The Disinherited (25 page)

During the hospital discussion Nancy would feed her husband the straight lines, sit with her legs crossed on the bed, stalk about the room in her new city wardrobe, obviously pleased to be spending this summer driving about and in a big cool building instead of being stuck in the trailer and Miranda’s kitchen, doing the endless canning and preserving that was the usual summer occupation. When the men were dizzy with their circles and didn’t know what to repeat next, Nancy would draw a deep breath and sigh. “Well,” she would say, “at least we won’t starve.”

Erik stayed out of the way, sitting near the window and smoking. Twice a week, in the afternoon, he would stop the doctor in the corridor, try to intimidate him into revealing something. Twice a week the doctor would say that if things worked out Richard would be allowed to go home, mobile but unable to do heavy work, with a life expectancy, well, even a year is a long time in anyone’s life and, besides, many people survive heart
attacks perfectly well as long as they do something about the causes. The doctor never looked at Erik. He would only stare down at his feet or off to one side as he spoke. Sometimes he would pat Erik on the shoulder as he finished, as if to remind him not to take all this stuff so seriously. After all. And reminded Erik of the importance of getting his father to diet, to stay away from alcohol, tobacco and sex. Miranda was the timekeeper. On her signal Erik would go out to the lounge and tell Brian and Nancy that it was their turn to visit. Then he would sit in the lounge and stare out at the lake, read, talk to the patients.

Since he had begun coming to the hospital all the patients but the man with the small tumours had changed. The man with the tumours still stood at the window in his blue dressing gown, smoking his pipe and talking about his wife and summer cottage. Periodically he went away for weekends but he always came back. He said that he was under observation and suggested that perhaps he was already taking radiation treatment for his cancers. But then he had talked about x-rays in a very unusual way, hinting to Erik that they were extremely dangerous, not to be taken lightly, possibly something to be avoided at all costs, making Erik unclear whether the man’s condition had even been diagnosed. After the first time he had met him, the time the man had said he needed a drink, Erik had bought him a pint of whiskey. Now the man always had whiskey in his room and sometimes Erik, if he didn’t find him in the lounge, would go to visit him in his room, have a drink with him and look through what seemed to be a limitless supply of picture magazines. Mr.
N. Zeller
was typed on a piece of paper and stuck to the end of the man’s bed, but Mr. Zeller never offered any verbal tag for himself, not even giving Erik a chance to confirm his speculation that his Christian name must be Norman. Or perhaps the anonymity was supposed to suggest that the name was more exotic, that in fact the man in the blue dressing gown was perhaps the well-known skipper of the
Nautilus
, obviously having been unexpectedly becalmed in Kingston and fallen on evil days. Nonetheless, Mr. Zeller, Norman Nemo, confided one day to Erik that he was no longer so fond of his wife, that his two blonde and healthy teenage daughters left him with a feeling of
faint incestuous revulsion and that for his employer, a man whom he had not seen for many years, he had no feelings at all, not even gratitude. And after saying this, he had put his pipe in his mouth and in the same diffident tone with which he had originally announced to Erik the deplorable condition of his bladder, he had said that Erik was perhaps his only friend. This declared one evening, while he was in bed, wearing his gown and sipping at some cognac.

“Well,” Erik said, embarrassed, looking away.

“No offense meant,” Mr. Zeller added quickly.

“No, of course.” Erik stood up. “I’m sorry, I promised I would make a phone call.”

“Yes.” Beside Norman Nemo’s bed was a white telephone.

“I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Erik stalked out of the room, down the hall and past the nursing station and elevators to a small lounge where there was a pay telephone. Inserted his dime and dialled Rose Garnett’s number. Over the telephone she sounded less removed, girlish. But when he arrived there, he had already lost hope again. She answered the door wearing paint-stained blue jeans and a man’s shirt, several sizes too big for her, that had the sleeves ripped off at the elbows. She took him back through the living-room and kitchen to a room that faced into the back garden, with small French doors. The room was in a total shambles; recently an elaborately furnished study, it now had all its furniture pushed into its centre and covered by painter’s linen. Off to one side was a pile of lumber and a table saw. A bookcase was rising up one wall and along the other some sort of bench was being built. Everything was covered with sawdust. Rose Garnett’s eyes were grey in the bare light. The boards were all marked for their cuts, straight lines drawn by a lead pencil; she handed him one end of a board and turned on the saw — a brief sharp scream as it sliced through the wood and then she drew the board closer, for the next cut.

