A Good Death

by Gil Courtemanche

  “Sam, would you like me to beat you at ping-pong?”

  “All right, but after that I’ll demolish you at chess.”

  DESPITE THE WINDING DOWN OF THE YEARS I CAN STILL BEAT WILLIAM AT PING-PONG, AND DESPITE THE YEARS HE STILL HAS ahead of him, he always humiliates me at chess.

  But this time the ping-pong game doesn’t fit the pattern. I’m more interested in enjoying myself than in defeating my opponent. This is partly because I know I’m a better player than he is. In other circumstances it would be called having a superiority complex. I miss all my slams, which normally are my specialty. Sam laughs mockingly and tempts me with high lobs that look easy, and which I smash one by one into the net. He plays methodically and defensively, the way I play chess. I continue playing an attacking game, slicing the ball or putting backspin on it or hitting it as hard and, I hope, as decisively as possible. I put my faith in aggressiveness and instinct, on my reflexes, as William does when he plays chess. The chess master who is giving him lessons says that when logic settles into his imagination he’ll be a genius. I fall behind, Sam laughs more and more. I miss another slam, an easy one. Sam stops laughing even though he’s never been a humble winner. He needs one more point to beat me once and for all. Ever since we began pummelling each other every Christmas over this wobbly table in this narrow basement, banging our heads on the water pipes that thread through the rafters, ever since Christmas has existed and Sam has been old enough to hold a racquet, he has been waiting for this moment. His first victory. He sets his racquet on the table.

  “I don’t want to play anymore,” he says.

  “You only need one more point to beat me.”

  “You’re not playing seriously. It doesn’t count. It’s like you’re letting me win.”

  “Come on, finish the game!”

  I want him to have this first win. A Christmas present he’ll always remember.

  “Do you love Grandpa?”

  Most of all I don’t want to answer that question. “Come on, it’s your serve.”

  “Tell me. Do you love Grandpa?”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  He says it without hesitation. His answer thunders across the table at me like an unreturnable slam. He’s defying me now.

  “Serve the ball!”

  He serves me a soft, easy one, and I flick it back to his corner. Twenty-twenty. I win a point on my spinning serve. He misses his own. I’ve won.

  “Okay, you win, but you haven’t answered my question.”

  No, my boy, I haven’t answered the question, because… I offer him another chance to beat me. He declines. He has chosen his field, his sport: truth, a curious game that rarely produces winners. Still, I try to beat him at it.

  “So, why do you love him?”

  I’m hoping for a surprise attack. My opponent was waiting for a backspin, but what I’ve sent is an overhand topspin that hits the table and takes off like a rocket on a downward curve. He returns with a strong, hard backhand that catches me off balance.

  “Because he listens to me and doesn’t judge me.”

  Okay, his point. But now it’s my turn. I’m not about to let myself be beaten when the subject is my own father.

  “Well, Sam, it’s easy to listen when you can’t talk.”

  “He can talk, you just don’t understand him. And you still haven’t answered my question.”

  Two-love for him. An upset in the making. In any match there’s a point at which you can recover from a strategic error by stepping back and allowing yourself to lose another point in order to improve your position on the field, or you can stay on the attack, throwing caution and restraint to the wind.

  “No, I don’t love him.”

  “I understand what you mean.”

  Now it’s three-love Sam. Choosing his words carefully, he explains to me that he doesn’t love his mother, either. He likes her well enough, but more as you would like someone you knew well, someone with whom you had something in common, to whom you owed something or someone you could count on. He doesn’t for a moment want me to think he’s passing judgement on his mother, on her quality as a mother.

  “I’d rather have parents who were older, who had no other life left than that of their children.”

  “Why, so you can be free to do whatever idiotic thing comes into your head?”

  “No. Christ, you can be a jerk sometimes. How can I explain it? So that I don’t have to be told that you can’t make a living playing chess because chess players don’t have time to learn things like grammar and trigonometry. Do you know who Bobby Fischer is? Well, do you think Bobby Fischer did his homework? No, he worked on his openings.”

