A Good Death Read online

  The door opens into a vestibule—a tiny one, but a vestibule all the same. To the right, stairs lead down to the basement, where since day one there’s been a ping-pong table, a supreme luxury in those days. Also in the basement, in a corner near the furnace, is my father’s precious workshop. The only time I was ever allowed into it was to get his belt across my backside. Through the vestibule is an arch into a sort of imitation entrance hall, two metres square. On the right, a varnished wooden staircase rises to the four bedrooms on the second floor. To the left, a large double door opens into the living room, which contains my father’s stereo, piano, three Renoir reproductions and a more recent acquisition, a Hammond organ. Straight on is the door to the kitchen. This was the only door we used when we came home from school, since the living room was theoretically also off limits.

  No sooner had we moved in than my father decided we needed more space. There were already six of us brats and a seventh on the way. He drew up plans for a family room off the kitchen, towards the back of the house. Since that addition, we’ve followed an unwavering ritual: we take off our boots in the vestibule, hang up our coats in the closet next to the staircase, go into the kitchen to deposit our plates and bottles of wine on the round table, give Mother a peck on the cheek and then continue on into the family room. For decades the living room may as well not have been there, as far as we were concerned. Only my father’s impending death has brought it back into use. It is now his bedroom, since he can no longer climb the stairs. His bed has been moved downstairs, and in one corner there is a chair equipped with a motor that would allow him to sit down and stand up unaided if he ever used it, which he obstinately refuses to do.

  We have eaten all our meals and held all our holiday reunions in this family room, as though we have agreed to preserve the rest of the house intact. Christmas, New Year’s, Easter, Epiphany (ages ago, it seems now), our parents’ birthdays, our own and our various spouses’ and children’s birthdays. We pack the room dozens of times a year, and will continue to do so right up to the end, which is where we very nearly are now. My mother has always wanted us to think of the house as the family home. And so we have.

  It must be at least ten o’clock, since the younger ones are becoming fidgety. They finished eating long ago and have been running around the house, banging on the piano, fighting peacefully amongst themselves, shouting up from the basement, terrorizing the cat, who is now hiding behind the furnace in the part of the basement that is still out of bounds. We have called them back to the table for dessert. I look at us all and think of the Last Supper. We all have our assigned places. I don’t know what ritual we have been following, but we invariably take the same seats around this long table, which is in fact not a long table but a series of small tables shoved together, one after the other as our tribe has increased in size.

  My father presides at the head of this collage of tables. Directly across from him, at the far end of the family room, is the television, which he alone controls with the remote kept jealously by his side. To the left of the TV is the Christmas tree with its gifts, all of which have been hefted and shaken and rattled impatiently by a succession of small hands. My mother sits to his right, as she has done since time immemorial. Centuries, at least. And then, moving around the table in a counter-clockwise direction, there is Géraldine, who is a banker, and her engineer husband, about whom I know nothing even though they’ve been together for twenty years; then Julie, whose ambition it once was to write tragedies, and her new, silent boyfriend, who at least has an honest smile; then Bernard, the most serious of us, a timid professor of geography, which probably explains why he has never married; then Mireille, a homeopath, a dealer in herbs and therapies, as honest and generous as St. Francis of Assisi, and her husband, a bureaucrat who has become disillusioned with bureaucracy; then their two well-behaved, exemplary daughters quietly awaiting their presents and their dessert; then my own daughter, who is thirty and still trying to find herself, possibly because I lost her somewhere along the way, and her daughter, my granddaughter, who draws suns with faces; then Lise, a nurse for whom I cannot feel any affection; then Claude, a teacher, and his wife who works for some union or other and is a feminist. And finally Isabelle, whom I am about to marry. Luc is missing. He doesn’t believe in family, lives in Vancouver. And also Richard, who died when he was still a child.

  That being said, none of us has a Christian name as far as my father is concerned. He has always, since we became adults, identified us by our occupations, by our various lines of work. I am the Actor. Julie, the Tragedienne. Luc is the Businessman, Géraldine the Banker, Bernard the Geographer. Our father doesn’t see us as people, only as a set of functions.

