A Good Death (5 page)

My mother’s face freezes like that of a terrified child. Whatever she was about to say dies on her parted lips. Her eyelids, creased by so many tiny wrinkles, close slowly over eyes filling with tears. It pains her to be seeing what she is seeing. My father turns his back to the sink and looks off into space as Bernard, Lise and Claude come into the kitchen carrying plates and platters. They stop in their tracks and look at one another, wonderingly. My father is crying, and it’s not a pretty sight. His whole face has dissolved into tears—eyes, nose, mouth. He sniffs and runs the back of his hand across his nose, which is dripping, and then runs the other hand over his wet mouth. I don’t know who it is who says, You’re not well, or which one of the sisters, speaking softly, says, He’s obviously had too much to drink and eat and he should have listened to the doctors, but of course he never does what anyone tells him to do. Dad, you’re being unreasonable! So what? I know he hasn’t heard a word anyone has spoken, but it’s as though they have been directed at me. I have become my father, I hear what they are saying about my tears, my weakness, no doubt even about these dishes I must have only half-washed. But I tried so hard. I take him firmly by the arm, hold him tightly at the top of his elbow as he held me so often when I was a child, and I draw him towards me.

“Come on, Dad, you should lie down.”

“No… the walleye… the presents…”

“We can talk about the walleye tomorrow… Rest for a while, and you can come back later for the presents.”

He lets me lead him towards his bed, no longer crying. My mother has opened her eyes again and is trying to recover her party face, while the children (as I call my brothers and sisters, because I’m the eldest) go back to stacking plates and bowls on the round kitchen table. I think it’s Claude who makes a joke, wanting to defuse the drama of the situation, and then installs himself at the sink in my father’s place to finish the dishes. My father shu±es slowly across the kitchen tiles. I don’t like this physical contact I have with him. He’s not aware of this. It’s far too late to explain to him how distasteful it is for me to be holding him up, walking beside him. And useless. I know what I’m doing, I’m helping an old man to bed, an old man who is dying, and it doesn’t matter which old man, or that he reminds me of a dying father. I can live with that.

HE’S LYING ON HIS BED, MUTTERING TO
HIMSELF. FROM THE KITCHEN I CAN HEAR THE
SOUNDS OF CLATTERING DISHES AND HUSHED
conversations. He doesn’t want to get undressed. I didn’t offer to help him, which bothers me. I just watched him lie down on the bed, normally a fairly simple procedure. What could be easier than to let yourself flop down on the bed, or rather, since he is a methodical person, to sit on the edge, take off your shoes and then, in a movement that encompasses the whole operation, let your spine arch back, head hit the pillow, and not even notice your legs as they follow the rest of the body and assume their customary position. In order for him to sit I had to hold him. Then he instinctively bent over to untie his shoes, forgetting that he can no longer do that. He can’t bend his back far enough to reach the laces. I offered to undo them for him but the sequence of grunts with which my offer was met I assumed meant no. His body is no longer a whole. Nothing seems attached to anything else, his head to his neck, his hips to his legs, his arms, which dangle at his sides, to his shoulders. He leaned on the bed on one elbow and with his left hand reached down and pulled his left leg up. The other leg followed, but not without some effort. All the motions we normally make without thinking, he has to mentally break up into their component parts, try to put them back together again, then execute them, step by step, so that moving is no longer a graceful dance but a halting, arduous process. I stand here as useless as a coat hook in a garden. His eyes light on the piano and he says the word, piano, then they turn to the Hammond organ and he says, organ. He completes the survey of his horizon by contemplating the small stereo that sits proudly atop an old cabinet that contains his turntable from the 1940s. He does not say, music. I ask him if he wants to listen to a record, or if I can play something for him on the piano or the organ.

“Too… much…” He looks for the word. “Too… much… noise.”

“It won’t bother anyone.”

He shakes his head angrily. He doesn’t understand that I don’t understand.

“Too… much… for me… noise. The others…”

It suddenly occurs to me that I haven’t heard a single note of music in this house for two years. Whenever I’ve come on my own to visit, there has not been a sound from the piano or the organ or the stereo. It was in this very room, this living room, that I first discovered music, those mysterious sounds wafting out to me from the turntable, sending me off I have no idea why, into realms of dreaming, crying, dancing, even when I was a small child. As with all autodidacts, my father’s taste flitted about everywhere without logic or consistency: Tchaikovsky and Beethoven mostly, Chopin’s sonatas, but also Nat King Cole, Liberace, Louis Armstrong, Edith Piaf, Sinatra. And, to remind himself of I don’t know what—his worker origins, perhaps—the slushy music of polkas and accordions and military marches. His favourite records of all, however, were Bach’s toccatas and fugues as played by Albert Schweitzer, the mythical doctor and modestly talented organist who avowed great love for the African people, whom he thought were so poorly evolved intellectually and to whom he dedicated his life. Father admired Schweitzer a great deal, Africans not so much.

