Good to a Fault (26 page)

“Oh yes,” Lorraine said. “I’ll love you forever.”

“So will I,” Trevor said.

Paul came in and leaned down over the bed, saying quietly, “I’m going to see Darwin, but I’ll be back to keep you company. May I say a prayer with you?”

Lorraine looked up, surprised into a laugh. “Sure,” she said. “Fill your boots.”

Everybody stood still. Paul said, “Dear God, comforter and healer of the sick, we commend Lorraine to your care through this long—”

He stopped, because Lorraine was suddenly gagging. Paul grabbed the kidney basin from the rolling table and handed it to her, and she filled it, all in one expelling, with watery, bile-coloured vomit. Clary traded him a towel for the basin, and emptied it in the sink. It was all smoothly done, and when Lorraine looked up and grinned at him, Paul went on.

“Speed her recovery, and Darwin’s, and give her, and all of us, courage. Dear Lord, give them your peace, tonight and always. Amen.”

Everyone said
Amen
.

“Well, that was nice,” Lorraine said. “I never know what a prayer is going to be like, but that was good. Thank you.”

Paul considered himself dismissed.

He went out past the ante-room into the darkened evening hall, lingering a moment to see if Clary would follow him. She did.

She held the room door almost shut, and leaned against the outer wall, and Paul pulled away his mask.

“Do you love me?” he asked her.

“I love you,” she said.

“And I you,” he said.

Everything else aside—everything included—that was true.

L
orraine had passed the point of bravery and acceptance of whatever they did to her; she was truly afraid now. They had explained the kind of death rejection would mean, if her counts did not improve. Quick, she told herself, meaning to console, but it set her heart racing, pounding, painfully staggering after an unreachable goal: the old life.

Dr. Lester had talked about the possibilities of graft-versus-host disease, like for example that it sometimes made people shed their skins. Lorraine had a strong mental picture of that, but she shut the eyes of her mind, the lids behind her lids. She shut her brain from accepting that as a possibility. She lay there thinking,
I have children, I have children, I have children
. Wrong thing to think—she was wracked with loud weeping. It was night, but Darwin was not there, and crying hurt but she could not stop for a long time.

When Clary arrived in the morning Lorraine begged her straight off.

“I need to see Clayton,” Lorraine said. She could feel belligerent weight behind her words and tried to tone it back, but her sense of time passing was too painful.

Clary stopped taking off her gloves.

“I need to talk to him, I’m too scared now. Darwin heard he’s in the city somewhere, but he can’t find him while he’s stuck in here, so I have to ask you.”

Clary nodded.

“You go find him, okay? Bring him as soon as you can. Will you?”

To Clary’s eyes, Lorraine seemed to be slightly on fire. The fever breaking out in actual licks of flame. “No?” Lorraine demanded, her voice crackling.

“Oh! Yes—of course I will. I was trying to think where to look for him.”

“Darwin heard he’s got a job upholstering, look there.”

In Darwin’s room Clary sat on his bed, since all the chairs had been dragged over to the other half by family members of the bedraggled old man in the next bed. Down-at-heel, up-at-heart, lots of laughing, the old guy snuffling and wheezing happily while they told each other one story after another. Some of them were the fattest people Clary had ever seen, some were tenderly skinny, with flake-white skin, and they were all semi-drunk, even on Saturday morning. Darwin was leaning back against his headboard, himself again, but with a taped and swollen nose.

“Swingline Upholstery, Avenue D south, little grey building. He calls in the morning and if they need him he comes in. A pipe burst or something at the last place he was staying, he had to leave. You’re going to have to ask around. Try the Silver Tap, or this morning maybe ask at Chevy’s Café, if you ask one of the girls.”

Clary had her notebook out and was writing,
Swingline, Ave D, Silver Tap, Chevy
.

“It might take a while. Remember what he looks like?”

“Oh yes,” she said. His face thrust forward, eyes bulging at her, shouting
My kids! You could have killed us!
“I know him. He knows me, too.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think he’ll avoid you. He knows you’re doing good for the kids, better than he could do now.” The reassurance was unreassuring.

A big burst of laughter from the window side of the room, the older woman rocking back and forth in her chair wiping tears from her eyes, hooing and hawing. Darwin laughed too, and Clary, too—she couldn’t help it. They were having such a riot.

“When are you—” Clary asked Darwin, not even knowing how to finish the question.

“They’ll let me out soon. It’s not like I feel bad.”

Clary nodded. They all made a fiction of everything, it seemed to her. There was the story of what was happening to Lorraine, to Darwin, to the children, and then there was the happier story they told each other, pointing out the funny parts, riding the surface over the bad. She was the worst, letting the children believe this was just ordinary treatment. When the fire was bright around Lorraine’s bed, and Darwin was kindling.

