The Matter With Morris (8 page)

For a year now, Libby had volunteered at Deer Lodge where Morris had put his father when he was too confused to take care of himself. Libby had chosen Deer Lodge so that she could see her grandfather more often. Every day she was there she went down to Grandpa Schutt’s room for lunch and sat with him. At first she had been upset that he did not know her, that his mind soared in many different directions, and then one day she discovered that he liked to listen to her iPod Shuffle, that this quieted him and relieved his agitation. And as he became familiar with the music, he began to sing along in his baritone voice, quite beautiful really, chiming in to songs by the Pogues and Bob Dylan. “He likes ballads,” Libby said. “Softer music. No techno, that upsets him.” She
was so matter-of-fact. She bought him his own iPod and downloaded some classical music and gospel tunes. Some country. His favourite was Leonard Cohen. One evening, Morris arrived for a visit and he heard his father grandly singing “Bird on a Wire.”

Morris could learn something from his own daughter. He said now, “Your mother must be happy, you working in a hospital, a step closer to becoming a doctor.”

“I’m not going to be a doctor. You know that.”

“You’re eighteen, Libby. You don’t know that yet.”

“Are you okay, Dad?”

“Oh, well, what a question. I’m pursuing happiness.” He smiled and then shrugged. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about your father.” Then he said that he wanted to warn her. He was getting rid of his cellphone and his e-mail address. “Though I’ll keep my land line. You can call me at home, but no message service.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m cancelling everything. No more technology in my life. I’m throwing out the TV as well. And cutting off the Internet.”

“Why are you doing this? Does Mom know?”

“She’ll find out. It’s not a big deal. I was standing in the meat line at De Luca’s and the woman in front of me gets on the phone and asks her husband what kind of cheese they want, Reggiano or Padano. She can’t even make a simple decision. The cellphone has become a soother, an umbilical cord, a clattering intrusion. If we ‘re texting or talking, we think we’re alive. So, kaput, mine’s gone.”

Libby said, “But I like being able to call you. I like knowing that you might pick up, or that I can text you and you’ll get right back to me. This makes me sad. Why wouldn’t you want to talk to me?”

“Libby, Libby. It’s not that. We can talk as often as you like. You can write me letters. You can come over and walk in my door anytime. You can phone me at home, just like that. To tell the truth, if you were the only one in the world who had my number, I’d keep my cell. It’s the others I don’t want to talk to. My editor, my agent, your mother, Meredith.”

Libby jumped on this. “Why don’t you say sorry to Meredith? She’s waiting. She told me that you’re stubborn. Called you a mule and said that all you had to do was say sorry and she’d let you see Jake.”

“She said that? ‘Stubborn’?”

Libby nodded.

Morris spooned the last of the soup from the bowl. Little flecks of peppers, a remaining noodle, the last bit of shrimp. He said, “We did talk. She wouldn’t really listen, but she did say I could see Jake. I’m taking care of him next Saturday. The thing about Meredith is she’s inflexible.”

“No, Dad, it’s you. You say sorry and then you break into this long rationalization for why you said what you said or how it’s the other person’s fault for why you said what you said. Just say sorry and shut up.” She wiped her mouth with a napkin. Said that she had to get home. She was meeting a friend. She wrapped a yellow scarf around her neck. Morris imagined that she would never find a boy good enough for her, which was why she was dating this Shane, who was probably
a postmodernist to boot. She was too vulnerable, and though she would say she was unimpressed by credentials, there was something gullible about her. She loved her father, wasn’t that a sign of gullibility? Though a daughter like her would forgive her father of much. Had already. She had never said a word about Martin, whom she loved, even after he and Lucille had sat her down and given her all the facts, even told her about Morris’s anger and threats and the challenge to Martin to just go and join the fucking army already. She had said nothing. Just hugged her father and cried and said, “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.” Who wouldn’t want to be with a girl like that?

