Montreal Stories (7 page)

I
NEVER LIKE
to leave Canada, because I’m disappointed every time. I’ve felt disappointed about places I haven’t even seen. My wife went to Florida with her mother once. When they arrived there, they met some neighbors from home who told them about a sign saying
NO CANADIANS
. They never saw this sign anywhere, but they kept hearing about others who did, or whose friends had seen it, always in different places, and it spoiled their trip for them. Many people, like them, have never come across it but have heard about it, so it must be there somewhere. Another time I had to go and look after my brother Kenny in Buffalo. He had stolen a credit card and was being deported on that account. I went down to vouch for him and pay up for him and bring him home. Neither of us cared for Buffalo.

“What have they got here that’s so marvelous?” I said.

“Proust,” said Kenny.

“What?”

“Memorabilia,” he said. He was reading it off a piece of paper.

“Why does a guy with your education do a dumb thing like swiping a credit card?” I said.

“Does Mother know?” said Kenny.

“Mum knows, and Lou knows, and I know, and Beryl knows. It was in the papers. ‘Kenneth Apostolesco, of this city …’ ”

“I’d better stay away,” my brother said.

“No, you’d better not, for Mum’s sake. We’ve only got one mother.”

“Thank God,” he said. “Only one of each. One mother and one father. If I had more than one of each, I think I’d still be running.”

It was our father who ran, actually. He deserted us during the last war. He joined the Queen’s Own Rifles, which wasn’t a Montreal regiment—he couldn’t do anything like other people, couldn’t even join up like anyone else—and after the war he just chose to go his own way. I saw him downtown in Montreal one time after the war. I was around twelve, delivering prescriptions for a drugstore. I knew him before he knew me. He looked the way he had always managed to look, as if he had all the time in the world. His mouth was drawn in, like an old woman’s, but he still had his coal-black hair. I wish we had his looks. I leaned my bike with one foot on the curb and he came down and stood by me, rocking on his feet, like a dancer, and looking off over my head. He said he was night watchman at a bank and that he was waiting for the Army to fix him up with some teeth. He’d had all his teeth out, though there wasn’t anything wrong with them. He was eligible for new ones provided he put in a claim that year, so he thought he might as well. He was a bartender by profession, but he wasn’t applying for anything till he’d got his new teeth. “I’ve told them to hurry it up,” he said. “I can’t go round to good places all gummy.” He didn’t ask how anyone was at home.

I had to leave Canada to be with my father when he died. I was the person they sent for, though I was the youngest. My name was on the back page of his passport: “In case of accident or death notify
WILLIAM APOSTOLESCO
. Relationship: Son.” I was the one he picked. He’d been barman on a ship for years by then, earning good money, but he had nothing put by. I guess he never expected his life would be finished. He collapsed with a lung hemorrhage, as far as I
could make out, and they put him off at a port in France. I went there. That was where I saw him. This town had been shelled twenty years ago and a lot of it looked bare and new. I wouldn’t say I hated it exactly, but I would never have come here of my own accord. It was worse than Buffalo in some ways. I didn’t like the food or the coffee, and they never gave you anything you needed in the hotels—I had to go out and buy some decent towels. It didn’t matter, because I had to buy everything for my father anyway—soap and towels and Kleenex. The hospital didn’t provide a thing except the bed-sheets, and when a pair of those was put on the bed it seemed to be put there once and for all. I was there twenty-three days and I think I saw the sheets changed once. Our grandfathers had been glad to get out of Europe. It took my father to go back. The hospital he was in was an old convent or monastery. The beds were so close together you could hardly get a chair between them. Women patients were always wandering around the men’s wards, and although I wouldn’t swear to it, I think some of them had their beds there, at the far end. The patients were given crocks of tepid water to wash in, not by their beds but on a long table in the middle of the ward. Anyone too sick to get up was just out of luck unless, like my father, he had someone to look after him. I saw beetles and cockroaches, and I said to myself, This is what a person gets for leaving home.

My father accepted my presence as if it were his right—as if he hadn’t lost his claim to any consideration years ago. So as not to scare him, I pretended my wife’s father had sent me here on business, but he hardly listened, so I didn’t insist.

“Didn’t you drive a cab one time or other?” he said. “What else have you done?”

I wanted to answer, “You know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been supporting your wife and educating your other children, practically single-handed, since I was twelve.”

I had expected to get here in time for his last words, which
ought to have been “I’m sorry.” I thought he would tell me where he wanted to be buried, how much money he owed, how many bastards he was leaving behind, and who was looking out for them. I imagined them in ports like this, with no-good mothers.
Somebody
should have been told—telling me didn’t mean telling the whole world. One of the advantages of having an Old Country in the family is you can always say the relations that give you trouble have gone there. You just say, “He went back to the Old Country,” and nobody asks any questions. So he could have told me the truth, and I’d have known and still not let the family down. But my father never confided anything. The trouble was he didn’t know he was dying—he’d been told, in fact, he was getting better—so he didn’t act like a dying man. He used what breath he had to say things like “I always liked old Lou,” and you would have thought she was someone else’s daughter, a girl he had hardly known. Another time he said, “Did Kenny do well for himself? I heard he went to college.”

“Don’t talk,” I said.

“No, I mean it. I’d like to know how Kenny made out.”

He couldn’t speak above a whisper some days, and he was careful how he pronounced words. It wasn’t a snobbish or an English accent—nothing that would make you grit your teeth. He just sounded like a stranger. When I was sent for, my mother said, “He’s dying a pauper, after all his ideas. I hope he’s satisfied.” I didn’t answer, but I said to myself, This isn’t a question of satisfaction. I wanted to ask her, “Since you didn’t get along with him and he didn’t get along with you, what did you go and have three children for?” But those are the questions you keep to yourself.

