by Ann Birch
“Sorry to hear that. It must have been a shock for Mrs. Tindall. But he was an old man, wasn’t he? With serious heart problems?”
“Yes, yes, but one thing upsets her more than the way he died.”
Roberta turns the page she’s reading from Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years. “Get on with it, Mother.”
“She can’t forget her last words to Bill as he went out to the car. ‘Don’t slam the door’ was what she said. And now she keeps asking me, ‘Why didn’t I tell him I loved him? That I couldn’t get on without him?’ I don’t know what to say to her.”
“Tell her it’s only in literature that people get the send-offs right. As in ‘Goodnight, sweet prince: / And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.’ Or sometimes, if we know a person’s going to die, we have space to get our lips around the right phrases. Otherwise, it’s bound to be something along the lines of poor Mrs. Tindall’s last words.”
“Perhaps we were lucky to have a day to say goodbye to your father. His heart attack was sudden, but he was able to understand us right to the end, though he couldn’t speak. But even so, I think I passed up an opportunity to say a few things.” There’s a puzzling note of what — anger? — in this last comment.
Roberta finds her own voice getting tight. “I remember holding his hand and telling him he couldn’t just die and leave me.” She had been only eighteen. “I didn’t think I could face life without him. And then I met James.”
“And it’s happily ever after, dear?”
Well not exactly, Roberta says to herself as she mutters an affirmative and they hang up. But James has seemed happier lately, though he hasn’t talked much in the last day or two. He’s in his study now with his CD turned up loud. It’s Stravinsky’s The Nightingale. The music stops suddenly, and in a few minutes he knocks on the door.
“Off to Trin now. I’m hoping to beat the rush-hour traffic and have an hour or two in the library before my lecture.” He’s wearing his bike helmet and his backpack is over one shoulder. “Catch,” he says, throwing the CD at her. “You like The Nightingale. I do, too, but I’m always a bit skeptical about the power of beauty to vanquish death. Nice idea, though. I wanted to hear it one more time.”
“Thanks.” She puts the CD into her computer. “I’ll play it while I’m typing up these notes. You’d better get moving. It’s four o’clock.”
But he hovers, moving over to her desk and touching her shoulder. “How about a hug?”
“Happy to oblige.” She stands up and puts her arms around him. The backpack gets in the way, and he throws it to the floor. She puts her face against his soft cashmere sweater, feels his lean body against her breasts. “Are you okay now, James? Happy?”
“Not exactly happy, but better than I was.” He picks up the backpack, hoists it onto his shoulder. “Goodbye, love.” He pauses at the door, looks back and says, “Bye, love,” again.
She hears him go slowly, step by step, down the stairs. At the foot of the stairs, he calls again, “Bye.”
“See you later,” she answers. “Best get moving. Time marches.”
As the front door bangs shut, she thinks about the hug and the repeated goodbyes. Not his usual exit mode, but nice.
She works away for the next two hours. Charlie comes back from his chef-training course, yells, “Hi,” and then Ed is next, home earlier from his law office than usual. “We’re making grilled cheese sandwiches for supper, Mom,” Charlie calls from the bottom of the stairs. “And we’ll let you know when they’re ready.”
So at six o’clock, they are seated at the breakfast-room table enjoying sandwiches and Caesars when the doorbell rings. Ed answers. He comes back in a minute, his face pale. “There’s a cop on the porch asking for you.”
Roberta goes to the door. She sees a tall young man in uniform. Even in the dimness of early evening, she can see sweat gleaming on his face. He takes off his cap and runs his fingers around its brim.
“You’re Mrs. Greaves?”
“Yes. What’s wrong?”
“There’s been an accident. Involving your husband. I’m sorry to say it’s serious.”
“A serious accident? Involving James?” She is totally at a loss. “What has happened?”
“Your husband has passed. I’m sorry.”
“Passed? Passed what? What do you mean?” As Roberta says this, she realizes that her sons are standing close behind her. Charlie takes her hand.
