed she hadn’t settled until they played Chinese checkers on her pillow. Although younger, two decades ago, our old family friend was already balding and recently into a comfortable retirement.

  So no, it was not his lack of trustworthiness, at least not quite. I was puzzled the next morning by what I found on Greta’s bedspread. His effect on her felt coincidental. Yet imagining him now, bobbing up and down atop our daughter, who would be unable to stop laughing at his effeteness, discomfited us. Having to toilet him before she was thirty could well turn her compulsive laughter manic. She loved long swims, so it seemed grotesque to contemplate for her an abridged future of pre-palliative care. Patrick confided to me, and I wished he hadn’t, it would be like mating the family’s pet goat to a rubber raft. Shamefully then, every time Rudy arrived that summer to take her chopping carrots—once our front door closed, and we watched him in the driveway ushering her regally into his Nash Metropolitan, we fell apart on the floor.

  Howling?

  We could as well have wept.

  “Vintage slapstick,” said Patrick. “He and that puddle-jumper!”

  Her fullback bulk she inherited from her father. Until she turned nine, I had cooked leanly for them both, after which, when they wouldn’t suspend their taco top-ups before bed, I gave in to more lamb roasts than were good for either. By fourteen she was approximately half her father’s weight, and by nineteen all of it. By twenty I turned to Pacific cod and deluxe veggie burgers, too late to reconstitute her chronic hunger. I knew she was compensating on campus with oriental fare—just not of the Japanese variety. Pork, I guessed, not tuna—thick Shanghai noodles instead of sushi. Patrick had her tested for diabetes and an underactive thyroid, prescribed a statin for cholesterol, and made a valid attempt to put things right by yielding to a better regimen himself. He was unable to resist the snacks his clinic should not have provided its staff, but did, continuing to measure his own size between Important and Severe on the Body Mass Index, and so proving a poor model for the younger doctors, their patients, his own daughter.

  Greta herself wondered about bariatric surgery to reduce the capacity of her abounding belly. Patrick poo-pooed this and checked her further for sleep apnea and atrial fibrillation.

  A perfectionist about everything but her weight, she was sailing through college as she had through high school. Academically, that is. There she enjoyed snap quizzes as much as cryptic puzzles in the Globe. Do No Harm was the guiding motto of her current faculty, and if a challenging headwind blew up in her ethics course, her debating style was pointed and not always tactful. One evening over dinner at Pastis, she put it to us: “When could eliminating sodium chloride—you know, completely, from the food you serve—be called an act of love?”

  “At McDonald’s,” said Patrick, “definitely.”

  She looked serious.

  “Go on, sweetie.”

  He knew, from listening to patients, that it was sounder to establish a baseline than to answer any query too soon. A case history required forbearance, especially in ethical riddles of the heart, which Patrick was convinced this was, and not a practical question about blood pressure. Margaret claimed it was an interesting conundrum to imagine the consequences in a world of older men like Kim.

  “Rudy?” I said.

  “His taste buds,” she explained, “have withered enough. Rudy’s, yes. He looks like hunger on the heath.”

  Our Greta enjoyed her own sideshows. She was not the least ashamed of wearing activewear for plus-size people. It Might Be Wise / To Accessorize. She herself would never have followed such chalkboard advice from a clothing shop we’d just walked past, one with svelte cubbyholes instead of counters for belts and scarves to pair with garb far daintier than hers. Her haircut looked like a boy’s. She appreciated the athletic vigour of boys without ever attracting much male, or, for that matter, female desire. Whether she was as confident of her body as she appeared was moot. She was buttering a breadstick and burst into laughter. Our waiter hovered before being allowed to get in a word about his rabbit.

  “I’m assuming,” she went on importantly, “my word ‘eliminating’ refers here to the entire loss of salt, and not to an equivocal demise favoured by academics like my ethics prof. He’s a bit of a joke. Hands-behind-his-head type.” Relaxing into her assessment of his complacency. “He isn’t hired to conjure hypotheticals that the real, afflicted world isn’t likely to test or understand.”

  “Then I would have thought,” said Patrick, “he was hired for the right reason.”

  I thought her hoot sounded unnecessarily aggressive. “. . . Maybe. But maybe the real world needs to be tested a little more capriciously?” She had avoided boring us, she said, with any of their predictable class debates about blood transfusions and assisted dying. Those “obvious, enlightened storylines” didn’t offer much meat for debate. She’d conjured up this one herself to afford a more interesting exchange with her “enlightened, progressive ‘parentals’.” Like her father she enjoyed making outlandish equivalences—in this case, love and salt. But to us “parental units” her equivalence sounded a bit nonsensical. I couldn’t help but think, having contrived to yoke herself to Rudy, she was challenging us to resolve our objection to a relationship that made little sense in the real world.

  “A peculiar proposition,” Patrick later agreed. Allowing, however, that in the real world of affliction—“Isn’t that what she called it?”— their seeming friendship might enjoy a kind of logic.