  And I learn that my father knows how to play chess quite well. No, I’m not learning that, I am remembering how, when I was four or five years old, he plunked me down in front of a piece of wood with little tin soldiers on it and tried, without the slightest success, to teach me the patient yet cunning advance of the pawns, the sneaky strategy of the knights, and the overwhelming power of the queen. I didn’t understand a thing, and he mated me in two moves, the classic trick of fathers who want to impress their children even as they’re humiliating them. Since I’d already been humiliated a hundred times, I decided to loathe the game and take pleasure in disguise and imagination. By which I mean the puppet plays I put on for my brothers and sisters, and declaiming the poems of Rimbaud at school concerts to parents who were shocked to discover that their children were learning things as ridiculous as “A red, U black…” and what’s this about a boat that has had too much to drink, and Ionesco, whom I understood not at all except that the dialogue in The Bald Soprano resembled the rare conversations I’d had with my father.

  “Anyway, that’s what I mean. When Grandpa was still talking, he asked me what I wanted to do with my life. I said, Bobby Fischer, and the next minute we were playing chess. I beat him easily, but he was happy that he’d at least put up a good fight. Can you imagine it? Your father, who has even more pride than I do, smiling after losing a game of chess? Since then we’ve become friends. With my mother it was hopeless. She sort of understood the pawns, but after that, nothing. I beat her in five moves, and you can take it from me, she wasn’t happy about it. Grandma doesn’t know the first thing about chess, not even who Bobby Fischer is. But she cuts out all the accounts of chess matches in the newspapers. I offered to teach her the basic rules, and Grandpa burst out laughing. He looked at me like I was one of his buddies and I would understand why he laughed. Before a tournament, I come here and explain my tactics and strategies to them. They drink tea and listen without understanding a word I say, but they never interrupt and then they ask me to phone them after each match to tell them how I did. Okay, maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me that only old people know how to listen. Maybe it’s because they don’t have much of a life of their own that other people’s lives interest them so much. All parents do, though, is talk.”

  “And that’s all they do to make you love them, is listen?”

  “No, they talk, too, but only to answer questions. And they don’t answer them the same way. It’s like they take more time than parents do, or teachers. They think about things. Maybe they have to go back over their whole lives before they reply, or like they have so many memories and experiences that they know it’s not easy to give answers. I don’t know where all these words are coming from, because I don’t usually talk like this, but believe me, their answers give us our freedom.”

  Answers that don’t say no, that invite reflection. I’m discovering parents, especially a father, I’ve never known.

  It’s time we went back upstairs and rejoined the tribe, at least for me. I’ve learned a bit about my nephew, which is enough for me. And Isabelle will be looking for me. My father is probably asleep, and that thought I find comforting.

  “William, do you really not love your mother?”

  “Yes. No. I love her the way anyone loves their mother. But at my age it’s hard to
love. No, I love her, but not like I love my grandparents. When I see them, I always feel like it’s for the last time. Don’t you think that makes it easier to love them? And Grandpa seems so happy when I’m around. That makes it easier to love him, for sure. Mom doesn’t make it easy. And neither do I. I don’t give her a lot of chances. Maybe if I thought Mom was going to die, I’d love her more.”

  “Or maybe you’d run.”

  “No, I wouldn’t do that. I may not be a good son, but I don’t hide from her.”

  FROM UPSTAIRS COMES A SOUND LIKE ALL THE FURIES OF HELL HAVE BEEN LET LOOSE. OOHS AND AAHS, BABBLED SHOUTS IN which words are lost in intense discussion that dissolves into bouts of nervous laughter from several other adolescents. I hear Penelope, Sam’s sister, with her piercing voice:

  “Grandpa!”

  “Couldn’t… sleep… uhh!… too… noisy…”

  He’s back.

