The Disinherited (22 page)

“I’m not worried about it,” Richard said. “I’m worried about you.”

“I’m all right.”

“So am I.”

“You are looking pretty good,” Erik said. Just like Simon, absolutely unselfconscious, flipping the cigarette about in his fingers, sitting on the windowsill now, knee bouncing with nervous energy.

“I should have beat you more when I was able,” Richard said. Both his arms were working now and the flu was gone, but somehow he still felt sick, not cured or over the worst, but just at a new stage where the symptoms were more diffuse. He couldn’t help staring at Erik, wondering if he would ever come alive, what would it take? And he was afraid of Brian too, keeping out of his way when Brian was in the room, not talking to Nancy at all, always deferring, waiting, Brian so dumb he didn’t know anything at all; a man shouldn’t hate his adopted son that way, Brian, the exact same age as Katherine’s Richard, living where he had died, no reason — just fact. Herman White’s nephew from Belleville was the lawyer now, keeping an office in each of three small towns and making his rounds, a secretary in each office and him now, they said, with a telephone in his car, making as much money as a doctor and living in a stone house with hardwood floors and two fireplaces. Erik, Miranda, Brian and Nancy: they would fill up the whole couch, and Leslie White, ten years out of law school and still wearing his uncle’s gold cufflinks, would perform the reading of the will, in ignorance. Erik was looking back at him, as if he might have been speaking; maybe his sickness was only a mouth that swallowed up unattended moments, demanding more and more and, as it did, opening ever larger so finally it would turn itself inside out, like every other disease, and end up a floppy pink epiglottis and a long steaming throat. “Do you remember when you had your tonsils out?”

“Yes,” Erik said. “It was the first time I got ice cream.” Still looking at him and coming over to sit beside the bed. “You know,” Erik said, “that just because I don’t want to live on the farm, it doesn’t mean I didn’t learn anything from you.”

“That’s nice,” Richard said.

“It’s just that, well, there’s a lot of important things going on
in this country and so, you know, people have to be able to think clearly. And the university is the place where that happens.”

“The rules …” Richard said, remembering a previous argument when Erik had claimed that all logical thinking had rules.

“Yes.”

“You teach people the rules,” Richard said. “Yes.”

“What about life?”

“What about it?”

“Who teaches people how to live?”

“I don’t know,” Erik said. Richard could tell he was starting to lose his temper. He had just put out one cigarette and was now lighting another, forgetting even to go and smoke it by the window. “People have to teach themselves how to live.”

“God help them,” Richard said.

“He never has.” Erik up on his feet, pacing back and forth from window to door. It was amazing, Richard thought, how easily he was baited, and wondered if Simon had found him that transparent, arranging the whole episode with Katherine out of his inexhaustible malice, God, Erik would never have stood up to that at all. “People think well, all right, all they have to do is tend their own garden as best they can, never look beyond it, as if the world has stopped so they can do whatever they want, but it’s not true, things have changed, the whole world is connected together.”

“It was always connected together,” Richard said.

“Politically.”

“That’s what Hitler wanted.”

“God.” Erik had sat down now, giving up entirely, looking as if he had decided he would sit there without speaking until either someone else came or Richard died, whichever came first, it didn’t matter.

“I’m sorry,” Richard said. “I’m just an old man.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“But I’ve always thought that there was more to life than rules and logic.”

“Of course,” Erik said.

“A man has to know his own destiny.”

“Oh Christ,” Erik sighed, starting to get to his feet again and then slumping back into his chair. “No one has destinies any more,” he said. “They live in apartments and breed goldfish.” It was early afternoon, just after lunch. The courtyard was emptier than ever, mid-August doldrums, and the sun shone flat and hot on the black asphalt. Around the edges of the courtyard, and slowly encroaching on the middle, were crumpled-up chocolate bar wrappers, old newspapers, crushed milkshake cartons. There were only a few cars parked there, all of them seeming dusty and familiar.