  Really?

  Rudy threatened to step it up a notch, by taking her to a film.

  Already, every Sunday afternoon, he was escorting her to the Living Room on Powell Street, a charitable act to help feed mentally challenged, often homeless men and women, inside a dedicated storefront of communal tables and an institutional kitchen. We could understand the rationale in this. Who could gainsay his generosity of spirit? Except you sensed his social responsibility wasn’t going to exclude its irresponsibility should Greta’s goodwill happen to connive with it when it came to changing his (inevitable)
Depends and spoiling her future. “Are we maybe not getting ahead of ourselves?” ventured Patrick. (The same man who had recently floated the goat and raft equivalency!) Possibly we were, although it wasn’t my conceit of the Old Vic actor and his pop singer that concerned me here. In that theatrical world, reliant on glamour and illusion, a couple convinces us of their compatibility when they manage to overcome our expectation of a natural order for couples. May/August acceptable; March/December is yoking it. Even an arranged marriage between Hindus has its safeguards against an unnatural alliance.

  Given their disparity in age, shape, and promise we had no illusions about how the comedy between our own two glamourpusses would play out should it get to the stage of an “afflicted” world. Death and Diapers was not, as her father put it, the play Noel Coward wrote. He thought for a moment, before turning over to turn out the light.

  “I prefer Noel Coward to Tchaikovsky,” he said.

  “Schubert.”

  “He was the down-to-earth guy, was he?”

  “Death and the Maiden.”

  “Ouch.”

  *

  Rudy had been a practical man who’d made an excellent living from air conditioning. When he sold out, he had stopped playing golf—a sensible career move in my view, when business gab between holes is no longer the motive. But whatever acuity he once possessed, to rethink and then circumvent the need for freon—the strategy that enriched his bottom line—it now seemed to have dribbled away in his weakness for black-and-white reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. I recall him wryly asking us one evening if we ever caught these reruns. He smirked, squaring his narrow shoulders. “Shucks, Andy. I don’t like to blow my own horn, but golly gee . . . ” Now that his younger voice had thinned, he did a convincing imitation of the foolish deputy Barney Fife, teasing us, waiting for Margaret to float down the banister in a crinoline. She didn’t, of course. On the sofa he crossed his short, dwindling legs. We were watching Jeopardy, which he thought too buzzer-busy to take seriously the actual categories popping up on screen. His apparent fondness for sidekick sitcoms made it difficult for us in turn to take seriously his charitable side, no matter how many carrots he might chop.

  Sensing our skepticism, Greta reassured us the next morning at breakfast that without his believing a word of the gospels Rudy was supporting an entire Union Gospel summer camp for welfare children. This alone had persuaded her to help him cook up vats of curry at the Living Room as part of the elderly Mom-and-Pop team from Gujarat, who followed the Baha’i faith and its stricture to offer comfort to the less fortunate in skid row. Patrick thought a touch of mania in Rudy’s post-

  retirement devotion to the unfortunate couldn’t be ruled out but he didn’t mention this to Greta.

  We wondered what other good deeds Rudy had in mind. We did not consider our daughter a charity, but perhaps he did, offering to squire her about that summer when her present life at college must have appeared as dateless as it had been in high school. He was a caring man, a solicitous man; it wasn’t that. What it was, was that he was a little old man with no future.

  Who did he think he was fooling?

  Margaret maybe. Or else she was fooling herself, which only seemed to encourage his nobler instincts. She was now “seeing” someone, and although she would never portray it in this way, a teenage history of elimination at musical chairs could only have reminded her of never having “seen” anyone before. Beyond, that is, a recent med student in her immunology class, who mocked comics from his home province of Newfoundland, where he earnestly believed they were breeding by the bushel in every spud patch. Doing stand-up in our den, he was probably rehearsing his bit for fellow comics in the Student Union Building about a fat girlfriend. And, yes, there was the noodle chef at SUB whom we distrusted, not because of his dietary influence, bad enough, but because his intentions seemed perversely mattress-driven. He drove a van.

  According to Greta, just friends.

  Not until she and her friend Rudy started going out on what could now be considered dates—here a talk, there a doc—did we truly recognize the liability of Rudy’s age. He had turned eighty-eight in June. A week or so later, they drove off for a day-hike to Garibaldi Lake. Margaret hooted brashly and told him he’d be lucky to reach lake-level without oxygen. Her skepticism helped to reassure us she saw him clearly for the age he was, for the agility or rather lack of it he actually possessed. He responded by claiming the volcano there hadn’t erupted in ten thousand years. Worried, Rudy? “So,” she later said to him, “what were you expecting, lava?” Halfway up the trail, already at an unfamiliar elevation, he had to be carried back down in a blanket sling by Greta and three hikers. He was that light—and then he wasn’t. A thunderstorm, blowing down the valley, made his wet weight feel like a dead one. While she, unbalanced by her own weight, slapped at ticks.

