Mount Pleasant

by Don Gillmor

  “So what is it these days, nature or nurture?” Harry asked Sarah, a question that drew a sharp-eyed glance from Gladys.

  “What?”

  “I mean that whole debate.”

  Sarah reached for the wine and filled her glass almost to the top. “Is this a quiz?”

  “Just curious.”

  Sarah stopped just short of rolling her eyes. “It’s an unanswerable question.”

  “But a lot of energy goes into trying to answer it, doesn’t it? Like the shape of the universe for physicists.”

  Gladys glared subtly as Sarah stared at her wine for five seconds. Then she recited in a near monotone, “The relationship between lymphocyte precursors and other blood cell lineages is basically groundbreaking. The RAG1/GFP knock-in mice experiments are… I mean, you can chart the entire sequence of lymphocyte differentiation events in bone marrow. Bottom line: steady-state lymphocyte formation doesn’t recapitulate ontogeny.”

  Harry wondered how much of this was distorted and/or bullshit. “But in your own case, what would you say?”

  “Is this the lame hypothesis where people go into psychology to deal with their own problems?”

  “Do they?”

  “Everyone has problems, Dad,” Ben said, rallying to his girlfriend’s defense. “It’s a bit simplistic.”

  “Psychology is a perfect complement to law,” Gladys said.

  “Not everything is about getting a job, Mom,” Ben said, who’d always been adept at translating Gladys’s words into their actual meaning.

  Sarah was twisting her perilously full wineglass, rotating it on Gladys’s expensive Provençal tablecloth, a fact that Gladys registered with quiet alarm as she reached to take Sarah’s almost untouched plate. The tablecloth was bunching slightly in small swirls that would unbalance the glass. Gladys stared at the glass for a second, then went into the kitchen. The background music she had meticulously chosen filled the void.

  Harry stared at Ben, remembering the unconditional joy he’d felt when Ben was an infant. Those months when Harry took him for long walks in the stroller, talking to the sleeping lump curled under the fleecy with its cute, hopeful slogans. Back then, Harry had overflowed with love. He’d imagined Ben growing up and imagined new victories in his own life. Gladys had the difficult job—the nightly feedings, getting up when Ben was afflicted by some unfathomable fear, lulling him. Harry just had to push the stroller in the pleasant autumn light and change a few diapers. He occasionally imagined that he was raising Ben alone, like a valiant TV dad, just the two of them. Harry used to sit on the bench outside the organic grocery store and return the smiles of women who walked by, and then he’d stare at Ben’s sweet face and think, You are the love of my life.

  What was he now, Harry wondered. This young man, resentful and distant, holding his girlfriend’s hand as if in solidarity against Harry. His own father had been a miserable role model, and Harry realized he hadn’t done much better, despite the vows he’d made to himself as he pushed the stroller. What would he pass on to Ben? Debt, perhaps. Distrust of the world, certainly.

  Ben and Sarah were talking about something, but Harry couldn’t tune them in. The hum of his debt suddenly intruded, and it had taken on a new, musical quality. As Harry watched his son’s mouth move, he heard what sounded like the forceful strains of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony.

  Gladys finally came back carrying a fruit flan she had made. Dessert arrived as a mercy, and there was a lull as she cut and distributed it.

  “This looks wonderful, Gladys,” Harry said.

  TWO

  THE NEXT DAY, HARRY ARRIVED at his father’s private hospital room to find Dale in the small bathroom behind the partially closed accordion door.

  “Did you manage to unhook her brassiere?” his father said.

  “What?”

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

  “It’s me. Harry. Your son.”

  “Teachy preachy.”

  Harry could see his father’s thin, hairless calves, his lengthy white feet through the partly opened door. They were separated by six feet. “Dad, do you know where you are?”

  There was a flatulent blast, then a high, piercing sigh. After two minutes, his father said, “She moaned and she meant it.”

  Harry stared upward, looking for guidance. His father’s mind was increasingly erratic. Wild thoughts burst forth during these visits, followed by moments of cruel lucidity. Harry imagined a landed trout inside his father’s head, flipping stupidly on the dock. After another five minutes, Dale said, “I’m finished here.”

