Good to a Fault

by Marina Endicott

  In all this time, his whole life, he had only made love with Lisanne, and against all his wishes he could hardly bear that Clary had not been her last night. That she was going to the Mayan Riviera to be entered, entered, and everything that was holy was profane.

  He constrained himself before he broke into sobs. This was not even real, and it was ungrateful. Clary was infinitely worth loving, infinitely kind, entirely herself. He pushed back on the turquoise leatherette to recline, determined to meditate, and fell asleep beside Lorraine.

  Self-righteous about their need to know, Mrs. Pell had told the children that Darwin was hurt. Now they would have to be taken for a visit after supper. It would probably do them good to see Lorraine, too, even in her present state. But in fact, Clary wanted to leave the children safe with Mrs. Zenko and drive to Paul’s house, and never go to that charnelhouse hospital again. Her mother’s had been an awful, staggering death, everything about her ravaged and ruined, all her beauty gone. Her father, eighteen years earlier, had died more beautiful than before, pared to bone and sinew, made clearer, his soul visible. Her mother had drained away in despair until only the husk was left and the poor husk suffered longer. Which would Lorraine be?

  She could wonder that in comfort, while at the same time the smell of Paul rose from her hands, her clothes, clouded around her and made her beautiful. For a bitter moment she hated her own health and luck, and everything else that made her different from Lorraine.

  Dolly could not eat her supper. Too bad, because she loved Grace’s beans. She was afraid to see Darwin if he looked bad too. She wanted to cry or hit Trevor but she tried to distract herself from that, since it would only lead to more badness. But he was stupid, and Pearce was gross, smearing beans on his face. They should not let him eat by himself if he was too young for it. Disgusting.

  She pushed her chair back from the table quickly and ran down the hall to the bathroom because she was going to throw up. She shut the door tight so nobody would come in there, and leaned over the toilet. There was spit coming up in her mouth. She spit, but she didn’t let herself throw up. She wiped her mouth and looked at herself in the big clean wall of mirror: eyes sloped-down at the corners, flat brown hair, crooked teeth hidden because she was keeping her mouth shut. She looked sad. The hospital made her neck feel tight, but you could not tell anybody you did not want to see your poor skinny mother. Dolly grabbed the big towel off the rack and buried her face in it and screamed as loudly as she could. It made no noise at all. Then she went to get Vanity Fair, to have something to read if her mom was sleeping.

  Down the hospital halls Trevor tapped his knuckles on Pearce’s car seat over and over in a certain rhythm until Clary asked him not to because Pearce was sleeping. So he touched his thumb to the wall, then his baby finger, then his thumb, then his baby finger, in exactly the right order. But what about Darwin? As he walked he did his toes for Darwin, left big toe, right little toe, right big toe, left little toe.

  When they got there, Darwin was fast asleep and Fern said the nurses wouldn’t let them into the room. She promised he was okay and Trevor had to believe her. But he kept on ticking while they all went upstairs and into the special washroom to wash and mask, to see his mom. He got to be first this time.

  Dolly couldn’t stand to stick around and wait for her turn. Too many bodies in this little washroom. She slid backwards without anyone noticing. Maybe she’d go back to the third floor and check on Darwin again; she could sneak past that nurse. She took the right turns, and it wasn’t like she didn’t know the hospital, but she found herself in a dark dead end anyway. This was wrong. Through a passage by the staff elevators she could see lit rooms.

  She ran on quiet feet, turned sharply left, and almost bumped into a stretcher lying against the wall. Or into the feet stretching off it, wrapped with a sheet. At first she thought it was a dead person but when she got to the head it was not covered, so he must be still alive. It was her Keys Books man. Just left there in the hall like a piece of machinery.

  His nose pointed up to the ceiling. His closed eyes were sunken in around the eyeballs but the bony parts stood out, and his flaring white eyebrows like antennae. Except that he was so long, everything else about him had shrunk down flat.

  Nurses were far away, busy. It was almost the end of visiting, and the night things were happening in the rooms: people’s friends being hustled out, their medicine bags being changed.

  Dolly stood by the Keys Books man for a minute. She wanted to touch his eyelids, smooth them the way her dad liked her to do, but she was scared he would wake up and bite her fingers off.