“You can change if you want,” Rose Garnett said. “There’s some men’s clothes in the kitchen cupboard.” And finding in the cupboard jeans and two shirts, the hunting jacket that had been in the school house — even the hat and rifle were still there, crammed into a corner, the muzzle of the rifle jammed
into an old ruined pair of workboots. He put on the jeans. The husband had been shorter than him, stockier. He took a piece of twine and tied the pants on. The cuffs hung half-way down his socks. The shirt fitted well enough, the sleeves just a bit short so, feeling curious, he put on the hunting jacket and, extracting the rifle, the workboots. The boots were far too big for him, huge, must have been specially made for size fifteen feet. And the rifle. Automatically he had broken it open when he took it out of the boots and a shell had fallen out, .303 — no safety catch. He put the shell into the pocket of the hunting jacket and went to the room where Rose Garnett was working. “You wind up in the small of the back,” she said, looking at him. “The big feet are to keep you from falling over.”

And later, when they were splayed out on her bed, Erik feeling scattered by her, taken apart, she rolled over and touched him gently with her index finger. “Touch,” she said. “Touch. Touch.” Not so gentle. “Touch. Touch.” Moving her hands over his body, pressing, pinching lightly, drawing out pains in his back and stomach so he found himself humming as she touched him, curling up tightly with his knees pressed into his stomach, and then she began to rub her knuckles up and down his spine, circling them in the soft areas of his back, digging them in, making him feel like things were realigning in there somewhere, clouds of electricity moving sluggishly in the centre of his body, and at the same time a total exhaustion that seemed to blanket his nerves, something he couldn’t move through to escape her or succumb to enough for sleep. Curled tightly, he locked his arms so that his knees were buried in his elbows; she rocked him back and forth on the bed, back and forth, seasick motion with her knuckles still digging and exploring, the sides of her hands chopping into his lungs and kidneys, the base of his spine. Slapping on the fresh garden sunburn, kneading his arms and shoulders and then back and forth once more, rolling him off the bed and onto the floor. “You’re such a lump,” she said. “What’s wrong with you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’d rather leave.”

“No. I gave the car to my mother.” And when she turned the lights off and shifted onto her side to sleep, Erik put one
hand on her back, lay against her in the dark, unhappy and tense. Woke up in the middle of the night, dreaming he was the perfect man, floating through space in a glass ball.

One day when he went to the hospital, the wheelchair by the fire exit was empty. “They took her to a home,” the nurse said. “We can’t do anything for people like her. At the home she can have people like herself to talk to. She won’t be so lonely.”

“She never talked,” Erik said. “The most she could do was rattle the arms of her chair.”

“Well,” the nurse said. She was one of what seemed to be an infinite number of student nurses who were assigned this ward on rotation. She was so much younger than Erik he felt awkward, almost fatherly with her. Near the end the old woman’s skin had softened to resemble grey mucus. The nurse’s skin was fresh and young, looked like it might glow in the dark. Her teeth still had tiny gaps between them that would grow together. “Well,” the nurse said. “She wasn’t sick. We couldn’t do anything for her.”

“She was just old.”

