A Good Death Read online

  “It would be better for my husband if he were dead. For his sake, that is what I think, but also for everyone else’s, for me, for you. But he doesn’t want to die. I’ve talked to him about it. He sees you and he feels happy. He sees this house and he feels proud. He remembers and sees his memories marching and eating before him.”

  My mother retracts her wet bird’s head into her shoulders as though she thinks she has said too much. Sam turns pale. I have found a way out.

  “We forget, Sam, that—”

  “Yes, we forget, I know, but I often see him crying when I tell him what I’m doing.”

  “I see him cry, too, William. He cries because he can’t hear Céline Dion talking about sick children, because he can’t see the puck when he watches hockey on TV, because he disgusts you during meals, because he can’t hear what you’re saying and he doesn’t have time to answer before you answer for him. He cries ten times a day. At first it made me feel terrible. My husband, crying! And I tried to console him, as I would comfort a baby who can’t tell me where the pain is coming from. I can’t tell you how much anguish and torment I suffered because I didn’t know how to calm him when he cried like a baby. But I’m used to it, now. Tears are just another thing to wipe away, like spit or snot. It’s part of his illness. So I wipe them away. I know you are kind. I assume that your conversations are crazy but they are only meant to relieve me, and maybe to give him some pleasure, but for now it isn’t my husband who is killing me, it’s life, your lives spinning around ours. My husband and I have been eating margarine for thirty years, and now we’re told that our arteries are blocked and we should have been eating butter. The cardiologist lectures me about the fat in salmon, the psychologist tells me not to worry about any of it, and you, my children, watch us as though we’re animals in a cage, discussing our diets and our emotions and trying to convince me that this is best or that is better. A mother’s problem, William, is that she wants to make everyone happy. Not even God can do that. Pour me a small glass of wine… And my husband is dying. Of course I’ll be happy for him when he finally goes, even though he doesn’t want to die. I’ll be sad, but I won’t be unhappy. I’ll rest for a week, you’ll come over nearly every day, and I’m not sure I want to leave this house but I do know that I would rather talk to my husband who doesn’t answer me than to the four walls that don’t hear me. I might start doing volunteer work, but who would I talk to about that? You, I suppose, during your rare visits, or on the telephone, to fill the time between visits, but good lord, your lives are so full, what with children and projects and debts and divorces and mistresses, you’re all so busy living that I feel like a stranger with my ordinary little corner of life. And my arteries are already hardening and they’re going to get harder and eventually the doctors and you children will get hold of me. You’ll take my fate in your hands. William will visit me and bring me bags of potato chips and his mother or one of his aunts will be scandalized, and you, my son, you’ll write a play in which a son wants to kill his mother to liberate her from her sad and lonely existence… I’ll have some coffee with a little brandy in it, please, there’s a bottle under your father’s bed… brandy wakes me up when I’ve had some wine… I think I’m a little tipsy… I’m going to have a nap until your father comes home…”

  She smiles coolly, like a cat asking permission to go on biting an outstretched finger. She isn’t really looking at us, she’s settling her gaze on us for a fraction of a second. Then, taking a deep breath that produces a slight groan, she continues.

  “Why doesn’t my husband want to die? His life is an intolerable burden to him. Why don’t I want to die, even though I’m so exhausted, so, so tired? Because we’re afraid. Yes, even though we’re good Catholics, we’re afraid there’s nothing else, nothing after death. There, I’ve said it.”

  She pours herself a good dollop of brandy and explains that duty is a form of affection, life is an obligation that comes from God, and the sight of children whether happy or sad is what pushes us to go on. If they’re happy, then it cheers and reassures those who are about to die; if they’re sad, then they are someone we can give comfort to, they give us the will to endure so we can be there when the sadness comes back. That’s why we go on living when life is disappearing. Because a new life is being born. Of course she’s only speaking for herself, and she very much doubts that my father entertains the same thoughts. To tell us the truth, she doesn’t know why he torments himself, because that’s what he’s doing, she’s convinced of it.

  “Do you remember the walleye in the photo, how proud he was of it? He waved the trophy around and called the neighbour over to make him jealous of his prize. I remember your silence, and how you wouldn’t touch a mouthful of it when we ate it to celebrate your father’s victory, even though you normally liked fish. He was in a foul mood that night, and I didn’t know why. He loved winning so much. And then he told me that he had stolen the fish from you. He didn’t want to be embarrassed by his own son. I can tell you this now, he wasn’t proud of it. Do you remember that fish? Can you imagine his humiliation? If it were me I would have wanted to die. There we all were, standing around him like nurses, or policemen, or judges, even his great-grandchildren. ‘Look out, Grandpa!’ No, I couldn’t have done it, but I don’t have the right to think as you do. But maybe it would be a good thing if we went together… to death, maybe it would… Okay, I’m going to have a nap. No need to tidy up, there’s not a lot going on around here.”