  No neurological damage, in spite of MRI evidence of past cortical erosion, yet the incident ought to have warned her of his growing tendency to push himself when the day of his being pushed—in a wheelchair—wasn’t far off. “I think it’s the parental units who are pushing it,” she warned us. She was working this summer at Patrick’s clinic, where I’d once managed the books, but just as often found myself booking appointments, filing records, ordering copy paper. Before our getting together, Patrick asked if I would ever consider giving up my position to help him raise baby Margaret and run his home. I’d watched him move like a fullback, graceful if hefty hips shifting shut the door of his examining room—and after a time said yes. The upgrade worked out for me, my older age no barrier to the two of us functioning well as a team, and I didn’t mind volunteering at his golf club.

  Where I had happened one day to reconnect with Rudy.

  “Hello, Denise. Rudy Skupa.”

  I looked up from distributing name tags. This for a reception on behalf of a QC lawyer come to speak about stick-handling the proposed appropriation of the course when its lease expired down the road. “Rudy! How are you?” My tone exceeded whatever my feeling now was about Rudy, unresolved since cottage days. But I didn’t, as my mother had, hold a grudge. I stood up smartly and offered him my hand.

  He emerged later from the meeting to say he was going to cancel his tee-time. He didn’t know how members could golf on unceded land in good conscience when it belonged to the Musqueam who lived nearby in crummy houses. The lawyer’s strategy for holding onto its lease had gone unappreciated by Rudy. I assured him, when he asked, that my partner rarely golfed because of his practice. “Not another lawyer?” he wanted to know. “No, no. Physician. Just as billable.” Over drinks in the lounge, studying his thinning hair, I was reminded of the summer he’d barged over with a generator that had given our cottage on Savary Island its first grid to run electric lights and a small freezer for the crab.

  Magically, I remember, he crossed the new wires as if they were short-tempered garter snakes. He’d forgotten his snub-nosed pliers and made nifty do with our children’s scissors. His hair in those days, when he had hair, was blonde, and my father said his voice resembled Dick Cavett’s. “No, no,” said my mother, over her record player that now had power. “Nabucco’s.” It wasn’t quite what you expected, its richly modulated timbre emerging from a short man to create a large man’s presence. If he chose to he could sound imperious. “How much do you still love me, Cynthia?” He was flirting with my mother, remembering a disagreement they’d once had about him smoking cigarettes, of which she sharply disapproved. “I could smoke punk wood if you like, from the beach?” He didn’t mind putting himself forward when he thought he’d been forgiven. She felt that for a business fellow he had a distinct flair, calling the Irish-green sports shirt he put on for dinner, in place of his working wife-beater, “a wowser.” She reserved judgment on his ashtray, when he remembered to use it, a small clamshell he’d found outside and placed atop the driftwood coffee table. It was casual at the cottage. I had noticed whenever he visited u
s in Babylon, as she referred that evening to the city, there were no ashtrays for either him or my father.

  His tan face glowed that summer.

  “Yes. I was in my bronze age, then.”

  I sometimes thought of asking him, after his disavowal of lawyers, to join us at home for a meal and decided to cold-call him a year or two later to see if he was free to babysit. I explained our emergency with Greta. “It’s like old times,” he said upon reentering the house. “Same bedroom?” He felt welcome after that evening to drop by in the same casual way he used to with my parents. He was a curious and congenial man, his off-the-wall questions allowing others to relax and trust—not exactly his charm, but his foursquare appeal. His voice had not yet lost its lower octaves, allowing it to turn wheezy enough in these later years to deputize. You could guess how he’d once made a success of his business if it meant courting, as it must have, the sort of building contractors who needed persuading of their need to recondition air in a temperate city. They didn’t, of course, but he could be authoritative without sounding like the AC salesman he was. Patrick and I began to count on him as a reliable mixer at garden parties. I fully believed my parents, at least my father, had long ago come to terms with his tragic visit to the cottage. Apparently not so my mother. The last time he saw her, at her nursing home, she refused to see him. It had bothered Rudy.

  Yet at her funeral.

  “I’m sorry for your loss, Denise. Your mother should be canonized. I plan on petitioning her every day in heaven for the miracle of her zeppoli. Do you remember how she filled them with a honey concoction?” I didn’t, no. “That she wouldn’t divulge?” Alone in our kitchen once, he’d been sampling one of these pastries before she happened to introduce him to a hefty diva, whom he recalled was kind to him, very down to earth, when he hadn’t felt comfortable mixing with the dressy crowd my mother had invited that evening to fete this soprano and her cast after their performance downtown. He said to me, at the funeral: “You’d been travelling, I remember. You were on top of the world, in pearls, enjoying yourself with everyone there. Anyhow, I was grateful to your mother for leaving us alone, the singer and me, shooting the breeze in your kitchen. She must have trusted me not to embarrass her, the lowly salesman. Probably because she was from down under, she couldn’t have been more salt-of-the-earth.”