Fever (20 page)

But she could not discover the connection. Try as she would, she could not understand. Suddenly she wanted to go to Babette and shout angrily, flesh is flesh! But she did not know even what this meant.

She set the skillet on the stove, turned the burner on, and dropped butter into the pan. Next she took a small, heavy, red-enamelled pot from the cupboard and measured a little flour into it, then searched for the quart of stock she kept in the back of the fridge. The butter had begun to melt and she lifted the cutting board heaped with the sliced mushrooms, smelling of the earth, faintly musky, and pushed them into the butter. She turned them with a wooden spoon, listening to the sizzle, watching them turn golden in the melted butter and the heat.

In the evening Armand came home.

“How did it go today?” he asked from the hallway where he was hanging up his coat. She came and stood in the doorway, wiping her hands on her apron.

“All right,” she said. “The nurse came.”

“I know, it was her day,” he said, moving his briefcase to a corner where no one would trip over it, although it had been four years since the last child had left home and much longer since any of them had raced, giggling and shrieking, through the house. “Did she have anything new to say?” Ginny watched the polished brown leather case gleaming in the corner. She shifted her eyes to her husband, who stood running his hand over his thick, yellow-brown hair.

“You got a haircut,” she said, putting up a hand to touch the short hair high on his neck, where it glinted in the artificial light. It felt prickly against her fingertips.

After dinner Armand came upstairs to pay his daily visit to his wife’s mother.

“Emmaline,” he said, smiling. “How are you this evening?” Ginny was sipping a cup of coffee and sitting in the chair Babette occupied in the mornings before she made the journey downstairs. Emmaline lifted her hand again, and again moved it back and forth an inch or so in each direction.

“I am well tonight,” she said. “I had the most wonderful dream.”

“Really,” Armand said. He came into the room and sat down beside Ginny in the only other chair in the room, and crossed one leg over the other with a gesture that was polite, not quite weary. In this light Ginny noticed the grey in the hair above his ear and shifted in her chair, resting her head on its back as though she too were weary, although she wasn’t.

“I am not afraid to die now,” Emmaline said. “Everyone was so kind to me, so gracious and interested.” She waved her hand again, the other one still holding onto the top of the quilt. “Such beauty.” Armand glanced at Ginny, then looked back to Emmaline.

“That must be a comfort,” he offered, finally, again adjusting his position slightly.

“Aha,” Emmaline said. “If only Babette could have such a dream.” Armand looked back down to his lap and moved his hands. Ginny could always feel how all he wanted to do was rise and go. Just go.

“Perhaps she will,” Ginny said, to quiet her mother. It was time for her mother’s evening pills. She rose and opened the drawer in the bedtable by Emmaline’s head. The drawer opened smoothly, it was amazing how smoothly it always opened, and the round white vials sat smugly at the front of it. Ginny wanted to press her palms against the tops of them, to feel their hard plastic biting into her flesh.

“I’ll get some fresh water,” Armand said, and was gone before she could turn around.

They settled Emmaline for the night, moving her brass bell that had come from India close to the edge of the bedtable. Even if she were able only to knock it to the floor, Ginny would hear it. Emmaline sighed, almost happily.

“Mother,” Ginny said, brushing her cheek and forehead with her lips. Emmaline appeared not to have noticed or heard. She lay there, half-smiling, her eyes open, looking out into the room, even as Ginny turned out the light and moved the door so that it stood slightly ajar.

“I think there may have been dancing,” Emmaline said, “and tapestries on the walls were woven with red and blue and gold thread.” Ginny hesitated, about to ask her mother a question, then instead, hurried downstairs to the family room where Armand was reading the paper and his mother sat in the armchair watching the television set. Babette’s cheeks were flushed a rosy colour, as if she had been out walking in the snow.

“What is this dream?” she asked Ginny abruptly, fiercely. “What is it?” Ginny sat down on the sofa beside Armand, and tried to think of a reply for Babette. “It’s ridiculous,” Babette
said. “She should be in the hospital.” Armand crackled his newspaper, lowering it. “Mother,” he said.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Ginny remarked, after a moment.

“Get me my Brompton’s,” Babette said, her voice wavering between querulous and outraged. Armand rose quickly and went into the kitchen. Ginny didn’t move. She found the room a little chilly, she preferred warm rooms, especially in the winter, but right now Babette suffered terribly from the heat. Funny, Ginny thought, when she’s so thin. And me so well-padded, yet loving the heat.

