The Good Father

by Wayne Grady

  “No one is just a ten-year-old kid. I failed you, Daphne. That’s what was festering in me that night, with the house rattling and ticking about us as though parts of it were flying off. Shingles, shutters, eavestroughs, loose bricks, shrunken mortar, peeling paint, cracked glass, it was like an Edward Gorey cartoon. All the things I should have fixed came back to haunt me. Freud says that if you dream about a house falling apart, the house is you. Except I wasn’t dreaming. The house really was falling apart. And so was I.”

  “So you were lying there tormenting yourself with the past. With regrets. Feeling guilty about yourself?”

  “I have done the things I ought not to have done, and I have left undone those things I ought to have done, and there is no health in me. That about sums it up. Guilty and angry. Guilty about things I couldn’t undo, and angry that I couldn’t be forgiven for them. I thought about the times I tried to call you and gave up actually trying to reach you. I felt how you must have felt. That’s what we’re left with in the end. The last thing we feel is empathy for the people we’ve hurt.”

  “Lydia Davis says anger is always a great comfort.”

  “It isn’t, though, not in the end,” he says, looking around. “You feel so right at the time, so righteous, it’s almost biblical. But then you realize that in fact you’re wrong. That night, I felt anger and guilt, which added up to regret. I guess the usual word is repentant. I hated my anger towards you. I wanted to kill it. There was definitely no comfort in it.”

  “What about now? Is there solace where you are?”

  “Do you mean here in this cabin? It’s quieter than the house was, although the trees are loud enough when the wind comes up the channel. You told Tom about that line from Yeats’s poem, how he ‘heard the sea-wind…scream in the elms above the flooded stream’? A violent image for such a gentle poem.”

  “Oh, Dad, it’s a violent poem! He talks about ‘the murderous innocence of the sea’ and hopes she’ll be happy ‘though every face should scowl and every windy quarter howl or every bellows burst.’ Is that what you hoped for me? That I would be surrounded by scowls and howls and still be happy?”

  “Of course! That’s what I meant by gentle. It’s a love poem, a prayer. I thought of you in your basement room, lying there in the dark, thinking there was nothing wrong but an upstairs window rattling in its frame. You got up to check. I heard you come upstairs and pad around in the kitchen, checking the windows. I would have got up with you if I could. Then you saw that it wasn’t the wind and the house didn’t have those kinds of windows anyway, I’d had them all replaced. You were thinking about our old house in White Falls.”

  “You knew Mom was sleeping with the mayor, didn’t you?”

  “Everyone in town knew. I got used to the averted eyes. No one blamed me; they were harder on your mother. She thought she was clever, but in a small town, no one likes someone who thinks they’re clever.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “I miss the life we had together. Young family, good jobs, nothing behind us, everything ahead of us, fresh and new. And I miss the house. It had a past, and it was still standing, still harbouring life. You always remember your first house. I loved the sloped floors. You used to set a marble against one wall and chase after it as it rolled across the room, laughing like a loon. I loved the bleary windowpanes, thickened at the bottom by time. The old fireplace that filled the room with smoke every time I lit it. After I left, whenever I was in a house with a fireplace I’d breathe in the smell of woodsmoke and a great wave of nostalgia would flood through me. Winston’s house in Vancouver, for example.”

  She feels they are rubbing up against something here, some looming object. Her year of addiction, the details of which she barely remembers but knows were huge in her father’s mind. Conrad writes somewhere about rowing a small boat across a harbour at night, in total darkness, and sensing, knowing, that there was another presence on the water, perhaps the hull of a ship, perhaps something more mysterious, and in any case he’d better account for it in his rowing even though he couldn’t see it. Her year with Paul was like that. Her body floated through the murk while her mind drifted somewhere above it, in the false predawn light, when it should have been down there with its hand on the tiller. Conrad’s metaphor, not hers, but it makes her shiver.

