A Good Death (19 page)

“I want some.”

My father is not expressing a desire; for the first time in years he is issuing an order.

“Even… if… not… good for… my heart.”

And he pounds his chest hard, just to the right of centre, where he thinks his heart is situated.

ISABELLE AMAZES ME. I TELL HER ABOUT
OUR LUNCH, STILL CAUGHT UP IN MY CONFUSION BETWEEN DREAM AND REALITY, SURPRISED
to find myself laughing about it, stunned at feeling close to this couple I have never really believed in and who now seem to be taking shape before my very eyes. You were laughing at death, she says, do you realize that? So what did you decide? Nothing, really, nothing specific. That’s the whole problem. My father went to lie down and my mother ended the discussion by tossing the ball into our court with a malicious little smile, as though to say: “Now that you know what we want, what are you going to do to help us?” What she in fact said was that for New Year’s Eve dinner we’ll have the cassoulet, nothing else—oh, she almost forgot, oysters for appetizers. And cheese, of course, and why not a Saint-Honoré cake? As for the other thing, she said, simply, probably for my benefit, we’ll talk about it later, when the time comes. There are a few things they have to do first. Like what? Oh, maybe go camping and fishing, we’ll discuss it later, dear. And she showed us calmly to the door.

“You laughed at death?” Isabelle repeats, with a smile.

Well, yes, but not as much as they did, and Isabelle, you cannot imagine the storm of controversy that this menu of hers is going to unleash. I can hear the Homeopath, the Banker and the Nurse already, the scornful, nasty remarks they’ll make every time my father takes a mouthful of food, the I-told-you-so’s with every belch and hot flash. The New Year will begin with unbearable family chaos. So what’s new? she says, putting her arms around me. According to her, I have the only totally dysfunctional family that seems to function very well, thank you very much, and keeps on functioning, albeit in a kind of chaotic harmony. This organized shambles, this cacophony of orders, opinions, directives and proclamations in which I have lived since childhood, doesn’t really bother me. It’s my mother and father who terrify me. Dad, knowing nothing of our wild machinations, and Mother, who knows my every thought, chose us, William-Sam and me, to be their Dr. Kevorkian. At a time to be determined by them, without consulting us, they’ll tip us the nod and we’ll off them. Because despite all the hilarity we have entered into a pact. Nothing stated, nothing so firm as a handshake, but a contract nonetheless. We know we said Yes. The word
yes
has been resounding in my head for a long time now, taking up all available space, swallowing neurons left and right, whether my mouth was able to articulate it or not. I have had the psychological equivalent of Parkinson’s disease.

IT’S RAINING CATS AND DOGS. DECEMBER
31ST IN A YEAR OF GLOBAL WARMING. WHEN
I ARRIVED WITH WILLIAM TO START THE CASSOULET
, my mother told me that there was nothing to worry about, all the children have been told what was on the menu and in each case their medical and moralistic jeremiads stopped when she explained to them that this would be their last New Year’s Eve. The Banker, who’s been cool with my mother since Boxing Day, comes into the kitchen chewing out her husband for not holding the umbrella properly and hands me a bag, saying she made a rice salad for anyone who still has a brain left in their head. “You’re free to eat whatever you want, my dear,” my mother tells her, “even in my house, but don’t put it on the table. You can come in here to the kitchen to serve yourself.”

“Mother, be reasonable.”

“We’ll talk about it tomorrow, dear.”

Hardly anyone arrives empty-handed. It’s as though habit has more weight with them than my mother’s wishes. Each carries a dish, as tradition dictates, even though she told them all not to bring anything. She greets everyone by saying, “Thanks but no thanks.” The Homeopath is practically in tears and my mother has to be firm. For lunch she and my father had calf’s liver and bacon, English style. My sister, who calls herself a natural healer after having come out of a long depression and is now a rabid vegetarian and a fierce separatist, regards eating English calf’s liver as an insult to nature and capitulation to the enemy.

After spending time in the kitchen pouring ourselves aperitifs, we move into the family room, lightly touching Dad’s hand or kissing him gingerly on the lips, as we would a religious relic, without expecting an answer to our How-are-you-feelings. We’ve been like this since the onset of his illness. Mother has already been drinking. I tell her I can tell, smiling. A little port, dear, it gives me strength for the meal. William looks worried and his mother hugs him, happy that he’s thinking about the two casseroles in the oven rather than the classic Russian Opening in chess. The tragedy of modern parenthood: they no longer have children, they have strangers in children’s bodies. My mother interrupts my thoughts.

“Your father is writing now. He writes instead of trying to talk.”

After we left on Boxing Day he sat down at his desk, took a pad of lined paper from the drawer and for hours forced himself to line up a series of letters, rapt in studious silence as though he had gone back to elementary school. First he covered an entire page with
a’
s, then
b’
s, right up to
z’
s, the entire alphabet, then carefully placed the pages in the drawer as if they were a valuable document. The next day, more pages were covered with words, random and with no apparent sense connecting them—smoke, eat, thanks, slut, Europe—dozens and dozens of words settling themselves more or less comfortably on the lines of the paper. Then he started on sentences, most of which also had no meaning. “A butterfly cries bacon.” When my mother asked him what it meant, he wrote: “Nothing. I’m just writing sentences that stay on the lines, and as you should know it’s not easy to start speaking again. I try words. I put them together in a straight line.” He spent the entire week working like an opinionated and persevering schoolboy. My mother had to go to a stationery store to buy another dozen pads of lined paper and some notebooks. For her it was a week of serene calm and happiness such as she had not known in three years. He wrote ceaselessly. That afternoon he handed her a page from a notebook. She crumpled it up and stuck it in her sleeve, as the absent-minded aged do with Kleenex. She smooths it out and hands it to me. The writing is shaky but clear. “It’s a good idea to go together.” Yes. A tear floods down a crease in her face. She does not wipe it away with the back of her hand, as she normally would do. It poises at the top of her lip, drops onto her tongue, and she licks it. A liberated tear, probably her first.

