Charity

by Keath Fraser

  Before leaving she made a point of returning to his deathbed. To our apparent delusion about his deathbed. “. . . I think you’re wrong there. At least where Margie’s concerned. She’s said nothing about a deathbed.”

  Patrick looked puzzled. Still sitting at the kitchen island after she left he slid his glass across the granite. I was washing out the wine glasses.

  “She’ll say anything,” I said.

  “Who, Greta?”

  “Her too.”

  He picked up the empty Merlot bottle and took a swig. “Obviously, Judy being Judy, she favours drama-queen stories that remind her of running off to her own Timbuktu.” He was trying to make me feel better. “Don’t know why she can’t open up to us . . .” Margaret, he meant. “There had to be a deathbed. They spread his damn ashes.”

  The following week I heard back from the Swiss office of MSF. They were sorry for our loss. (I had been careful to state in my inquiry that Mr. Skupa was part of our family.) The response was not at all what we’d surmised about his death. Even Judy’s deathbed intelligence had been at best half-baked. I wanted her to recognize this at the same time I reported the facts to Patrick.

  I reported them over dinner.

  Rudy, it seemed, had requested a transfer soon after arriving in Sierra Leone. The office in Switzerland did not know why, except his re-application suggested that his experience in silviculture might be better utilized in Niger. Silviculture? When glaciers receded, had he once nursed seedlings? We knew him only as a wire and cooler guy. The office person, a Scandinavian by the sound of his noir accent, went on in an even, professional voice. Mr. Skupa was eventually sent to plant acacias in semi-arid holdings that grew peanuts.

  “Peanuts,” said Patrick.

  I shared this intel about Rudy’s peanuts, or rather his contribution to the future yield of peanuts. His expected contribution. Peanuts were grown to make something called Pumpy’Nut, a paste fed to malnourished children in the feeding centre Mr. Skupa had reached from Sierra Leone. His trees were to help conserve the necessary topsoil for growing the peanuts.

  The man who called had regretted to inform me that Mr. Skupa had lost his life shortly after arriving in Niger.

  “Niger,” repeated Patrick.

  “Apparently, yes. He was hired as a ‘remote camp manager’ to oversee trees.”

  This news must have suggested to Patrick how far his own case history of Margaret’s addiction to drugs had now eroded into a handy but disposable fiction.

  “Trees,” he repeated. “At his age, the triumph of hope over endurance.”

  *

  “Anything else?” asked Judy. I had been careful to get her on speaker-phone before sharing my news from MSF with Patrick. “Denise?” She was listening in as I served him his dinner.

  A pause was important here to savour my advantage. I poured the wine, ringing slightly the bottle’s neck against our crystal glasses.

  “There is, yes,” I now answered. I waited for Patrick to lift his glass. “Here’s to Rudy,” I said. We both sipped. “Rudy,” I explained, “was killed one morning in Maradi for his cell phone. At least as far as my MSF contact can confirm it, that’s what happened. A suspected rogue member of Boko Haram shot him in the head.”

  Patrick looked shaken—I mean, shaken for a physician long used to the drama of life and death. He set down his fish fork. He had eased my own father into death, the resolution to what Daddy had long called his “tricky ticker,” some years before it was legal to do so with morphine injections.

  “The pathos,” he finally said. “A fool like him, going off to die in the barrens of Niger—for what? Charity? For nothing.”

  “Nobility, I suppose.” Judy’s voice through the receiver sounded reassuringly thin. “Margie didn’t mention how he died. If she was even told.”

  Margaret we believed was in her bedroom. She had refused dinner, arriving home that afternoon more tired than usual, muttering to herself that the downtown library was a “flu pit.” She dumped a book on the foyer bench, sneezed, and vanished upstairs.

  “All she told me,” said Judy, “was he passed unexpectedly. When we were at the beach.”

  She decided to go on. The ashes they were pitching into the ocean breeze had blown back in their faces. She herself had had to turn sideways. But Margie seemed to welcome the chance to renew her grief, speaking hesitantly between handfuls of what Judy called “Rudy’s last fling.”