  “I know what you mean about woodsmoke,” she says, steering clear of the collision. “I always thought of the Curtis house as the autumn house. I used to go there after our modern-novel classes in the fall. Alyssa would invite one or two of us for tea and biscuits. We felt selected, almost elected. We’d sit around the fireplace, privileged and smug, talking about our favourite women novelists. I was in love with Edna O’Brien, she appealed to my longing for what Alyssa, somewhat disparagingly, called traditionality. I think now I just wanted what Alyssa had. A home, a husband, being loved. I wrote an essay on the image of the father in The Lonely Girl. Fairly transparent of me, now that I think about it, but my point was that the father was significantly absent from the novel, in which Caithleen has an affair with an older man and then leaves him. I argued that the whole novel was about loneliness, about trying to stuff socks into the empty space left by the absent father. That’s why Alyssa called me a traditionalist. Sometimes Professor Curtis came downstairs and joined us. He’d say something silly about Shakespeare, for example what a great woman novelist he would have been. Alyssa would shoot him a look and he’d take his tea back upstairs to mark papers. I was sublimely happy, those autumn afternoons.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “Paul happened. My older man. My sock.”

  “But why did you let Paul take you out of that?”

  “I didn’t think I deserved it. I thought they’d find out sooner or later that I didn’t really know anything about Edna O’Brien, I’d just read one novel and a few stories. I didn’t believe I was special. No one had ever made me feel special before.”

  “Ah, that would be me.”

  “Not just you.”

  Daphne gets up and lights the stack of paper and kindling in the wood stove. When the fire is crackling, she feeds a fir log into it, conscious of her father watching her, his face expressionless. She moves the kettle to the centre of the cooking surface. Perhaps he’s thinking of other fires. She thinks now is a good time to broach the big, dark thing.

  “If you loved the house in White Falls,” she says, “and were resigned to Mom’s affair, and your job at the college,” she takes a deep breath, “why did you leave?”

  “I wasn’t resigned to your mother’s affair, I just ignored it. I lied about it. And as for my job at the college, I couldn’t continue to teach journalism after the dean refused to publish my students’ work. I left because I could no longer be an honest man in that town.”

  “You mean because you were selfish? Thinking about yourself, as usual?”

  She doesn’t believe it was that simple anymore, she’s moved beyond that, but she’s never actually confronted him with the accusation, and she wants to know how he might respond. She still sees his leaving as a betrayal, but now she considers it more as a mistake than a premeditated desertion. And people are allowed to make mistakes. Well, they make them whether they’re allowed to or not, so they might as well be allowed to.

  “I needed to lick my wounds,” her father says. “And remember, I thought I’d just be gone until the spring. Not even a year.”

  “And what about my wounds?”

  “I thought your wounds would heal. Mine wouldn’t have.”

  “My wounds damn near killed me, Dad. And don’t say what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, because it doesn’t. What doesn’t kill you leaves you so weak and bloodied it takes you years to recover, if you ever do, and you are never stronger.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  He speaks so softly that Daphne isn’t sure she heard him correctly, but in case she did
n’t she doesn’t ask him to say it again. He knows. He’s sorry. Never mind what he knows and what he’s sorry for, those are the words she’s been yearning to hear from him all her life. The only words that can release the same words from her.

  “I know. I’m sorry, too,” she says, and adds, “Dad,” so he doesn’t think she’s being sarcastic or glib. In case he’s forgotten who is speaking to whom.

  The kettle whistles. She gets up and makes a pot of tea. The wind is coming up again, she can hear it in the chimney, blowing up from the channel and stirring the trees. This place could have taught Yeats a thing or two about wind.

  “Was it raccoons making that noise, do you think?” her father asks. “I remember telling you I had raccoons in the garage, maybe they decided to colonize the house. You thought you should go outside, or at least upstairs, to check the attic. Maybe it was Millie exploiting the local mouse population. Where is Millie, by the way?”

  “Elinor and Sandra have her.”

  “Oh, of course. Elinor and Sandra and Millie. I thought you and Elinor would get along better than you did. I thought Elinor and I would get along better than we did. We got along for a while.”

