The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  Elinor is in the sunroom, sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book.

  “Oh, sorry,” Daphne says, backing out.

  “No, please stay,” says Elinor, closing the book and getting up to move a chair closer to hers. She places a small table between them for their coffees. Daphne glances at the book. Nadine Gordimer. The room is a bit chilly. Elinor has a brightly coloured beaded shawl-like thing draped over her shoulders.

  “I love your shawl,” says Daphne. “Did you get it here?”

  “Thank you, no, I bought it when I was in South Africa last fall. It’s a traditional Ndebele blanket, worn only by married women. Incredible beadwork, isn’t it? Husbands present them to their wives so they can cover their breasts and no longer be sexually attractive to other men.”

  “Interesting.” Okay, blanket, not shawl. How delicately she corrects me. Before rehab, Daphne would have bridled at that, maybe even gotten up and stomped out of the room. Now she lets it go. She also probably would have ranted about cultural appropriation, about rich white women adorning themselves with traditional African garb. Instead, she asks Elinor how she liked South Africa.

  “Loved it,” Elinor says, dreamily. “I was attending a psychology conference. Sandra and I were. Speaking of which, how are you and Sandra getting along?”

  “Great,” Daphne says. “I mean, it’s work.”

  “That’s good. It’s supposed to be work. Do you find the writing helps?”

  “I don’t know yet. It’s all bits and pieces. Maybe it’ll help me organize my thoughts. At the moment I’m just sort of blurting everything out.”

  “As I understand the process,” says Elinor, “that’s probably what Sandra wants. No self-editing. No self-censoring.”

  “It’s sort of like writing a letter to myself.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But then mailing everyone a copy.”

  “I doubt Sandra will want you to do that. You’re writing about your relationships with your parents, I assume?”

  “Yeah, all that. But you’re in it.”

  “Certainly I’m in it. But that doesn’t mean I should see it.”

  “What’ll I do with it, then?”

  “When you’re finished, read it over carefully, look for themes that keep recurring in your narrative that tie any loose ends together. They’ll be in there. Then, when you know what you need to work on, Sandra will probably tell you to burn it.”

  “Burn it?” This throws her. “But I want you to see it. I want Dad to see it. What’s the point, otherwise?”

  “Why do you want us to see it?”

  “I guess I want us all to be on the same page.”

  Elinor takes a sip of her coffee, puts the cup down, and, in a gesture Daphne finds curious, runs her hand over the cover of her book, as though brushing away crumbs or dust. Like Aladdin rubbing his magic lamp.

  “The same page,” she says. “Yes, I suppose that’s a secondary goal.”

  “What other goal is there?”

  “Right now, Daphne, only two months into therapy, you’re at a crossroads. It’s a peculiar kind of crossroads, though, because you are going to go in both directions at the same time. What you write in this letter to yourself is one road, but what you don’t write, what you leave out, either inadvertently or deliberately, will be the other road. And you will also be on that road. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “No, sorry, not the foggiest.”

  Elinor laughs, but gently. “Well, let’s just say you’ll end up with two letters. One written and one unwritten. It’s the written one you want us to see, Sandra, me, and your father, but it’s the unwritten one, the one you don’t even want yourself to see, that will really count.”

  Oh great, Daphne thinks. Thanks for that, Yoda. Just what she needs, another impossible mission statement. Like take care of your mother for me.

  * * *

  —

  Dad and I got along, sort of, for a while, Sandra. He wasn’t as distracted as he usually was, at least not on the surface, but after a day or two I saw that underneath he was ready to explode. I assumed being with Elinor was making him edgy. She’s much more demanding than my mom was, believe it or not. Demanding in a different way. I mean, when Mom was demanding she made Dad feel like shit, as though she thought he was an idiot and always would be. But when Elinor’s demanding she makes him feel that he could be less of an idiot if he applied himself. She makes him feel that his true self is not a shit. At the time, though, I thought Dad had just hooked up with another domineering woman, like that was his comfort zone, and that after nearly ten years of it he wasn’t feeling all that comfortable anymore.

