Charity Read online

  A mob of mostly men was clutching and grabbing at our saris, no more prophylactic than our Levis the day before.

  I turn down the flame and add two pods of black cardamom to my simmering lamb-shanks. The risk of my current life. That I won’t remember to remove these before ladling Patrick’s dinner onto the mashed potatoes he likes. Sufficient thyme and cumin already potted.

  “Are you sure she’s really working? In Whistler, there’s more dope than Shanghai.”

  “That’s not Judy’s apprehension.”

  “I hate Skupa,” said Patrick. “I hate his diabolical memory.”

  “My dear Patrick. Are you old enough to remember the golden oldie . . . the line that goes, ‘Stupid Cupid, stop pickin’ on me. . .’?”

  As voices go, in the rate and range of its vibrato, mine resembles a motorboat’s.

  I can’t do my homework and I can’t think straight

  I meet him every morning ’bout half past eight

  “Denise. Get a grip.”

  You mixed me up for good from the very start . . .

  “You through?”

  I’m acting like a lovesick fool . . .

  “Denise, please!”

  Mine isn’t the aria to deliver him the daughter he wants. He isn’t convinced Skupa-Cupid had the same effect on Greta. Is still shaking his head when he settles into his panforte fichi e noci with cream.

  *

  After dinner I settle down to go over house books. How to market a plus-size home without fear of its demolition, followed by feng shui fabrication of a brand new castle. Is there a remedy for conserving the romance of my family’s modest descent? For staging the place for an Open when it doesn’t matter if you stage it at all, since no one wealthy enough wants to move in without killing the lights and flattening its archive?

  Diagnosis is easy—a case study of old city courting younger structures, slimmer lots—yet time also requires the hands-off counsel of Hippocrates. Do no harm.

  A ledger isn’t the only house book. In a diary I notice my speedwriting contraction for “skinny- dip . . .” Hardly the language of “current-liabilities” when you’re looking to list and not noodle about in the looming downfall. Numbers are needed from “taxes,” “hydro,” “gas” to supplement a realtor’s square-footage, full baths, acreage. Plus “revenue” from “accounts receivable”—had we ever accepted renters, and maybe should have—to tempt the profit motive of a buyer otherwise bent on demolition. My invoices go way back to the upkeep of a putting green my father inoculated every spring with Round-up, now a labyrinth, which I hired a stonemason to help me lay through the weeds. Here’s his invoice.

  Patrick wonders why I want to sell out, when our daughter’s future in Whistler is far from settled. He agrees the house is too much for us to keep up, but since he isn’t planning to retire any time soon the thought of its loss has upset him. He sometimes swims a few lengths in the summer, or sweeps the tennis court of maple leaves come fall, before inviting one of the young doctors round to his “humble abode” for a set. My surprise announcement has perplexed him. He’s conflicted. We may not need six bedrooms, or is it eight, but empty space as a satisfying reflection of the universe is a mirror he’s quite content to look into every morning while he shaves, and a place at night to look around for leftovers in his slippers. He supposes my father had hoped to have more children, another son at least, to carry on his family business.

  He ponders this. “Why didn’t he anoint you?”

  “I wasn’t his favourite.”

  The diary has distracted me. Not least some marginalia entered later, I notice, in speedwriting: “Nostalgia as surrender? When the past has temporary hold of you & the present offers not enough resistance to make the future a hopeful alternative?” I’m afloat in the night sea off Savary, admiring unstable phosphorescent waves lapping the dark sand. My father has waded in up to his hips—I can tell he’s smoking a cigar, its tip aglow and the scent drifting lazily to me on the offshore breeze. Turning, I see in the moonlight Rudy treading water farther out. A chorus of Hebrew slaves is singing “Va, Pensiero” in the lighted cottage where my mother is making mellow use of our new generator to spin her LP. By now she has put my brother to bed and is walking down to the beach . . .

  But enough wallowing in lost Eden. Greta’s future has a better past than my family’s conflagration. I’m sitting in the solarium where she used to tug a blanket backwards against Sandy’s clamped teeth. Sandy was a beagle with scratchy nails and a barking fear of an itinerant coyote. Greta at six had close to seventy pounds on Sandy, gaining weight on him by the week, not to say traction. At nine, when she discovered he had fifty times the smelling power she did, she soon informed me that dogs smell in stereo, are capable of coordinating two sets of information at once, each nostril an instrument in harmony with the other to register new memories.

  “His nose is a vault,” she remarked. So was her Mac, I thought, from which she had extracted canine facts in impressive excess of her school assignment on “Cats.” She was surprised we didn’t possess a safe, even one in the wall, or have a safety-deposit box like Sandy’s: a dog possessed many such boxes. I was enriched by her widening world at nine and her capacity to draw from it instructive analogies. At fifteen—the assignment “Hunger”—instead of Google she decided to try me. The topic would normally have taken her no more than a half-hour to knock off with a trot down the information highway. Except she happened to recall I’d once been to India.

  “You never know,” Patrick whispered to me across the table. “Sometimes adolescence just wants to cuddle up.”

  I knew it was because the Wi-Fi was down.