“Passed away. Your husband is deceased. I’m sorry.”
“Dead? No. No. He’s at Trinity College giving a lecture. What are you talking about?”
Ed speaks. “I think we need to sit down, Ma. Let’s all go into the living room.”
Roberta sits on the sofa wedged between her sons. The policeman perches on the edge of the chair opposite. He runs a crumpled handkerchief over his cheeks. “According to witness reports, your husband was riding his bicycle along Bloor Street, keeping to his lane––”
“Stop, stop, please,” she says. “Skip all that. Just tell me what happened.” She can feel her heart banging against her chest.
“Like I say, he was in his lane, heading east, obeying the rules of the road apparently, and then he turned his bike right into the path of a van. The driver had no chance to stop. We’ll have to investigate, but at the moment, it seems like an unfortunate error in judgment. No alcohol or drugs involved, as far as we know.”
“So … he’s … dead.” She slumps forward and Ed steadies her.
“Yes, I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Greaves. We’ve taken him to the morgue. He had paper ID with next of kin listed, but we need someone––preferably a close relative––to come with me and my partner and make a definite identification of the––”
“Charlie and I’ll go, Ma,” Ed says. “You stay here.”
An image of Edvard Munch’s The Scream fills her brain, but her sons are there –– and the cop –– and she tries to hold herself together. “I’ve got to go, too. Whatever has happened and whatever I’m forced to see, I’ve got to be there and deal with it.”
The policeman who delivered the news and his partner sit in the front of the cruiser, Roberta and her sons squeeze into the back, and they’re off, the siren clearing the road ahead of them. Her neighbourhood has grown dark; the shadows of the big trees cast a pall over the street lights. It seems like midnight, though it’s only seven o’clock. Roberta takes deep breaths, tries to prepare herself. She can’t make head or tail out of what the policemen are saying to her. But Ed is scribbling notes, recording it all. Charlie has draped his long wool scarf around her shoulders. There is comfort from their warm bodies, their breath. May the trip never end.
But far too soon they are at the morgue on Grenville Street, a place Roberta has only read about in the papers –– when there is some grisly death or unidentified corpse. It is an ugly two-storey concrete building, dimly lit. What a place for James to come to. She remembers his words in her study, something about wanting to believe that beauty can vanquish death. Not a chance in this place.
They follow the policemen through the smudged glass doors into a murky corridor and down black-tiled steps to a basement room where they are met by a sober-faced man in a white coat. There is a stainless steel table on which Roberta sees the outline of a body covered by a green cloth. Suddenly, she knows that her sons must not see whatever is under that sheet.
She looks up at their faces. Ed’s is pale grey, and Charlie’s, bright red. “Wait outside, boys. I have to do this on my own. I’ll be with you in a few minutes, and that’s when I’ll really need your help.”
“Let me know when you’re ready to view the deceased,” the morgue attendant says in a low voice as Charlie and Ed move toward the door. “We’ve cleaned him as good as we could, but it’ll be bad. Take your time.”
Roberta waits until the boys have closed the door behind them.
The room is as cold as the pit of Dante’s Hell. And the stink. A sick mix of blood, feces, and … mouthwash? She steadies herself against the edge of the gurney. “Now,” she says.
The officers move a few feet away, and the man pulls back the sheet. Over the banging in her head, she hears him mumble again about “cleaning him up” as best they could. She takes a deep breath and forces herself to look down. It’s not James in front of her. It’s a head, yes, but an unrecognizable head beneath its disgorged eyes and the pit where a nose once was. Holding her hand over her mouth, she tries to swallow the bile that rises from her throat. She looks at the bits of plastic helmet smashed into the face. Nothing there that she recognizes. Hard even to tell what colour the hair is beneath the gouts of blood.
“Any distinguishing features you might remember?” the attendant asks.
