Hardy 05 - Mercy Rule, The (30 page)

This was not to say there was not a great deal of crying out in general — and screaming and giggling and fighting and running around — and Hardy never for a moment doubted that if he wasn’t in
baby-sitting
mode, they would destroy the house as surely and as efficiently as Vesuvius had destroyed Pompeii.

Finally, Frannie came home. Hardy, nearly insane with enduring the kid stuff, asked her if she minded if he took a little break. He’d be back in a while — going for a jog.

Until three years before, Hardy had been religious about running a four-mile circle from his house on 34th Avenue, out to the beach, south as far as Lincoln, then back east along Lincoln to Park Presidio, up through Golden Gate Park, and back home.

Frannie warned him that maybe he should warm up for a week or so, get back in some aerobic condition before tackling four miles. To which he’d beaten his chest like Tarzan, getting a big laugh from the kids — their dad was funny — and told his wife he’d be home in forty-five minutes. He was still in shape.

He had never given the workout much thought; it had been part of his daily routine. Today, before he’d even made the fifteen or so downhill blocks to the beach, he was truly winded. But never one to let a little physical discomfort stand in his way, especially when he thought it could be overcome by an act of will, he turned south and kept jogging.

Frustrated by the burning in his lungs and leg muscles, he decided he’d just
show
his uncooperative body who was boss and run in the soft sand, not the hard pack by the breakers.

When he finally realized that the cramp that stopped him a mile farther on was not a fatal heart attack, he was in a real pickle. He hadn’t brought either his wallet or keys.

So now, at the farthest possible point from his house, he was stopped in agony, without cab fare or ID. He was going to have to walk, or limp, home.

He’d better start walking. Getting back home wasn’t going to be quick. It was sometime after noon and the wind off the ocean had picked up. His sweat glands worked fine, and the dampness of the sweats he wore made it even colder.

He wasn’t going to make it home. He would die here, limping on the beach. The fine-blowing sand would imbed itself into his damp sweatsuit, his very pores, and turn to cement, and leave him permanently frozen in place.

He could see it clearly: generations hence, tourists would flock to San Francisco, to the binoculars at the Cliff House, and pay a quarter to look down the beach and marvel in wonder at the origins of the manlike form that had magically appeared one day in the late nineties, an eternal sandstone monument to middle-aged flabbiness and stupidity.

It took him nearly an hour and a half to get home from the beach. He had a bath, tried Glitsky and Graham again to no avail, got in a twenty-minute nap. He was going to survive, although the next few days might not be much fun.

*
    
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*
    
*
    
*

That night, he and Rebecca were having their own ‘date.’ The word had a lot of emotional resonance in the family due to the traditional Wednesday ‘Date Night.’ They’d instituted something of the sort with their kids — Hardy with the Beck, Frannie with Vincent.

He and his daughter got to North Beach with time to kill before their dinner reservation, so they strolled the neighborhood together. The Beck’s dress was a flounced floral print in pinks and greens. She wore black patent leather shoes and white tights. Holding hands, flushed with excitement to be in the grown-up world with her dad, Rebecca chartered her way through the tail end of Chinatown with its ducks hanging whole in the windows, its bushels of strange green vegetables and even stranger brown tubers on the sidewalks, its fish in tanks, live poultry in cages.

‘Can we go in one?’

‘Sure.’

In front of them a tiny Asian woman ordered something and the man behind the counter took a turtle from a tank and a cleaver from the butcher block, eviscerating and cleaning it as he would have any other foodstuff.

‘I didn’t know people ate turtles,’ she whispered as they left.

Hardy bought an orchid from a street vendor and leaned down to arrange it under his daughter’s hair band.

They quickly passed — Rebecca silent, holding Hardy’s hand tightly — through the gaudy tourist Saturday-night gauntlet of strip shows and adult theaters, the hawkers and gawkers and rubes from out of town, and then up Broadway by the tunnel to the quiet serenity of Alfred’s.

At their banquette the Beck smiled at her father with an adoring radiance. Her strawberry-blond hair was pulled back off her broad, unlined forehead, usually hidden by bangs. It made her look three or four years older. Her manners were flawless.

