The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  Before he finishes the coffee, his phone rings. He looks down at the screen. It’s Dr. Beattie.

  “Hello? Dr. Beattie?”

  “Hello, Harry. Is this a good time?”

  “I’m in Vancouver.”

  “I received the results of the biopsies on those polyps today. I’d like you to come in so we can discuss them.”

  “I’m in Vancouver.”

  “I know. You said that.”

  “Do I have cancer?”

  “We’ll discuss it when you come in. When will you be back?”

  “I don’t know. A few days, a week. How long have I got?”

  “Ha ha. Call me when you’re back in Toronto.”

  So he has cancer.

  * * *

  —

  At eight thirty, when people start leaving the building, presumably to go to school or work, he closes his book, leaves the car, goes into the foyer, and rings the buzzer for number 3. The mailbox beneath the buzzer is so full he can pull several items out of the slot: his own note from the day before; two Pizza Pizza flyers; a hydro bill addressed to S. Narayan; a Telus phone bill for someone named James Claymore Sr.; a TD bank statement for Matilda Ho and Lucille Ho. Nothing addressed to Daphne. When an elderly woman comes through the inside door with a shopping cart, Harry holds the door open for her, and when she is gone he goes into the building proper. Number 3 isn’t on the second floor at the front, it’s on the ground floor at the back. He presses the button beside the brass number plate and waits. He presses it again. When there is no answer he slips his note under the door, and leaves.

  * * *

  —

  In his car, he calls Paul and Winston Curtis again, gets the same recorded responses and leaves the same messages. So many dead ends. He doesn’t know what else he can do until either Curtis or Ogilvy call him back. He calls Elinor and gives her a brief report of his early efforts, trying to sound positive. That he didn’t find her in the Downtown Eastside could be seen as good news.

  “I called your ex,” Elinor says. “To see if she had Daphne’s cell number.”

  “You did?” he says. “I thought of that, but quailed. What did she say?”

  “Well, I made the mistake of explaining the circumstances. I told her Daphne has cut herself off from us and that you’ve gone to Vancouver to find her but you need her cell number.”

  “And she said she doesn’t have it.”

  “No, she said she has it, but she won’t give it to us. She says that if Daphne doesn’t want to have anything to do with us, then we should respect that. I told her that Daphne may be in trouble. She may be having a kind of psychotic break brought on by excessive drug use. Do you know what she said to that?”

  “She said Daphne doesn’t take drugs.”

  “Yes. She said she is in frequent touch with her daughter and if Daphne were in trouble of any kind she would know because she is Daphne’s mother.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “Well, I did argue with it. I’m afraid I was a little short with her. I asked her if she regarded working with the mayor as sufficient training in the recognition of incipient psychosis. She said that as far as she was concerned, breaking off relations with us was far from an indication of psychological trauma, it was the smartest thing Daphne has ever done. She should have done it ages ago, and then she hung up on me. I’m sorry, Harry. I tried.”

  “Don’t be sorry, El. But maybe she’s right, maybe there isn’t anything seriously wrong with Daphne. Maybe we should back off and let her have her own life.”

  “I spoke to Sandra last night,” Elinor says, after a pause. “She works with a lot of women Daphne’s age. And she agrees there are indications that we should be concerned about.”

  “What indications?”

  “Depression, low energy, delusions, mood swings, irritability, substance abuse, memory loss, trouble making decisions.”

  “Jesus,” Harry says, “that sounds like me.”

  “In a man your age it’s just annoying. In a young woman of twenty it’s worrisome. Find her, Harry. She needs help.”

  He ends the call, then remembers Dr. Beattie. He considers calling Elinor back, but doesn’t.

  * * *

  —

  “Harry Bowes? Winston Curtis here. Sorry I’ve been slow returning your call. Yesterday was not my office day, and today I was out to lunch, or rather out having lunch, or possibly both.”

