The Disinherited (6 page)

Near the nursing station several doctors were standing closed and white around a metal filing cabinet: one doctor, the one who had been shouting, was pounding on top of the cabinet in rhythm with the points of his argument, building up his innocence like an incontrovertible debate. They were standing opposite the first room, one of the rooms that had had its door closed, with a NO ENTRY sign on it. Now the door was open. A stretcher emerged from the room. A sheet, long and bulging, covered the stretcher entirely and hung unevenly over the edges, its hem ruined and made crooked by the body’s erratic profile. An orderly pushed the stretcher rapidly to the elevator: the doors were open and ready. The doctor who had been so vociferous calmed down as soon as the stretcher was out of sight. He shrugged his shoulders philosophically, with the ease of a politician, and resumed talking in whispers. A new file was pulled out and after a brief consultation the doctors closed the door of the first room and went into the room across the hall. A few doors down from his father’s room, at the opposite end of the hall from the nursing station, was a large brightly-lit lounge for the patients. Some of those who had been walking around earlier were now crowded at the glass doors separating the lounge from the hall. From there, none of them had been willing to go any closer, they stood watching the same scene as Erik.

“Must have been a mistake,” one of them said.

“They say he got an infection. There wasn’t anything wrong with him when he came here. He was just having a lung taken out.”

“Not supposed to die during the day.”

Erik went back to his father’s room and sat beside the bed.
Richard Thomas had finished with his insurance documents and was reading a magazine. Brian and Nancy were still sitting on the vacated bed. Nancy was holding a piece of paper on her knees and making a shopping list. A nurse came into the room and stuck a thermometer into Richard’s mouth. She smiled at everyone. She was very young, not even twenty, and pinned to her uniform was a plastic-covered
Nursing Assistant
badge. “How are you today?” she asked and smiled again. She took his wrist away from the magazine and started measuring his pulse.

“Pretty good,” Richard Thomas said. She finished with his wrist and put the magazine back in his hand. Then she got a glass of water from the bathroom and gave him three different coloured pills.

“And your breathing?” she asked. “Are you breathing any better?” There was nowhere to sit so she crouched at the end of the bed with her elbows resting along the horizontal metal tubing. Miranda had put down her magazine and was watching her intently, as if all officials had the same information and might betray it by flaws in their deportment and other accidental human moments.

“Pretty good,” Richard Thomas said.

The nurse stood up and flexed her knees. She smiled around the room. She had a little notebook out but wasn’t writing anything down. “He never tells me anything,” she said and slid her face through the necessary gesture. She smiled again and looked towards the bed where Brian and Nancy were sitting. “I guess he’ll be back soon,” she said.

“He’s a hockey player,” Miranda explained to Erik. “He broke his foot and it didn’t set right so they’re breaking it again for him.”

“That’s nice,” Erik said. He had lost the feeling of active discomfort and now was just lethargic and tired. His watch said only ten o’clock. Richard lay still in the bed, the sheet folded over him exactly and his right hand draped carelessly on the back of his left. Erik wondered how long it would take his father to die, whether it would happen easily and passively one night in his sleep or whether he would have to be prolonged by esoteric mutilations. Or possibly this was just a temporary setback
for the body and it would endure finally, without reason or shape, like the woman in the hall or the cars scattered carelessly like wheelchairs in the empty courtyard.

The girl in the school house had told him that death was nothing special.

“When you’re young, life is too much for you and you try to push it away.”

“And?”

“When you’re old, there’s less to push away.” They were standing in the middle of the room, fitting the tubes of paint to the machine as it was necessary. They had covered the walls and the floor of the room with paper and were running the machine at full speed. “His idea was to perfect the machine and then to go around to institutions offering to do murals. You could do a gymnasium in a few hours and even something like an office building in a couple of weeks.” The arms of the machine wheeled about the room, spraying thin stripes of paint in long curved arcs. “You see here,” she said, grabbing one of the arms and switching off its connection to the motor. “You can set it any way you want.” She turned the nozzle and let it go again. It sputtered paints in small round dots. Now that they had made love and were covered with paint, he had lost his fear of her. They were wearing long, knee-length laboratory coats, and with the yellow and red paint splattered finely over her, she looked more like a field of wildflowers than a rose, harmless and transient. She was smoking a cigarette and demonstrating the details of the invention. “Of course there were still a few problems to be worked out,” she said. “He hated being young. He always said that he was just waiting for time to pass, to be sixty years old, or even older, like the man we used to visit here, so old there was only enough energy to cut wood and go for a walk every day.”

