Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  “How you doing?” Lorraine said, hardly above a whisper.

  “I’m okay,” Dolly said.

  They sat silent again.

  Dolly felt as if her whole life had come zooming down to this little pinprick of time, in this empty place. Her eyes seemed to be able to see the bees roaming in and out of the bushes, even though they were too far away.

  “I loved Rose,” Lorraine said. Trevor came out of the front door, trotting along to the back, like Rose must have trotted when she was Trevor’s age, Lorraine thought. “She had no temper, she thought everybody was great, she made you laugh. She was a great cook and she loved to keep things clean. I hope Clary is being like that for you guys.”

  Dolly kept staring fiercely out the open window.

  It seemed to Lorraine that she didn’t even know she wasn’t answering. The pain of not being with the children for the last month pushed at her breastbone, at her mouth. She held it in. Dolly did not need to see that. I guess I’m going to die of this, Lorraine thought. I guess my children will go on without me, the way I’ve gone on without Rose. She could see it painted on the walls of the broken-down house: death, abandonment. People do die, she thought. Everybody. And the bees come and hover through the bushes, even so.

  She is their mother, Clary told herself a hundred times a day. Let her do it for them. But that was complicated by the weakness Lorraine was trying to hide. She needed help to lift Pearce to her knee to give him his bottle. She had to stand still in the hall for a while, after tucking Trevor and Dolly in, before she could carry on to her bedroom. Her energy peaked and troughed. During the day she moved from room to room restlessly, walking slowly but determined on exercise; she commented often on the freedom from i.v. lines. She tried to eat with the children, but halfway through lunch she would get up and make her way back to bed, fragile eyelids shut, lying on her side with the afghan over her, one hand out into the air of the room, in case the children wanted to sit beside her. Sometimes Trevor did. He would sit on the floor, very still, his back up against the bed, his hand lifted up and resting on his knee to be able to keep holding his mother’s hand.

  On Thursday night Pearce cried and cried, his gums hurting, and Lorraine was too exhausted to do anything about it. At 2 a.m. Clary stood in the doorway, the hall night light shining behind her nightgown, and Lorraine was glad to see her.

  “You take him in with you tonight,” she said.

  Clary laid Pearce back in his crib, which made him yell in frustration until she gave him a fresh icy soother, and manoeuvred the crib on its little wheels down the hall to her room. She shut the door on his subdued disgruntled grunts and sucking, and went back to help Lorraine into bed.

  Lorraine was crying, jagged tears streaking both sides of her face, leaning forward on the bed to ease her abdomen.

  “Are you hurting?” Clary asked her.

  Lorraine shook her head. “Just sick,” she said. “I’m hot, I don’t feel right.”

  Her temperature stayed high through the night, no matter what Clary did. She put her in a cool bath finally, hoping to keep it from rising any farther, and phoned the cancer ward. There was a brief wait while the nursing station got hold of Lorraine’s medical oncologist, and at 5 a.m. the resident called back to say they were sending an ambulance for her. Her temperature was 104 on the old Fahrenheit thermometer, and Clary was glad not to have to torment her by folding her into the van.

  Clary woke Darwin, then phoned Mrs. Zenko and asked her to come over to be with the children. They were all awake by now, huddled on the floor beside Lorraine’s bed with frightened faces. Clary wished she could send Mrs. Zenko to the hospital and stay home with the children herself. She shook off cowardice and shoved her wallet in her pocket, and backed the van out to follow after Lorraine.

  Once the ambulance had gone, the children sat with Mrs. Zenko, watching Cinderella for the fortieth time, Trevor still snivelling gently. Dolly was afraid Mrs. Zenko would try to hug her or hold her, but she did not, she just let Trevor tuck his cold hands under her sweater elbow where it was warm. Pearce slept and slept, as though he had had enough life for a while.

  From the hospital, Clary called Grace and Moreland and asked them to help, just for a few days.

  “I can’t manage on my own,” she said, and it was a relief to admit it.

  Grace came up trumps, of course. They drove in straight away, and while Fern settled the children, Grace got a fridge-full of groceries and ran a mop around the place.