  “No pangs worse than grief, I guess.” She was wondering how to upstage me. “Unless it’s childbirth?”

  Her voice sounded small against the oak where I’d placed the phone in the centre of our dining table. I was satisfied to keep her at a distance, making the resurgent “mother-daughter thing” harder to sustain. Besides, I had the scoop, so there wasn’t much more for her to tell us.

  “Yeah,” said Judy. “She really spilled the beans.”

  Patrick raised his hand to silence me. Arrested in mid-air, the glass in his other hand, head now inclined toward the handset. “Go on?”

  “Rickety Rudyard,” she now called him, “left our daughter, not long after suffering sunstroke in Sierra Leone. I’d forgotten how he’d crumpled up on her, climbing to Garibaldi Lake.” Vigorous at first, he’d erected compostable latrines with fans he wired himself, and ordered local woodchips laid down inside toilets to help absorb the waste. Fellow aid workers had indulged his interest in helping them with laptops and hairdryers connected to the wrong kinds of plugs.

  “I can just see him, poking his nose into the local sockets.”

  She was enjoying this, milking his tragedy. I suspected most of it was fabrication on a pattern sketched faintly for her by Greta. Still flirting with her design line, Judy, knowing where the zipper went, how the sleeves attached, and the kind of cuff to stitch, was dressing up Greta’s pathetic story. His official reason for a transfer was that his expertise could be better utilized in a less-developed MSF clinic, “. . . in Niger, you now tell me? But, according to Margie, that was just an excuse on his part. To set her free.”

  “Free?” Patrick said. “Chained to African diseases without Netflix?”

  “At least he was no poltroon,” said Judy. “Flawed, maybe.”

  Nodding, we pretended to remember what “poltroon” meant. Probably no worse than a goat. Judy thought removing himself deeper into the boonies must have challenged Rudy’s sanity.

  “I think it challenged Margie’s,” she said. “The abrupt news of his death? That’d give even Mother Theresa the black dogs. She hardly had time to say good-bye and bam. The thing that defeated her,” said Judy, “and still has her in its teeth—he’d let her think she was spicing up his life . . .”

  “Well, wasn’t she?”

  I didn’t know if she heard me, standing at the sideboard now with Patrick’s plate, about to ladle his stew. Venison chunks in port sauce, prefaced by a pan-fried herring in bacon rendering, to be followed by a whipped pear mousse. A happy autumnal variation on his usual fare of lamb and mashed, which kept him girthy but not always satisfied.

  “Actually no, Denise,” said Judy. “He’d agreed to accompany her to Africa. Margie got a bee in her bonnet about helping out in a wider world than just the Living Room.”

  “That’s odd,” said Patrick. “We offered to send her to work with Jimmy Carter. House-building. She could’ve got it out of her system the following summer.”

  “The thing though is this, Patrick . . .” Her telephone voice starting to sound winsome. “His transfer? The real reason? He hadn’t wanted to burden her with having to look out for him in case he collapsed again.”

  “Nobility?” said Patrick.

  “Shame,” said Judy. “On her part.”

  She didn’t like to say, and was only repeating what she was told, but Margie realized Rudy’s silent arrangement to unburden her of himself must have begun a day
or so after she’d laughingly repeated to him, not long after their arrival in Sierra Leone, what we—“and more especially you, Denise”—had once remarked about her dating a geriatric with whom she’d soon find herself bogged down, nursing him through skin and bone to his last rattle.

  Patrick glanced back at the speaker-phone, then at me. Vigorously, I shook my head.

  “Rubbish,” I said coolly. “I’ve never said anything of the sort.”

  Not to Margaret, anyway. And nothing corresponding to this gaunt analogy of Judy’s. It also hurt that Greta might have called me Denise. Especially to Judy.

  “Maybe he finally figured it out for himself,” I said. Removing Patrick’s fish plate and setting down his stew.

  “Indeed,” agreed Patrick. “Ricky was a whimsical fellow. He could act bizarrely. Isn’t his house still a mystery?”

  “Indeed,” I said. And turning toward the phone, raised my voice. “We thought you were following up on his daughter, his so-called daughter, living there? After we last spoke?”

