A Good Death (2 page)

I imagine being my father as he is now, with someone wiping my mouth and laughing and explaining that I’m drooling and that I should go to bed and sleep even though I’m not in the least tired, that I can’t have dessert because it’s too rich and therefore bad for my health. I am my father. I know I’m sick, very sick. I want to kill someone. I’m humiliated. I am not a child. And in any case, even when I was a child I hated it, felt diminished and insulted whenever anyone fluttered a cloth in my face and wiped my chin, cheerily telling me what a filthy little mess I was. What’s an old man supposed to think when being old means being treated like a child?

The breadbasket on the table is empty, has been for several seconds. I took the last slice myself. I look to my right and see my father glowering at the absence of bread as though he were the victim of an intolerable injustice. A family without bread on the table. A father without bread. The entire history of human misery in that one accusation: no bread. I sense that he is about to erupt. My mother, however, still worried about his health, mentally tallies the number of slices of bread he’s already eaten. She shrinks. She looks to her right and gets an approving nod from one of my sisters, the calorie counter. Would you like some more bread, Dad? He looks at me and makes a noise that could be yes but sounds more like the blissful sigh of a baby who has just felt his mother’s nipple moisten with milk. My mother looks down at the table. My sister shoots daggers at me with her eyes. When he sees the refilled breadbasket he coos. I’m not kidding. He takes a thick slice, slathers it with butter and pâté, to which he has pointed with his knife and which I have passed to him, and he swallows the whole thing in three mouthfuls, almost without chewing. Rigid Parkinson’s, it seems, hasn’t affected his taste for bread—the neurons still respond to a whiff of pâté. My sister mutters something inaudible. Grumbling at me, in other words. My mother eyes his gluttonous contentment, shrugs her shoulders and lets them drop closer to the table, so that her nose is almost touching her empty plate, as though she were trying to shrink even further.

My father chews more bread, this time a slice he has soaked in salad dressing, having finished off the pâté. He cuts himself a wedge of Camembert and stuffs it into his mouth with the bread. He doesn’t look up. He stares down at the table, his eyelids half-closed like the shutters of an old, dilapidated house. Good God, he’s feeling guilty! At least that is what it looks like. Unless he’s merely resting, gathering forces for a fresh assault on the food. But since his stroke and the Parkinson’s, since his legs stopped taking orders from his brain, since whatever it is that issues from his mouth is no longer speech, since he has had to be taken care of, a man who has never cared for anyone in his life, since he stopped being a man, a real man, a man who stomps around and orders people about, he has been making little guilty-child faces every time he sneaks a slice of bread, and his eyes gleam like those of a thief when he finishes off more cheese in two mouthfuls than everyone else at the table combined. My mother shrinks a little more whenever she sees him ignoring his doctor’s warnings. By eating so much, my sick father is killing my healthy mother.

I find myself thinking, and it’s not an appropriate thought, this being Christmas Eve, but as I watch my mother transform into a fragile butterfly and my father into a wild, gurgitating boar, I cannot stop myself from thinking about their deaths. The way they comport themselves at the table, their attitude to food, forces the thought of their deaths upon me. There’s my mother, who takes little nibbles from the end of her fork and chews them methodically, taking no pleasure from them. And then there’s my father, shovelling the food down in gargantuan mouthfuls and then, on the off chance that his mouth will feel neglected for even a second, cramming in huge chunks of bread as soon as the first half-chewed mass begins its descent into his stomach. Of course I have to accept his death, since it is so obviously imminent; I’m not being morbid thinking about it. But when I see how my mother frowns as she talks while my father, majestically silent, picks up his plate in his trembling hands, causing such anxiety among the children that they all look down at the table so as not to have to witness the impending crash, I imagine both their deaths.