  It was an odd topic to assign an obese teenager, unless an ulterior lesson on the broader one of conspicuous consumption was intended. A day’s fast might have proved a better lesson than a research essay. “Really?” cracked Patrick. I said nothing as she snacked on an after-supper pepperoni stick dipped in Dijon. Maybe I’d missed my calling to the classroom.

  Pencil poised, she waited to scribble down my memories of third-world tribulation. Her already indecipherable scrawl, Patrick felt, was a sign from the Greeks she was destined to write prescriptions.

  I recalled for her young men’s waists in Bangalore, how you could wrap a man’s tie around any one of them, twice. Arms on girls the circumference of liquorice whips. “Mom, that’s racist.” I explained I was exaggerating to make the case for hunger’s scourge. She smiled and put down her pencil. She appreciated my help but it didn’t appear useful, such hyperbole, in the case against hunger. I supposed she needed regions and statistics.

  She asked why I’d gone to India. I mentioned Norrie. Our junket, together. Even what Norrie had casually said at the train station about not being born, had her parents stayed in India, or if they had, about not surviving. Greta wondered if she meant not having enough to eat. I said I hadn’t thought of that, but no, it was something else.

  “What, then?”

  I think this was the first time after childhood Greta ever looked at me without seeming to know what I was about to say.

  “Female infanticide.”

  She was surprised but not shocked.

  “Killing girl babies?”

  “Or fetuses.”

  “How come?”

  “Maybe your teacher should assign the topic.”

  He didn’t have to. She was soon pestering her class to raise money for . . . but the cause lacked sufficient definition—or so this “geog” teacher decided—to persuade potential donors it was possible to find a suitable destination for funds she might hustle before the end of school term.

  “He mainly thought it was extra-jurisdictional.” She imitated his tone while wobbling her jowls. Palms on her bountiful adolescent chest. “I don’t see what the end of term’s got to do with it.”

  She spread her notes. I later found them
stashed upstairs in a drawer full of old candy wrappers.

  “Don’t worry,” I told her. “You and I can start a foundation some day.”

  I mused wryly about growing our house’s population with unmarriageable daughters, including me. “You?” It was no more than a high-minded statement you share with a teen whose ascendant standards are in need of ongoing support to keep them from receding too soon. With Greta, now swimming every week—often against the current and getting high on exercise—nothing worried us less than the tide going out on her standards, unless concerning her diet, for which her standards as well as ours remained irredeemably slack.

  “You?”

  “Well, sort of me,” I responded.

  And decided to share my reason for going to India. Unfortunately, it didn’t make as deep an impression as I hoped. Confessions can be self-satisfying and she may have sensed preening. I shared with her the tale of my termination and my non-marriage to Barry. I didn’t mention my non-marriage to her father. Oh, and yes, how I couldn’t have any more children. I could have been wrong; I mean about her response. She sat patiently, not knowing what to do with her pen. I had embarrassed her, or else she felt I’d embarrassed myself. The thought of a sibling, even a half-sibling, no longer viable might have touched her, but it didn’t cause her any noticeable grief.

  I went on to recite from memory the poem Barry had shared with me in our class anthology, the day we discussed my abortion, calling it my “old-girl’s” motto. More hyperbole, I feared. Without smoke / that is how / good old wood / burns / that is how / I want to live / to give / fire without / smoke to be / fire. “Miriam Somebody,” I told her. “Her words stuck. I don’t really know what they’ve got to do with hunger.”

  When I opened Judy’s envelope, I saw with surprise what Greta had scribbled down. These same lines, guessing instinctively where they ought to break, in the idiosyncratic way I suppose she remembered me carefully reciting them. I took a while to translate why I felt so moved, but also why she’d bothered. Maybe to remind me in her barely discernible hand of my youthful resolution? If she was willing to take my name—hey Mom, was I living up to mine? She must have wondered, when I was making fun of her and Rudy, whether my old motto hadn’t since gone up in smoke. And her memory of my cynicism, a smouldering reason for having refused to talk to me about her bodily attrition.

  Who am I kidding? She needs a loan!

  Leaning on her creditors, playing upstage to their conceit. As Judy believes, softening me up.

  Still, the scenario I prefer is the one I intend putting to her father at breakfast tomorrow.

  “A proposition, for her future?”

  “Let’s hear it.”

  I tell him. My scenario, unlike his, has her in the leading role of travelling director for a family foundation devoted to the elimination of female infanticide. A private operation like my father’s. Accountable, of course, but this time of profit to more than just one family.

  “I don’t believe it.”

  Believe it I tell him. She just needs to let us know she’s onboard. Come to see us, agree she might like to afford her life another option. In return, we would agree Patrick’s clinic no longer seems, if it ever was, her first choice.

  “I beg to differ.”

  I show him Greta’s schoolgirl notes on hunger, in the indecipherable hand he favours as a physician. He’s tickled he can’t read them. Gls r_ lk b po Hnd p_s cs c- a d_re ss . . . Speedwriting was a skill that impressed her and which she quickly picked up from me. As I do with his clinic’s books, I summarize for him what here amounts to the mission statement she and I would soon formulate: Girls aren’t welcome by poor Hindu parents because of a dowry system, and then, if they manage to barter a marriage through debt, a daughter isn’t just lost to a husband’s family but enslaved by them as the extra cost of housing her.