  When Clary dragged herself home at midnight the three of them were sitting in the clean kitchen playing Hearts, and Grace immediately put a mug of tea and a shot glass of brandy in front of her.

  Clary hated brandy but she took a gulp. “She’s okay,” she told them. “She’s hooked up to every line in the universe, again, and that giggling student nurse hurt her hand again putting in the i.v. line, so they had to go back to the wrist, but she looks better already. Darwin’s staying the night, and I told him I’d go back early in the morning. It’s bad timing, because school starts next week and we were going in to register the children…”

  She paused to drink the tea. And the brandy was good. She finished it.

  “Care to play a hand?” Moreland asked. He was a demon at Hearts, he never lost.

  “I would,” she said, and prepared to receive the Queen of Spades.

  22. Jesus, Mary and Joseph

  The next night was bad too—Friday night. Darwin was in the orange chair when Clary left at midnight; closing the door she saw his eyes open, and he nodded, never really sleeping. Hours and visits blurred, but by Saturday’s evening visit antibiotics had brought some light back into Lorraine’s grey skin. While Darwin played euchre with her, letting her choose cards with a bent straw, Clary went back to help Fern put the children to bed, and to get some sleep herself.

  Leaving the hospital after a hard visit with Joe Kane, Paul saw that it was raining and stopped to put on his windbreaker, hoping vaguely that he himself would be more willing to let go, at eighty-seven. The zipper wouldn’t do up—he should break down and buy a new jacket.

  He was conscious of added weight in the building, Lorraine back on the fifth floor again. In a room alone this time, never a good sign. Paul said a quick silent prayer for her, pushing away death. (Binnie is dead, dead—how can it be true? ran the constant subtitle under all his thoughts.)

  He was afraid to go up, that was the bare truth. Coward. At least he could stand in the hall and say hello. He turned and caught the elevator as the doors were closing, and was raised up in one smooth swoop.

  Darwin was standing in the door of Lorraine’s new room.

  “Hey, man,” Darwin said. “Lorraine’ll be glad to see you. I’ll go down the hall for a while, since you’re here for a visit.”

  He was not, he did not want to be. He had visited enough death today. He nodded, and clasped Darwin’s hand, and went in.

  Lorraine was restless in the bed, her legs moving constantly beneath the sheets, but she held out her hand to him.

  “Hey,” she said. “You didn’t come round Clary’s while I was home, I was expecting to see you.”

  He said he was happy to have been expected, and sorry not to have come.

  “Darwin’s gone to get more ice,” she said. “I like it.”

  Paul nodded. He could see, now, that she was feverish and off-kilter.

  “He’s good to me,” she said. “He’s better than Clayton. Poor Clay.”

  He should be soothing her, comforting her, but she was going full tilt. “Clayton would be here if he knew but nobody knows where he is, you know.” Her eyes were bright but slightly unfocused. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” she said. Her legs switched—one side, other side of the bed. “He knew he couldn’t take it, there’s no shame in knowing you can’t handle something, you know yourself the best, nobody can know for you. Clary thinks he stinks but I still love him, I shove him, I glove him.”

  Paul kept her hand in his, gripping back when
she gripped his, releasing a little when she released. He said nothing, but gave her all his attention.

  “I have to watch him,” she whispered, urgent to tell. “He will—he tried—he shook Pearcey when he was—I stopped him, I stopped him in time, but it was rough. But it’s only from time to time, when things get him going, I can manage it.”

  She stared deep into Paul’s eyes, needing something from him that he tried to give. Not absolution, he didn’t think it was that.

  “They’re his. They’re mine. They’re not hers.”

  “No,” he said. “They are your children. They know that very well.”

  Maybe that was it. She lay back, and her legs ceased their constant restless movement. She kept his hand, but then Darwin came in, and she turned to him instead.

  “I know what I have to do,” she said. “I know how to do it.”

  Darwin sat on the bed beside her and let his hand rest on her abdomen, spread wide, very still.

  “I know now,” she said, more calmly.