“People don’t know what to do with themselves,” Erik said. He sprayed a white circle on her chest.

“You’d think it would be hard to clean,” she said. “But it isn’t. All the tubes connect to one central place with plastic piping and you just hook them up to a bottle of turpentine.”

“You can’t drink it.”

“Some people do.”

“Pat Frank drank some turpentine once. He was sick for a week.”

His watch said only ten o’clock. Richard was going through his magazine, turning each page slowly. Like the people on the stretcher he seemed under control, pleased to slide easily and gratefully through his last time. In the car Miranda had summarized the available information, diabetes and a heart condition; they didn’t know exactly what had happened in the field. It was serious but not hopeless. They would drive to the hospital and sit, unobtrusive and cheerful, in a room and wait for him to live or die. Then they would go home. Richard Thomas would not be allowed to smoke cigarettes.

“We’re going to do the shopping,” Brian announced. “We’ll be back by noon.”

“You can have a box of chocolates,” Nancy said. Her short-cropped hair and slightly snubbed features made her seem turned-in and sullen, like a self-explanatory cartoon. Her fingers were short and stubby and her nails were bitten down to the quick so her hands looked like they must belong to a nervous child.

“No chocolates for him,” Miranda said. “Nothing with sugar. You could get him some of those special candy bars though, they’re marked.”

“We’ll be back by noon,” Brian said again. Miranda looked at him, raised her eyebrows in protest of the repetition, and then picked up a magazine. Richard had leaned back and closed his eyes. Erik went into the patients’ lounge. The windows looked out over Lake Ontario. It was a clear day, but windy, and the lake was spotted with whitecaps. One of the patients came and stood beside him. He was wearing a blue terrycloth robe and smoking a pipe. His hair was carefully cut and brushed. It was silver-tipped and curled at his collar. His hands were fine and delicate. He gripped the wooden sill of the window, not supporting his weight but tense, looking out at the water, as if he had spent time at sea and the sight of the lake returned him to it.

“Big boat went by an hour ago,” the man said. “Just before they took that fellow out.”

“I missed it,” Erik said.

“Can’t have people dying here,” the man said. He looked at Erik as he spoke and Erik felt that he was being somehow measured, appraised. “My wife made me come here,” the man said. “I’ve got little tumours all over my bladder. Most likely it’s cancer.” He spoke, still looking directly at Erik without taking the pipe from his mouth. “Caused by smoking, couldn’t have been anything else.”

“I’m sorry,” Erik said. He found it difficult to maintain this conversation.

“People die,” the man said. He was small and fine and the tone of his voice implied other languages. “They’re going to give me radiation treatments,” he said. He looked perfectly calm. He might have been discussing the weather. “What are they going to do for you?”

“I’m not sick.”

“But all too human,” the man said. He laughed and looked out the window. His pipe had gone out and now he withdrew it from his mouth and held it in his hand. “It’s easier to have something,” the man said. “Until you get it.” He re-lit his pipe. “They’re going to let me out for the weekend. I could sure use a drink.” The doctors had progressed down the hall and were now standing outside his father’s room, discussing the case in whispers. Erik strained to hear, but couldn’t. They decided on their strategy and marched into the room. A few seconds later Miranda came out of the room and into the lounge. Her eyes were red and she looked like she was about to cry.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. I guess I’m just tired.”

“What are they doing?”

“Just what they always do. They take his pulse and listen to his chest. Then they ask him a few questions and leave.”

“I’ll go talk to them,” Erik said. He went and stood outside the door. They had drawn a curtain around the bed but it wasn’t opaque. He could see the doctors standing above the
bed, leaning down, their shadows brushing against the curtain. One of them was asking Richard what kind of cows he kept. Richard began to explain the operation of the farm. In the middle of a sentence one of the doctors opened the curtain and they all left the room. “Excuse me,” Erik said. He positioned himself in front of the one in the most expensive clothes. “I wanted to ask you about my father.”