  “We didn’t get along at first, but we do now. She came to sit with you a few times when you were sick, to give me a break, so I could get out of the house, do some shopping, go for a run in the park. I wasn’t good for anything that went into my head, like a movie or a book. Sandra said that was a good thing. Sometimes I’d go to their house. I think for some unofficial trauma therapy.”

  “I know it wasn’t easy, looking after me. I thought I was finally getting it right, but I guess when you think that you really aren’t. Remember the time you found me at three in the morning, trying to fix an electrical outlet with a screwdriver? It was loose, I said. Coming away from the wall. Someone pulled too hard on it, it must have been you. You could get a nasty shock. Burn the house down. As though you were the one about to stick a screwdriver into a live socket. See what I mean? I wasn’t angry with you, I was worried for you. I was looking out for you. Because I loved you. But it was all wrong. I had the stick at the wrong end again.”

  “You looked so angry. You sounded angry.”

  “I know. I thought if you thought I was angry you’d stop pulling sockets out of the wall.”

  “Don’t you see how ridiculous that sounds?”

  “Now, yes, of course. I see a lot of things now. List, oh list.”

  The ghost of Hamlet. Whenever he feels an emotion coming on, he deflects it with a quotation from somewhere. Or is he just seeking company in his ghostedness?

  “I didn’t mind looking after you,” she says. “I just wanted to know for how long.”

  “I lingered. No, I clung. As to a clifftop.”

  “Cancer is hard to predict.”

  “Cancer is completely predictable. You get it, you die from it. It’s people who are hard to predict. At first you tell yourself that as soon as you become a burden to your loved ones you’re going to pull the plug, leap off the perch, skip to the last chapter. Who needs a denouement? Everyone knows how the story ends. But then, when you get closer to the time, you convince yourself that every day, every minute, every breath is a bonus. You see things with a startling clarity, as after a long fast. You’re clinging to that clifftop, you’re thinking about letting go, and then you see an ant, and you think this is probably the last ant you’ll ever see, you’d better pay attention to that ant. So you hang on to the cliff, studying that ant. And then you see a bird. And then you see a blade of grass.”

  “So you weren’t angry?”

  “Not at you, no.”

  “Is there anyone you know where you are?”

  “Like who?”

  “I don’t know. Charles Darwin? Sigmund Freud?”

  “I didn’t know them.”

  “Bernie?”

  “Who came to the funeral?”

  “You were there, don’t you remember?”

  “I was dead.”

  “You’re dead now.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  “Some of the guys from basketball, Leon and Hubert and Ozzie. I didn’t get their last names.”

  “That’s all right, neither did I.”

  “Sandra and Elinor, of course.”

  “Of course. Faithful to the end.”

  “Gaspard and Manon from the restaurant. And Dorothy and Simon. They’re living together now, did you know that?”

  “No, but I’m not surprised. Bernie’s been dead for some time.”

  “And Mom came, with the ex-mayor.”

  “Yes, that was good of them. You sold the house?”

  “Elinor sold it and gave me half.”

  “She bloody well better have. I left you my half of the house.”

  “I kept the car. It’s in Vancouver. You know all this.”

  “I do. My ashes are still in a cardboard box in the trunk.”

  “I don’t know what to do with them. Where would you like me to put them?”

  “Out here would be nice. These gardens look a little clayey.”

  “Okay, but not in the vegetable beds.”

  “They’d still be organic, wouldn’t they?”

  “Maybe, but Tom would still find it weird.”

  “Tell me about Tom.”

  “When he comes here, we sleep in one of the cabins with the beds pushed together and cook and eat in the main house. He does most of the cooking and I do the shopping and the washing up. We have Wi-Fi now. If I have work, I go back to Vancouver with him, and we leave Caroline and Bay to look after things here. They live up the road, between here and the village. I drop in to see them when I’m running. They’re in their late sixties, a bit older than you were. Bay’s full name is Barry. He says he used to work for the CPR in Prince Rupert, and when they terminated him he took the railroad out of his name. He watches you when he tells you that, to see if you get it. It’s a test.”