“What’s your wife like?” my father croaked. His eyes were interested. I hadn’t been prepared for this, for how long the mind stayed alive and how frivolous it went on being. I
thought he should be more serious. “
Wife
,” my father insisted. “What about her?”

“Obedient” came into my head, I don’t know why; it isn’t important. “Older than me,” I said, quite easily, at last. “Better educated. She was a kindergarten teacher. She knows a lot about art.” Now, why that, of all the side issues? She doesn’t like a bare wall, that’s all. “She prefers the Old Masters,” I said. I was thinking about the Scotch landscape we’ve got over the mantelpiece.

“Good, good. Name?”

“You know—
Beryl
. We sent you an announcement, to that place in Mexico where you were then.”

“That’s right, Beryl.” “Burrull” was what he actually said.

I felt reassured, because my father until now had sounded like a strange person. To have “Beryl” pronounced as I was used to hearing it made up for being alone here and the smell of the ward and the coffee made of iodine. I remembered what the Old Master had cost—one hundred and eighty dollars in 1962. It must be worth more now. Beryl said it would be an investment. Her family paid for half. She said once, about my father, “One day he’ll be sick; we’ll have to look after him.” “We can sell the painting,” I said. “I guess I can take care of my own father.”

It happened—I was here, taking care of him; but he spoiled it now by saying, “You look like you’ve done pretty well. That’s not a bad suit you’ve got on.”

“Actually,” I said, “I had to borrow from Beryl’s father so as to get here.”

I thought he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and I had my next answer ready, about not begrudging a cent of it. But my father closed his eyes, smiling, saving up more breath to talk about nothing.

“I liked old Lou,” he said distinctly. I was afraid he would ask, “Why doesn’t she write to me?” and I would have to say, “Because she never forgave you,” and he was perfectly
capable of saying then, “Never forgave me for what?” But instead of that he laughed, which was the worst of the choking and wheezing noises he made now, and when he had recovered he said, “Took her to Eaton’s to choose a toy village. Had this shipment in, last one in before the war. Summer ’39. The old man saw the ad, wanted to get one for the kid. Old man came—each of us had her by the hand. Lou looked round, but every village had something the matter, as far as Her Royal Highness was concerned. The old man said, ‘Come on, Princess, hurry it up,’ but no, she’d of seen a scratch, or a bad paint job, or a chimney too big for a cottage. The old man said, ‘Can’t this kid make up her mind about anything? She’s going to do a lot more crying than laughing,’ he said, ‘and that goes for you, too.’ He was wrong about me. Don’t know about Lou. But she was smart that time—not to want something that wasn’t perfect.”

He shut his eyes again and breathed desperately through his mouth. The old man in the story was his father, my grandfather.

“Nothing is perfect,” I said. I felt like standing up so everyone could hear. It wasn’t sourness but just the way I felt like reacting to my father’s optimism.

Some days he seemed to be getting better. After two weeks I was starting to wonder if they hadn’t brought me all this way for nothing. I couldn’t go home and come back later, it had to be now; but I couldn’t stay on and on. I had already moved to a cheaper hotel room. I dreamed I asked him, “How much longer?” but luckily the dream was in a foreign language—so foreign I don’t think it was French, even. It was a language no one on earth had ever heard of. I wouldn’t have wanted him to understand it, even in a dream. The nurses couldn’t say anything. Sometimes I wondered if they knew who he was—if they could tell one patient from another. It was a big place, and poor. These nurses didn’t seem to have much equipment. When they needed sterile water for anything,
they had to boil it in an old saucepan. I got to the doctor one day, but he didn’t like it. He had told my father he was fine, and that I could go back to Canada anytime—the old boy must have been starting to wonder why I was staying so long. The doctor just said to me, “Family business is of no interest to me. You look after your duty and I’ll look after mine.” I was afraid that my dream showed on my face and that was what made them all so indifferent. I didn’t know how much time there was. I wanted to ask my father why he thought everything had to be perfect, and if he still stood by it as a way of living. Whenever he was reproached about something—by my mother, for instance—he just said, “Don’t make my life dark for me.” What could you do? He certainly made her life dark for her. One year when we had a summer cottage, he took a girl from the village, the village tramp, out to an island in the middle of the lake. They got caught in a storm coming back, and around fifty people stood on shore waiting to see the canoe capsize and the sinners drown. My mother had told us to stay in the house, but when Kenny said, to scare me, “I guess the way things are, Mum’s gone down there to drown herself,” I ran after her. She didn’t say anything to me, but took her raincoat off and draped it over my head. It would have been fine if my father had died then—if lightning had struck him, or the canoe gone down like a stone. But no, he waded ashore—the slut, too, and someone even gave her a blanket. It was my mother that was blamed, in a funny way. “Can’t you keep your husband home?” this girl’s father said. I remember that same summer some other woman saying to her, “You’d better keep your husband away from my daughter. I’m telling you for your own good, because my husband’s got a gun in the house.” Someone did say, “Oh, poor Mrs. Apostolesco!” but my mother only answered, “If you think that, then I’m poor for life.” That was only one of the things he did to her. I’m not sure if it was even the worst.

It was hard to say how long he had been looking at me. His lips were trying to form a word. I bent close and heard, “Sponge.”

“Did you say ‘sponge’? Is ‘sponge’ what you said?”

“Sponge,” he agreed. He made an effort: “Bad night last night. Awful. Wiped everything with my sponge—blood, spit. Need new sponge.”

There wasn’t a bed table, just a plastic bag that hung on the bedrail with his personal things in it. I got out the sponge. It needed to be thrown away, all right. I said, “What color?”

“Eh?”

“This,” I said, and held it up in front of him. “The new one. Any special color?”