  She gets up. She is stooped, not with the burden of years but with the weight of words and thoughts, so many words, so many thoughts in such a small, curly head that once, as a child, dreamed in a garden filled with old people. But what was she really dreaming of? A garden of daisies, perhaps?

  “Mother, what did you dream about when you were a child?”

  “A big house and a husband and a lot of children. There, you see? Despite what you call my modernism, I’m not so different from most women of my generation. You make me out to be a beauty because you think your father is a beast. But he saved me from the convent, which is where my family would have sent me.”

  The doorbell rings and my mother, surprised, says the mailman has already been by. She hurries to the door and peeks out from the vestibule. She cries out in alarm.

  “It’s your father. There must be a problem.”

  Yes, there’s a problem all right. My father is sitting in a wheelchair imprisoned in a straitjacket. Two male nurses are standing with him, one on either side, looking fed up. My mother is indignant, and so is William, who comes up and puts an arm around her shoulders. “My husband is not a madman, you have no right.” The nurses protest mildly. They’ve seen it all before. My father lost his temper. When a nurse tried to take a blood sample he grabbed the syringe from her and stabbed her with it. Then he started shouting, which is why he is gagged. They try to explain, but explanations are not part of their job description, they are not officially required to say anything except the day-hospital administration has decided that this gentleman has behaved in a way that posed a threat to the other patients and hospital personnel. My mother begins to shake, goes up to him and takes his hand, which he pulls away. He looks angry and hard, the way he used to look after whipping me with his belt, his eyes cold and grim at the same time because of the ferocity of my punishment and the seriousness of the situation.

  “We’ve given him something to calm him down, ma’am. He wouldn’t stop shouting, he kicked anyone who got too close to him, he spat at them, yes, he spat on me. All he would say was Enough, and Stop. You never know how old people are going to react.”

  My father is shivering, and so are we. We all feel the same chill. It isn’t much, but it’s something. William removes the gag. I brace myself for the shouting and complaining, but no, there’s only the icy silence of the day after Christmas when the sun glints off the snow and blinds us mortals. My father begins to shiver more violently. His teeth chatter and his head shakes, and I realize he is naked un
der his thin green johnny-shirt. I hadn’t noticed it before because of the straitjacket covering the upper half of his body. I look at his ugly, deformed legs, wooden sticks poking out of the cloth like obscene flotsam.

  It’s warmer in the kitchen. The straitjacket has been taken off. He has a blanket over his shoulders and we are sitting at the table, waiting for him to say something. Nothing comes. The look in his eyes hasn’t changed, it’s the look of a man who has come to a decision. Mother keeps pumping him for answers. He lifts a cup of coffee to his lips with a sure hand; Mother is ready with a napkin but he transfixes her with a look that says, Not this time. He puts the cup down like a normal person. He reaches for Mother’s hand, then changes his mind.

  “E… nough… stop… die. I want to die.”

  He picks up the cup, his hand still steady. Mother releases her breath and lowers her eyes. William says, Shit. And me? I don’t want to be here. When Mother begins to murmur as though she were rocking a cradle—Oh my husband, what are we doing? Oh my husband, what are we doing?—it’s all I can do to keep from jumping up and running out of the house. I don’t want to hear this. I’m only here by accident, because of some dream that got put into words. I’m a hostage of my own imagination. If I express myself in words, it’s because I want to say something, to tell something, not so I can get caught up in my own discourse. Staging a play is a way of organizing a life we refuse to share, and art today is rarely anything but an escape. A wife, her sense of responsibility, the exaltation and fear of having to live alone. No, ever since my father began beating me, that is precisely what I have refused to take part in. I wasn’t responsible for the violence, typical though it was for the time, and so I decided not to be responsible for anything. Not out of fear of being punished, but out of fear of having to pay the price. I therefore refused to take part in any activity that produced a tangible, measurable result, whose product could be the subject of objective evaluation. I refused to be judged, because if I am not judged I cannot be punished. Creativity exists outside the rational grid of judgement; it’s a bomb shelter for the weak and the anxious, the tormented and the clairvoyant. A bad play is not a mistake, it’s a pathway to an interesting exploration. And there’s always someone around who adores your worst work, some introvert who writes to you saying you’ve released her from her iron collar, or a WASP couple who send you a we-don’t-know-if-we-should-accept-or-refuse-your-challenge-do-we-love, while waiting to read the reviews before making up their minds. A doctor doesn’t have such leeway, can’t afford to be complacent about botching a childbirth or an operation on a brain tumour. Nor can the cop when he draws and fires and finds out later that what the man in the dark alley was pointing at him was an overripe banana. I chose to invent my own universe, at least until Isabelle came along, somewhat late in my life, to draw me slowly into reality, which is where I am now because of my words, my spoken dreams, and because of William and my father, whom I now love for the first time because he hollered “Stop!” My mother coughs and puts a hand on my arm.

  “Son,” she says quietly, “you could write a play about both of us having a good death.”