  “I’m almost through my book the second time,” she said. She showed it to his closed eyes. “Vanity Fair. You gave it to me.”

  He didn’t even have a room to be in. He was probably dying, that’s why.

  They all were. Her mom, and the old guy, and now Darwin. And she herself was dying, shrivelling in her own body, already. Everybody, everybody, every body dies.

  So it’s not so bad, it’s not unfair. She left him and went away down the hall to see if she could find Darwin’s room before she’d have to go back and wash up for her mom.

  Trevor saw that Paul was in their mom’s room—sound asleep in the blue leaner chair. Their mom was asleep too, it was quiet and shadowy in there. Clary went and put her hand on Paul’s cheek to wake him up, the way she woke Trevor in the mornings. Paul opened his eyes and saw where he was, and looked up at Clary and smiled, his stiff face creasing. He was okay. Trevor had thought maybe Paul was sick too. Paul put his hand up and touched Clary’s cheek that same way, and then he looked across and waved at Trevor and Fern. The pink nurse grumbled and swished her tight pants right by Trevor’s nose, going to check the bag on the big pole. Flick, flick, her finger jigged the lines, and then she leaned over and said, “Lorraine! Lorraine! You’ve got some visitors here.” Her voice sounded crisp and slightly mean, but she was busy. Trevor didn’t hate her, the way he did the short-haired one.

  His mother dragged her eyes open and saw him, before anybody else. She held out her arms and he went in close, squeezed between the i.v. pole and the bed. It hurt a bit but not too much, and his mother’s soft thin face was close. He could not remember the last time he’d been able to talk to her all by herself. He could not think of anything to say.

  “Hey, Trevor,” she said, taking the worry away from him. “I’m so happy it’s you. I miss you so much! Is Clary taking good care of you?” He nodded. “Are you okay?”

  The others were outside the door, they couldn’t hear.

  “I’m just tired,” she said. “I love you, baby.”

  He stared at her face.

  “After you’re gone from sight, and can’t be seen, or be with us, will you still love me?” Trying to get at the idea of dead without saying the word of dead.

  “Oh yes,” Lorraine said. “I’ll love you forever.”

  “So will I,” Trevor said.

  Paul came in and leaned down over the bed, saying quietly, “I’m going to see Darwin, but I’ll be back to keep you company. May I say a prayer with you?”

  Lorraine looked up, surprised into a laugh. “Sure,” she said. “Fill your boots.”

  Everybody stood still. Paul said, “Dear God, comforter and healer of the sick, we commend Lorraine to your care through this long—”

  He stopped, because Lorraine was suddenly gagging. Paul grabbed the kidney basin from the rolling table and handed it to her, and she filled it, all in one expelling, with watery, bile-coloured vomit. Clary traded him a towel for the basin, and emptied it in the sink. It was all smoothly done, and when Lorraine looked up and grinned at him, Paul went on.

  “Speed her recovery, and Darwin’s, and give her, and all of us, courage. Dear Lord, give them your peace, tonight and always. Amen.”

  Everyone said Amen.

  “Well, that was nice,” Lorraine said. “I never know what a prayer is going to be like, but that was good. Thank you.”

&
nbsp; Paul considered himself dismissed.

  He went out past the ante-room into the darkened evening hall, lingering a moment to see if Clary would follow him. She did.

  She held the room door almost shut, and leaned against the outer wall, and Paul pulled away his mask.

  “Do you love me?” he asked her.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “And I you,” he said.

  Everything else aside—everything included—that was true.

  35. Swingline

  Lorraine had passed the point of bravery and acceptance of whatever they did to her; she was truly afraid now. They had explained the kind of death rejection would mean, if her counts did not improve. Quick, she told herself, meaning to console, but it set her heart racing, pounding, painfully staggering after an unreachable goal: the old life.

  Dr. Lester had talked about the possibilities of graft-versus-host disease, like for example that it sometimes made people shed their skins. Lorraine had a strong mental picture of that, but she shut the eyes of her mind, the lids behind her lids. She shut her brain from accepting that as a possibility. She lay there thinking, I have children, I have children, I have children. Wrong thing to think—she was wracked with loud weeping. It was night, but Darwin was not there, and crying hurt but she could not stop for a long time.