  Anyway, I could tell something was up. Maybe they’d gone through my purse and found my stash, or counted the empty wine bottles I’d hidden under some jars in the recycling bin. They were probably expecting me to ask for money, which I had no intention of doing because I had Paul and didn’t need tuition. But there wasn’t much I could get past Elinor. Well, she’s a psychologist, she sees into people for a living. She had this way of looking at me, like everything I said was either stupid or a lie. I’m no authority, but isn’t love supposed to be about seeing the faults in another person and not saying anything about them? Maybe it isn’t. Maybe love is being brutally honest, like stripping everything down to nothing and building something up from there.

  Actually, that’s kind of what I’ve done with my life.

  The night before I left we had this family dinner, just the three of us, one of Dad’s us-doing-things-together moments. Elinor was dressed elegantly and yet somehow casually, a nice look if you can find the right grace notes. Dad was dressed up, too, for him. Checked shirt, knit tie, sports jacket, loafers. He looked like a used-wine salesman, no wonder his business wasn’t doing so well. We were drinking his profits. Me maybe a little more than the others. I’d had a glass or two and a couple of lines in the basement before coming upstairs, so I was feeling good.

  The dinner was a fucking nightmare. Dad still had his crab-like way of asking questions, like, what was I going to do when I got back to Vancouver, when what he really wanted to know was if I was doing drugs. So I said, “This and that.” Then he asked what I was going to take when I went back to school, which was his way of asking if I was going back to school at all.

  “I’m going to specialize in Renaissance literature,” I said. “You can ask my thesis advisor, Professor Curtis, if you don’t believe me.”

  Dad was on that like a shot. “Thesis advisor? You’re going into third year, how can you have a thesis advisor?”

  “Like you know all about university because you’ve been an adjunct in a journalism department.” I could see that stung, so I went on. “Until you quit teaching to become a capitalist, that is, shilling cases of overpriced wine produced by multinational corporations that use exploited workers in third-world countries under environmentally unsustainable conditions.”

  He sat there blinking. Maybe I’d swung a little below the belt, but he had, after all, called me a liar. In fact, it was worse than that—he was suggesting that I wasn’t even good at lying. And that had me all twisted up inside, because, in point of fact, I was lying, but I’d thought I was pretty good at it.

  I hadn’t finished second year, I didn’t have a thesis advisor, and if Dad actually checked with Prof Curtis, who’d been my second-year English prof and to whom I still owed an essay on the poems of Sir Walter Raleigh, I’d have been royally screwed. I took deep breaths and brought myself back to centre court. I drank some wine. Very patiently, I explained that UBC offered a third-year thesis course in which I could write an essay in lieu of going to regular classes, and that’s what I was going to do in the fall, with Professor Curtis, who had agreed to supervise me. Truth is, I hadn’t seen Professor Curtis since before Christmas.

  Dad said, “So what’s your essay abo
ut?”

  “The poems of Sir Walter Raleigh.”

  He looked at me. “Walter Raleigh wrote poems?”

  There it was again. The disbelief. That patronizing tone. The assertion of his undeserved authority.

  “Yes, he did,” I said as icily as I could manage. “A whole book of them. You may not have come across it while teaching in journalism school.”

  Ooh, the look he gave me. He was stunned into silence. We both were, actually. That’s when Elinor stepped in. His bodyguard.

  “So,” she said, “how much of that money we sent you last month do you have left? Do you need more?”

  “You mean after buying food and paying rent and bills and taking taxis to the fucking airport so I can come here and be interrogated by the KGB? No, thanks, I’m fine, I don’t need any more of your money. Paul’s looking after me now.”

  Dad’s face contracted. I could see I’d gone too far. By which I mean, too far to turn back. I used to see him look like that back in White Falls, just before he flew off into one of his rages. I braced myself.