Armand had returned with the bottle of medicine and a teaspoon and stood in front of his mother, filling the spoon with the pain-killer, bending to set it in her mouth.

Ginny was suddenly freezing. She tucked her icy hands under her thighs and rocked back and forth, shivering. Goose bumps stood out on her arms and her toes felt as if the blood had stopped circulating in them. Even the end of her nose felt cold.

Babette swallowed, gagged, choked, suddenly sat forward, coughing. The unexpected thrust of her head knocked the bottle out of Armand’s hand. It fell to the floor, the liquid swirling out onto the rug.

Ginny stood up. He puts his mouth on my breasts, she wanted to shout. Yes! She felt as if she were choking herself.

Armand was kneeling, touching his mother’s knee with one hand while he righted the bottle with the other, saying, “You’re all right?” to Babette, who had stopped coughing. He lifted the bottle to the light. “There’s still a couple of doses left.”

Ginny almost spoke then, but Babette was looking at her, silencing her with the fierceness in her pale eyes. Ginny hugged herself.

“It’s so cold in here,” she whispered. “I’m so cold.”

I was dreaming and when the phone rang, I woke confused, still back in Saskatchewan on a hot summer afternoon, running down a dusty road toward my father who was walking home, swinging his arms, quickening his pace when he saw me running out to greet him, wearing a smile both gay and tender and the dream was mixed with the shrill ring of the phone—my father coming toward me, swinging his arms and smiling, and me beginning to stumble.

James was turned away from me, his greying hair rumpled, the sleeve of his pyjama jacket twisted oddly around his shoulder as he spoke into the phone.

“Oh no!” he was saying. “Oh, god,” then a pause and, “yes, tomorrow, four o’clock.” Another pause. “Yes, all right then, Connie. Yes. Till tomorrow.”

James’ father had died. Another in the series of deaths that dogged our middle age: first my father, then his mother, my mother, and now, his father. And now it would begin again—the travel, the pain and tears, the rituals, and all the same questions rising up to echo, unanswered, once more.

“I’m so sorry, dear,” I whispered. James had turned so that he was lying on his back looking up at the ceiling. I lifted myself on
my elbow and saw that sorrow and resignation had crept into his eyes and settled in the lines of his face. At first I wasn’t sure if I should touch him. I put my hand gently on his shoulder and began to straighten the twisted sleeve of his pyjama jacket. He lifted his shoulder and arm to help me, then turned to me, leaning against me, and began to shake with those silent, agonized tears men have.

Connie met us at the airport in Saskatoon, standing out in the crowd as she always did, thin and smartly dressed in a pale gold linen suit, her dark hair arranged in a chignon, but set apart less by her appearance than by a certain indefinable brilliance that clung to her that was composed partly of tension and partly of a brittleness I always felt but couldn’t comprehend. She had recently gone through her third divorce.

James and Connie hugged briefly and brushed each other’s cheeks. Grief, for he had loved his father deeply, had made James tentative, blurred him, as if he too might melt away, was only waiting, hovering in a confused way till things came clear to him, while Connie vibrated with some barely controlled, unacknowledged emotion, that was not, couldn’t be, sorrow.

“Poor dad,” James said to her, blinking, holding her hands and Connie said, “Yes,” in a harsh voice and looked away.

Standing in that small, crowded airport as we waited for our luggage, making disjointed small talk about the flight and the heat, I remembered that in the dream and in the actual waking moment too, I also had loved my father. I was about eight years old then and I had loved him unconditionally.

In the end of the dream, as the phone woke me, I had been stumbling. Stumbling? Yes, of course, one day when I was not even out of the yard, I stumbled over a stick and fell head-long on the path. The stick had a rusty nail in one end and it cut my ankle in that soft, fleshy part on the top of my foot, just below
the shin and there was blood everywhere, and always on the edge of panic as a child—terrified at the blood, I turned away from my father and ran screaming into the house to my mother.

Then, because the ankle became infected and refused to heal, I had to go to the hospital where I stayed for over a week, running a fever the whole time, in constant pain, while they gave me antibiotics and soaked my foot twice a day in an antiseptic bath that was so hot I could barely stand it.