Avenue D South:
Swingline Upholstery
in flowing 50s writing. Modern, from the time when everything was getting better and better in the space age, illness and death being beaten back. The storefront was baked white by the sun, dazzling on this cold bright day. Inside the small front office, Clary touched the bell on the deserted counter. It made no noise. She knocked on the door to the workshop, then pushed it open. Brighter back there, a big open space crammed full of couches and chairs in various stages of recovery. Some were peeled down to bare wood and canvas straps, others were being pulled together, their backs buttoned snug. A middle-aged man was leaning into a spring, forcing down to fasten it with wire pliers.

“Excuse me,” Clary said. “I’m looking for Clayton Gage.”

The man turned his head, but left his shoulders and arms to control the spring.

“Well, if you find him, tell him to come pick up his cheque,” the man said.

Clary’s heart sank.

The pliers twisted twice, three times; the man straightened up. “Hasn’t been in for a week, or called. The deal
was,
he would call every morning. Six rush orders. If I can’t deliver I’m out big-time.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “His wife is in hospital. She needs to see him.”

“Guess he doesn’t want to see her.”

“She’s undergoing—difficult treatment. She needs him.”

The man came around the low platform he’d been working on, and steered her back out to the front room. “We’ll look on my phone,” he said.

He hauled the phone up from under the counter, and hit the buttons,
peering at the little screen. “Best invention in the last fifty years. You can see who’s calling you, but you pay for it.” Tap, tap, tap, tap—he worked his way back through the phone’s memory.

“Here,” he said, pointing at the numbers. “That’s where he called from, that’s last Friday week, you could start from there.”

10:30 a.m., Friday, the number and a name: Perry Paddock. He shoved the phone towards her, and she dialed, and waited. No answer. Too much to hope. Clary wrote the number down and thanked the upholsterer.

“Davis,” he said, sticking his hand out for her to shake. “You tell Clayton to get back here when he can. I got lots of work for him, I just need steady. My wife thinks he’s a good bet.”

She found a phone booth with the book torn out, so she called Fern, told her what was happening, and asked her to look up Perry Paddock—it was an address on Avenue R.

“Any emergencies?”

“Not yet,” Fern said, in her gentle, half-breath voice. “But three big diapers so far.”

“Oh my God. He had broccoli yesterday, it may not be agreeing with him.”

“I’d say not. Dolly helped me with the last one, didn’t you, Doll?”

Clary could hear Dolly laughing in the kitchen, making retching noises.

“Can you give them lunch?”

“As long as it’s not broccoli. My mom and dad called and said they were coming in to shop and they’d bring burgers, and I’ll give Pearce some banana.”

Clary wanted to race home and have a hamburger with Grace and Moreland. Instead, she drove farther down into the alphabet streets, to R, a warren of shoddy brick apartments built in the 60s. Moving up through the decades, she told herself. Half the windows in the front were covered with tinfoil, many broken. One or two were boarded up entirely with plywood. Mail boxes and buzzers inside the foyer were labeled haphazardly, but there was Paddock. Clary pushed the button, still pearly white in all the grime. Nothing. She buzzed again. Coming in the front door, an old woman with frizzled hair said, “That’s the one that burned out. They’re gone.”

“Paddock?”

“Gone.” She went up the stairs, not pausing or giving Clary another glance.

The Chevy Café, car parts incorporated into the sign, was a dingy little dive with an interior reek of old grease and sour milk. Clary waited while the skinny waitress took a pan of plates and cutlery out through the swinging door and then came back.

“I’m looking for—” She had a moment of hopelessness, but went on, anyway. “For Clayton Gage, who comes in here sometimes, or maybe a Perry Paddock? Clayton Gage was staying at his place. His wife is sick, and she wants to talk to him.”

The waitress looked at Clary as if she couldn’t connect her with Perry Paddock. It was her fault, her too-fancy clothes. She looked like she could only be chasing Clayton for a bad reason.

“Darwin told me to ask here,” she said. “Darwin Hand, do you know him?”

The waitress smiled then, gums showing wetly pink. “Oh, yeah, I know Darwin all right. Perry went back to La Ronge, but Clayton couldn’t leave, so he’s gone to Portia House on 26th. Not much of a place, but I guess he was desperate. Always room there.”

“Thanks,” Clary said. She wished she could tip her.