  My mother tells him he has eaten too much as she sets the yule log on the table, and Lise and Isabelle come from the kitchen with the orange mousse and fruitcake. Claude has brought a plate of Turkish delight, Bernard one of baklava. Dad uses his remote to turn up the volume on the television because Céline Dion is singing “O Holy Night.” He doesn’t say anything, but he grunts something that sounds vaguely like “Shut up.” No one hears him. We are too busy asking who wants cake or mousse or both, and Lise is saying she made the baklava herself from an original Babylonian recipe, not that she’s been to Babylon personally but she saw it made on TV by a very nice-looking young man with an Italian name. I’m not listening because I’m talking about Lebanon and Turkish delight, which I ate there once a long time ago. The volume of our voices rises with that of the television. My mother is going on about the mousse, how it has been my favourite dessert since I was two years old, although unnoticed by her I haven’t touched orange mousse for years. Louise, usually the quiet one, is asking how it is that there is no more cheese, and has someone forgotten to put out the salad? I turn to my father, who has set the remote down on his plate and is looking at each of us in turn with dull, reptilian eyes. No one looks at him. He is alone. My mother repeats that the doctor prefers that he not have dessert. Lise, the specialist in all matters concerning desserts, begins praising her own yule log. She tells us how difficult it is to make, the special little tricks you need to know, you wouldn’t believe how long it takes. She gives us the temperature at which the butter has to be kept, the quality of the flour, which must not be machine-ground. She uses only organic, fair-trade chocolate, and the fruit all comes from local producers. It is not so much a yule log she has given us as a manifesto. Everyone takes a piece. The plates overflow. We offer polite exclamations of ecstasy, because in our family we are not big on out-and-out compliments. Over by the Christmas tree I hear the start of an eloquent disquisition on the virtues of fair trade.

  “It’s not good for him,” my mother says.

  I’ve been watching his right hand slowly close into a fist, first the little finger, then the other three curling into the palm, the thumb arranging itself across the backs of the knuckles and, finally, the other hand coming over to enclose the first, making a tight ball, which he raises above his head. I close my eyes.

  “Be . . . quiet . . . I’m . . . hungry!”

  Then the sound of his fists pounding on the table, the plate shattering (one of Mother’s favourites, someone must have been thinking), and suddenly Céline Dion’s crystal-clear voice pervading the room with its practised tremolos. He seems more surprised by his outbreak than we are; enormous tears look for a southerly route down his deeply ravined face. He stands up shakily, tries to pick up the pieces of the broken plate, but leaning over, he forgets to steady himself on the table or the chair, forgets he has Parkinson’s and that his neurons are not communicating with one another quickly enough, and falls heavily to the floor. One of my sisters shouts at him to stop being so foolish. I think it’s the Banker. She recognizes foolishness when she sees it, being so free of it herself. Silence falls over the room, a deathly silence, as we all hurry to help him. But he is already back on his feet, having been helped up by Julie. My mother comes to his defence, explaining that his emotions are too stro
ng for him, he can’t bear them. My God, I think, how she loves him! She is shaking, shrinking a little more. “Would you like some dessert?” Julie asks him, and he sits back in his chair shamefaced, his head down and his shoulders hunched, like a child waiting for the punishment he knows he deserves. Then, still like a child, but this time a younger one, one who has been forgiven, he smiles at his unexpected victory. Yes. Mother makes a sign with her fingers: just a small piece. Lise makes up a huge plate with one piece of each kind of dessert, as much as all of our servings put together. He looks at the plate as though it were a Christmas tree surrounded by presents he’s not allowed to touch. For a while he just stares at it, a prisoner standing at the suddenly opened door of his cell, blinded by the sun, paralyzed by the rush of light and colour, overwhelmed by the caloric enormity of the thing placed before him. Then I see by his eyes that he wants to say something. He opens his mouth slowly and, no, lowers his eyes again and stares at the overflowing plate of forbidden fruit, astonished by the sudden good fortune that has been granted him. The rigid Parkinson’s emits a thin th… ank… you, and he smiles like an overfed baby about to burp up its milk.