  “I’m planning to,” replied Judy, defensively.

  “Ah,” I said. “But weren’t you the one hurrying down like a dizzy Sally to check out Greta—at the Living Room—before she could say uncle?”

  “That’s your characterization. Did you also tell her Rudy was to blame for your brother’s death?”

  I lifted the handset from the table and pressed Off. Smiling, I sat down to my own plate and then stood up again.

  We both waited to hear if our daughter might be listening from upstairs. Going to the bottom of the staircase, hoping she’d change her mind and join us, I noticed her library book was a copy of BC Health Guide, which you could only pick up at a drugstore.

  This was not nothing I thought.

  *

  Judy soon found out that the present occupant was not interested in the return of the Nash Metropolitan. Hadn’t realized it was missing from her garage. Had never been inside her garage. She wasn’t interested in pressing charges against Margaret or in paying off the outstanding ticket and impoundment fee. She had pointed out to the police that they couldn’t have legally issued a fine anyway, not for a boating infraction in federal waters. “The chutputz!” remarked Judy. She complained to Judy the police would be returning the vehicle—minus, for some reason, its convertible hardtop. How could she sell it now? While the probate advanced, her executor’s powers would allow her to continue living in the house before she got rid of it. The Nash she meant. She intended to stay in the house. She had someone’s grandchildren living with her, but didn’t say whose. Hers maybe.

  Judy had come by to fill us in on the house that ought to have gone to Greta. She was wearing shoulder pads, a power suit of excessive expectation for such a modest invitation from us, but it was probably what she’d put on to impress Rudy’s “least favourite” daughter when she called.

  Margaret was upstairs, refusing again to come down for dinner. This had been going on for weeks. Possibly a gerbil-bit of lunch, then nothing before the sound of flushing. We remained on tenterhooks, sniffing for burned air. Then Patrick would drive back to the clinic.

  “Are you still insisting on the rehab route?” asked Judy, savouring my pâté.

  Patrick said he was referring her to a nearby recovery centre called The Orchard. Detox was expensive. Still, there was a wait list.

  Judy claimed Rudy had actively disliked his daughter. Margie told her this woman had never given him much comfort. Fostered as a teenager through Catholic Charities, she hadn’t lived with him for more than a year before running away to the States. In later decades, through two marriages to deadbeat musicians, she’d badgered him for money. Studio productions gone sour, her children to weed, a persistent reliance on food stamps. She’d made it for a time as a minor pop singer, but had grown gradually blowsy, returning recently from a tinder landscape and a felony charge for growing domestic pot in Fresno, California.

  “Caali-fornni-caation. . . !” sang Judy.

  This fabrication was getting away from her. Greta had no more told her all this than a barn owl.

  “You should’ve asked her if she ever sang Stop, In the Name of Love. She’s probably Diana Ross’s age. Has Greta met her?”

  “She already has enough on her plate.”

  “The point I guess is,” I replied, adding rosemary to my roast, “she never has anything on her plate she’s willing to eat.”

  Patrick smiled. I was going to have the last word, whether Judy liked it or not.

  “Her weight, yes,” said Judy. “It’s a worry for you both. The way it never used to be—when she was so fat? I used to worry about my own weight. I thought about my ass more than was healthy.”

  Now that she had the stage, she allowed the wine to divert her. She said in Tokyo she’d had lots of time to study girls in tennis skirts. Uninterested in seeds, she had nothing better to do during tournaments than conclude that a woman’s progress, far more than a gentleman’s, could be marked by her behind. Competitive in its own way, an expanding continuum, from youth through middle-age, “roughly”—she went on—“ass, bum, bottom, rump.” Ruummp she called it, with resigned finality. Not, she added, the progress of all women, while nodding generously, I thought, in my direction.

  If thanking me for the invitation to dinner, it felt more like an excuse to carry on. It was rare, she continued, but a defining shape was sometimes settled into for good at an early stage and her lover learned over time to be grateful for this contravention of the genetic time machine. She wondered if Patrick appreciated what he had in me. Something, she confessed, her own machine had missed out on—“any arrest of the natural progress.”