He dropped her off at home, watched her run up the stairs of the old house he used to live in, a three-storey Tudor style that was begging for a paint job. Perhaps Lucille’s new man, a heart surgeon and handy at many other things, was also a scraper and a painter, and while repairing Lucille’s heart, he could have a go at the house. Morris drove away, surprisingly full of good cheer. Libby had kissed him on the cheek and hugged him and told him to be good and to think twice about getting rid of his phone. He meandered happily through the city, torn between liberty and licence. He had in mind a tryst, someone who would offer him tricks, a prestidigitator, a juggler. He flipped open his cellphone as he drove and phoned the Fort Garry Hotel and made a reservation for that night, and then he dialled the 800 number by memory.

The woman who answered was efficient, as always, and Morris imagined her as the secretary slotting appointments
into various daybooks. The time and the place was agreed upon. No credit card was required; Morris had an account with this company. When the woman asked what he preferred that night, Morris said, “Surprise me.” When the woman called Morris back, she told him that Alicia would be joining him, and that she would arrive at midnight. Morris hung up and experienced the charm of humble awe. A brief meditation on the human soul. His soul. He saw that he knew nothing, and in acknowledging this he was suddenly at peace with not knowing. In the past, as a columnist, he had been expected to know something, had even presented himself as knowledgeable, and in pretending he had found prestige. No longer. Socrates had said something about ignorance:
All I know is that I know nothing.
Morris had been reading about Socrates lately, trying to make his way through
The Republic,
thinking that if he could understand the bigger questions, questions that soared above his own insignificant world, then he might not be so flummoxed by his own littleness. It was a bit of deception, this notion of knowing. Hah. And so, Morris thought, knowing that you know nothing makes you in fact a little wiser. He understood that the woman who would join him later that night, a woman with a false name and a sham of a smile, yet a willing heart, was not the path to love, but it would be a form of knowing, and it was a connection. He would reveal himself, offer his modest body to her, and she would not recoil. They would become acquainted. It was contact that he craved. He anticipated carnal love. He knew he was selfish and deluded and he wanted to remain so, at least for that evening and on into the night.

But first, in order to reclaim some balance on the teeter-totter that his life had become, he would pay his father a visit. With the gradual loss of his intelligence and memory, his father strangely was becoming more tender, as if the unforgiving walls had been broken down, and as a result, Morris himself could be more indulgent. He was learning to touch his father, to rub his feet and back. About a month ago now, on a Sunday morning, after an expensive Saturday night with a woman named Chelsea (it had become a pattern that he visited his father either before or after a night with his women), he had dropped in on his father and fed him a baguette that he’d picked up at the French bakery in St. Boniface.
As you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me.
Together they had chewed the bread and then taken a drink of water from a plastic cup, and his father, sitting at the edge of his bed, his white legs bared, had mumbled something about Morris’s kindness. “Ach,” Morris said, “you’re my father.” And then he’d kneeled behind him and shampooed his father’s hair and dried it, and then lifted his shirt and rubbed his back, and in doing so he was struck by his father’s flesh, so loose in comparison to Chelsea’s, and he remembered how, the night before, she had lifted her arms above her head as Morris bent to kiss her navel. On that Sunday morning, seeing the back of his father’s small grey head, he suffered shame, for his own sexual vigour, and for the uselessness of his father’s cock. Do not take me there, Morris thought. He read then, from a collection of poems by Frost that his father kept at his bedside, selecting pieces at random, because it didn’t matter to his father, who simply liked the sound of what he believed
was Samuel’s voice. Morris accepted this, as he accepted the responsibility of taking care of his father. What affection and impatience he felt.

A few days later, when Lucille came by to check on him, he told her in an outpouring of magnanimity that he was becoming reconciled to his past, his upbringing. Everything that he had rejected in his father turned out to be true or correct: the parsimony, the frugality, the strictures, the chastity, the faithfulness. His father had been maniacal about living honestly and with integrity. He had recycled before it was in vogue. He had tithed more than ten percent. He had sheltered the homeless and fed the poor. He was not wasteful or degenerate. Many of these things Morris had rejected. He had thrown out the old and gathered up the new, the modern, the material, as if the past could be thrown out like a heap of garbage. It turned out that his father, in his stinginess and harshness, had been quite right about the world. It was damned.

Lucille smiled, briefly, something he had not seen in a long while. “You’re scaring me, Morris,” she said. He studied her studying herself in the bureau mirror. A memory of Martin admiring himself in this same mirror the first time he wore his dress uniform. What a clean-cut handsome boy, all done up for servility and for war.