After a week of lonely misery, lying silent and bundled up in the bed as if it were blizzarding outside, although it was the height of summer, my ankle still not healing, the doctor scooped me up in his arms, carried me to an examining room by the ward office, gave me a whiff of anaesthetic, the memory of which still sends a little shiver of fear down my back, and when I woke I was back in my hospital bed and my mother was sitting beside me smoking. I remember how she made a little drawing on her pale blue Players package of the sliver of wood the doctor had removed from deep inside the cut.

Then I went home to find that I was so weak from lying in bed that I could barely walk. And it seemed to me, although I would never know this for sure, that I never again ran out to greet my father as he came home.

The luggage began to tumble from the opening onto the belt. James moved forward, jostling my arm, to pick up our suitcases.

“This way,” Connie said, leading us toward the exit to the parking lot as if she thought we’d never been in the Saskatoon airport before. She had been in the city a week, ever since their father’s first heart attack. She could do that because she didn’t have a job, her divorce settlements having left her secure. We stepped through the sliding glass doors and were immediately enveloped in the baking prairie heat.

When James saw that Connie was driving their father’s car, a
fifteen-year-old blue Buick from the era of big cars, still in mint condition, tears came into his eyes. He blinked them back, then set the suitcases in the trunk Connie had opened. But when he had laid them inside, and the trunk was closed and Connie was opening the door on the driver’s side, James paused, lifted his eyes from the car, and stared around at the few trees stunted by the jet exhaust and then up at the huge, hot prairie sky. “I thought we had more time,” he said.

“I did too,” Connie said briskly, “but more the fools us.” She got in the car and slammed the door. James didn’t move.

“James,” I said softly. He turned his head slowly toward me, smiled vaguely, then got into the front seat beside his sister, while I got in the back.

“It was sudden, James,” Connie said, as she put the car in gear and backed it out. “He didn’t feel a thing. And the attack that put him in the hospital was a mild one. He didn’t suffer much.” She said this not in a comforting way, although I believe it was her intention to comfort him, but angrily. Did she not love their father? I wondered. Had there been trouble between them? If it was so, James had never mentioned it. He often talked about his father in a warm, loving way, what a good father he had been, how understanding, how supportive. And how close they had been. I had assumed Connie had been included in this and I had envied both of them.

Connie paid the toll then drove us out of the parking lot and into the light traffic moving away from the airport.

“I waited for you to come to make the arrangements,” she said. “Are you up to stopping at the undertaker’s right now? He needs to see us, the sooner the better.” James gave a little start, he turned to look at Connie, and then the surprise faded and was replaced again by that deep sadness. Connie kept her eyes on the traffic, refusing, I thought, to look at him, and there was such
tension in her neck and shoulders that I thought I had better act as go-between.

“What do you think, James?” I asked, leaning forward. The leather of the seat still had a faintly new smell when you came close to it.

“Yes, sure,” James said, and I was grateful to hear the steadiness that I loved in him returning even under his shock and sadness. He would suffer, I knew, was suffering, but he would be all right.

Connie changed lanes, moved out into the more congested lane of traffic going downtown, still not even glancing at James. She drove aggressively, angrily even, and looking at their backs, brother and sister, in the seat in front of me, the one tense and dark, the other fairer, relaxed into his sorrow, it seemed to me that a conflict was inevitable, although why or what about I didn’t know, and I prayed that when it came—if it came—it wouldn’t be too bad.

They talked to each other in low voices about other family members who had still to be called, and about the neighbours and their father’s friends, reminding each other of this person or that. My mind drifted and I watched the cars pass us, and the buildings, altered now by time, that had once been so familiar to me.

We drove with the windows down since the car, despite its luxurious interior, didn’t appear to have air conditioning. I rested my arm on the open window and as we waited at the stoplights I could feel the reflected heat rising in waves off the asphalt. I was suddenly back a teenager in this city, waiting at bus stops on my way home from the swimming pool, going out on dates summer evenings to movies downtown. I couldn’t recall my father ever meeting or talking to one of my boyfriends. I couldn’t even recall one of them in the same room with him. And yet, the night before my wedding to James, he flew into one of
his rages, starting out in a mildly accusing way because I was marrying out of his church, and when I didn’t try to placate him, his voice began to rise, he played off his own outrage, used it to let out all the unexpressed anger he had been hoarding over my neglect of him as my father, and my turning away from him.

I cried, after he had worn himself out as he always did eventually and had gone to bed, standing out on the dew-dampened front lawn in the thick summer darkness. It was late then, after midnight, and I was to be married to James the next morning. I thought how I would be gone the next day, gone for good.