“Yes?”

Erik took the doctor by the arm and led him away from the door and down the hall a bit. “I want to know what’s wrong with him, and whether his arm will get better.”

“There’s some damage,” the doctor said. “But not much.”

“He can hardly move his arm.”

“Yes, we’re going to try physiotherapy.”

“And?”

“We’re hopeful it will respond to treatment.” All the time the doctor spoke, he looked down at his feet as if it was some kind of error that he was not at least two feet taller than Erik. The doctor was wearing sandals.

“He’s a farmer,” Erik said. “It’s important to know whether he’ll be able to work again.”

“Yes,” the doctor said. “I see. Well, it’s possible but very unlikely.” He looked directly at Erik for the first time. “I’m sorry,” he said. He shrugged his shoulders. He was the same doctor who had been so angry earlier in the morning. “If he loses fifty pounds, stops smoking and takes things easy, if, that is, he survives the next two weeks, then he could live very comfortably for five years. Even ten or more.” He patted Erik on the arm and then left him, to join his colleagues and begin discussion of the next case.

Erik went back into the lounge. His mother was talking to the man with the tumours. “What did he say?”

“Nothing much,” Erik said. “We’d better go back in; he’ll be wondering what’s keeping us.”

At noon, Brian and Nancy came back and Erik and Miranda went out to get some lunch. The old woman was still sitting by the fire exit, her hands in perpetual motion.

“Oh God,” Miranda said. “Sometimes you two are so predictable.” At the hospital Richard had finally brought up the subject of the farm, asking Erik if he would stay there for a few months, until he was better.

“I didn’t know what to say.”

“You spend the whole day sitting on the windowsill, just waiting to pick a fight with him. Pass me the sherry. I don’t know why there’s never anything but cheap sherry in this house.” She took the bottle from Erik and re-filled her glass. “I remember when they first got electricity here,” she said. “Every light in the township was on all night. House and barn. Do you remember? Of course Richard had to do something special; the next day he drove into Kingston and bought a refrigerator. Everyone came to see it. You would have thought it was the Queen. My grandfather used to keep his playing cards in it. In Winnipeg. Made them snap, he said.”

Erik lit a cigarette. Her father had been killed in the war. Or had just died in the trenches, no one was sure. He pictured the First World War as an endurance contest, set in a bog in France. He had never met any of his grandparents except through photographs and odd bits of stories. In their pictures they all wore high collars and stiff, set faces; they might have been anyone at all. “The trouble is,” Erik said, “I don’t even know if he really cares about who gets the farm.”

“That’s not it at all. You know he cares.”

“And you?”

“It is all determined,” Miranda said. “We can only bow to our fates.” She nodded her head vaguely and then sipped at her sherry. “Madame says that we cannot escape our destinies.”

“You believe this stuff?”

“No,” Miranda said. “But life without faith is like an empty egg.”

“Oh.”

“You should meet her,” Miranda said. “You’d like her.” She reached down to the floor and picked up her purse. She put her hand inside it and drew out a card. “Here,” she said. “You can go see her when we’re in town tomorrow.”

“I’ve taken a job at the University of Alberta.”

“That’s wonderful.”

“You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

“It’s so far,” she said. “When will we see you?”

For the past five years he had been coming home once a year, at Christmas. He stubbed out his cigarette. “You can come and visit me,” he said. “We could meet in Winnipeg and you could show me the house where you grew up.”

“It’s gone.”

“I feel like I don’t know you anymore,” he said.

“Tomorrow, I’ll bake you some cookies.” She smiled at him and twisted her glass in her hand. He imagined her after Richard was dead: drinking a little every day and not having too much housework to do. “Your father went to the city, to university. He could have stayed but he decided to come back. It was the right thing for him to do.” Richard had told him once about his own father, Simon Thomas who had mourned his wife by forgetting her, and, as soon as he could, moved into town and lived common-law with a woman who couldn’t cook.