“Hasn’t rained for a while,” Richard said. The patch of sky he could see was hazy blue. A few more days without rain and it would turn almost yellow-blue, mean and catty, Simon used to call those skies, hating cats himself, keeping two in the barn and none in the house, drowning any that ever came around, talking about Henry Beckwith’s barn where you could count at least a hundred of them at any one time, so many cats that there wasn’t room for them all to line up along the beams at once. Erik had composed himself again, was sitting with his cigarette by the window, where he was supposed to be, ready to be discovered by Miranda. In the middle of the morning the doctor had come, sat beside Richard Thomas’s bed and told him that he could go home in a few days if he was still feeling well.

“But no work for at least six weeks,” the doctor said. “No work, no sex, no liquor, no arguments, no spiced foods, no stairs.” Every morning the doctor did his rounds at the same time, wearing a freshly starched linen coat and carrying a clipboard. “We used to keep people in the hospital much longer. But now.” He shrugged his shoulders. His face was tanned and his hair wet, combed straight back. Whenever he saw a doctor Richard couldn’t help inspecting him closely, looking for signs of disease and decay. He couldn’t remember hearing of any doctors being patients in this hospital. His own doctor seemed not so young, maybe fifty: liver spots on the backs of his hands and on his face, the body unscarred by work, sedentary, the kind that would gradually get rounder and rounder.

“You should get more exercise,” Richard said.

The doctor nodded. “No time.” He stood up, patted Richard
carelessly on the leg, as Richard would have patted a cow, in passing, and then left the room. Richard wondered if they were saving the bed for him. All day, making his rounds, fighting one losing battle after another. The feeling of fear again, this time sharper, in his throat; and it stayed with him, locked in his throat the whole morning, not moving when the nurses came in to see him or when he read his magazines, there all through lunch, making it hard for him to swallow and still, now, with Erik, it was in his throat and chest. He could ask for a tranquillizer. He wondered what would happen if he said to Erik that he was afraid to die, that he was so afraid to die that he had been hurting from it all day, that the fear was what had him that first day, bile and death, without knowing it, trying to fight it off by going out and then being caught anyway, that way, on his own beach which he had refused to sell because he believed in life, his life; and remembering again how it had locked him, kept him in the moment, tried to warn him that he was only struggling against his own life like an animal caught in a trap, twisting open its own arteries and bleeding to death. It would be better if the bed were cranked up more, if he could sit up straight and look at the wall or out the window, keep his eyes open. Now the room appeared to him as through a film, the innocuous blue plaster so successfully bland that it didn’t seem to matter whether it was there, whether he saw it. Erik had gone and so Richard tried visualizing him in his empty chair, get the mind to concentrate on something else, remembered suddenly a book on self-hypnotism he had read fifty years ago, the rage of the school library, his brother Steven the best subject of all, passing out at the slightest command, crawling on the floor of the school house and barking like a dog, begging in the desert for water, until Henry Beckwith had caught them at it, and made the four main culprits stay after school, one standing in each corner, reciting all three verses to the national anthem fifty times each, in order. The centre of his vision was liquid pastel, blue, but the corners were filled, like the courtyard, with unaccountable rubbish, things he couldn’t see when he swivelled his eyes, but were only visible indirectly, like dreams that are forgotten as quickly as they are recounted so in the end one feels only that something has passed. A hand on his arm and looking
he could see Miranda had sat down in Erik’s chair, second shift, was already emptying her handbag of special diabetic treats, mail for him, her white handkerchiefs to blot her lipstick on. What have you been doing? she was going to ask him, she asked him every afternoon and he thought he might say well, nothing, just dying. As if she herself would never die, neither with him or lateras if this was all right that he sit rolled up into a fat dying slug on this narrow bed, being cranked up and down three times a day and hoping to be well enough to take himself to the bathroom instead of using a bedpan, as if it was all right that he put himself and everyone else through his inch-by-inch drama because his death was absolutely unique and irreparable, the last mortal man being dragged off the stage, still singing, one hand over his heart and the other holding out his straw hat for applause, his pockets stuffed with pain tickets to be cashed in at heaven. Miranda had handed him a card: a cherubic angel wearing a pink shawl and a halo on the front and then inside, in raised gold lettering:

In the fields the roses are red red red.
And you can hear the tinkle of the cowbells;
Today I hear that you are stuck in bed,
I hope that tomorrow you will be well.