“That’s right.” That was the day his father’s fever had begun. They had put the sides of the bed up, like a great aluminum crib, in and out tubes snaking through the bars. Erik could lean over the bars and watch his father, the flesh gone suddenly grey and purposeless, like the old woman’s. Or he could watch him on the machines, see him breathing on the dials of the respirator and the oxygen tank. A nurse was in the room at all times, sitting in a chair at the end of the bed, legs crossed, a clipboard resting on her upper thigh. Richard’s chest moved up and down and each time his chest collapsed the machine hissed with it. The door to the room was closed now, with a NO ENTRY sign hung from it at eye level: NO ENTRY, lettered in red block capitals on white cardboard. A tube was inserted into the back of Richard’s hand, to feed him. And they were ready to cut a hole in his throat to help him breathe more directly if necessary. The doctor said that they were trying to get his fever down, but they weren’t worried about the possibility of another stroke. He said they might cut open his chest and insert an electronic gadget beside his heart, one that would tell it
when to beat. Miranda seemed to have given up. She didn’t like being in the room with Richard any more, so Erik took the longer shifts, safe now because Richard was beyond hearing or speaking. They said he was unconscious, but sometimes he would open his eyes. Flat and diffuse, the energy drained away by fever and pills, they presented no colour at all, tiny pupils bathed in a milky fluid. When he left them open for longer than a few seconds, the fluid would brim over the sockets, run like tears down his cheeks. He wasn’t unconscious at all. Even if he remembered nothing at all afterwards, the doctor said they never did, as if he had gone through whole zoofulls of sick and dying animals and had all the possibilities charted out according to the best and most infallible method of modern science — even if he remembered nothing at all afterwards it didn’t mean he wasn’t conscious. The eyes would swivel towards him, waiting. And when Erik’s eyes were lined up with them the messages would be sent. It was impossible that Richard would want to live this way very long. Erik could stand above the bed, looking down at the eyes, waiting for them to close and rest, willing the nurse to go away, wondering exactly when Richard would want him to do it, how. The possibility had occurred to him once before, but then he had thought that it would simply be a matter of supplying the appropriate pills, after due consultation. But now pills would be impossible to ingest. He would have to grind them up, put the powder in the bottle that was suspended above Richard’s head. Once he put his hand on Richard’s. It was cold, white and cold, the muscles like liquid on the bone. He slid his fingers into the palm of the hand and it closed on them, like a baby’s. Richard’s hand so cold and Erik felt hot, flushed, waves of heat pounding out from the centre of his body, turned back at the edges, no way to escape, each reflected wave helping to wall in the next. He was swaying on his feet. The room was moving with his stomach, expanding and contracting, threatening to slip around. He looked over at the nurse. She had noticed nothing, was sitting half-asleep, her chin slumped down against her chest. Looked back at Richard and saw his eyes wide open, frantically signalling him, his mouth twitching. And then, with Erik locked into his vision, Richard’s face relaxed, suddenly
smooth and confident like the face of the hypnotist who has finally got his subject in the groove, all the lines and pockets in the skin filled with sweat and glistening but still in some way content, Erik’s fingers held tight in his palm, eyes wide open and pupils dilated, beaming the coded signals direct. And Erik could feel the tension beginning to drain away from him, literally drain, down his legs and through the soles of his feet, which now seemed infinitely big, like Rose’s husband’s boots, so big it would be impossible to fall over, each cell grounded in Richard’s universe, the hospital growing like some huge mutant flower out of the earth. Richard’s eyes opening even wider, his mouth suggesting movements, words, asking the question and Erik, mesmerised, nodding his head up and down, yes — an image of himself as a baby lying in a crib and Richard standing above him, the same way, looking down, not just watching but willing the patterns right into him, picking the baby up and holding him to his chest, forcing his own heartbeat into him — all right, Erik thought, Richard’s hand crushing his fingers, all right, and now for the pitch, he thought, breaking it.

But still he stood there, held him, other hand clenched around the aluminum rail, sweating, he slid his hand down the rail and it was shining and beaded where his palm had passed. He could still see Richard’s eyes but his own were closed, closed tight, he was seeing everything through the lids of his eyes: the moist shiny rail that reflected nothing, the nurse who now stood beside him, waiting for him to notice her, Richard who now lay unmoving. Maybe she wanted to tell him that his father was dead. He opened his eyes. The nurse was sitting at the end of the bed, filing her nails. The machines were working: his father was still alive. Erik slid his fingers free and went out of the room, walking down the hall to get Brian and Nancy. His shirt was plastered to his back in a wide stripe.

From the lounge he could see the lake. But from the lake it was impossible to pick the lounge out from the midst of all the buildings, or even distinguish one building from another, all of them boxes of windows, shallow and glaring in the sun. The shoreline along the lake had been cultivated, a long grassed boulevard with trees and benches ran beside it. The lake itself
was separated from the boulevard by a short cement wall and a rocky beach. Some of the rocks were huge, projected out into the water like glacial tanks. Erik found a place where he could sit, cupped by a warm hollow in a rock, his feet in the water, Richard’s imprint still on him.