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  My mother had been furious when she noticed my bedspread the next morning. It was not thought so much a crime when I was a child, or even talked about when it happened around children, compared to two generations later, when children were taught to stand up for themselves and say no. Less evidence is now required, about any transgression, to sustain or even suggest culpability. I was happy when my father came into the room after Rudy left. He sometimes did, to tuck me in. Emotionally distant, though not quite so removed as my mother, he sat on the bed breathing a little heavily and said he was “played out”—I guessed from golfing too long that afternoon with his “tricky ticker.” He smelled of tobacco, of himself. I wanted to finger his thinning crown, and for him to forgive me for not finding his presence as rousing as Mr. Skupa’s. He couldn’t make-believe in the same way.

  My ardor surprised him. “He’s left you over- excited. Give me your hand.” He began to rub it. As a five-year-old, I felt sorry for him. “The sun,” he said, “has turned your hair golden.”

  Rudy’s generation was the dubious beneficiary of my father’s. All of them smoked as a rite of passage, continuing to inhale during life’s remaining cruise through health and sickness until they disembarked with cases of emphysema, polluted arteries, lung cancer. Daddy, an electrical wholesaler, had got to know the younger Rudy through building contractors they had in common. My grandfather had sold wire and cable to municipalities and builders in the growing towns of British Columbia—before my father, after getting into dishwashers, TVs, turntables, recommitted Catalpa Electric to construction supplies, including the air conditioners he invoiced to Rudy. He died still totting up figures my mother mockingly called his “jolly numbers”—while Rudy, failing to believe in his own indispensability, had the later good sense to retire before his business retired him.

  When I first knew Rudy, he had been around since the Middle Ages with its castles and serfs. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. I suspect my mother had asked him as a favour to babysit when our nanny was visiting her family in Ecuador. The same way, decades later, when Judy couldn’t come, I needed someone we could trust to sit Greta. Someone cheerful who liked children. Rudy was someone without family obligations and available to accommodate those of others, including dogs and offspring. This at least was the impression he gave, the affability of a confidence man you were confident was not one.

  When my mother began rebuking my father over breakfast—not wanting them to quarrel, I said it had been Rudy. Theirs was a mock-bicker mode of a marriage, yet one likely to endure for the benefit of some estate plan after papers were sealed and mailed back to a law firm with signatures and reimbursement of an invoice. My father respected invoices. Marriage was less cut and credible. Marriage hadn’t helped him all that much, I supposed, from feeling “played out.” He had endured enough of my mother’s nagging without having to answer this morning for the “shocking lack of respect” he’d shown his little girl the night before.

  She studied me atop my big-girl booster seat at the dining table. And then promptly disappeared to call Rudy, to condemn his unconscionable conduct. She used our telephone on the wall inside a little grotto in the echoing foyer. “Alma 3090-L!” My father and I listened from the dining room. She told Mr. Skupa what I’d reported him doing. Then silence. Somewhere along the hallway, before she swung back through the connecting door, her face had softened. Rudy had apologized. He had assured her his reckless act wouldn’t happen again. My father studied his poached egg, the yolk leaking into his toast, now cold. Flushed, ashamed of himself, he burped. “McGavin’s.” Unavailable, Maria’s homemade flax loaf while she was still abroad. He said nothing more, flexing his watchband as if late for the office. Mr. Skupa, his business friend, had accepted blame for what both of them knew was my lie about his own wanton lapse. I had rescued my father by slandering Rudy. It was a debt my father now owed to each of us. And one, in turn, I owed to Rudy for not telling my mother the truth.

  There seemed no reason for him to have admitted guilt, except that I was dear to him. Dearer, it felt, than I was to my father. At that age I was too young to consider the possibility that someone might be currying credit with someone else to do with the wholesaling costs of air conditioners. Or even that I myself might be currying favour with one parent over another, by covering up for him, even at the risk of losing Rudy’s on-going approval.