IT WAS ABOUT
one in the morning when I was awakened by a violent argument coming from my parents’ bedroom, which was on the second floor next to the room I shared with Richard. I could hear my father shouting and my mother crying, pleading with him, then a sudden scream of pain. It was the first time I’d heard a woman scream and it terrified me. I was seven. Then there were loud footsteps, curses ringing out down the stairs, then thunder, a hurricane of noise roaring from the Hammond organ, which, until then, I’d known only to make the light, tinkling sounds of flutes, trumpets or violins. I know now that it was the most famous of Bach’s toccatas and fugues. Father had cranked the volume up to full blast, pounding the pedals so hard that the whole house shook, even the walls and floors, under the assault from the heavy vibrations of the music. Richard woke up screaming, and my mother came into our room to tell us not to worry, that our father was just playing some music to calm himself down. Then the doorbell rang and the music stopped. I could hear the neighbour’s voice, and of course that of my father: “What? You don’t like Johann Sebastian Bach? You don’t like great music? You’re an idiot!” And the door slamming shut. I was already beginning to realize that in my father’s view, there weren’t many people in the world who weren’t idiots, and I was afraid that I was one myself. He went back to pounding out Bach until the police arrived. After a long, heated discussion, they agreed that Bach was a great musician but that he shouldn’t be played at two o’clock in the morning. My father agreed. We went to sleep to the “Moonlight Sonata,” our tears dried and our fears put off until another time.

“DO YOU
remember Bach’s ‘Toccata and Fugue’?”

He glares at me as though I’m beginning to get on his nerves. He wants me to leave so he can enjoy the peace and quiet that comes to him only in sleep.

“No… The walleye… I’m… going…”

He gives up, closes his eyes. Which confession was he going to make? The walleye or Bach?

I GO BACK
to the kitchen. My mother, who has lived with my father’s stormy moods, his highs and sudden lows, for sixty years, has already forgotten his tears—fortunately, for how could she have survived so long if not by lowering the curtain after each little drama? Her days are filled with these outbursts that have us, the children, running for cover. After each holiday we go home. She stays here. And, I imagine, has to pick up the pieces the next morning, delicately but firmly putting all the dots back on all the
i’
s. If she had the same outraged response as we do, it would kill her. I sit down beside her. She gently pats the back of my hand and lets herself be reassured.

“Don’t worry about him,” she tells me. “He’ll be better tomorrow. He drank a bit too much. These family holidays are always hard on him, emotionally.”

All right, I’m a ten-year-old. My mother has patted my hand and I’m happy. Why do parents have to die in order for their children to feel grown up? She goes back to her conversation with Isabelle. They’re planning our wedding reception. Isabelle and I are getting married next month. The wedding will let my mother die happy, or nearly, knowing that all of her children are happy, or at least being looked after. I’m the last one, and it looked as though being happy and being taken care of were both going to elude me.

“You don’t know how happy you two are making me…” She pauses. “But I’m not sure your father and I will be able to go…”

Isabelle protests. I add my exclamations.

“It’s too complicated,” she adds, implying that we should let her have her way in order to avoid certain problems that no one else has mentioned or even thought about. She’s afraid that my father will spill wine on the tablecloth during the speeches, or splutter incoherently in front of Isabelle’s family. Don’t misunderstand me: she’s not afraid of being humiliated herself (well, maybe a little, but only a little). She wants to protect my father from embarrassing himself, but mostly she wants to spare him the emotions that the doctor has told her will kill him. She believes she has to save him from what to us is life, so that he won’t die. She can’t let him have feelings any more than she can let him have saturated fats. She has to prevent him from being happy in order to prolong his life. She doesn’t put it that way, but that’s how I understand it.