  The last month had been the most time Harry had ever spent with his father. His parents divorced when Harry was sixteen, but Dale had pulled away long before that. He worked in wealth management and disappeared into money, and then into another marriage (and another divorce). After the divorce from Harry’s mother, Dale was supposed to take Harry and his sister, Erin, for two weekends a month, but that arrangement petered out, and Harry rarely saw him for more than the odd afternoon.

  Harry accompanied his father on the early visits to doctors, had sat as a witness while a serious woman with the pinched face chronic pain sometimes produces (a professional tic perhaps, Harry thought, a pre-emptive solidarity) explained the specifics of his father’s brain cancer. Harry jotted notes as she veered into jargon (“anaplastic astrocytoma”), ascribing human qualities to the cancer (“tendency to infiltrate”). At first she lightly disguised its fatal nature (“excision may discourage but not eradicate”), then punctured any hope even for experimental treatments (“gene therapy converting adenoviruses in Russian subjects has not yielded …”). Dutifully searching the Internet, Harry discovered that five television series had used this cancer to kill off unwanted characters.

  The curious effect of the ensuing medical sessions was that his father’s cancer became more vivid to Harry than his father himself. Dale had never come into focus, a distant, silent, unsupervising figure. But his disease was visceral. Harry became acquainted with the expensive machines, the heavy artillery used in what was usually described as a battle. He examined the positron emission tomography of his father’s brain, which looked like a psychedelic walnut, and wondered what it now contained. Several million memories that had been arranged by priority (the hand on the neighbour’s thigh, the martinis made with mannered precision) now randomly scattered like a filing cabinet overturned by thieves.

  Now Harry led him back to his bed and helped him lie down, covering him with the hospital sheet. The destruction of his father was precipitous. He didn’t always recognize Harry when he visited, he spoke less, his body a venous network of atrophied limbs, the skeletal core trying to surface as his brain flailed. His face was taut, his arms laid out beside him like a child’s, thin and guileless, floating through an OxyContin landscape.

  Harry looked at his father and pondered what was effectively gone. He wondered if Dale pondered Harry’s life as well, staring through eyes dulled by painkillers, enlarged and extruding as the rest of him retreated; what did he see in this fifty-two-year-old man? But if Dale was pondering anything in the withered prison of his head, it would be his ill luck; he would calculate the odds of his own cancer (12.8 per 100,000, thirty-two percent survival over five years) the way he had calculated bond yields. His sister, Erin, and his father’s girlfriend, Dixie, hadn’t been involved much at first, but they now visited regularly. Dixie was only a few years older than Harry, a handsome woman with sun-damaged skin, long-legged and purposeful, her smile honed in the hospitality industry. On those occasions when their visits overlapped, Dixie was always smartly dressed in dark clothes, and Harry wondered if she were trying out different funeral outfits. Harry was straining to recover something from his palsied relationship with his father, but he also recognized that both he and Dixie hovered over Dale with the shared expectation of a significant inheritance. Erin did not share that unfortunate bond; she and her husband were discouragingly well off.

  Harry pulled out th
e book he had brought and started reading aloud. His father had little interest in fiction, but Harry remembered that he had enjoyed Ian Fleming’s Bond books, and he found a paperback copy of Goldfinger in a second-hand bookstore. Sitting on the chair beside the bed, he read slowly.

  When Harry had read to his son years ago, his voice became deeper, comforting both of them. Ben would fall asleep on Harry’s chest, and the smell of that perfect head filled him with a contentment that was unrivalled sixteen years later. Breathing in the essence of his only child in the comfort of that bedroom, the star and moon pattern of the curtains barely visible in darkness, he often fell asleep as well. Dale hadn’t read to Harry. And now, when young fathers gathered in the park with their offspring, resentfully searching for the diaper bag, wiping the non-toxic rubber nipple with the tail of their shirts, here was their triumphant conceit: we are much better than our own fathers. What would Ben say?

  Harry looked at his father, who showed no sign of having understood anything about the devious Auric Goldfinger. His collapsing face was blank. Harry closed the book and wished for his father’s death.