My mother will slip away with such a self-effacing expiration of breath not even her sheets will be disturbed. She hates to be a bother to anyone and would be surprised to see so many tearful faces beside her coffin. My father will go with a roar, a kind of explosion, in a burst of anger and terror. My mother will die quietly, decently, like a lady, having always known that her voyage was written in her file long ago and that the only uncertainty has been the date of departure. My father will rage against life, which he will have failed to conquer only because it betrayed him. With his dying breath he’ll say he’s hungry, if only to put death off for a few more seconds. And in those final seconds he’ll mentally go through every book he’s ever read and every conversation he’s ever had having to do with eternal life. He’ll hedge every bet, beginning with that of Pascal. He’ll beg God and Allah to forgive him, look around for any other gods to whom he can appeal, and just before seeing that famous diffuse light supposed by many to illuminate the end of death’s tunnel, he’ll suddenly remember Julie, his youngest daughter, who at the moment is talking about her mortgage but who, twenty years ago, at a Christmas Eve dinner much like this one, tried to convince him of the reality of reincarnation. In the last split second before dying, he’ll decide to believe in reincarnation. With luck Julie won’t be there to tell him that those who have lived sinful lives are likely to come back as lizards, or beggars. My mother will die of exhaustion, happy to have finished her work, to have raised her children, in all probability to be meeting with her God, in whom she still seems sincerely to believe. Death for my father will be a humiliating defeat. Men do not die. Which is why he’ll cling so desperately to what he called Julie’s “idiocies,” although Julie herself hasn’t believed in reincarnation since she stopped being eighteen and had two children.

My parents have lived in this house for forty-five years. We fled from the cloying intimacy and clamour of our downtown neighbourhood to this new suburb, which at that time was practically in the country. I remember the silence of that first morning, the sight of a ploughed field thirty metres from the back of our house, a cow doing its business on our property. All too soon, however, the bucolic fields to the south of us became a boulevard, then a strip mall, and finally a hideous excrescence of the city. The three streets to the north were inhabited by the English, who ignored us, which suited us just fine. And beyond them, towards the city we had abandoned, were the Italians, many, many Italians, who went to the same church as we did and baked such wonderful bread.

Since then the suburb has gone the way of the world at large. Haitians now live where the Italians were; Arabs took over the English streets; and Tamils moved in as the Québécois moved out. To my father’s great relief, our street was spared these revolutions, except for a Chinese family that speaks to no one, a Haitian who dresses better than the whites, and an Italian Jehovah’s Witness who makes terrible wine but has a good heart and a dog that barks too much. My mother enjoys her daily visits to the good-natured halal butchers, and my father despairs on behalf of the entire city to see tall Blacks walking down the street as if they owned the place.

It was a good enough house for its time. Two storeys, red brick, set back from the street on a nice lot, plenty of windows and a sloped roof that gave it a certain noble profile.

To a child of seven, which is what I was when we moved, it was like a small castle. To get to the front door we had to walk three metres along a concrete sidewalk, climb three steps, walk another three metres and then up two more steps.

The door opens into a vestibule—a tiny one, but a vestibule all the same. To the right, stairs lead down to the basement, where since day one there’s been a ping-pong table, a supreme luxury in those days. Also in the basement, in a corner near the furnace, is my father’s precious workshop. The only time I was ever allowed into it was to get his belt across my backside. Through the vestibule is an arch into a sort of imitation entrance hall, two metres square. On the right, a varnished wooden staircase rises to the four bedrooms on the second floor. To the left, a large double door opens into the living room, which contains my father’s stereo, piano, three Renoir reproductions and a more recent acquisition, a Hammond organ. Straight on is the door to the kitchen. This was the only door we used when we came home from school, since the living room was theoretically also off limits.

No sooner had we moved in than my father decided we needed more space. There were already six of us brats and a seventh on the way. He drew up plans for a family room off the kitchen, towards the back of the house. Since that addition, we’ve followed an unwavering ritual: we take off our boots in the vestibule, hang up our coats in the closet next to the staircase, go into the kitchen to deposit our plates and bottles of wine on the round table, give Mother a peck on the cheek and then continue on into the family room. For decades the living room may as well not have been there, as far as we were concerned. Only my father’s impending death has brought it back into use. It is now his bedroom, since he can no longer climb the stairs. His bed has been moved downstairs, and in one corner there is a chair equipped with a motor that would allow him to sit down and stand up unaided if he ever used it, which he obstinately refuses to do.

We have eaten all our meals and held all our holiday reunions in this family room, as though we have agreed to preserve the rest of the house intact. Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Epiphany (ages ago, it seems now), our parents’ birthdays, our own and our various spouses’ and children’s birthdays. We pack the room dozens of times a year, and will continue to do so right up to the end, which is where we very nearly are now. My mother has always wanted us to think of the house as the family home. And so we have.