  “That’s great, Daphne,” he said, his voice rising. “So you won’t be needing me to pay the rent on your apartment anymore. No more living off the avails of capitalism.”

  I shrugged. I thought about bringing up Yevtushenko. I thought that if I complicated the discussion, I could hide behind the confusion.

  “We are not the KGB,” Elinor said quietly.

  “We can’t be both capitalists and the KGB,” Dad said.

  “We’re people who love you and are concerned for you.”

  “No, that’s okay, Elinor,” Dad said, building steam, “let her have her say. I’m a capitalist, am I?” he said, looking across the table at me. “Just what do you think a capitalist is, Daphne? Anyone who earns a living? Anyone who owns a house and a car and has a bank account? Do you even know what a capitalist is? We live in a capitalist system. Capitalism pays your tuition, pays the rent for your apartment. Damn it, Daphne, capitalism built the university you go to, if you’re even going to it, and the building you live in, if you’re living in it.” He looked at me in surprise and sat back in his chair. “Shit, I can’t believe you’ve got me defending capitalism. As a journalist I dealt with the fallout from capitalism every goddamned day!”

  “Dad, I know what capitalism is, and I know what it does. It steals land from Indigenous peoples and builds universities and apartment buildings on it. It turns starving refugees away from its shores because they pose a threat to capitalist complacency. I don’t have to just accept it, like you do. Oh, that’s the system we have, get used to it. Fuck that! I know lots of people who are out there fighting that shit every day.”

  “People like who?” Dad asked.

  “People like Paul.”

  “Daphne,” said Elinor, “we don’t even know who Paul is.”

  I know now that Elinor had nothing to do with Dad’s leaving, that they didn’t get together until after he’d been in Toronto for a year or more. Mom didn’t actually believe that, though, and at that moment I was channelling her. She was pretty sure Elinor had been in the picture all along, might have been the reason he left. She said they could have met online, or at a conference somewhere. At the time, I was willing to believe anything bad about Elinor. Mom used to say you can’t trust a woman who’d steal another woman’s husband. This from a woman who was having an affair with her boss, a man who was married and had three children. But Elinor was the wicked stepmother. I was brainwashed into hating her even before I knew what she looked like. Did she have horns? A tail? A hooked nose with a wart on the end of it? Remember, I was, what, twelve. I visited Dad a few times when he was in his bachelor apartment near the university, and I’d just begun to have a real relationship with him. I looked forward to those visits. Having Dad to myself. He took me to the Toronto Zoo, to the Planetarium at the Royal Ontario Museum, and once we went to a Blue Jays game. He asked me how things were going at school and if Mom and I were getting along. And then suddenly he was living in a big house with some woman named Elinor. I hated her at the bus station when she and Dad met me and she gave me a hug and asked me what kind of cookies I wanted to bake with her. I could tell she wasn’t the cookie-baking type. And I didn’t have to look very hard for things to hate her for. She made me make my bed every morning! I had to ask to be excused from the table! And my dad adored her. So, like I said, I was conflicted. I didn’t blame Elinor for Dad’s leaving, I just hated her for it. I felt I’d be unfaithful to my mother if I was nice to her.

  “Paul and I have a real life,” I said. “We do the things normal couples do. We cook, we entertain, we go to the market on Granville Island, we spend weekends at his cottage on Salt Spring Island, we go sailing. We talk.”

  “So, you’re living together?” Dad asked.

  “Not really,” I said. “I still have my apartment.”

  “All this while going to school?” he said.

  “I never see you two doing anything together,” I countered. “Why is that? You each have your separate lives. Don’t you ever go out, like to concerts or movies or whatever? Don’t you ever have fun? Paul and I have fun.”

  “Tell us about Paul,” Elinor said. “Who is he?”