  I’ve doctored up her transcription. Slovenly punctuation, ditto syntax. The main goal of the Catalpa Foundation will be to help Indian NGOs educate Hindu families inclined to eliminate the costly birth of girls by eradicating them.

  “You’re dreaming,” says Patrick. “The cost of dowries will just skyrocket. Why don’t you think instead of subsidizing polyandry?”

  “Or jobs?”

  I confess part of all this is to give my life over to making it smaller.

  “Downsizing,” he says, “isn’t exactly giving your life. It’s just changing it.

  He misses his daughter. Who, he wonders, erased the sea from her heart?

  *

  I wander upstairs after dinner to survey the cost of the future. I’ve sorted through taxes, utility bills, plumber invoices, records of gardeners’ wages and roofing costs, statements from the Land Title and Survey Authority, the deed my father once procured from the retired shipping mariner who built our house before the war. The First One. None of this file will discourage a wealthy new owner from building an even larger house looking farther out to sea.

  Knock knock?

  I enter the bedroom once mine, then Greta’s, before she shut me out. I intend to make the house difficult to destroy without also razing this same room we both dreamed in. I hope to commission an artist to paint its walls. An esteemed artist, who will agree to support our commendable cause against infanticide. How can she refuse? Public participation on her part would guarantee from the city the same heritage designation this artist herself enjoys. Am I dreaming?

  Mother introduced us years ago at a church bazaar. She had bought one of her early canvases at a small gallery off Main called Grunt. It amused her to pronounce its name. (Surprising, as she’d long raised the drawbridge against “fart.”) I remember we’d agreed to bake pies for the bazaar, before asking Maria to spend a day in our little orchard picking cherries to mix into crusts. Mother’s philanthropic sense, like mine, was based on others pitching in.

  Will it help?

  Her reputation as a sculptor, painter, video artist has ascended to old-master status, so even if the house’s preservation isn’t assured, her walls will guarantee greater leverage for our foundation in the sale to establish it. She’s given her life to burning brighter with age. The destruction of a late mural by her would amount to a national scandal. I’ll suggest to her the whimsical theme of Princess Mouseskin’s bosky exile. Who knows but that Greta’s posters from anatomy class, still pinned to the walls, won’t inspire their replacement with dancers, servants, dogs. Invite her to go further! An installation! Stuffed tunics, ceramic slippers. Even a skin to step out of. A soundscape of dishes, goblets, royal remorse. A banquet for the ages.

  Not beyond her, the rekindling of a father’s love.

  Rudy had arrived that evening, I remember, his breath smelling of cigarettes. He had something to share before tucking me to sleep. A gift for the little princess. First he lifted my window, sliding carefully closed on its rings the velvet curtain. A late robin nesting in the laurel, the tick of lawn sprinklers below. Twilight extinguished, my bed lamp coming up.

  My bedspread pulled back to reveal a swelling between the sheets.

  Then this illustrated Grimm, a book he extracted to let me touch it, calfskin covers tinged with the scent my mother abhorred.

  He opened it and began to read, his voice in my ear pitched deeper than a mineshaft. Turning pages, by the end no longer reading them. He had the lines by heart. I’d rather die than eat such food. At the last line, pausing for breath, he inhaled the whole scene before blowing it skyward in a long dispelling stream. Not smoke, but the essential element of his voice alone. Delighted, I snuggled deeper into its scent and heard him whisper, as he prepared to leave me . . . Now that he had found her again, she was more dear to him than his kingdom and all the jewels in the world.

  *

  Judy was right, if for the wrong reason. But has taken no comfort in her suspicion of a relapse. Our daughter was found dead of a suspected fentanyl overdose
in the driver’s seat of the little car we bought her to visit us in, now and then, downtown.

  We look west to the fireworks and the Salish Sea.

  We were expecting her that week. At our smaller, repurposed table.

  Her car was discovered over-parked on Powell Street, her bloated body slumped across the wheel. At first she had looked like a young man. From her coat pocket, the police retrieved an oblong box containing my pearls. I had continued to think, as she settled into her serving role in Whistler, that she had been looking forward to her life on behalf of the dowry-less in the real, afflicted world. Now, I wasn’t sure. It would have made all the difference to us both.

  Keath Fraser won the Chapters / Books in Canada First Novel Award for his 1995 novel Popular Anatomy. His stories and novellas have been published in many anthologies in Canada and abroad. Collections of his short fiction include Taking Cover and Telling My Love Lies. The volume Foreign Affairs was short-listed for a Governor General’s Award and won the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. He is the author of As For Me and My Body, a memoir of his friend Sinclair Ross; and of The Voice Gallery, a narrative of his far-flung travels among broken voices. The royalties from his international best-

  selling anthologies Bad Trips and Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel were given to Canada India Village Aid (CIVA), the late NGO founded by George Woodcock. A selected stories, Damages, is forthcoming from Biblioasis in May 2021.