Mount Pleasant (2 page)

“Do you plan to continue with psychology?” Gladys asked Sarah.

“I don’t know, Gladys. I’ve been thinking about environmental law. Do you know how much particulate the Sunways Paper plant put into the atmosphere in 2009? Eleven thousand tonnes. Being exposed to it for twenty-four hours can raise blood pressure, not to mention the carcinogenic nightmare.” She glared at Harry as if he were the CEO of Sunways. “And we’re dealing with it every day. I mean, you can almost see the stacks from here.”

Harry glanced at Ben, who was examining the two women in his life, perhaps gauging that future dynamic.

“I think that’s admirable, Sarah,” Gladys said.

“It’s a growth industry,” Harry offered. He examined Sarah, her second-hand clothes and ongoing defiance. Would he have fallen for her when he was nineteen? The fashions weren’t dissimilar from Harry’s own years at university. The music was similar as well. Sometimes it was the same. Ben had three hours of the Grateful Dead on his iPod, which seemed like an abdication of responsibility. Shouldn’t he embrace the sound of his own generation?

“Most working women leave the house each morning with 127 toxins either in them or on them,” Sarah said. She began listing on her fingers, “Formaldehyde, lead, phthalates. Methyl, ethyl, propyl and butyl, which can seriously fry your hormones
and cause breast tumours. Cosmetics are basically toxic waste dumps. I mean, we’re killing the planet so we can look good.”

“I mean, the laws are there,” Ben said. “But no one has the balls to enforce them.”

“Maybe it’s more a question of money than balls,” Harry said. “Environmental cases tend to be wars of attrition.”

“Which is why the major polluters always win,” Sarah said. “Someone has to stand up to them.”

“One of the problems,” Harry said, “is that these lawsuits tend to come down to a balance of probabilities. The company lawyer argues that the lead in the plaintiff’s blood isn’t from the massive chemical fire but from chewing his HB pencil in sixth grade. The irony is, as we all become more toxic just by walking around and breathing bad air and eating carcinogenic hot dogs, it becomes increasingly difficult to prove that some company was responsible for the whole neighbourhood being diagnosed with leukemia on the same day.”

“So you’re saying we should just give up?” Ben said.

“No, no, of course not.” Even when he sought solidarity, Harry ended up drawing some line in the conversational sand.

“When I think of all the shit we put into the atmosphere,” Ben said. “Those Lincolns that got, like, a kilometre a litre, everything we burned up at the cottage, those bottles we threw away. I mean, it blows me away.”

“Well it was a different time, I think everyone now knows—”

“But we should have known then. I mean, it isn’t that hard to figure out. The world isn’t that big.”

“It used to be,” Harry said. He remembered that sense of space; when he was little, people still heaved litter out their car windows, confident the landscape would digest it. His son, he noticed, was more tenacious in Sarah’s presence. Perhaps she was good for him.

As Ben aggressively quoted landfill statistics, Harry silently invented one of his own: If all psychologists were placed in a landfill, we would gain a better understanding of ourselves.

Harry thought about his father. Now there was a planet killer: a chain-smoking, leaf-burning, pesticide-spreading clear-cutter (slightly, at the cottage), a driver of motorboats. He never owned a car that got much better than ten miles a gallon. He shot raccoons, poisoned squirrels and once, in Florida, fished drunkenly for a marlin he later had stuffed and then abandoned (he would never have put it up in the house). He ate bloody steaks and burned trash. His only nod to conserving anything was refusing to have air conditioning installed because he thought it was vulgar.

At the moment, his father was lying in a hospital bed, his limbs and brain withering; he would have just finished commenting on the woeful, largely untouched dinner that had been presented by the smiling nurse. He was disappearing now, unable to conserve himself.

“Remember those beetles at the museum?” Harry said to Ben, trying to bring the conversation back to some environmental common ground. When Ben was young, they had taken a private after-hours tour of the museum, part of a fund-raising effort. Ben had been so obsessed with dinosaurs that Gladys feared it was a sign of a learning disability. They became members of the museum and regularly went to examine the dinosaur skeletons and listen to Ben recite their diets, habitats and idiosyncrasies with authority. In the sub-basement, there was a steel door that sealed tight. The elderly man in the grey cardigan who was giving the tour said, “Now this isn’t going to smell very pleasant.” He gave them a horror movie butler smile and opened the heavy door. A wave of frightening air came out, the heavy smell of decay. “Be cautious where you step,” the man said.

There were bones everywhere, birds, animals, things that had been given to the museum. Hundreds of dermestid beetles crawled over everything, stripping the bones right down to the bacterial level. In this age of cleansers and technology, it was extraordinary that they used insects for something like this, and that it was done in the actual museum. When Harry examined his son for his reaction to this vision of hell, he could tell that Ben was worried that the creepy tour guide was going to shut the steel door and lock them in the sub-basement, and the next person he showed the room to would see their bones, stripped clean of all flesh. Harry knew Ben was thinking this because it was what Harry would have thought at that age. A part of him still laboured against the thought.

“That creepy room. God.” Ben turned to Sarah. “Like a million beetles, they use them for cleaning bones. In this special sealed room in the basement. You wouldn’t believe the smell. We smelled like death for hours after.”

“In the actual museum,” Gladys said. “I find it difficult to believe—

“Remember, I told you,” Harry said.

“It seems so primitive.”

“It is. But it was the best method.”

“I’ll remember that if I ever need a skeleton cleaned,” Sarah said.

“Would you like more risotto?” Gladys asked her, despite Sarah’s almost untouched plate.

“No, I’m good.”

Harry poured some wine into his glass. He could feel antipathy building, and this made him angry, this failure in himself to put up with his son’s girlfriend, to show her kindness and demonstrate wisdom. He should try to be more sympathetic. Who knew what kind of family life she’d had?
Gladys, who prodded Ben’s friends for details about their parents, hadn’t been able to get anything from either Sarah or Ben. “Why are you so obsessed with where everyone’s from, Mom?” Ben had said. And Glad responded, as she always did, that she wasn’t obsessed, merely interested in who her son was spending time with. To which Ben had predictably yelled, “I’m spending time with Sarah. She’s who she is. Why can’t you just let things be?”

“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

T
HE NEXT DAY
, H
ARRY 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.