  I’ve got to stop, now, Sandra. My hand is shaking so much I can’t write any more. Fucking tears are blotting out some of the words. I need to breathe.

  * * *

  —

  She tried to tell them about Paul. Not all the sordid details, but enough of them. She told them he was an environmental lawyer, that he got injunctions to stop forestry companies from cutting down the planet’s last old-growth forests or Russian trawlers from scooping up the seabed. That he helped First Nations groups prevent oil companies from building pipelines and power lines across their land. She didn’t exactly know what Paul did, he never talked about his work, but she was sure it was something like that. She told them he worked in his father’s law firm, owned a big house in Point Grey, drove a silver SUV, had a wine cellar, she’d thought her father would like that. She didn’t tell them about the coke, which Paul kept almost permanently on hand, or that she skipped most of her morning classes because she was hungover, and most of her afternoon classes because she was stoned. She didn’t think she and Paul were doing anything wrong, but she knew there were some truths parents are ill equipped to handle. She felt virtuous about withholding the whole story from them. She was being protective.

  “That’s great, Daphne,” her father said when she had finished painting Paul as the patron saint of the Pump House Gang. “I’m glad you two have fun together. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t throwing away your future, that’s all.”

  “My future? Dad, you left. You can’t tell me how to live anymore. You gave up that privilege. You handed my future over to me, and I’m living it the way I see fit.”

  She watched him respond by pouring himself another glass of wine.

  * * *

  —

  She’d met Paul at a UBC football game, the Ubeecees versus the Calgary Dinos. It was late fall of her second year. Her student loan was already running out and she didn’t want to ask her father and Elinor for more money, so she was looking for a part-time job over the Christmas break. She’d put applications in at all the usual places, the campus bookstore, some restaurants and businesses downtown. There was a housing boom in Vancouver, she thought everyone would be expanding. She could type, and if all else failed she thought she’d make a good temp in some kind of office. She had a job interview that afternoon, at a real estate office on Broadway. At the game, Paul came over to where she was sitting with some friends and handed her a beer. He was wearing a leather UBC jacket with “Law” on the back, and a white silk scarf. They talked for a while, watched a bit of football, she said something about ignorant armies clashing by night, which he didn’t get, then he said there was an alumni party after the game and would
she like to come?

  “Are you an alum?” she asked.

  “Class of ’05. Law.” In case she couldn’t read. “You?”

  “English,” she said. “Class of 50.”

  He said he was into environmental law, and she thought that was pretty wonderful. She saw him as a rebel against his class, just as she was. But his class still showed. He was attractive in the way people with untroubled minds sometimes are. Here was no Kyle. Everything he wanted had been handed to him: the law degree, the good clothes, an SUV, the future.

  Not surprisingly, he’d never heard of White Falls. She’d got rid of the Madawaska Valley accent long ago, one of the first things she did, although sometimes when she was angry or having sex it crept back in. No one knows how to say “fuck” in three syllables like a Madawaska girl having an orgasm. Paul was a clean-cut, up-and-coming socially minded lawyer who saw the true potential in her that everyone in her family seemed to have missed.

  At the time, she thought he’d be good for a few free drinks and maybe a temp job in his father’s law firm, Ogilvy Robinson. So she went to the alumni party with him. It was in a part of Vancouver she hadn’t known existed, somewhere with high cedar hedges and, behind them, horse barns and dog kennels and miles of white board fences. All the cars parked outside were sleek and black, and all the people inside were sleek and white. And drunk and stoned. She’d never seen so much blow. There were bowls of it all over the place. She’d done a few lines in her time—her last year in White Falls was a bit of a blur—but this was a whole new level of debauchery. Paul introduced her to some of his cronies from the office, and they did a few warm-up lines in a kind of conversational way. When his friends drifted off, she and Paul watched a couple performing on a sofa and she could see Paul getting turned on, so she slid her hand into his pants pocket, and the next thing she knew they were in his house.