‘What a little doll!’ ‘Such a charming child!’ ‘You are one lucky man!’ ‘You must be so proud of her!’

The two of them — Rebecca was meant to hear — took the compliments in stride, modestly, graciously. ‘Thanks.’ ‘She is a gem, isn’t she?’ ‘I know — her dad is so proud of her.’

It was difficult to reconcile the sophisticated daughter who sat across from him now, dazzling the waiters and staff, with the jelly-covered dervish of the morning. But then Hardy realized it would be equally difficult to recognize the well-groomed man in the dark suit as the limping, teeth-chattering hunchback of Ocean Beach he’d been only a few hours ago.

‘And for the lady?’ the waiter asked.

She ordered a Shirley Temple in a martini glass to go with her father’s Bombay. After the drinks arrived, they clinked their glasses. ‘To you,’ Hardy said. ‘I’m so glad we do this.’

Rebecca looked down demurely. ‘Me too.’ She sipped and put the glass down carefully, then looked back up at him. ‘Daddy? That man you’re helping, why did he kill his father?’

Out of the mouths of babes, he thought.

‘Well, I don’t know if he did.’

‘They said at school he did.’

‘They did, huh?’

She nodded solemnly. ‘Because he was sick — the dad, I mean. We had a big talk about it, if it was okay. They said he killed him because he was so sick, but I know I wouldn’t want to kill you, even if you were sick. Then I wouldn’t have you anymore.’

‘No, that’s true, you wouldn’t.’ Hardy searched for an approach. ‘Have you been thinking about this a lot?’

She shrugged. ‘A little. I mean, I know you’re helping him, right? So you must think it’s all right.’

‘I don’t think it’s bad, hon, not necessarily. It depends on the person who’s sick, I think, if he wants to die.’

‘But that would mean he’d want to leave his son too.’

‘Well’ — Hardy rubbed at the table with his fingertip — ‘not that he’d want to. But what if he was hurting all the time? What if I was? You wouldn’t want me to spend my life suffering, would you?’

‘But I wouldn’t want you to
die
!’

He reached across the table and put his hand on top of hers. ‘This is just something we’re talking about, Beck. I’m not going to die, okay? We’re talking about my client’s dad, and he was old and really really sick. I think he wanted to die and he needed his son to help him. He couldn’t trust anybody else to do it right.’

‘Well, then, why is there going to be a trial if it was the right thing?’

‘Because the law says it’s wrong. But sometimes things that are against the law aren’t really wrong. They’re just against the law.’ He heard himself uttering these words and wondered if he really believed them. When he’d been a prosecutor, the distinction wouldn’t have mattered a fig to him. He wondered if he was beginning to even
think
like a defense attorney, and, for the millionth time, wasn’t sure if he was comfortable with it.

But Rebecca, her face betraying every nuance of the quandary, hadn’t lost the thread. ‘Like what? What
isn’t
wrong but
is
against the law?’

He searched his brain. ‘Well, you know those places we passed coming here, with all those posters of naked women?’

‘Yeah. That was gross.’

‘It might be gross or whatever, but it’s not against the law. It might not be the way you’d want to choose to live, to do that kind of stuff. You might even think it’s
wrong
, but it’s still not against the law.’ He squeezed her hand. ‘Are you sure you want to talk about this? Is this a little… serious?’

A frown. ‘
Dad-dee
. I’m nine, you know. I think about a lot of things.’

‘I know. I know you do.’ He smiled at her, this justice-freak daughter of his with a passion for knowing what’s right and what’s wrong. And the example he’d just given her was backwards — something perhaps morally suspect but within the law. He wanted the opposite to make the point. ‘Okay, let’s start over. Maybe I used the wrong word, like
wrong
, for instance. There’s the law, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Okay. So the law is just a bunch of rules. That’s all it is. Some good rules and some rules where it doesn’t make too much sense that they even have the rule. The point is, though, good or bad, if you break one of the rules, you’re going to get punished. That’s another one of the rules.’

‘Right.’

‘But sometimes you break a rule — a law — because you think there’s no reason for it, or it’s just plain wrong. Now you’re still going to get punished, because you can’t allow people to just go breaking the rules, but maybe when you go to trial to get punished, people will realize that the law is dumb, and they’ll change it.’