  The call comes at three o’clock, while Harry is having a late lunch in the cafeteria at the Museum of Anthropology. He spent the morning wandering around the campus, enjoying being among students again, the energy, the promise, the necessary illusion that knowledge is being passed from generation to generation. He was, of course, looking for Daphne. Just because she dropped English doesn’t mean she isn’t going to university—maybe she decided to switch to something else. Forestry, for example, or pharmacology. It’s a Kafkaesque world. But now, obeying some perverse instinct, he’s eating lunch in a place where he thinks she is least likely to show up, half expecting her to walk in at any minute.

  “Hello, Professor Curtis, thanks for calling me back.”

  “Winston, please. I have news for you, of a kind. But where are you now?”

  “The Museum of Anthropology.”

  “Ah, mere minutes away. Come up to my office.”

  Curtis’s office is unremarkable. It reminds Harry of his old office at York. Functional desk, uncomfortable chairs, one wall lined with books, a window overlooking a courtyard at the centre of which is a large, snow-covered water feature made of cement slabs tilted at different angles, with the water turned off.

  “Welcome to Vancouver, and as I said, I have good news for you. Well, goodish news: my wife Alyssa and I were just having lunch with Daphne.”

  Harry sits on one of the uncomfortable chairs. “You had lunch with Daphne? Where? Do you know where she is now?”

  “At a Thai place on Broadway. I forget the name. Doesn’t matter, she’s not still there. I dislike Asian food, don’t know why, but anyway. No, I’m afraid I don’t know where she went. She left early to help a friend, I think, someone named Chloe, whom I suspect to have been a fiction.”

  “How was she? I mean, did she seem all right?”

  “Hmm, well. On the surface of it, yes, sparkly and bubbly as usual. But frankly, Harry, I have to say no. She drank quite a lot of wine, and she kept going to the ladies’ and coming back in an ebullient mood, if you catch my meaning. And then she said she had to go out to help this Chloe character, and although we waited a full hour for her to return, she didn’t come back. Paul was quite upset.”

  “I tried reaching him at his office,” Harry says, “but he hasn’t returned my calls.”

  “Hmm, yes. Paul Ogilvy. Ogilvy Robinson is a venerable firm, as it happens the firm that Alyssa used for her divorce two years ago. Paul wasn’t her lawyer, he works mainly on environmental issues, I gather, enabling pipeline companies to circumvent the Endangered Species Act, that sort of thing. Daphne didn’t know, apparently. She thought Paul was out there supporting Native groups by lying down in the paths of bulldozers. She took it pretty hard. I wasn’t that surprised, to tell the truth. Alyssa and I met Paul last year, when we were invited to a Christmas gathering at his house. Somewhat canonical, as I recall. Dry sherry and almond biscotti. Daphne was there. She was still coming to classes then, but I could tell she was drifting. Even so, I was surprised by her choice of a partner. He’s not at all her type. A bit of a Petruchio, dull-witted and something of a blowhard. And Daphne is sharp as broken glass, of course. One hates to see a promising student go astray. I let her know so this afternoon. After you and I spoke last week, I called Paul to arrange this lunch. I was alarmed then, and I am not less alarmed now.”

  “Do you think she’s with Paul now?”

  “Well, she m
ay be, but I can’t be sure.”

  “Do you have his home address?” Harry asks.

  “Let me check,” he says, opening his laptop. “I’m pretty sure it was on the party invitation, which came by email. How would I search that? Daphne told me, by the way, that she is, as she put it, taking a break from her relationship with you. I was sorry to hear it.”

  “Yes, she’s said pretty categorically that she doesn’t want to see me. It’s probably best not to warn her that I’m on my way to her house.”

  “If the department finds out I’ve given you a student’s home address…”

  “I just want to see her,” Harry says. “I need to know she’s all right.”

  “Need, yes,” Curtis says. “As you can imagine, I’ve seen this many times. A young person leaves home to come to university, has the larger world open up before her eyes, sees her former life as something, let’s call it transitional, something to be emerged from, and suddenly the needs of the parent are no long paramount.”