  “I get it.”

  “Caroline works at the Co-op, in the office, making sure everybody doesn’t suddenly decide to grow cabbages and no one’s growing carrots. Bay makes gluten-free sausages in his spare time. They look after this place when we’re not here, the gardens, some handiwork. I know this isn’t telling you about Tom, but it’s how I talk about him. Tom is all those things. We’re like a family.”

  “Don’t rely too heavily on similes.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You aren’t like a family, you are a family.”

  “We are.”

  “That sound you kept hearing in the basement, that steady beat, you thought it sounded like someone drumming a military tattoo, rattatat, rattatat, over and over, and that made you think of Grenadier Pond, and that made you think of going for a run. I heard it, too. It did sound like an army on the march. Once you heard it you couldn’t not hear it. You sighed, pulled on your running gear, and went upstairs. But then you couldn’t hear the sound in the kitchen, probably because the fridge was drowning it out. You poured yourself a glass of water and tiptoed down the hall to my room and listened at my door. The sound was not coming from in there. When you were a baby, I used to listen at the door of your room, and if I couldn’t hear you breathing I’d go in to check on you, see if you were still alive. You slept on your stomach with your arms by your sides and your little hands open. I’d put my hand on your back, feel it rising and falling, the steadiness of your breathing such a comfort. Such a profound relief. It told me I was doing something right. I’d get up two or three times a night, just for that feeling of being relieved of worry, like a farmer checking the horizon for storm clouds and seeing nothing but blue sky. There’s another simile. Sometimes you’d wake up, cry a bit, go back to sleep. What patterns were formed then, that’s what I was wondering, how by fulfilling your needs I fulfilled my own. As you are doing now with Tom. I
sn’t that the basis of family? I mean, without that, what is there?”

  “But then you stopped fulfilling my needs. I was asleep, I didn’t have any needs other than for you to be there. And you weren’t.”

  “We keep going back to that. Can’t we move on? I’d never experienced that before, that intertwining of needs. I loved your mother when we conceived you, and when you were born I discovered a whole new dimension of love, an immeasurable volume of it. It was like being in a dream in which you’re in a house you think you know, and then you open a door and suddenly you’re in a room you never knew existed but is more beautiful than any other room you’d ever been in. That was your gift to me. Standing in the darkness, listening to you breathe. And that was also my gift to you.”

  “But you left!”

  He sighs. “That night, you opened my door a few inches and looked in. I was sleeping on my back, my hands folded above the blankets, my head turned to one side, away from the door. You watched me for a long time, looking for the rise and fall of my breathing, as I once did you, and when you thought you saw it, you gently pulled the door closed, relieved that I was still alive.”

  “You were alive then, were you?”

  “I was, yes, that time. You went back into the kitchen and the fridge motor had cut off, but the lights above the counter were still on, so you shut them off and sat in the dark until you heard the sound again, coming from outside, a transformer on a hydro pole maybe, or someone’s rooftop air conditioner. A very faint, steady buzz, from somewhere towards High Park. You thought: Grenadier Pond, night patrol, a fife and drum escort. Remember what you read on the plane on your way to Toronto, about Marconi’s belief that sound never really died, it just gradually faded from audible to inaudible, and that if we had the right equipment we could hear the past? We could listen to Socrates lecturing to Plato, or sit in on Galileo’s astronomy class at the University of Firenze. Darwin arguing with Captain FitzRoy on the Beagle. Who knew what the right equipment might be? For all Marconi knew, it might have been a microwave oven arcing into some LED lights, like the ones I had in the kitchen. The sound seemed to have a sort of intentionality to it, a rhythm, like that of someone trying to communicate over a long distance in time. The music of the spheres, percussion section. Anyway, it was a nice night for a run, it had cooled down a bit, and I was still asleep. Your runners were by the back door.”