  “She’s been straying this last couple of days,” Darwin told Paul, without taking his eyes away from Lorraine. “A bad night last night.”

  Paul nodded. “I thought—”

  Darwin looked up and caught his eyes. “The nurse will be in pretty soon with some more serious stuff, it’ll calm her down again.”

  Lorraine tried to sit up. “I’ve got to go—”

  “No, sweetheart, you got to stay for a while,” Darwin said. He pressed her shoulders down, sliding her pillow into better comfort as he made her lie back.

  “I don’t have to go,” she said obediently. “Not right now.”

  “Not now,” he said, agreeable.

  Paul thought he would get a coffee before tracking back up to see Lorraine again. But while he was still waiting in line, Darwin came down.

  “She’s out, she’ll be out for a while,” he said. “I could give you a ride.”

  Since Paul had walked, he agreed. But Darwin turned right from the hospital grounds, and drove across the bridge over the shining black water, the lights reflected in arch after arch of shadow-bridge. His big slow car slid down the streets to 21st and parked in front of the Senator Hotel.

  “I’m going to get some off-sale—Clary doesn’t have anything but her mom’s old sherry in the house, and I could use a beer,” he said.

  “I could too,” Paul said.

  “Let’s go in, then. You play any pool?”

  The hotel was crowded and hot on a Saturday night, the music loud, a grey veil of smoke hanging four feet down from the blue Styrofoam-tile ceiling. Darwin got them a table by the wall, working his way through the jostling bodies, saying Hi, Sheldon! Hey, Chris, as if this was his regular bar. Paul felt a strange mixture of exhilaration and panic. He had not been in this kind of bar since university, and he must look like a—a priest, he said to himself. He took off his jacket and rolled his sleeves up. Maybe he could look like an off-duty accountant, if he tried.

  The girl leaned down to Darwin, but Paul couldn’t hear what he said. In a few minutes she was back with a full tray, placing glass after glass on the table. Six glasses of draft beer, and two shot glasses overflowing with whiskey of some kind. Paul could feel a murmur of protest working its way into voice, and he stifled it. A couple of beers weren’t going to kill him. His sermon was already finished, for once. The shot was Irish whiskey. It caught at the back of his throat and filled the whole upper half of his chest with a warm transfusion of relief.

  “She’s delirious,” Darwin shouted over the racket.

  “I thought, yes,” Paul said, nodding his head many times, in case Darwin couldn’t hear him either.

  “It’s some kind of a reaction to her medication, they’re not surprised.”

  Paul was surprised that he could hear what Darwin was saying. The whiskey was helping. He drained one of the beers.

  Two older men leaned down, palms on the table, talking to Darwin. Frowzy fellows. They were surprised and pleased to see him, it had been quite a while, and so on. They ignored Paul, after a short nod, so he was free to stare around the room, or what he could see of it in the haze. The noise seemed to be affecting his eyesight. At least a third of these people had to be older than himself. Women with caked, gluey make-up and outfits revealing leathery bosoms and bony shoulders; men with softened faces, noses fallen off their original line, red-blotched skin; those sets sat together in silence or argued, their talk spiked with jeering wheezy laughs. Philosophizing tables of freshly returned university kids too young to be out were sprinkled here and there, as hardened as Pearce, some with goatees or strange sideburns. Eloquent hockey fans leaned toward each other across a large long table, faces all broken and patched-together, little girls with sharp eyes and soft mouths sitting between them.

  More beer. These were small glasses, but the draft, although watery, was surprisingly delicious. “I liked the taste of beer, its live white lather, its brass-bright depth, the sudden world through the wet brown walls of the glass, the tilted rush to the lips and the slow swallowing down to the lapping belly, the salt on the tongue, the foam at the corners.”

  “What?” Darwin yelled, through the arms of the old guys.

  “Sorry, nothing—it was Dylan Thomas talking about beer, I’m sorry.”

  Paul waited to become furious with himself for quoting out loud, but shame did not arrive. Instead, he felt quite happy to have remembered all that, and he began cudgelling his memory for more. Those famous last words, of course: “‘I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the record.’” He was on a roll.