  When Clary arrived in the morning Lorraine begged her straight off.

  “I need to see Clayton,” Lorraine said. She could feel belligerent weight behind her words and tried to tone it back, but her sense of time passing was too painful.

  Clary stopped taking off her gloves.

  “I need to talk to him, I’m too scared now. Darwin heard he’s in the city somewhere, but he can’t find him while he’s stuck in here, so I have to ask you.”

  Clary nodded.

  “You go find him, okay? Bring him as soon as you can. Will you?”

  To Clary’s eyes, Lorraine seemed to be slightly on fire. The fever breaking out in actual licks of flame. “No?” Lorraine demanded, her voice crackling.

  “Oh! Yes—of course I will. I was trying to think where to look for him.”

  “Darwin heard he’s got a job upholstering, look there.”

  In Darwin’s room Clary sat on his bed, since all the chairs had been dragged over to the other half by family members of the bedraggled old man in the next bed. Down-at-heel, up-at-heart, lots of laughing, the old guy snuffling and wheezing happily while they told each other one story after another. Some of them were the fattest people Clary had ever seen, some were tenderly skinny, with flake-white skin, and they were all semi-drunk, even on Saturday morning. Darwin was leaning back against his headboard, himself again, but with a taped and swollen nose.

  “Swingline Upholstery, Avenue D south, little grey building. He calls in the morning and if they need him he comes in. A pipe burst or something at the last place he was staying, he had to leave. You’re going to have to ask around. Try the Silver Tap, or this morning maybe ask at Chevy’s Café, if you ask one of the girls.”

  Clary had her notebook out and was writing, Swingline, Ave D, Silver Tap, Chevy.

  “It might take a while. Remember what he looks like?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. His face thrust forward, eyes bulging at her, shouting My kids! You could have killed us! “I know him. He knows me, too.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t think he’ll avoid you. He knows you’re doing good for the kids, better than he could do now.” The reassurance was unreassuring.

  A big burst of laughter from the window side of the room, the older woman rocking back and forth in her chair wiping tears from her eyes, hooing and hawing. Darwin laughed too, and Clary, too—she couldn’t help it. They were having such a riot.

  “When are you—” Clary asked Darwin, not even knowing how to finish the question.

  “They’ll let me out soon. It’s not like I feel bad.”

  Clary nodded. They all made a fiction of everything, it seemed to her. There was the story of what was happening to Lorraine, to Darwin, to the children, and then there was the happier story they told each other, pointing out the funny parts, riding the surface over the bad. She was the worst, letting the children believe this was just ordinary treatment. When the fire was bright around Lorraine’s bed, and Darwin was kindling.

  Avenue D South: Swingline Upholstery in flowing 50s writing. Modern, from the time when everything was getting better and better in the space age, illness and death being beaten back. The storefront was baked white by the sun, dazzling on this cold bright day. Inside the small front office, Clary touched the bell on the deserted counter. It made no noise. She knocked on the door to the workshop, then pushed it open. Brighter back there, a big open space crammed full of couches and chairs in various stages of recovery. Some were peeled down to bare wood and canvas straps, others were being pulled together, their backs buttoned snug. A middle-aged man was leaning into a spring, forcing down to fasten it with wire pliers.

  “Excuse me,” Clary said. “I’m looking for Clayton Gage.”

  The man turned his head, but left his shoulders and arms to control the spring.

  “Well, if you find him, tell him to come pick up his cheque,” the man said.

  Clary’s heart sank.

  The pliers twisted twice, three times; the man straightened up. “Hasn’t been in for a week, or called. The deal was, he would call every morning. Six rush orders. If I can’t deliver I’m out big-time.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “His wife is in hospital. She needs to see him.”

  “Guess he doesn’t want to see her.”

  “She’s undergoing—difficult treatment. She needs him.”

  The man came around the low platform he’d been working on, and steered her back out to the front room. “We’ll look on my phone,” he said.

  He hauled the phone up from under the counter, and hit the buttons, peering at the little screen. “Best invention in the last fifty years. You can see who’s calling you, but you pay for it.” Tap, tap, tap, tap—he worked his way back through the phone’s memory.