Beneath these engraved lines, Katherine Malone had signed her name, writing it carefully in her still perfect school teacher’s-daughter hand, big round letters that might have been formed by a twelve-year-old, and surrounded her name with x’s and o’s; Katherine Malone now seventy-two years old, and when he had seen her recently, when they went to church at Christmas or Easter or to one of the socials that were more of a tourist attraction now than a community affair, she seemed older to him, indefinitely old, her body beyond everything except survival, fat, even fatter than him, soft, her face framed by curling grey hair, round face. Never far from Peter Malone, who was heavy too, heavier than either of them and looked like a bulldog with his huge jowls and lumpy flesh, hair still thick and black, parted down the middle and combed straight back so he looked severe and pocked, an old-world judge handing sentences of torture
and death with complete assurance, or a missionary who didn’t care about anything except keeping his feet clean, but he was still soft in his own way, giving Katherine flowers every year for their wedding anniversary and buying her nightgowns and négligées for her birthdays, every year the same, thirty-nine pink nightgowns all the same size, getting so monotonous with his gift that she retaliated by buying him scratchy long underwear every Christmas. Nine months after Simon Thomas’s funeral, Katherine’s baby was born. She called him Richard Malone, just like that. Miranda found out first, one day in town, and then came back and said to Richard how nice it was that Katherine Malone had remembered him that way, weren’t they old flames? And that it was strange how birth and death were always mixed together, Richard’s namesake being conceived at the very same time as his father was buried. And telling Richard how the day after the baby was born Peter Malone had gone to the General Store and handed out cigars, like he always did, only this time, of course he was only joking, he kept saying that he didn’t mind being the one to hand them out so long as they were charged up to Richard Thomas’s account, good old Richard Thomas, and wasn’t it peculiar how he’d been keeping to himself these past few months, since the funeral, like all the Thomas men, playing his cards so close. The baby was born in mid-December and that year the snow was late coming, the ground frozen but bare until after Christmas, so Richard walked back the old way, to the Beckwith place, the afternoon of the winter solstice but then, in sight of the house but too embarrassed to go in, turned around and walked back. When he got home that day, running the last mile over the frozen fields, the furrows from the fall’s ploughing all frozen into place, panicky, Miranda was upstairs packing, and said that she was going home to Winnipeg for Christmas and he could write her when he decided what he wanted. And if it was to include her, it had better include a child too, even if they had to go to the agency to adopt one.

“Maybe I could just get a scarecrow,” Miranda said, “and sit it in the chair here.”

“Sorry,” Richard said, “I must have fallen asleep.” She
looked tired today, the lines on her face deeper than ever and her eyes looking as if they were propped open. “You should get more sleep.” Miranda nodded. “I’m serious.”

“So am I.” She handed Richard another card, a thank-you note embroidered in buttercups and vines. “You should write something back to Katherine Malone,” Miranda said. “She’s always liked you.”

“Sure,” Richard said. He took the notepaper and envelope from Miranda and put it on top of the night-table, beside the diaries.

“You don’t have the slightest intention now, do you?”

“You could tell her how much I appreciated it,” Richard said, “next time you see her.”

“You could tell her,” Miranda said. “They said you can go home in a few days, and people will be able to come and visit you.” So, good, they would prop him up in the living-room in a stuffed chair, under a blanket, yes, and he could have the Frank brothers and Katherine Malone over for tea, tea and sherry for the neighbours, though come to think of it none of those had ever been past the kitchen except maybe Katherine Malone once or twice for ladies meetings. “You’ll want to get your eyes tested,” Miranda said, “get new reading glasses so it’s comfortable to read, you always said you wanted time to read. And Mark Frank is putting up a new TV aerial this afternoon, one of those kinds where you push the button and it rotates. Your arm is getting better, isn’t it? Erik’s laid a patio, out back near the tile bed, and mowed the grass so we have a yard, I always wanted one anyway. And he’s getting one of those tables with an umbrella sticking through the centre so we can drink tea in the shade.”