  Darwin’s eye shifted to him again, even though the larger of the two men was telling him a long, convoluted story about a trailer and two dogs.

  “HE SAID,” Paul shouted, leaning forward, “He drank to reconcile the disorder outside and the order within himself.”

  “Me too,” Darwin said.

  “I drink to forget,” Paul said.

  “Me too,” Darwin said.

  “Lisanne.”

  “Before we die of thirst,” Darwin begged the waitress as she sailed by, empty tray skied above helium fingertips.

  She gave him a huge heartfelt smile, as women must always do for Darwin, Paul thought. She vanished, but only to serve them the faster.

  “I wish Clary was here,” Paul said, suddenly.

  Darwin drained his glass to the bottom before he nodded and put it down again.

  “Someone has to stay home with the babies,” Paul said. Then he worried that Darwin might not realize he was joking. But the beautiful waitress came back with that three-cornered, bountiful smile, and Darwin gave her a fat tip—but it wasn’t Darwin’s turn to tip her, it was Paul’s turn, so he tipped her too. There were beers and a couple more shots of Irish on the tray for them, and this time they clinked before knocking them back, and the Irish hit Paul in the places in his throat that had been missing alcohol for too long. He needed a beer to go chasing after it, which is why they call it a chaser, like the hair of the dog who chases.

  “I don’t normally drink in the evening,” he told Darwin, and Darwin nodded and agreed and they were swept up in a group of people Darwin knew who were going on to the Pat, and wanted them to come too, so they drank up the beer and wandered in a straggling strand, a skein of loose knitting, unravelling up the street to the Pat. Good thing they didn’t have to drive, Paul was going to say to Darwin, because they should probably not have driven, but Darwin was far ahead talking to some people who were laughing, and the two drunk university boys beside Paul wanted him to settle a question for them: how do we know that we exist? Are our senses evidence enough? If we can touch a table, then do we know that it is there? What is there?

  Paul laughed to be in such a conversation, and bent his mind to explicating how we know what we know, in a spume of eloquence that gave him enormous pleasure, riffing on the constantly-shifting boundaries between tacit knowledge and focal knowledge, and how this boundary shift in it
self is a tacit skill and is used to blend new information with old, and even to create new, extrapolated knowledge.

  “We categorize the world in order to make sense of it,” he told the boys, at least the closer boy, the one with the nose rings. “And that gives us unconscious shortcuts. Knowledge is rooted in the tacit. Look, look, this sign,”—staring up at the ABJ All Makes Pawn Shop sign, gappy neon fizzing in the quieting night—“is made up of small characters, originally from the Phoenician. But are we ever aware of the alphabet? You don’t have to think—you see the words and know what they mean. How do you know English? You don’t put conscious thought into how to speak—phrases come already-strung to the tongue. How do you know how to sing? You just sing!”

  The smaller boy had the bar door held open by the big brass handle, and it looked too heavy for him. Paul hurried the other nose-ring boy inside.

  “But this is epistemology—I am on steadier ground with ethics.”

  He stopped himself before he told the boys that he was an Anglican priest, because he suddenly found that he was no longer certain whether he was pretending to be slightly drunk to humour them or whether he had slipped ahead of them and was truly drunk. It was like Kelly whatsisname from At Swim Two Birds, listening to the little man discoursing on Rousseau: “Kelly then made a low noise and opened his mouth and covered the small man from shoulder to knee with a coating of unpleasant buff-coloured puke. Many other things happened on that night now imperfectly recorded in my memory, but that incident is still very clear to me in my mind.”

  Where he had been when reading that was still very clear in Paul’s mind, sitting on the windowsill at Trinity, perhaps the year before he met Lisanne, perhaps the same year; but before, before. When buff-coloured puke and Rousseau and an addiction to language had seemed all part of one package that he would be untying all his life.

  Naturally a wife changes you. As I changed her, Paul thought. He could feel tears coming like blisters, like cold sores ready to sport. He opened his eyes wider and forged his way through the crowd to Darwin, to bid him good night before setting off on the long walk home.