  Dale died three nights later. If dying was a final leaving, then the true moment of his father’s death may have been decades ago. Harry’s most vivid memory of his father was the recent version, his protracted death. Yet it was Harry’s duty to mourn.

  Standing at the entrance to the Anglican church, he shook hands and hugged, thanking people for their presence. He smiled at aging, addled friends of his father’s whom he hadn’t seen in two decades and assured them (falsely) that Dale had had a peaceful passing.

  Erin performed the same ritual a few feet away, clasping each outreached hand with both of hers. Gladys was beside him, offering accepting noises and sad smiles as a response to the condolences. Ben stood awkwardly with Sarah, his hands folded in front of him, gangly and useless and dreaming of escape.

  As Harry finally walked toward the front pew, he surveyed the gathered—dutiful, dry-eyed, shifting uncomfortably in the warming interior of the church with unpierced hearts. The financial community had come out. A few of the old neighbours. His mother looked elegant in a midnight blue dress. Dale’s second wife, Tess, hadn’t shown.

  He sat beside his mother and reached into his suit jacket for the reassurance of his written eulogy. My father was a complicated man. His mother looked at him, her face brightened by gin.

  “This is no time for honesty,” she said.

  Harry turned to look at the crowd. Dixie was exiled resentfully in the middle rows, splendid in black, her ash blond hair effectively pinned. Near the front were Dale’s colleagues from BRG, the firm where he had worked for most of his life. Harry hadn’t seen them in twenty years. The heroically named August Sampson was now stooped and bald, myopic, hair bristling on his outsized ears. Beside him, Prescott Lunden sat like an aging soap opera actor, handsome and silver-haired, the reassuring figurehead. In the pew behind them was the short, pugnacious Dick Ebbetts, who had greeted Harry’s mother and leaned in to whisper something into her ear for an inappropriate length of time. The financial world embraced funerals, reassurance that money was flowing downward at a sombre pace.

  Harry touched his head experimentally. He wasn’t sure, suddenly, if he was here. Maybe it was he, rather than his father, who was gone. Roughly the same crowd would be at Harry’s service, the financial guys replaced by a smattering of academics. This thought spooked him. His composed wife, his indifferent child; would they be equally composed and indifferent if it were Harry in the casket? If it were his waxy face and black suit beneath the polished wood? He crossed his hands, clutching himself, pressing his fingernails urgently into his palms, waking himself from the dream, if it was one. “Dale Essex Salter,” the minister began, then paused, as if he too was unable to recall the nobility of the deceased.

  At the edge of the curving, welcome synclines of Mount Pleasant Cemetery, a few trees showed a hint of autumn. There was a soft breeze. The September sun was high and bleached the pale grass. The cemetery contained almost 170,000 dead, a city of the lost, the vicious hierarchies of money and beauty and talent and luck levelled among the Japanese katsura and red oaks. There was another funeral in the distance, the dotting of dark shapes around the unseen hole. Behind Harry, an ancient crone sat in a folding chair, the kind parents use to watch their kids play soccer. Harry didn’t recognize her. Perhaps, he thought, she’s one of those people who spend their days attending the funerals of strangers, getting comfortable with death as it moves closer.

  The minister uttered a last few calming words over Dale’s casket, then everyone drifted away. Harry lingered; he wanted to see his father lowered. It seemed impolite for everyone to turn their backs and leave while Dale still sat there exposed. When the gleaming coffin was lowered on canvas belts, winched into the earth, it made a slight mechanical clicking sound that reminded Harry of when he attached a playing card to the wheel of his bicycle with a clothespin as a boy, then cycled around the neighbourhood, listening to its motorized clack.

  As Dale descended, Harry thought he heard murmuring, indistinct sounds coming from the hole. The dead welcoming a new arrival. Or the collective regret of all those lives escaping through this fresh fissure. We never bloomed.

  Harry picked up a handful of earth, almost experimentally, then threw it on top of the coffin. He walked back to the parking lot to find Gladys standing beside the car. “What were you doing?”