  “I don’t think they’ve ever been paramount with Daphne.”

  “But perhaps they have been with the parent?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And of course there’s something else happening now, and this may be closer to the way Daphne sees things. Parents are the equivalent of the missionaries sent by imperialist nations to subvert an indigenous people who are standing in the way of their imperialist designs.”

  “Yes, Daphne said something along those lines in her letter of resignation.”

  “The missionaries spoke of saving souls, too, never mind that indigenous people already had their own ideas about their souls. Nonetheless they were forced to hand theirs over to the missionaries to be harvested in the same way that fur traders harvested their furs and lumber barons harvested their trees. There are a lot of mixed metaphors in there, but you can see the analogy. Daphne’s generation is pushing the pendulum back to where it came from. Even the university, when it isn’t condemned as a bastion of white privilege, is excoriated as a colonialist institution designed to stifle individuality and creativity, elements that pose potential threats to the capitalists who donate the vast sums on which universities now depend. We’ve seen all this before, of course, haven’t we, in the sixties, when we were all disestablishmentarians? I believe drugs were involved then, too—a certain amount of hash and LSD allowed by the establishment to dampen our revolutionary fervour. And it worked. By God, did it work. ‘Drugs and Dionysian music,’ as the writer Guy Davenport puts it, took the fight right out of us. It probably worked in ancient Greece, too. Daphne referred to me this afternoon, when she didn’t think I was listening, as ‘the Jacket,’ as though I were a character in a satirical farce. Perhaps something by Gogol. Well, she was right to do so. We have failed her, Harry. Is it any wonder they’re tossing us aside?”

  “That sounds all very well in the seminar room, Winston. But right now I need something to work with down at street level.”

  “It always takes the street a while to catch up with the seminar room. Daphne seems to have a foot in each. One foot in the grave and the other in the grove. By which I mean, it’s not too late, she could go either way. Ah, here’s Paul’s address.” He reads it out to Harry. “It’s in Point Grey.”

  “Thank you, Winston.”

  “I’m just advising you to tread lightly.”

  “I will,” Harry says, “although it feels like hesitating before throwing a life jacket to a drowning child. I’ve always hesitated, Winston, and now I’m not sure that’s the right thing to do. I think I may just have been doing what was easiest for me. I’ll let you know when I find her.”

  “Good luck, Harry. Do keep me informed. And when you find her, tell her I’ve broken every university security protocol there is by giving you Paul’s address. She’ll appreciate the irony.”

  * * *

  —

  Trocadero Crescent would have been hard to find at the best of times, but with the street signs coated in wet snow it takes Harry several passes before he stumbles across it. The street isn’t the kind that invites curbside parking—there are no curbs or sidewalks—and so he pulls into the driveway of 4423 through an arch carved into a twenty-foot cedar hedge, half expecting alarms to ring and men with uniforms and large dogs to emerge from behind the garage. But except for a motion-detecting light coming on above the garage door, nothing happens. The light illuminates a cone of swirling snow, and another car in the drive, a blue Ford Focus parked off to one side. Harry senses that Daphne isn’t here, that he has missed her again, but he rings the doorbell anyway. Normally when he presses a doorbell and doesn’t hear a chime, he assumes the bell is out of order; here he imagines a house so solidly fortified that no sound can emerge from it. He looks for a camera and is contemplating a small node above the porch light when the door opens and a woman wearing an apron and holding a red plastic-handled mop stands in the doorway looking at him.

  “Is this the home of Paul Ogilvy?”

  “Sí. Pero Señor Paul is not here.”

  “Is Daphne Bowes here?”

  “No. Señora Daphne too.”

  “I’m her father.”

  “Sí, mucho gusto. I am her housekeeper. Mariela.”

  They shake hands. Hers is small but exerts a firm grip. She lets go quickly and steps aside to let Harry enter the hall, then closes and locks the door behind him.

  “Do you know where Daphne is?” Harry asks. He feels he is making excellent progress.