It must be at least ten o’clock, since the younger ones are becoming fidgety. They finished eating long ago and have been running around the house, banging on the piano, fighting peacefully amongst themselves, shouting up from the basement, terrorizing the cat, who is now hiding behind the furnace in the part of the basement that is still out of bounds. We have called them back to the table for dessert. I look at us all and think of the Last Supper. We all have our assigned places. I don’t know what ritual we have been following, but we invariably take the same seats around this long table, which is in fact not a long table but a series of small tables shoved together, one after the other as our tribe has increased in size.

My father presides at the head of this collage of tables. Directly across from him, at the far end of the family room, is the television, which he alone controls with the remote kept jealously by his side. To the left of the
TV
is the Christmas tree with its gifts, all of which have been hefted and shaken and rattled impatiently by a succession of small hands. My mother sits to his right, as she has done since time immemorial. Centuries, at least. And then, moving around the table in a counter-clockwise direction, there is Géraldine, who is a banker, and her engineer husband, about whom I know nothing even though they’ve been together for twenty years; then Julie, whose ambition it once was to write tragedies, and her new, silent boyfriend, who at least has an honest smile; then Bernard, the most serious of us, a timid professor of geography, which probably explains why he has never married; then Mireille, a homeopath, a dealer in herbs and therapies, as honest and generous as St. Francis of Assisi, and her husband, a bureaucrat who has become disillusioned with bureaucracy; then their two well-behaved, exemplary daughters quietly awaiting their presents and their dessert; then my own daughter, who is thirty and still trying to find herself, possibly because I lost her somewhere along the way, and her daughter, my granddaughter, who draws suns with faces; then Lise, a nurse for whom I cannot feel any affection; then Claude, a teacher, and his wife who works for some union or other and is a feminist. And finally Isabelle, whom I am about to marry. Luc is missing. He doesn’t believe in family, lives in Vancouver. And also Richard, who died when he was still a child.

That being said, none of us has a Christian name as far as my father is concerned. He has always, since we became adults, identified us by our occupations, by our various lines of work. I am the Actor. Julie, the Tragedienne. Luc is the Businessman, Géraldine the Banker, Bernard the Geographer. Our father doesn’t see us as people, only as a set of functions.

My mother tells him he has eaten too much as she sets the yule log on the table, and Lise and Isabelle come from the kitchen with the orange mousse and fruitcake. Claude has brought a plate of Turkish delight, Bernard one of baklava. Dad uses his remote to turn up the volume on the television because Céline Dion is singing “O Holy Night.” He doesn’t say anything, but he grunts something that sounds vaguely like “Shut up.” No one hears him. We are too busy asking who wants cake or mousse or both, and Lise is saying she made the baklava herself from an original Babylonian recipe, not that she’s been to Babylon personally but she saw it made on
TV
by a very nice-looking young man with an Italian name. I’m not listening because I’m talking about Lebanon and Turkish delight, which I ate there once a long time ago. The volume of our voices rises with that of the television. My mother is going on about the mousse, how it has been my favourite dessert since I was two years old, although unnoticed by her I haven’t touched orange mousse for years. Louise, usually the quiet one, is asking how it is that there is no more cheese, and has someone forgotten to put out the salad? I turn to my father, who has set the remote down on his plate and is looking at each of us in turn with dull, reptilian eyes. No one looks at him. He is alone. My mother repeats that the doctor prefers that he not have dessert. Lise, the specialist in all matters concerning desserts, begins praising her own yule log. She tells us how difficult it is to make, the special little tricks you need to know, you wouldn’t believe how long it takes. She gives us the temperature at which the butter has to be kept, the quality of the flour, which must not be machine-ground. She uses only organic, fair-trade chocolate, and the fruit all comes from local producers. It is not so much a yule log she has given us as a manifesto. Everyone takes a piece. The plates overflow. We offer polite exclamations of ecstasy, because in our family we are not big on out-and-out compliments. Over by the Christmas tree I hear the start of an eloquent disquisition on the virtues of fair trade.