  Before he was betrayed by his own heart and neurons, I never saw my father at a loss for words or discountenanced in any way. It was not a part of his nature. Nothing took him by surprise. He seemed to know and understand everything. One day, when we were walking along a hiking trail, he picked up a small stone, a nondescript bit of grey rock of absolutely no interest to a child my age. This is the oldest rock in the world, he said, a piece of the Canadian Shield; it has survived the Ice Ages, the dinosaurs, Lake Iroquois. He spoke of that rock as though he knew it intimately. How could he have known so much about the secret life of a rock, a man who sold Bambi bread and pastries for a living, who had no college education, who dressed like a bum when he went out shopping or even to church?

  In those days, which seem far off to me now, people put on a clean shirt and even a tie to go to Steinberg’s, that temple of modern grocery retailing, for a box of Shreddies, a jar of Cheez Whiz and a pound of hamburger. Not him. He shu±ed in wearing sandals that tinkled absurdly when he walked, shorts that were too large for him and accentuated his skinny, hairy legs. Worst of all, he never shaved on Saturdays. As far as he was concerned, going shopping on his day off was not the same as going out; it wasn’t a big deal—it was just something that got in the way of his renovating or gardening. So while he walked up and down the supermarket aisles wearing what he wore when he was renovating or gardening, I followed distantly behind him, overwhelmed by mortification.

  Now he’s trying to spear a mouthful of orange mousse with his fork. Orange mousse is not something that can be easily eaten with a fork, but no one has thought to give him a spoon, and rather than complicate his life further he has decided to do without one. A huge glob falls on the tablecloth. He laughs. My mother lowers her eyes. He looks around the table. No one has noticed. Emboldened, he tries to pick up the glob with his fingers, gets almost none of it but licks his fingers happily anyway. My mother takes her spoon and scoops the rest back onto his plate. He looks around for it on the tablecloth. Then, apparently forgetting that the mousse ever existed, he attacks the baklava with his fork. Not even real baklava, real Greek baklava, the most inspired of baklavas, is easily cut, especially with a fork. It resists cutting. He is too old to be struggling with recalcitrant desserts. He looks down at his plate and discovers the glob of orange mousse that had gone missing a few moments before.

  “Ah, good, so you’re back!” he says.

  I tell him that mousse is my favourite dessert, and my mother, who is listening, puts an enormous serving of it on my plate. My father watches me eat it, laughing. Does he know that I no longer like mousse? And what about my mother, who is explaining that now she uses only 100 per cent pure orange juice and for the past few years has been adding the juice of two lemons? When you were young, she says, I always used frozen orange juice, but you loved it anyway. Funny how things change, isn’t it? My father slides his mousse towards me, smiling beatifically. Proud of himself. He wins.

  He was also proud of himself when he showed me that piece of rock on the trail. He put it in his pocket and brought it back to the campsite, which meant we were all going to hear a repeat of the story of the world’s oldest rock, true or invented, over dinner. When we were older, because he would never let himself be outshone by his own children, whom he was sending to high school and college and university, he boned up on everything that we weren’t being taught at school. The planets, stars and galaxies, rocks and minerals, semi-precious stones, the pyramids and Egyptian mythology, the great cathedrals of Europe (which he had never seen), cheese, mushrooms. Even things he couldn’t learn from books or by watching television he pronounced upon with such devastating authority that, even if we had learned about them and were aware of the deficiencies of his grasp of a particular subject, we never said a word. At such times it was not his universal knowledge that held us back, it was the absolute certainty of his declarations, and his capacity for anger.