  “Yeah!”

  The sound is pure relief, joyful and raging. My father bursts out with a laugh mixed with choking and gagging. William’s eyes widen, Mother finds her Mona Lisa smile again, Dad gets his breath back, barely, and shouts:

  “A good death!”

  And smiles. For the first time in years I don’t notice his toothless mouth; all I see are his lips forming a real smile.

  “I’m starving!”

  He laughs again and places a hand on my mother’s shoulder, and she senses immediately that it’s a new hand, or rather the old hand, the hand from the garden, the hand from their first days together. She leans her head to the right so that her cheek touches the transformed hand. An old person’s muscles are not designed for acts of love or affection. A few curls tickle the back of my father’s hand, but her tired, stiff neck prevents the cheek from resting on the hand that remains on her shoulder and looks soft. I could be imagining this. I could be wrong. My father is not Stalin, he’s a weak dictator, stripped of all his certainties. His violence spoke only of his weakness and his fear of life. His hand slides slowly from her shoulder to her arm, the way mine does with Isabelle, stops on her forearm for a few seconds and then settles on her hand. It’s the gesture of discothèques and bars, a creature of shadow and noise, of that first, hesitant discovery that comes just before the plunge into the gulf of I-think-I-love-her and she’s-the-woman-of-my-life, that crucial moment when you choose between going for the one-night stand or the long haul. Let’s be honest: between possession and abandonment. I made the same gesture with Isabelle at two in the morning in a bar filled with smoke, and not the kind that comes from tobacco. I felt death breathing down my neck, I was as desperate as my father is now, and I chose abandonment. I wish she were here now to tell me what to do with two old-timers giving themselves over to the same need.

  William is no longer staring. Mother is trembling again. My father says he’s hungry but doesn’t let go of my mother’s hand, and he repeats himself as though important words are stronger than dysfunctioning neurons.

  “I’m hungry and I want a good death.”

  That’s exactly how he says it, with maybe a slight hesitation before “I want a good death.”

  “We’ll start with food, my husband. There’s plenty of time for death later.”

  “No… I’m… tired… Die.”

  Is it possible that my mother finally feels free? She gets up and, laughing, recounts how we wanted to kill him by stuffing him with bacon, foie gras, pig’s knuckles, beef marrow, Saint-Nectaire and wine. My father sputters and laughs. “Great idea!” he manages to stammer. William adds timidly that she forgot the baked ham and Chinese takeouts. We laugh openly, almost gaily. My mother brings in a bottle of wine. She opens the fridge and takes out salads, greens, red and orange peppers, fruit, cartons of soy milk and vegetarian hamburgers to reveal her secret stash in the back: Camembert, sliced garlic sausage, a small pot of goose rillettes, a thick slice of coarse pâté. She makes no excuses for having hidden these forbidden delicacies. She confesses it openly, asking only that we keep it to ourselves. She believed in all the diets, the medical injunctions, the regimens imposed on my father, who really did look sickly. But not for herself, who was living as close to death as he was. She doled out a little to him from time to time, when he begged and pleaded, the way one gives a child the candy that is normally denied him. But not too much. She was afraid of being caught by her children. Maybe they knew more about keeping an old man alive than she did. In short, she didn’t want to hurt us.

  “You… cheated!”

  “Yes… for a long time. Ever since your stroke. I wanted to keep you around.”

  “Bread! Butter!”

  He makes short work of a butter-and-rillettes tartine, drains his glass of wine in three gulps and asks for more. William tells him he’s eating too fast, he could choke and die. Then he takes it back, realizing you can’t accuse someone of chasing after death when you’ve just handed him death on a plate. My father is eating fast for our sake, making sure there won’t be any death left for the rest of us. But he agrees to slow down. He takes a slice of bread, spreads butter on it, piles on five slices of garlic sausage and hands it to my mother with his toothless, timid baby’s grin.

  The Dictator is free. He has no more orders. He can only ask and give.

  “It’s good.”

  “Yes, very good.”

  It’s not a statement, but rather a question seeking approval and thanks. It’s a conversation.

  “I’d like another one.”

  My mother has never asked my father for anything. She interceded on our behalf, tried to make the punishment not quite so violent. But for herself she made do. She never said, Pass the salt, or, I’d like another slice of ham. If she wanted salt it was there on the table, where she had put it. The ham was sliced, all she h
ad to do was make up the children’s plates and then her own. All my father ever did was eat.

  “Not… good… for… you… Wine?”

  Another question. My mother smiles. Yes, with pleasure. His hand shakes, the bottle wavers, wine trickles into her glass and some of it spills onto the table. William takes the bottle and says he wants a glass, too. My father laughs and makes another sandwich for my mother, then takes a heel of bread and dips it in the wine that has pooled on the table. Chin-chin, says Mother. There’s another bottle in the cupboard behind the pasta. Nervously, William pours himself some wine; some goes on the table, some in his glass.