  “She and Señor Paul have a big pelea.” She makes two fists and bangs them together.

  “A fight?”

  “Sí. She has cut on her hand. She ask me to take her to a hotel. I put bandage on her hand, take her in my car. Now I am back to clean.”

  “How did she get a cut on her hand?”

  “A glass broke, I think.”

  “Jesus. Where did you take her?”

  “To Hotel Vancouver.”

  He feels relieved; he was expecting one of the shooting galleries on East Hastings. But why a hotel at all? Could Mariela mean hospital? “She’s there now, at the hotel?”

  Mariela looks doubtful. “Is a big hotel,” she says.

  While Harry tries to interpret this, Mariela reaches into her apron pocket, brings out a cell phone and a red leather wallet, and hands them to Harry.

  “Is Señora Daphne’s,” she says. “Tell her I find them under the white rug. I show you. I clean. It had blood.”

  “Blood?”

  “From her hand. In my country, all big hotels have doctors. Señora Daphne, she needs a doctor. Look.”

  Mariela turns and shows Harry the living room. The white shag carpet has splotches of blood on it, and the white leather sofa beside it is also smeared with blood. There is a broken wine glass on the coffee table, and more broken glass on the kitchen floor. Harry’s hand goes to his stomach. The place looks like a crime scene, or the path of a natural disaster, as though whatever it was that bonded things together, atom to atom, suddenly let go. Why did Daphne want to go to a hotel in this condition? Why does Daphne do anything? He doesn’t know his daughter, that’s the truth of it.

  He looks down at Daphne’s cell phone, thinking how useless it is without its owner. And how helpless and unreachable its owner is without her cell phone. Not that she’d answer if he called, but she might look at the screen and see his name and be comforted. The thought of Daphne wounded and unable to call for help, though irrational—there are phones in hotels, and attendants, maybe even doctors—makes him turn in despair to Mariela.

  “Is it a big cut?” he asks.

  Mariela draws a line on her left palm with her index finger, almost the length of her lifeline. “She took pills for pain. Many, I think. And drank much wine.”

  This is a warning. “How could you have let her go off on her own?” he says.

  Mariela ra
ises her chin. “And you,” she says. “How could you?”

  Harry stares at her. Did she really say that, or has he imagined it? But it’s true, he has no right to accuse anyone of mishandling Daphne. Mariela’s question is the one the dean asked about Melissa Stone. How could he have let her go off on her own? How could he have? And yet he has done it again. We learn nothing from our mistakes except how to make mistakes.

  “Can you call Paul and ask him if he knows where she is?” he says. “I’ll go to the hotel to try to find her.”

  “Señor Paul doesn’t know,” Mariela says. “He was here, then he leave and called me.”

  “All right,” he says. “If Daphne comes back here, will you tell her to call me?” He thinks about that. “Or will you call me?”

  “I think she is not coming back,” Mariela says.

  And still he feels he is close to finding Daphne—in the Hotel Vancouver, where she’ll be roaming the halls, or sitting in the bar, or he can simply go up to the reception desk and ask to be connected to her room. His options have returned.

  The storm is easing, but the roads are still greasy and no one in Vancouver knows how to drive in snow. You’d think people living on the flanks of the highest mountains on the continent would understand a controlled skid. But drivers still go too fast between lights and then jam on their brakes twenty feet from the intersection. Or think the best way to get out of a snowbank is to gun the engine until the tires hit pavement. Not driving well in snow is a point of pride with Vancouverites; it makes them feel closer to California than to Ontario. According to the radio, power lines have collapsed and the entrance to Stanley Park is barricaded because many of its ancestral Douglas-firs have come down. A woman walking her dog in Shaughnessy was struck from behind by a motorcycle. Snow accumulating on the roof of a sports complex became so heavy the roof collapsed and sixteen people attending a minor-league hockey game were taken to hospital. Harry flips from channel to channel. A natural anarchy has been loosed upon the world.