‘Like what?’

Hardy thought a moment for a clean example. ‘Well, like it used to be against the law for black people to sit on buses with white people.’

‘I know, but that was just stupid.’

‘Of course, but it was a law nevertheless, until this lady named Rosa Parks—’

‘Oh, I know all about that. We learned that in school. She sat on the bus and they went on strike—’

‘Yeah, well, and then they changed the law, and then it wasn’t against the law for black people to sit on buses. It was the same
thing —
in this case a right thing — but one day it was against the law, and the next day it was okay. It wasn’t the thing itself, it was the rule. Is this making any sense?’

‘Sure. I get it completely.’

‘Okay, I bet you do. Anyway, this thing with Graham — my client — it’s a little like that example, but not exactly. I’m not sure the law about letting you kill your father or mother ought to be changed.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because then how do you decide for sure whether or not it’s a good reason? If the person who’s sick really wants it? Or even knows what’s happening?’ Hardy decided to test his martini, buy another few seconds to think. ‘Or sometimes sick people are really hard to take care of, and maybe the people taking care of them get tired of it and just want the person to go away.’

‘That would be horrible!’

‘Well, yes, it would. But if there wasn’t some law preventing it, it might happen. There’s just all kinds of problems. It’s really really complicated. But in this case what Graham did might not have been wrong. I think. I hope.’

She met his eyes. ‘I know, Daddy, if you’re helping him, he didn’t do the wrong thing.’

Hardy had to laugh. ‘You know that, huh?’

‘Cross my heart.’

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Graham and his father didn’t only have Hallmark moments.

‘
Who do you think you are, telling your old man what to do?’ Though it wasn’t yet ten in the morning, Sal had been drinking. He took a feeble swing at his son, as though he were going to cuff him. ‘I’m the dad here. You are just
my
little snot-nosed kid and you do what I tell you, not the other way round
.’

Graham easily ducked away from the roundhouse, but that was the only thing that was going to be easy about this morning.

‘We got an appointment, Sal. The doctor, you remember?’

‘I ain’t going to no doctor. I told you. They take my driver’s license, what am I supposed to do for a living
?’

Graham tried to remain patient. ‘This is Dr Cutler, Sal, my friend. Not the other one
—
what’s his name? — Finer.’

‘They’re all the same. Finer, Cutler. I don’t care. I’m not going. He had settled himself onto his couch, arms crossed, the picture of resistance. There was a flask on its side on the table in front of him and he grabbed it and swigged from it. ’You know how tired I am of getting poked at?‘

‘Yeah, I do, Dad.’ Almost as tired as I am of all this, Graham thought. And Russ Cutler had told him the AD was only going to get worse unless this brain tumor turned out to be inoperable. Which — the good news — looked like the diagnosis.

Graham didn’t think it was funny, but the irony didn’t escape him. He’d brought Sal down to Russ Cutler for the Alzheimer’s. Sal’s eccentricity had suddenly become far less manageable. Graham had wanted an opinion whether his father should be left to live alone, or should be placed in the dreaded home. Would he even know it if he was?

Alzheimer’s wasn’t Cutler’s specialty, but he knew enough. The disease began almost imperceptibly, with smaller losses of short-term memory gradually becoming larger, more all encompassing. The distant past began to assume a more immediate reality than the present.

For Graham the most heart-rending aspect of the situation was its apparently random appearance. Forgetfulness, then a reversion to normalcy, or near normalcy. You kept wanting to deny that it had reached a point of no return. You kept hoping.

Up until a couple of months ago he had spent lots of time with his father, making his fish rounds, playing cards, going to meals, taking walks — Graham trying to get his own reality into focus. What he was going to do with his life. Where, if anywhere, he fit in. And Sal had been great. His best friend. A wise, albeit vulgar, counselor, playmate, drinking buddy.

But then, all at once, Sal wouldn’t be there in an almost literal sense. He wouldn’t know who Graham was. ‘Son, my ass! I haven’t seen either of my sons in fifteen years. Who the hell are you trying to fool? What do you want out of me? You think you’re going to get my money, you got another think coming.’