  THE DAY OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST ROCK, MY FATHER HAD DECIDED WE WERE GOING TO HAVE FRESH TROUT FOR DINNER, RAINBOW trout, the fish that gives such a sporting challenge to the fisherman despite its small size. My mother told him that if we were going to feed eight people we would have to have a miraculous catch. What did she mean by that? my father yelled at her. Did he not know every trout stream and every forest path in Mont Tremblant Park, just as he knew everything else? But that day the wind must have lost its sense of direction, or the trees had all changed shape, or the sun had decided to go off course, at least according to my father, who for years had magisterially blamed his every failure either on nature or on the park authorities. Not only were we unable to find our way back to the campsite, but what was worse, we hadn’t caught a single fish. I had been too cocky. I had apparently violated every rule of fishing, which, as everyone knew, was a motionless, silent art. We had come upon a promising spot, a pool of deep, dark water surrounded by rocks, a paradisiacal refuge for trout. I admit to showing off my lightfootedness, as well as my ignorance and audacity, by clambering up on the mossiest rock and displacing a few pebbles, which unfortunately plonked into the water. My father was sputtering with fury before I even made my first cast. But high up on that rock, confident in my superiority, I ignored the storm warnings. I was king of the castle. The trout were mine! I made my cast, and in so doing felt myself sliding slowly but surely into the cold, deep pond, in which I splashed about like a clumsy dog, my father calling me every name he could think of as I was sure I was drowning. He pulled me out with one hand and gave me a cuff on the head with the other. I had scared away all the fish. Now we had to find another pool, maybe even another stream. We couldn’t possibly go back empty-handed. And so we turned right instead of left, in search of the fish I had sent charging off in all directions. The sun went down as fast as a child sliding off a moss-covered rock, and we found nothing, not a stream, not a lake, not even a path, nothing but forest and more forest, which became denser and darker the longer we walked. I won’t repeat all the abuse he hurled at me. He would not admit that we were lost, not even when we heard wolves howling in the darkness through which we were trudging. I was cold and terrified. He swore at me. I cried. He bellowed. I struck off through the undergrowth in a different direction than the one taken by my father. Suddenly the trees parted and thinned out, and under my feet I felt the smooth crunch of a beaten path. I had found an old logging road. I yelled and yelled. Suddenly my father was standing before me. He looked down at the road and said, “See, I told you we weren’t lost.” It didn’t occur to me that it was I who had got us out of trouble; my only thought was that I was saved.

  Back at the campsite, where everyone was waiting anxiously (my mother and the five little ones, who were bawling from hunger), my father pretended not to understand what the problem was. What was everyone carrying on about? He knew the park like the back of his hand, why were t
he women making such a fuss? No, André is wrong, we were not lost, you know how upset kids get over nothing, although he did nearly drown himself because he wouldn’t listen to me. It was my fault we came back with no fish and had to eat whatever my mother could find for us. Then, while she heated a couple of cans of Cordon Bleu stew on the Coleman stove, he took the rock out of his pocket. That was when my mother and the other children learned about the Canadian Shield and dinosaurs and who knows what else. He could speak passionately about the things that fascinated him. Everything was still evolving, and then came the Ice Ages, and the Tertiary, and the Pliocene, and on and on. Even my mother, who couldn’t have cared less about rocks, was caught up in his story, like a snake in a snare. I still wonder if that wasn’t how he won her heart, with words, just as he charmed his children with stories of dinosaurs and Lake Iroquois that once covered all of Montreal. Imagine that! Fish swimming up Sainte-Catherine Street! And octopuses and other hideous creatures that later, when the water went down, became cows and pigs and cats. Humiliated, I slid into my sleeping bag and sank deeper into despair when my mother, after kissing my forehead, told me gently but firmly that I should trust him: “He’s your father, and he knows everything.”

  MY FATHER HAS solved the orange mousse problem. A spoon. The mousse vanishes into his mouth, which he opens four times wider than necessary. He reaches for a bottle of wine that is just beyond his grasp. My mother sighs but says nothing. Bernard, watching my father’s hand vibrating centimetres from the bottle without moving a finger to help him, wonders aloud if the old man hasn’t had enough to drink. There is something indecent about the way children talk about their parents as though they were deaf mutes. They are, after all, the ones who put us here. My mother sighs again and smiles weakly. He has always done whatever he wanted, why would he stop now? I sense more affection in her voice than reproach, but it might also be resignation. She pours a small amount of white wine into his glass, which already has some red in it. Bernard explodes. That’s a Puligny-Montrachet 1998, he howls, sixty bucks a bottle, a great wine! My mother apologizes. My father snorts. He’s not drinking wine anymore, he’s just drinking.