  Flamboyant and receptive, not a dry stick like Maria, he had permitted me to smooch him good night. “And I thought you were shy, Denise! You were ready to chop off the King’s head!” Theatrically, extending his hand: “Give me your money or your life!”

  My mother had been happy to accept his apology because it was easier to overlook his offense than it would have been my father’s. Rudy was fun, his crime and the evidence in my bedroom soon forgotten. My father, following his travelling salesman’s courtship of her in the thirties, mainly by fountain pen, had married his go-getter girl in Kelowna, where she was a waitress at the Royal Anne. Dearest Cynthia . . . I have his letters written in a compact hand talking up coastal life and breaker switches. My mother avowed more than once that he’d married her at the behest of his own mother to escape the war draft; his father’s business needed him more than his country did. He brought her back here to a better life: car, clothes, eventually me, my younger brother: and he learned to tolerate her evolving cultural interests in exchange for her household flair and a willingness to go along with habits of his she found increasingly odious.

  Such as pack-a-day smoking, snacking on Mars bars, and the way he failed to discipline his daughter except with the softest belt-strappings he could get away with in his study. Urging me to yelp loud enough for her to hear me downstairs in the kitchen. “Try a bit harder,” he whispered. I would be draped over his knee like a fox fleece. Nothing he did hurt me, but neither did it not hurt me, his indifference to what a mother might be disciplining her daughter for. Mainly, in my case, some challenge to her notion of a mother’s authority, though never for an offence deserving corporal punishment. He knew this, but that wasn’t his fight. He also knew she wanted to get back at his irksome inability to discipline himself, and her thinking she could succeed by forcing his will on me.

  She nagged till he took his puffing to the garage, and himself to disappearing, twice instead of once a week to his golf club. Where we suspected he lapsed regularly into syrup and French toast, only to endure her odd pleasure in scolding him for new levels of blood sugar that would kill him if the nicotine didn’t. She abhorred any secret indulgence, especially in him. Bacon too? When home kits became available, she found she could revenge herself by forcing him to roll up his sleeve and jabbing an insulin needle into an unmarked vein, a gratifying act of selflessness on her part, while scolding his existence for its remarkable indifference, chiefly to her. He would buy her costly gifts, bracelet or stole, scarf or perfume, but she wouldn’t be bribed into collusion if it meant excusing his “habits.” She found fault with every gift, refusing to wear any of them when he was around, even sometimes when he wasn’t, and returned to shops the ones she didn’t mind the most.

  *

  When fighter jets in formation explode like a bomb overhead, I pause in my tidal trench for a moment’s silence. It’s anything but silent in their ongoing wake. I try not to tear up. Trailing smoke, above the city in a heartbeat, they’re already streaking inland, headed for smaller and smaller cities in the direction of Hope. Of all towns over which to remind us of the dead—a million citizens and I sharing this pathetic moment as planes arrive there ahead of their sound.

  It might be wise

  To weaponize

  For those fallen in battle, this moving but dismal tribute. Downtown in Victory Square, wreaths and the last post to ennoble a vague quest called freedom. A century of believing our dead fought to save the rest of us from enslavement and not themselves from dying. From realizing too late the Great Game was rigged against them desp
ite their sacrifice in heading overseas. And now my mushiness in thinking everything they’d held dear might not have been vivid enough for them to blot out the madness and treachery had they lived.

  That they were as vulnerable as the rest of us to memories so bland as to make dying not matter much to anyone, including themselves. Pondering their own despair as they perished.

  I might bring this up over dinner. Surely Rudy’s death had to be different. His sacrifice for Greta?

  “Whatever,” Patrick will say. “Still, I don’t think you can reject emancipation as an abstraction. We actually fought for freedom.”

  “From what? The fairytale we went back to believing in, like hate won’t repeat itself?”