Nothing. She can remember nothing. Except. Except. “Was there a backpack?”
He goes into a tiny room nearby and returns with a plastic bag, pulls a backpack from it, and passes it to her. It’s sodden with blood, but she steels herself to draw back its flap and extricate the papers within. There, wet and sticky, are the lecture notes. The naked light bulb over the gurney shines on the title, still legible: “Lists in Dickens’s Novels.”
“Yes,” she says. “It’s James.”
6.
THE FOLLOWING DAY, THE POLICE decide to call James’s death “an unfortunate accident,” and Roberta goes ahead with the funeral arrangements. Charlie and Ed ask, like a Greek chorus, “Was it suicide?” Or alternately, “It was suicide, wasn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” she says. But she does know. She goes over and over in her mind the way James lingered in her study on that last afternoon, how he hugged her and mentioned he’d wanted to play the Stravinksy “one more time.” She had enjoyed that hug, thinking he was getting over his depression at last. Other days, he would just slam down the stairs and yell goodbye as he went out the front door. “Turned his bike into the path of a van,” had he? Well, that being a fact, it was no “unfortunate error of judgment,” as the officer at the front door had stated.
There has got to be a note somewhere, she says to herself. And she must now force herself to look for it. From the back of the kitchen counter, she takes a half-empty bottle of limoncello, pours herself a small glassful, and feels its oily-sweet sharpness slip down her throat. Then she moves up the stairs to look in James’s study. She hasn’t been in his room since his death, and as she pushes the door wide open, she sidesteps the familiar piles of old journals on the floor, sees the books piled, as always, helter-skelter on chairs, and breathes in the musty disarray she was always asking him to tidy up. What did the mess matter, anyway? It was his affair. She should have kept her mouth shut.
On his printer is his favourite deodorant stick, its top uncapped, exposing the smooth green head. She picks it up and inhales its sharp mint fragrance. Suddenly, she is weeping, the tears spilling down her face, her throat raw.
As she reaches for the box of Kleenex beside the computer, she notices a letter on top of the stack of Dickens’s novels he always kept to the left of his printer. Her name is handwritten on the envelope and inside is a card that a photographer friend gave him.
Afraid to open the card for a moment, she looks at the photo on the front: A sunset view of a placid lake with a canoe beached beside a dock. For a few seconds, she can’t bring herself to look inside. She knows that the message will not match the tranquility of the picture. She takes several deep breaths, then flips to the note, penned in James’s large, flamboyant script.
Dear Roberta:
I’ve got myself into a mess. You’ll find out about it soon enough. I don’t feel up to staying around to sort it out. You’ll deal with it. You’ve always been able to cope.
I tried to be someone else all the years of my adult life. I tried to be like that perfect father you were always talking about. I tried to be like those noble, upright, solid heroes in my favourite Victorian novels. But I’m no Sydney Carton.
Remember Yeats’s line, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”? My centre is broken. I want to die. I don’t know when the moment will come, but I imagine it will be just like heading into a jump on a fine October morning.
Whatever you and Charlie and Ed think of me, and I know you may hate me with good reason for what I’ve done and for what I’m going to do, remember I loved you all.
James
She puts the letter away in her purse in their bedroom. Now her teeth are chattering, and her whole body feels damp and cold. Stumbling into the bathroom, she tears off her clothes, turns the tap to hot, crawls into the tub, and lies on her back in the stifling warmth. She pumps up the volume on the radio she keeps on the shelf over the tub. Some erudite discussion on the CBC about Heidegger: She cannot wrap her mind around it. But if the boys are listening, they will not be able to hear her sobs.
Over the next few hours, she cannot stop rereading the letter. The fourth or fifth time, through, she notes its careful spelling and punctuation: the possessive form of “Yeats” done correctly, the double quotation marks around the line of verse. That may be just the norm for an English professor. Or, looking at it another way, it may not be the letter of a moment’s creation. He may have thought about it, kept it all inside his head through several revisions, and then sat down and put it on paper. She finds herself wavering between sorrow and indignation. Desperation she can understand. Deliberation is something else.