  “I threw some dirt in.” Holding up his smudged right hand as proof.

  They drove back slowly, Harry dreading the reception, Gladys staring out her window, Ben in the back seat texting. Sarah had gone home in her own car, perhaps to avoid this silence. At an intersection where they were stopped, Harry saw a couple on the sidewalk waiting for the light. They might have been seventeen. She was wearing a summer dress and sandals. She turned to the boy and kissed him and said something in his ear, then pulled away and looked at him expectantly. Harry remembered his prom date, Jenny Larsen, who had kissed him and mumbled, “You complete me,” a phrase she’d picked up somewhere. Good for her. Complete at seventeen, and at the unintentional hand of the incomplete Harry.

  The city had a Sunday hush. It drifted empty on the breeze. Harry opened his window to let in the soft air. It moved around his silent family with its false tropical breath.

  Contrary to the popular dictum, Harry’s father had taken his money with him. It was, at any rate, gone. The reading of the will had the giddy outrage of a practical joke. The executor, a terse stranger from one of the large, threatening law firms, revealed Dale to be essentially broke, a shock to both Harry and his sister, and a much bigger shock to Dixie.

  The three of them sat in the lawyer’s office as he intoned the will’s clauses with appropriate solemnity, accompanied by a paper version handed out with numbers and percentages highlighted. More than half the estate went to Dixie, a fact that was quickly mitigated by the alarmingly small sums involved. Dixie received $7,200. Harry was second, with $4,200. Erin, an enraged and distant third, received $1,100.

  As the lawyer, whose name Harry had already forgotten, rumbled on about various items, Harry tried to calculate how his father’s estate could have shrivelled so drastically. He had assumed that Dale was worth roughly $3 million. In Harry’s most shuttered thoughts, he had ascribed one million to himself, another million to Erin, with the rest split between Dixie and a few charities that Dale had supported. He had guiltily toyed with these sums. The mortgage would evaporate, then his line of credit and Visa bill. He would treat himself to a few cases of good wine (a case of a Pomerol that looked promising and a slightly guilt-inducing case of Château d’Yquem). He would fix a few things around the house, and they would rent a place in France for the summer. He would buy an expensive bicycle and join the brightly clad cyclists along the lakeshore. Gladys, he guessed, had her own math.

  He avoided looking at Erin, who detested Dixie and referred to her, after two glasses of wine, as “that tinted w
hore,” and who was now confronted by this awful arithmetic: Dixie favoured by a factor of roughly six to one.

  Dixie was the first to leave, tersely gathering her papers, on the verge of tears that would flow in the hallway then let loose in earnest when she was safely home, Harry guessed. She may have thanked the lawyer as an afterthought halfway to the door, but Harry wasn’t sure. His debt had resumed its roaring in his ears, an insistent martial sound that arrived in waves.

  Harry was stunned by the injustice of it. I wasn’t seeking riches, he thought, merely debt relief. This dream, the modest hope of a Third World nation lobbying the UN, had vanished. He was too tired to move, too afraid to glance at Erin, resentful of the lawyer, who sat mouthing something in the roar of Harry’s trashed prospects.

  Harry recalled the dark crowd gathered at the gravesite, their heads half-bowed. Perhaps one of them had taken Dale’s money. Or it sat in his coffin with him, Harry’s inheritance sent down to burn.

  THREE

  DEBT WAS HIS MISTRESS, the dirty siren who clawed his back. They had been together for three decades, entwined, an anniversary that had crept up. My god, has it been that long, my love?

  Gladys lay beside him, the subtle lines of her face piled against the pillow in the grey light. It was 4:30 a.m. and an unspent erection lolled. He fell asleep an hour before dawn, his dreams descending like carrion birds, tearing expertly at his flesh, dancing away from him with strings of red sinew in their beaks.

  Before waking, in that gloaming where you could manufacture your dreams and direct the action, where you were master of that bent landscape, Harry saw his father peeling off an endless succession of hundred-dollar bills, as if doling out an allowance. They formed a thick carpet on the ground, and thousands fluttered upward with every footstep.