  “Here,” he said, pointing at the numbers. “That’s where he called from, that’s last Friday week, you could start from there.”

  10:30 a.m., Friday, the number and a name: Perry Paddock. He shoved the phone towards her, and she dialed, and waited. No answer. Too much to hope. Clary wrote the number down and thanked the upholsterer.

  “Davis,” he said, sticking his hand out for her to shake. “You tell Clayton to get back here when he can. I got lots of work for him, I just need steady. My wife thinks he’s a good bet.”

  She found a phone booth with the book torn out, so she called Fern, told her what was happening, and asked her to look up Perry Paddock—it was an address on Avenue R.

  “Any emergencies?”

  “Not yet,” Fern said, in her gentle, half-breath voice. “But three big diapers so far.”

  “Oh my God. He had broccoli yesterday, it may not be agreeing with him.”

  “I’d say not. Dolly helped me with the last one, didn’t you, Doll?”

  Clary could hear Dolly laughing in the kitchen, making retching noises.

  “Can you give them lunch?”

  “As long as it’s not broccoli. My mom and dad called and said they were coming in to shop and they’d bring burgers, and I’ll give Pearce some banana.”

  Clary wanted to race home and have a hamburger with Grace and Moreland. Instead, she drove farther down into the alphabet streets, to R, a warren of shoddy brick apartments built in the 60s. Moving up through the decades, she told herself. Half the windows in the front were covered with tinfoil, many broken. One or two were boarded up entirely with plywood. Mail boxes and buzzers inside the foyer were labeled haphazardly, but there was Paddock. Clary pushed the button, still pearly white in all the grime. Nothing. She buzzed again. Coming in the front door, an old woman with frizzled hair said, “That’s the one that burned out. They’re gone.”

  “Pa
ddock?”

  “Gone.” She went up the stairs, not pausing or giving Clary another glance.

  The Chevy Café, car parts incorporated into the sign, was a dingy little dive with an interior reek of old grease and sour milk. Clary waited while the skinny waitress took a pan of plates and cutlery out through the swinging door and then came back.

  “I’m looking for—” She had a moment of hopelessness, but went on, anyway. “For Clayton Gage, who comes in here sometimes, or maybe a Perry Paddock? Clayton Gage was staying at his place. His wife is sick, and she wants to talk to him.”

  The waitress looked at Clary as if she couldn’t connect her with Perry Paddock. It was her fault, her too-fancy clothes. She looked like she could only be chasing Clayton for a bad reason.

  “Darwin told me to ask here,” she said. “Darwin Hand, do you know him?”

  The waitress smiled then, gums showing wetly pink. “Oh, yeah, I know Darwin all right. Perry went back to La Ronge, but Clayton couldn’t leave, so he’s gone to Portia House on 26th. Not much of a place, but I guess he was desperate. Always room there.”

  “Thanks,” Clary said. She wished she could tip her.

  Portia House was a beige clapboard building, an ugly rectangle with tiny windows. It might have been a hotel in the 30s, or earlier. Rooms, it said above the door. The front door was propped open with an old running shoe, even in this cold weather. The air inside was dank, and either the bulb was out or the electricity had been cut off. Buzzers in three lines to the left of the door, fifteen of them, but under the buzzers the name tags were mostly unreadable. No Gages. But there was nowhere else to look.

  On the first floor, she got no answer at the first door, marked H. K. in black marker on the wall. She knocked on the second door, then the others. Nothing. She climbed the creaking stairs to the second floor, trying not to look at the grey splattered carpet while she avoided the torn patches. It was very cold. She pulled her gloves up, to give herself some comfort.

  The hall was even narrower up there, and there were more doors, closer together. One was wide open. Inside, a grizzle-whiskered old man lay on a single bed under a small window. The room was all white, a messy white-washy job, plenty of paint splashed on the window panes. An opened can sat on a sheet of newspaper on the table, and a burnt mess in a saucepan. The floor was littered with dark junk, an undifferentiated mass of rags and paper. The man wore a torn undershirt and a pair of filthy trousers. He was lying on his side, staring at the door, and transferred his stare to Clary’s face when he saw her.