The neighbourhood was very quiet, except for the sound of distant cars that rose to a hollow whine over the treetops and houses. All the time I was crying I could hear the sound of those cars, people going and coming to movies and parties or dances on that Friday night. I was filled with pain, seeing no end and no solution to my unhappiness except through the act of leaving for good. And I was unable to say even then, riding in James’ father’s beautiful old car down those familiar streets that I now wished not to be on, of what my feelings consisted. I cried over the impossibility of ever turning it all simple again as it must have been when I was eight and loved my father unconditionally.

By ten that evening all the callers—neighbours, friends, a few relatives—had gone home and the three of us were left alone in the comfortable, once elegant living room. We had opened all the windows and doors to the prairie night, hoping to catch any breeze that might come up, and it seemed to me that the warm outside darkness had a gentle hum to it that might slowly seep into the shadowy room where we sat in silence, was held in abeyance only by the fragile skeleton of the house.

“Funny, I feel so little,” Connie said. James didn’t say anything and I tensed, hoping Connie would not go on in this vein. “I never felt I had a father,” she said, holding her glass of
whiskey up to the light. “I guess it’s no wonder I don’t feel much.” I could feel James closing himself off from her, turning inward, refusing her invitation to quarrel.

Trying to take the tension out of the moment, I took Connie’s remark as a casual one, as if I didn’t know how loaded with emotion it was.

“I felt the same way about mine,” I said. “But now, years after his death, I find myself thinking about him, missing him, in a way I never do my mother.”

“My father didn’t love me,” Connie said, not looking at either of us, her mouth twisted. She quickly got control of herself. “Don’t tell me yours didn’t love you either. What is it with these fathers and their daughters?”

James stood slowly, a big, rumpled, tired-looking man, his expression carefully neutral.

“I’m going to bed,” he said, in a mild tone, as if he hadn’t heard what had been said. “Good night,” and he went out of the room. Connie watched him walk away, then kept her eyes on the wall as if she could see through it to where we could hear him moving slowly up the stairs. Her eyes were very bright now and fierce. I yawned and stretched, intending to follow James as soon as I decently could.

“A long day,” I said. “I’m tired.”

“I’m not,” Connie said, abruptly, almost rudely. “I don'9t know how the hell I’m going to sleep tonight. I’m wide awake.” She stood abruptly and moved into the armchair that James had been sitting in, that had been their father’s chair. She leaned back, then put her arms carefully out on each armrest as if she were trying it out to see if she would buy it or not. “Keep me company for awhile.”

After a moment I said, “I’ve been thinking about my father, how I loved him when I was eight and when I was ten I was
already turning away from him, till when he died we were barely acquaintances.”

“At least you had a father till you were eight,” she said. “I never had my father. He was wrapped up in James. All he needed was a son. He never knew I existed.” Her anger was palpable, throbbing around us. At last I knew what that barely contained emotion I had been feeling in her since she met us at the airport was. It was rage.

“And now he’s dead,” Connie said, her tone fluctuating between bitter and wry. “I’m the one who’ll be stuck with going through this house, deciding what to do with everything. James won’t be any help.”

“I’ll help you,” I said, “if you’ll allow me.” She was silent, and I was too, wondering if it was true that her father didn’t love her, suspecting that it was since James hadn’t even bothered to deny it, wondering if my father had loved me when he died. I had no idea. I doubted it.

“The will will be fair, you know,” Connie said. Her voice had deepened and she looked directly at me. I felt it was the first time the real Connie had ever spoken to me. “It will be scrupulously fair, but somehow …” She looked away, her mouth working, trying not to cry. “Fair hurts even more.” Then she shrugged and lifted her eyes to me again, the tears gone. “Silly, isn’t it, at my age. But what could he do now anyway, to make up for all those years of benign neglect?”

At least it was benign, I thought, but decided not to say it. The air between my father and I had been so charged that I didn’t like being in the same room with him, and he knew it, and was uncomfortable around me, so that we avoided each other. Or was it only that I avoided him?

“I had a bad relationship with my father,” I said. “But it was as much my fault as his.”

“He was a good father?” she asked quickly, fastening those brilliant eyes on mine.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I doubt it.” I looked away from her. “But he was only an ordinary man, you know. He wasn’t anything special. He did what he knew, that’s all. I don’t blame him so much anymore. Or at least, I blame myself as much.”