  “The Nazis.”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “I remember,” he is going to repeat, “how shocked I felt hearing bacteria, not stress, might cause ulcers and be cured with antibiotics.” It has become his favourite teaching moment. “Wasn’t it the same with fascism? So-called incurable? We had to fight it with more than a lifestyle change. That’s your abstraction, Denise. Lifestyle change.”

  He’s more than the sum of his case studies, Patrick. That’s why I admire him. Ulcers and fascism. Medication—not cruise-ship therapy. I’m uncertain how much he really believes in the lifestyle change endorsed in rehab clinics like Margaret’s. Or in the one he’d like to endorse, minus current ethical guidelines, in his own clinic where he sets such a poor nutritional example. “Lifestyle change?” He’s no more enamoured of this slogan than of the other called affirmative action. “Stress isn’t the worst thing,” he claims. He himself will never retire if it’s just to relax. “You need to give your life to something, not change it.”

  “Like Rudy gave his?”

  “Well, that might be pushing it.”

  “Maimed, mangled by inhuman men? And Margaret grieving, the affliction that’s killing her?”

  “She’ll get over it.”

  “I don’t think she’s going to.”

  He thinks for a moment. “I might have to agree with you. Why?”

  I like the way Patrick looks at me lately. I can still surprise him.

  “Well, once Greta realizes she won’t get over her loss, isn’t that the first of her so-called twelve steps to recovery?” (There won’t be time to come up with a better response than this one when I’m baking his pesto crostini.) “Accepting that she has something to live for, by tending his memory for reasons other than guilt?”

  “Such as?”

  “Gratitude? For taking her mind off food?”

  “Really?” Not likely to be persuaded long by this one, once he starts eating. Especially the dessert I bought him at Meinhardt’s.

  “Denise, she helped him serve meals at the Living Room.”

  “To folks other than herself, yes.”

  “Not following you, sweetheart. Are you saying she should be grateful for her emaciated body?”

  Well, this isn’t quite the scenario I had in mind. Slow it down, let him have the last word—why not?—but remind him of his collusion.

  “Gratitude to something more than you, Patrick.”

  “To me! I’m fat, I admit, but—”

  “No, no. To something more than becoming a physician. Your hope for her.”

  “She preferred the alternative? Alliance with a skinny, mad, ex-air-con salesman?”

  I suggest Rudy offered her an example . . . beyond eating, consumption, the gold-star career. “You know, beyond becoming her own heroine? Has your case history taken that into account?”

  Yes, I like the way Patrick looks at me lately. I can still surprise him.

  He pulls up a chair. “A mind of her own, our Margaret. Like quitting school on a whim.”

  His real fear is she quit medicine because he expected her to take up co-ownership of his clinic some day. This would be stubborn on her part. He feels her addiction to weight loss and the dope to assist it has been a ruinous extension of such stubbornness. Contrariness pivoting on perversity. Poor Rudy probably didn’t stand a chance he thinks. When we thought he was manipulating her, she was actually urging him on. Persuading him to accompany her to Africa.

  “We were hard on Rudy,” says Patrick.

  I’d lost touch with Rudy after that summer weekend when he installed the fridge and generator at our cottage. The truth is he’d endured my slander once, and had done so again. Not only had he forgiven me my childhood mendacity, assuming he remembered it, but also, these decades later, my unkind lament reported to him by Greta upon their arrival in Africa. That I—well, Patrick too—was full of anguish about his impact as an aging stick on our daughter’s future. About her administering him palliative care and brushing his thinning gums. Probably also that we’d enjoyed ourselves, royally, at his expense, mocking his age and querying his motives while traducing their unlikely union—although never in her presence had we ever mentioned a goat or a raft.

  Protesting, herring gulls ahead of me flap off the dry sand to catch the breeze. I wonder if I’ll make it to the westernmost tide marker before the tide turns to stop me from reaching its ebb. There the shelf drops like a cliff into the sea.

  “Freedom,” I’ll decide instead to respond, “from the lies we went back to believing in, like the free market?”