  He’s standing in the kitchen doorway, looking dazed, naked from the waist up, the skin on his breasts and stomach sagging in pools of flab. He weaves a bit on his feet and smiles beatifically. The adults have gone quiet. Silence reigns, mixed with terror. It’s the first time we’ve seen our father as he really is. We only know his face and his symptoms, the diagnoses, the signs, we’ve never seen him looking so diminished, so naked, so ugly. We knew about his wobbling, the slurred speech, the fact that he falls regularly, belches, sleeps in his chair and drools in his soup. We’ve seen all that. We are familiar with his illness, but not with his ugliness, or his exposed feebleness. “You should get dressed,” my mother says. She isn’t worried about how he looks or what we are thinking. She knows all about how he smells, his folds and wrinkles, his flaking skin, the liver spots that make him look like a pale leopard, and the idiotic smile he makes when he’s not quite sure what he’s doing. She has borne ten children and sees him now as nothing more than the eleventh, who has to be told to put something on so he won’t catch cold. That’s all she’s worried about at the moment, a draft of cold air, a sudden chill. But she’s no longer of child-bearing age, an age of worrying about a draft that could get into a child’s lungs, or even an age of having a husband who nibbles away at the last few happinesses of her life and who, like a baby, shrieks when the bottle isn’t warm enough. It’s his health she worries about. While we worry about our own terror. When I see him, I’m afraid of my own old age.

  Sam is the only one who doesn’t share our thinly veiled disgust. I see the Commander, who comes on stage at the end of Don Juan. Is he going to take me by the hand and lead me into the flames of hell? No, my father is not Death as he appears on stage, or on the screen—he is ridiculous death, a statue lacking lustre, ordinary death showing itself unselfconsciously on Christmas Eve. Sam and my mother move towards him at the same time, drawn by the same compassion, the thoughtless generosity of those who are never held back by pity or commiseration. Sam has taken off his pullover. My mother takes my father’s hand and leads him away. Someone tries to say something funny: “Are you trying to frighten us, like you did when we were little?” Yes, he says. Sam puts his sweater over my father’s shoulders and my mother ties the sleeves around his neck to make a cape. On the television, which has been turned down, a priest is lifting the sacrament above his head. The camera pans across the crèche and slowly zooms in on the Baby Jesus. Cut to the priest lifting the chalice to his lips and drinking the blood of the child he has just displayed to us.

  My mother and Sam help him sit in his chair at the head of the table, facing the TV, and he asks for the sound and more bread. The Agnus Dei fills the room and stops both adults and children in their tracks. My father taps his fingers on the table while waiting for his bread. For years before we moved into this house, he sold bread for a living. He’s not proud of that time, especially since he was working for Weston Bakeries, but bread is the security of the poor, the staff of life. It fills the stomach cheaply. He was poor and so he became hooked on bread. At least that’s what I think when I see him grab a crust that has fallen onto the tablecloth as though he has dug up a black tru±e. He’ll eat any kind of bread, no discriminating. The crustiest baguette, American white bread, the olive-and-sun-dried-tomato bread served in all the trendy restaurants, hard-as-a-rock organic bread that the Homeopath brings over, cheese bread, round loaves that we used to call bum bread, rye bread, ten-grain bread. He eats it dry or soft, stale or fresh, buttered, smothered with jam or cheese or melted pork fat, margarine or pâté de campagne. But now that he’s sick, the chances are good that bread will kill him.

  Sam has come back from the kitchen looking serious and thoughtful. My father is smiling. My mother is looking sad or resigned or exhausted, it’s hard to tell at this stage. Santa has taken up his role as gift giver again, and my father gets a loaf of bread. Sam puts his hands on my father’s shoulders and whispers in his ear.

  “Eat, Grandpa,” I think I hear him say. “Eat your present.”

  “Good… pres… ent… thank… you…”

  And he stuffs bread into his mouth without looking up from his plate.

  “Sam, I don’t know why you want us to keep calling you Sam. You’ll be a man, my nephew.” He doesn’t know Kipling, but if he’d been my son…

  “William is too serious. Sam sounds more like me.”

  The diffuse family murmur resumes like a rumour passing through a village. My father eats, grunting with pleasure. Sam turns off the television.