Portia House was a beige clapboard building, an ugly rectangle with tiny windows. It might have been a hotel in the 30s, or earlier.
Rooms
, it said above the door. The front door was propped open with an old running shoe, even in this cold weather. The air inside was dank, and either the bulb was out or the electricity had been cut off. Buzzers in three lines to the left of the door, fifteen of them, but under the buzzers the name tags were mostly unreadable. No Gages. But there was nowhere else to look.

On the first floor, she got no answer at the first door, marked
H. K.
in black marker on the wall. She knocked on the second door, then the others. Nothing. She climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor, trying not to look at the grey splattered carpet while she avoided the torn patches. It was very cold. She pulled her gloves up, to give herself some comfort.

The hall was even narrower up there, and there were more doors, closer together. One was wide open. Inside, a grizzle-whiskered old man lay on a
single bed under a small window. The room was all white, a messy white-washy job, plenty of paint splashed on the window panes. An opened can sat on a sheet of newspaper on the table, and a burnt mess in a saucepan. The floor was littered with dark junk, an undifferentiated mass of rags and paper. The man wore a torn undershirt and a pair of filthy trousers. He was lying on his side, staring at the door, and transferred his stare to Clary’s face when he saw her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, apologizing for something.
That there is such a place in the world, and that you’ve ended up in it; that by my agency, my fault, my own most grievous prosperity, you are condemned to this shithole.

“I’m sorry, I’m searching for Clayton Gage. I need to find him because his wife is ill.”

The man said nothing, but his mouth moved, the whiskers twisting together and rotating. She realized he was pulling his teeth back into place. “Who?” he said, finally.

“Clayton Gage. His wife wanted me to—she needs to talk to him.”

“Younger fella, nose, smooth hair?” The old man struggled to sit up, and Clary, watching him, steeled herself to step into his room. He had managed to get up on one elbow, and she held the other sharp elbow to give him some leverage. His skin had a grey tinge, probably grime more than illness. Finally he swung his legs around and was upright.

“I seen him,” the old man said. “Next door but one. Eleven, I think it is.”

Clary didn’t know how to let go of him. Would he fall over?

“Don’t get many visitors here,” he said. “Except the NDP canvassers last month. Gave me a ride over to vote.” His bone-fingered hand patted her sleeve.

“Are you warm enough?” she asked him.

“Been through worse winter than this,” he said. “What’s your name?”

She was reluctant to give it to him; but it held no magical protection, after all. “Clara Purdy,” she said. “Maybe you knew my father, George Purdy?”

“George Purdy? Plumbing and hardware store by Stepney’s?”

“Yes, that was him,” she said.

“I sure knew of him,” the old man said. “You’re his daughter.”

“Yes.”

“I heard he died, though.”

“He did, nearly twenty years ago.”

“Not such a bad thing to go early,” the old man said, grinning, his whiskery whiskey mouth hanging open. Three teeth showing. Clary laughed too, but felt a nasty clutch of grave-stink from him.

“Well, I should look for Clayton,” she said. She disengaged his arm, waiting to see if he would collapse.

“You tell your dad, Harry Benjamin said hello,” he said, winking at her.

She could not tell if it was a joke or if he had forgotten that her father was dead, so she smiled and nodded and went out.

“Don’t close the door!” he yelled. “That’s my TV, that doorway.”

The next door down was 10, and the one after that, 11. Clary raised her hand to knock but had to force it to make a sound. Knock-knock-knock—she made her knuckles obey her. No noise from inside. She knocked louder this time. The old man—Harry Benjamin—had said he was there.

“Clayton?” she called. Still no answer. She didn’t know what to do. Leave a note?

She moved toward the light coming through the small front window, which looked out onto the snowy street. Her car was safe, nobody stealing the battery, which happened often each year in the first few weeks of real cold.

A man came walking along, talking to himself, arms gesturing jaggedly in the air, angry about something. It was Clayton.

She flinched back from the window. In a minute he would be coming upstairs. She couldn’t—Clary ran silently up the last flight of stairs, pulled her coat around her and sat hidden on the top step. His boots clumped up the stairs. He was muttering to himself, she couldn’t hear.

Harry Benjamin said
Hey!
but Clayton ignored him, key fumbling in the lock, and the door opened and shut behind him.

She sat huddled on the top step. It was darker; no window onto the street up there. The building creaked and cracked in the cold. Somewhere, someone flushed a toilet. As her eyes grew used to the inner twilight she saw a magazine on the floor, and the vague image became clear, an enormous pair of breasts bursting out of some leather contraption. Instead of jumping up and running away, she sat still. To keep her mind quiet she prayed, for Harry Benjamin in his
dirt, for the waitress, for the upholsterer. For Lorraine, almost out of habit. As usual, her prayers seemed to be swallowed by clouds, by the earth’s gravity.