On this subject the family is divided. I hear one of my brothers speaking about the embarrassment my father would cause so many people he doesn’t know, especially Isabelle’s very respectable family, whom no one but me has met yet, and my actor friends, some of whom are well known and even, in some circles, very well known. Of course they would be embarrassed if the old man suddenly tumbled out of his chair, or dumped his soup on Isabelle’s wedding dress. It goes without saying, there’s no point in discussing it. We need to face up to the anxiety he could cause, the embarrassment, the mortified smiles he would bring to all our faces. Put it this way: a sick person has certain inalienable rights. He is absolutely free to be a sick person if he wants, as long as he doesn’t act like a sick person, like an old man who is dying. If he is to be allowed to exist, a sick person must be in perfect health. Or at least be a polite sick person, one who is capable of hiding the fact that he is dying.

Com… pli… cated, as my father would say. I don’t think it is all that complicated, but I understand that no one wants to argue with my mother. Cats scurry off when you approach them directly, and come back only when they feel like it. Birds are worse. Mother is a catbird.

She asks me about my conversation with my father. I try to change the subject, not wanting to upset her and have her scurry off. I tell her we talked about music, that he told me music made too much noise.

Her hand, still resting on mine, trembles faintly and lifts away, joins her other hand, and together they support her delicate head. I realize how easily her head could shatter, how, like fragile porcelain balanced on a pair of alabaster hands, her tiny bird’s head could come crashing down onto the table.

“You mustn’t talk to him about music, it’s too emotional.”

She wants me to be grateful that she hasn’t chosen other words. Music. Emotion.

I couldn’t live without emotions. Without the thrill of worry, or uncertainty, or surprise; without emotion, yes, of course I would die. So are we killing my father by hurling emotions at him? By letting him live? I don’t ask that because she’s gone back to talking to Isabelle about the wedding dress, which Isabelle is keeping a secret from me so that I’ll be the more moved when I see her in it, and I am looking forward to having that emotional response, that leap of eye and heart, that sudden surprise she is preparing for me without asking my advice. She won’t even tell me what colour it is.

“My love, at least tell me the colour.”

“If I tell you the colour, you’ll see the whole dress.”

“No, just the colour, colour doesn’t tell me anything.”

“Colour is everything.”

That’s emotion, and it makes me want to live.

Mother’s hands are still cradling her fragile head.

“The doctor told me he’s to avoid strong emotions. They’re bad for his heart.”

“What about his head? Are they bad for his head? And his happiness? Are they contraindicated for that, too?”

Isabelle looks at me like a mother who wants to slap a child for behaving badly.

AROUND THE FAMILY
room the voices have become more mu±ed. I have the impression that they are calculating and consultative, as if they’re in some kind of informal family meeting called to decide the fate of our parents, either tonight or a few weeks down the road, the next time my father falls or when the majority of us, acting out of concern for my mother’s health, decide their respective futures for them. Since his stroke, some of us have already been avenging ourselves for his strictness during our childhoods, trying to take over most of the responsibility for the house. It’s not meanness or revenge in the literal sense of those words, I suppose. But I know what we are doing: unconsciously, we are reproducing the models of our respective childhoods. It seems to me that Bernard wants to re-create for our parents the constricting order they imposed on him. The Banker wants to install the logical, predictable organizational system she has at the bank, of which she is vice-president. As far as my father’s fate is concerned (and we have discussed it at great length), there are two opposing schools of thought: the Medicals and the Buddhists. The Medicals don’t drink, not really. They chart their glycemia, their blood-alcohol levels, the number of calories burned. If they smoke, it’s only with their evening coffee, preferably on Friday or Saturday. The Medicals, at least the women, weigh themselves every night. The Buddhists smoke like chimneys or not at all, drink as much as they feel like drinking and have completely contradictory opinions about everything. They’re fine with letting my father’s life take its normal course, letting him enjoy all the pleasures prohibited by hard-line doctors, but at the same time they wish that the ensuing flood of happiness, enjoyed in the teeth of the medical experts, would also lead to more happiness for my mother. But that’s the catch. If my father eats too many oysters and too much foie gras, he’ll grunt with satisfaction, but the next morning, when all the Buddhists are home meditating into the rising sun, it’s our dear, frail little mother who has to pick him up when he falls down because he blacked out from having stuffed too much fat into the old paternal metabolism. We know absolutely nothing about that. That’s where the two schools come up, however cautiously and timidly, against my mother’s concern. For us, she is the incarnation of everything we want the life awaiting us to be like. My father’s illness has given her back her soul, her voice; with her shining eyes, her arresting smile, her legendary family, the way she is with the Algerian butcher, so open-minded, she is more alive now than she ever was under my father’s thumb.