“I’m scaring myself,” he said. “Once, when Dad was sleeping, I thought how easily I could smother him. Just take a pillow and press it down onto his face.”

Lucille turned. “Oh, Morris. That’s awful.”

“No one would know.”

She looked at him carefully and then said, “Maybe it’s me you want to kill.”

He found his father sitting in a wheelchair by a window that looked out onto the street. There was a remnant of food on his blue shirt, near the left pocket. It was still damp, a green purée, and he took a Kleenex and wiped at it, cursing the incompetence of the workers. “Just a little something, Dad,” he said.

His father studied him. “Morris?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s me.”

“Good. I was thinking about the house. I want you to dig down to the weeping tiles. The foundation is cracked. We’ll have to tar and patch. Reinforce everything. Samuel can help.”

“Samuel’s in Idaho, Dad. He lives with Dorothy.” This was not true, he no longer lived with Dorothy, but it was easier to maintain that memory.

His father considered this. Nodded. His eyes gleamed briefly, sadly. He said, “Do it yourself then. Get Martin to help.” He brightened. “How is Martin?”

He took his father’s hand and held it. Stroked the back of it, where the blue veins ran in bas-relief. His father was docile, the result of medication that had been suggested by the family doctor. After all, the old man couldn’t just depend on music to calm him. His singing was bothering the other patients, and so the medication was an attempt at settling him down, and it was working. Too well. His father’s eyelids
dropped and he slept and then woke and said that he had to pee. He wheeled him to the washroom in his room. Helped him stand, loosened his belt, and pulled down his pants and underwear. Settled him onto the toilet and held his hand as he peed, while with his other hand he pushed his father’s penis downwards so that he would not have an accident. He was aware of touching his father.

“I have to poop,” his father said.

“That’s fine.”

“But I can’t.” He looked at Morris, so close that they could feel each other’s breath. Clarity now, the knowledge of intimacy. His father said, “The Metamucil isn’t working. I’m all bunged up. I’m so tired.”

Fifteen minutes later, his father stood and looked down into a toilet bowl that held two small turds. Morris wiped his bum. Pulled up his pants and tucked in his shirt. Buckled him and straightened his tie. And then helped him back onto the wheelchair. Back in his room, next to the bookshelf that held the King James Bible and
Pilgrim’s Progress,
he stood and drew the blanket up to his father’s throat. Touched his brow and then bent to kiss him. Eternity. The rejection of modern man, but never his father’s abjuration. His father had always fought the oblivion of infinity and even now, near death, he still fought it with utter ferocity. As his father’s eyes closed, and then opened, and then closed again, he read to him from Ecclesiastes. A book of melancholy and despair, but full of gladness as well. A return to nature.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full.
And as he read, he thought about this young woman Alicia, who would come to him at midnight.

2

I
n the months that followed Martin’s death, Morris had found himself walking the streets in the late evenings, looking into the lit windows of houses where people went about their domestic business, as if by peering into the private lives of others he could come to some better understanding of his own way of life. At some point, perhaps early on, though he could not be certain, he began to talk to himself and offer a version of what he saw in the houses. He only talked to himself in his head so that any passersby, though there were few, would not be alarmed. He told no one of this routine, certainly not Lucille, who would have declared him not only mad but criminal. He continued these walks through the fall and into winter. Later, living on his own, Morris had maintained these late-evening walks, and so it was one summer night that he stepped out of his condominium and walked up Corydon and then down towards the large houses near the local high school, and as he passed by the swollen lives of strangers, he paused at one point and saw a woman in a strapless dress, working in the kitchen. A man approached her from behind
and enveloped her.
The
woman
poured coffee into china
and then she lifted the cups as the man whispered in her ear, and he released her and the two of them disappeared from view, into the other room
to lie side by side and nuzzle on a chaise longue.
On the next street, in a massive barn frame, Morris saw a man standing in a room, behind a couch, watching TV,
thinking about the cost of a new garage door.
The man was alone.
His wife was leaving him.
And then, much later, returning home, Morris came upon a family sitting around a table, eating very late, and the father, or what appeared to be the oldest man at the table and therefore the father, was wagging a finger at his beautiful teenage son,
asking him hypocritically to tell the truth.