  At the far end of the table the Homeopath stamps her foot. She’s not a bit happy. You’d think she was the one being pushed into an early grave by being force-fed bread and cheese. I watch her blanch when I pour some wine into my father’s pewter cup. In desperation, she tries catching my mother’s eye, but my mother has withdrawn into some secret place located somewhere on the tablecloth, at which she stares without looking up, gently nodding her head. She is out of service. She has too many children tonight. The queen of natural health stands up brusquely and wraps her seventies scarf around her shoulders. Eyes firm, back straight, step determined. I steel myself for intemperate declarations, moral lessons. I try closing my ears. Isabelle says this is going to go badly. How has she learned to read my own family so well? The Homeopath doesn’t waste time chewing out Sam, who is the object of all her resentment, nor does she rebuke my mother. She goes straight for my father and takes his plate.

  “That’s enough! This is unacceptable! It’s not good for you, you must understand that.”

  “No!” my father shouts as though someone were trying to hang him. With a hand that is suddenly strong and sure, he grabs the pewter cup. Both cup and wine sail out into the air.

  “Dad!”

  A spontaneous cry from the adults in the audience.

  “My beautiful shawl!”

  I’m not sorry to see it go; it was one of those old-fashioned shawls with bulging fringes, like sideburns. I almost laugh at her anger, at the way she spreads the shawl over the seat of her chair and starts shaking salt on it, impatiently, because the salt runs so slowly. “Christ!” she says, unscrewing the lid of the shaker and emptying it onto her precious accessory. And I learn a few more things. That the shawl came from Boston, where she bought it in a fit of amorous delirium when she and her American boyfriend were demonstrating against the draft, and that this seemingly reserved woman is capable of swearing and even of being carried away. I’ve always thought of her as an obligatory homeopath, incapable of anger and blushing and passion. Anyone can make a mistake. We make mistakes all the time.

  Who, then, is she? The sour-tempered woman who lectures my father about slices of bread, or the one who’s in tears over a souvenir of a vanished America, or maybe of smoking a joint in the nude on a beach in Cape Cod? The one who always says Excuse me before speaking, or the one who spits Christ! because her father stained her shawl with a glassful of forbidden wine?

  I know the answer now; she is all those women, and I apologize to her for having always seen her as a caricature. Flat, no depth to her at all, not stru
ctured like the earth that is built up in layers so as always to be evolving and hiding its secret origins, and into which you have to dig, penetrate, if you want to understand it. In despair now that her shawl is soaked with wine, like all the other old things that are brought back to life, she gets up, goes over to my father and accuses him of having destroyed one of her most precious memories. All because of a love that no one could have guessed existed. An absurd love for what once was but which surely can no longer be. A beach. A fire, a joint for him, a glass of wine for her. A night. A shawl. My father smiles. He always smiles when he can’t hear what’s being said but senses it’s about him. He who never smiled at anything we said now resorts to this dolphin’s rictus as his ultimate defence. She lowers her head, withdraws from the fray, having realized that despite the brouhaha no one is interested in her shawl. She retreats to the kitchen, where she tries to soak a stain out of a part of her life. This is how memories, which are layers, get installed and never leave us. I will always remember her Boston, she will always remember our indifference to it. Who is right? No one.

  The flying wine cup ended its trajectory in my mother’s face, and her eyebrow is bleeding profusely—a real boxer’s cut, not dangerous but a wound from which blood pours as from a faucet. While my sister dies a little over her ruined shawl, the rest of us bend over our mother. The Banker says we have to call 911, others respond that it’s not that serious. My mother takes her napkin from her lap, pushes off the apprentice doctors and presses the napkin to her cut. My father puts his hand over hers.

  “Press… press… hard…”

  He keeps his hand on hers and repeats: Press, press. He is not smiling. He is concentrating. I hear a voice almost telling him to leave her alone, and from its tone comes the sense that he is too old to help his wife, too impotent and infirm, and that in any case it’s his fault that she’s bleeding. But he no longer hears the nasty comments. He may hear the words, but he can’t possibly imagine that he is the object of some reproach. He never does anything wrong. He only tries to assume his responsibilities.