  “I’ll admit these days, I’m somewhere between bum and bottom. When Patrick first got hold of me, I was early bum. Late ass, maybe. I was probably never in the nice-buns category, but relatively few girls are—not like you were, Denise, always slim—or if they are, don’t last there long. Rafael, it turned out, preferred buns. Avocadoes, the Mexicans call them. Or used to, agucates.”

  She spread herself more pâté before following me into the dining room. We could have done without this wandering monologue, but it amused Patrick. So I’ve left it in. Lips followed a pattern opposite to bums. “Plump to shrunk,” she said. “The long thin bias, upper one a downer when it starts to shrivel.” Body-image blether, I thought, of the sort unworthy of anyone’s case history, including her own. Her story was an open book but hardly worth reading. Abandoning a baby for the gratification of her own body? I knew I could never really respect Judy and began to resent setting out a fourth napkin, the chandelier picking out my fingers now crawling stubbornly across the table to pull a fresh glass into place.

  My mother had loved this wide stage of polished oak. A heritage table of hers and my father’s, which had entertained its share of industrial lieutenants, even Rudy, capital builders of an emerging province. I intended to leave it with the house if Greta didn’t want it—if she decided not to, or couldn’t have sixteen children—as it would be too long to fit a modern dining room, and you couldn’t flog it on Craigslist unless to a boutique sawmill for repurposed old-growth dining on smaller tables inside shoeboxes.

  “Our Margie went from muffins to cake in the short span of childhood, Denise.” This lament should have passed as well-intentioned collusion. But looking right at me, from the chair where she’d plunked herself, halfway toward Patrick’s, she said: “Suddenly, in the blink of a year, she’s entered the old-lady class with no buns at all.”

  You had to wonder why she bothered to compliment me in the first place.

  2

  downhill, a workout for my thighs from holding back on the forest path. Across Marine Drive and around logs to low tide, stones sloping slickly into kelp, then plodding onward through mud to these rumpled salt flats stretching seaward a mile.

  A trapped channel of saltwater, its wind-driven
wrinkles lapping at the silos of my gumboots. A shock of cold in the left one before, squelching, I reach a sandbar. This association of a dry sock and a wet sock, otherwise identical, making me receptive to how memory can double-dip, how it can trick you into thinking the serpent has slipped out of a second cuff before you realize, as I would this morning, that you’ve seen it do so only once. Every memory you suppose being a magic trick, its construction a reconstruction of what has been, for the most part, lost in time. Like this chronic poppy, the same one pinned to the lapel of my peacoat, a duplicate for decades. I should be ashamed.

  Tide pools shot by crabs no bigger than shrapnel. In my face, the November breeze, and as part of its molecular brininess, Rudy Redux, his ashes leaching deeper into the sand, and floating up from clam holes where they’ve drained since his reported dispersal. Herring gulls. A clamshell. Across the blue bay, lying in mist like an etherized patient, the island and our exiled daughter until recently resident in its bosky retreat. Getting cleaner by the week, we earnestly hoped, hungrier too. Physician, heal thyself—unfortunately, not an option for Greta without help from the island’s good people, caring people. A small white ferry tracking its coastline, headed to the gulf.

  O bring back, bring back . . .

  The breeze, yes. Rudy had lived by recycling hot air—returning it cooler, fresher—and died lying in some dusty back street of a searing country. Must have wondered why his sacrifice for “Grit’s” sake had come down in his final moment of exile to nothing more than madness, treachery. Or did he envision, in a second of stopped time, being borne back to a happy little kingdom of collectible cars and charitable acts on currents of air and ocean? His briefest memory of being murdered had to be his most vivid, bursting into death with an awareness that escaped him bursting from the womb. Ninety years recirculating in a single round to the temple.

  A wet sensation extending upwards through my hips. Recollection of his trauma bearing me back to the time of my vulnerable self. His ashes making me think of the woman I, too, like our daughter, had wanted to become. “Self-love,” encouraged the therapist, “is recoverable.” We were interviewing her at The Orchard pending Greta’s admission. My own story, not just our daughter’s, part of the case to be made in accounting for Rudy’s exile.