  “Poverty,” he is going to say.

  *

  The breeze freshens, bringing a scent of the timbered trusses ahead, clotted with mussels. The simple truth is, Rudy had given up smoking long before I’d asked him to babysit our Margaret. But after he began dating her, convinced of his self-gratification, I chose to remember ash on her bedspread. I failed to see that what I was looking at was the illusion that satisfied my assumption. He was old enough to be her grandfather.

  His chronic carelessness was not something my mother could brush off, not the second time it happened. She never forgave him. Less so my father, who hoped for someone to talk to at the gala reception to which he had invited Rudy without getting my mother’s approval. He knew she’d say no. Daddy never forgot a debt, no matter how small.

  His debt also to me.

  He paid for my trip abroad. This was after he arranged and paid for my termination, then illegal, at home. Today he might have suggested going to India for an abortion, not to forget one. It was the farthest away he could imagine, where what I needed to forget would be overwhelmed and even smothered by what a wholesaler friend had told him was the insistence there of gaudiness, confusion, poverty. My mother believed I was headed for Montreal, to “a home for unwed mothers,” where I would give “it” up for adoption. Language of the era preceding the expected exile. Into which girls “in trouble” had been cast since we first welcomed the CPR with bunting—their mothers accompanying them to the station on Cordova. My mother railed against “the boyfriend,” wouldn’t speak to him when he called, hung up when he inquired after me. She certainly would not have connived at any plan to “get rid of it.”

  I wasn’t sure I hadn’t fainted. The painful wetness of my procedure in a tall office building off Hastings Street. Similar perhaps to what mothers like Judy say about forgetting the pain of childbirth.

  My trip following did not free me so much as amend my horizon. Shortened it up inside colonial train stations, acquainting me with mobs instead of queues. I travelled with Norrie, daughter of my father’s wholesaler friend, whom he’d met in Montreal at a trade fair. She had never been to India either, and visiting her extended family in Bangalore seemed a ripe idea for what I was now calling my “gap” year. My mother took this to mean a year dedicated to “amnesia” as I awaited the birth of my child in Quebec. It was neither a year, nor was it forgetful, except in the sense she hoped it would be, in putting my shame behind me.

  “Leaving it all behind,” agreed my father, “will be beneficial.”

  The spring weekend I came home, she dr
agged him and me to see Joan Sutherland in a production of La Traviata. My mother, a member of the opera association, was hosting afterwards the cast reception and having it catered. She insisted the three of us dine first at an old frame house on Seymour, Iaci’s, but when we climbed the front steps she was surprised by the dining room and said for a recommended restaurant it felt like a bed and breakfast. Seven diners constituted a full house. Her Royal Anne might have served a mediocre table d’hôte but at least it had had booth-space for elbows.

  Looking over the menu she said, “It’s a miracle she and her husband keep coming back to this city. They’ve put us on the opera map. In exchange for what? Spaghetti and meatballs?”

  My father turned to me without conviction. “Cynthia tells me there’s a song in it I’ll like, sung by a father.” His finger traced the limited offering of dishes on the daily sheet. “What’s focaccia?” Roast beef was his preference. “I hear she’s a very large woman.”

  His amusement, expressed at either side of his mouth, was described by Patrick as the sound of air hissing intermittently from a tire. A kind of leaky chuckle, more bladder blockage than heartfelt discharge. Young Dr. Fitzgerald had then gone on, unkindly I thought, to yoke the prostate gland to an inner tube. It made me laugh.

  “It’s her voice that’s divine,” said my mother, “not her figure. I imagine Mr. Bonynge has been encouraging her to slim down.”

  “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings,” he rejoined, hissing happily. “Can’t say I’m not looking forward to that.” He put up with these occasions as part of their marital contract.

  “Keep your voice down, Larry.” My mother glanced at the bay-window table, inches distant, and then for some reason the floor, probably cat hair.