It’s way past midnight, and she cannot sleep. She gets out of bed, turns on the light, takes the letter from her purse, and reads it again. The door is open, and she’s got the thing in her hand when Ed appears in pyjamas and bare feet.
“What are you doing, Ma? What are you reading?” He moves closer. “You’ve been crying. And that’s Dad’s handwriting, isn’t it?”
“I thought you were asleep––”
“Asleep? I can’t sleep. What’s going on? We’ve got a right to know.”
Silently, she passes the letter to him. He reads it, his left hand clawing at his hair. He emits a moan, more like a howl, that brings Charlie running. It is his turn now to read. He breaks into sobs, and she puts her arms around him. For a moment, he leans against her. Then he backs away, wrapped in his own sorrow or anger, she cannot tell which. “I knew it,” he says. “And you knew it, too, Mom. Why didn’t you call us as soon as you found the letter? Do you think we’re kids or something?”
“How could I tell you that your father was a coward? Because that’s what people who commit suicide are. They’re cowards.” Her voice grows louder. She can’t hold back now. “He’s left us to bear the guilt of his death, to think about what we should have done, how we should have helped him. I wanted to protect you from that for a few hours at least.”
“Okay,” Ed says. “But I’m with Charlie. We’re not babies. So you could’ve let us in on it sooner.” He takes the letter back from his brother, and looks through it again. “‘I’ve got myself into a mess.’ I think that’s the important line. We had our suspicions, didn’t we?”
“Suspicions?” she asks. “What do you mean?”
“It didn’t occur to you that Dad might have been up to something?”
“I thought he was getting over his depression. He seemed happier lately. He was always at his computer working away on––”
“Come on, Ma,” Ed says. “You had to know he wasn’t working on his Victorian stuff. Remember when we picked him up after the launch, and he was staring at a screen filled with bar graphs? Did you seriously think that had anything to do with Dickens or Trollope?”
“So? Lots of times when I’m working on a project, I take a break from the document and Google something completely inane. I did it all the time when I was writing my book. What are you getting at?”
“Leave it, Ed,” Charlie says. “We’ve got to get through the funeral. Then we’l
l sort it out. One goddamn day at a time.” He puts the letter on the dresser.
“Sorry, Ma. Let’s all get to bed and try to sleep.” Ed touches her shoulder. Charlie wraps his hand around hers. Then, they go back to their rooms, and Roberta gets into bed. She sleeps on the right-hand side, the habit of twenty-six years of marriage. She turns on the radio, hoping the Australian news on Radio International, always on CBC at this hour, will put her under. But after an hour, she is still awake.
There is a chemical solution to this, she thinks, getting up and going into the bathroom to retrieve the lorazepam tablets James took in the early days after Bucephalus’s death. Where are the damn things? She spies them on the top shelf of the bathroom cabinet. She moves the stool close to the cabinet and climbs up. The little bottle is jammed to one side of the shelf, almost invisible for the wall of soap that surrounds it: Ivory, James’s favourite. Where on earth did it all come from?
James must have bought all this soap in the last few weeks of his life. She remembers the night when he kissed her toes here in this intimate space, and she’d noticed his dry, rough, and scaly hands. Now that she sees the soap, she realizes that he’d been washing his hands, probably over and over and over, and she had never followed up on the reason why.
What did Ed mean when he said that his father might have been “up to something?” Was this handwashing some kind of symbolic cleansing? Or is she just being crazy? She stands by the sink, head and heart pounding. She swallows a lorazepam pill, not bothering to put it under her tongue as the instructions state. She dumps the rest of the contents of the bottle into the toilet.
Then, she takes the large bag she puts aside for charity collections, climbs up on the stool again, and sweeps the bars of soap –– there must be forty or more –– into it.