A strong smell coming from the oven is worrying Sam. It’s burning. I assure him it’s not. It’s just the garlic and the lard and the tomato starting to fuse and percolate. Think of it as the beginning of the perfect cassoulet. Suddenly silence falls on the room. One of the brothers-in-law is saying something. “You all talk at the same time. No one listens to anyone. You behave like children. This is not how I raised you.” He’s reading a message my father has handed him.

We haven’t forgotten his existence, since his existence has been the centre of our family life as a boil is the focal point of a face, making you forget the look or the smile. But we have forgotten that he can hear us, that he can think, that he is still alive. We’ve been in the presence of an animated dead man, a sort of out-of-order machine that nonetheless continues to emit sounds and move about in a disarticulated manner. And now the dead man has refound his voice and, even more troubling, has gone back to being the little father of the people. He hasn’t changed. He is immutable. From the kitchen I watch him scribbling in his notebook. He writes with an anxious fury. I take in the sudden, jerking movements of the pen, the impatient erasures, the guttural sounds coming from deep in his chest. He rips the sheet from the notebook and gives it to my mother, who has come into the room for it. William says, “It’s ready.” Mother reads: “I am not sick. I am very old. You want to save me from dying. That’s very kind. I want to die the way I want. I’m hungry. Shut up!”

The family is silent. The two casserole dishes are steaming on the table, along with four platters of oysters, cheese, a salad and a Saint-Honoré cake glistening in the room’s light like a Tower of Babel defying God and all His prescriptions. My mother doesn’t like oysters, I remember now, but she hides a grimace and says, “Good,” as my father knocks them back like petits fours. All the children eat with their heads down, eyeing my father from the corners of their eyes to see what kind of mood he’s in.
Canadian
Idol
is on television, my father’s favourite program; Wilfred, the favourite of grandmothers and nubile young things, is singing. My father scribbles something. “Pavarotti is better,” my mother reads. A proclamation has been released. The conversation turns to opera, which no one likes, but we do like the Three Tenors.

Sam opens a bottle of old madiran and plays sommelier. My father doesn’t realize that he’s supposed to taste the wine and approve the choice, and we watch the ceremony, intrigued and surprised by it. Sam remains imperturbable, stays in his role, waiting. We have been waiting on my father for three years. We rarely ask his opinion unless it’s in the form of an interrogative affirmation. He has been hospitalized in his own house and cared for by his own creatures. I think he has become accustomed to thinking of himself not as a client but as a beneficiary, obliged to accept the service that is so generously given for his gratification. The beneficiary doesn’t refuse or criticize, he only thanks. Discountenanced, my father looks at his grandson with moist eyes, drinks the dribble of wine and says: “More.” You approve of the wine, sir? says Sam. My father nods, Yes, and says, “More,” and Sam fills his pewter cup almost to overflowing, which evokes from the Banker the comment that there is no need to ruin the Provençal tablecloth she gave Mother for her last anniversary. Sam continues serving, since this is his meal, his gift, which he imagines will be deliciously deadly. He stands stiff as a maître’d in a posh restaurant and places the best pieces of confit and sausage delicately on my father’s plate. My father grabs the bread and spoons himself more beans. The plate is overflowing and my father looks anxiously at my mother, from whom he is used to hearing reprimands about his gourmandizing and his gluttony. She turns to Sam and says, smiling, “Sam, you certainly know how to serve grandfathers, but grandmothers are a little more fragile. I want a bit of everything, but not as much as my husband.” Eyes widen around the table. Grumbling is heard. My father raises his pewter cup and gives a toast that none of us understand. Several of us lift our glasses mechanically. The silence that falls on the cassoulet eaters is broken only by my father’s intestinal rumblings and belches. He eats as though he is expecting to die in the next few minutes. My mother puts a hand on his, the one holding the fork, and asks him if he would like a napkin. Yes, all right, says his head, that is what he seems to want. A napkin, which my mother places in his hand and which he raises to his dripping lips. I watch him, and he doesn’t notice that I am observing him as closely as a doctor observes the symptoms of a patient in the terminal phase of illness. He eats like a man trying to wolf down his life. With a sense of joyous urgency.

The Banker and her husband are arguing. He reaches for the cassoulet, passing on the basmati rice with rice vinegar dressing and garnished with sprigs of Italian parsley that she has placed in front of them. The Homeopath gets up to fetch the raw vegetables with which she hopes to break up all the trans fats she has unenthusiastically introduced into her bloodstream. Her polite husband does not insist. The Tragedienne bursts out laughing and congratulates her son on his cassoulet, which she says is like manna from heaven. My mother doesn’t hear her. She is eating. My father is not listening. He is elsewhere, in the casserole that is soon going to be empty, and maybe he’ll ask someone to give him some cheese and chocolate mousse. The Banker is finding it intolerable that her husband thinks for one minute that she prefers some regimen to her own father. He thinks she does. The Banker is having trouble breathing. She is trying to swallow her pride and it isn’t going down well. In fact, she’s choking on it. The man with whom she has been living for more than twenty years stands up without looking at her.