The Disinherited (27 page)

“You seem so removed,” he finally said.

“That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’d better go back to your nice girl in Toronto. She can hold your hand and tell you that everything’s all right.”

“I’m not going to beg you,” Erik said.

“Go ahead. Do something. Do
anything.”
Then she had spun away from him, laughing, not even holding herself where he had hit her. “I thought you were dead.” She skipped towards him, one quick motion, flicking her hand out to Erik’s face, dancing about like a boxer. “Come on,” she said, “do it again.”

“I’m sorry,” Erik said.

“Don’t be sorry.”

“Well. You can’t just go around hitting women.”

“You can do anything. Anything. Did they stuff a set of rules in your ear when you were born?” She stopped in front of him, reached her hand into his trousers and pulled out his shirt. “Look,” she said, “a trick I learned in the Navy.” And taking one corner of the shirt in each hand, pulled it open with a snap, the buttons popping out serially, from bottom to top, dropping in a close pile on the sand.

“All right,” Erik said. He felt numb and spoiled. He tucked his shirt back in, thinking that now he would be wide open to the bugs. It would be worse now too, because it was later in the day, darker. He wondered what was happening with Richard,
whether the day had gone well. “This thing with my father is getting me down,” Erik said. “I’ll feel better when it’s over.”

“Over?”

“When he’s home.”

“Maybe he’s going to die.”

“I guess so.”

“Did you ever see anyone die?”

“No.”

“I saw my mother die,” Rose said. “We were in a car accident. That’s how I hurt my back.”

“It must have been awful.”

“Yes.”

“I thought Richard had died once, when I was standing there.”

“What did it feel like?”

“I don’t know. Sad.”

“What does it feel like when we have sex?”

“Nice. I like it.” He looked at her as he said it, suddenly secretive, as if afraid the child for whom these rituals of death and sex were performed might have been revealed behind the adult shell.

“But it doesn’t make you shout for joy?”

“Well. You can’t start shouting when you’re making love. It might scare you.”

“You just get in there and pray for stormy weather. God, my husband was like that too. Scared all the time. You don’t even feel it, do you?”

“What?” They were still standing near the lake, the basket and towels piled on the ground, waiting to be taken home. She was always this way, pushing, worse than the bugs. But the fear was there, part of his sensations, if not fear, at least discomfort, living somewhere in his bones where he couldn’t get at it. Erik lit a cigarette. Maybe it had been Valerie in the train station, casually offering her life, like that, as if it was nothing. “Well,” Erik said. “We better get going.” He bent down and picked up the towels, wrapping them around the back of his neck, already thinking he could fold them into the front of his shirt when the mosquitoes got after him.

“So,” Mr. Zeller said. Norman Nemo. The month in the hospital had melted him down, turning his greying hair completely white, taking twenty pounds away so that his muscular outdoors face had become hawk-like, his nose thin and curved now, bright red patches on his cheeks. “So,” Mr. Zeller said. “The father is dying and the young son pines away, afraid to take what is his.” They were in the lounge, Norman Zeller pacing back and forth, one hand inserted in his blue dressing gown to calm his bladder, the other waving the perpetual pipe. “Did I ever tell you about my career on the stage? Never mind.” The lounge was dark, but with the light from the hall they could see each other, their reflections in the plate glass windows that faced out onto the lake. “Yes, so. We move into the third act. The father is afraid to die and the son is afraid to live.” Norman Zeller gesticulated with his free hand as he talked. His voice had a surprising resonance. As if, Erik thought, it might even be true that he used to be a radio announcer, working New York music halls to finance his voyages. “Yes,” Nemo said. “The whole family lives with this terrible curse of the future. All tremble at the sight of the iron fist of fate. Meanwhile I enter. I am Polonius, uncle of the bride. This robe is my curtain. And when I die the curtain falls.”

“Good God,” Erik said. “What about the doctor?”

“He is irrelevant,” Nemo said. “A mere agent of the x-ray conspiracy, he symbolizes the false hope of the new world. For what can this doctor, this so-called medical madman do? He can put you in front of his machine, see through the very world of appearances to the real world. And what is his real world? A dried-up old skeleton. A few tumours. In the case of his religious patients it may include a St. Christopher’s medal. The doctor marries Ophelia after she is dead.” The lounge was filled with shiny leather furniture, couches and armchairs strung around the walls. Mr. Zeller preferred to pace as he talked. He had recently begun to favour a cane, a slim carved walking stick with a silver tip. He said it came from the coast of Africa, that it had been fashioned by a certain tribe of cannibalistic pygmies.

“Everyone knows that pygmies don’t eat people,” Erik had said.

“No one knows anything,” Norman Nemo had pronounced.

It was immediately elevated to his favourite line. He picked his walking stick off a chair and pointed it at the blank window. “No one knows anything,” he said, not proudly but with a bad Shakespearean inflection, taking his own unfortunate condition as his best example. “To tell the truth, my wife won’t let my children visit me any more. She says it’s bad for them to see someone dying. She wants them to remember me as I was, in colour photographs.” His wife only came to visit him in the mornings, when there were no other visitors, because she didn’t want to be recognized. “Yes,” Nemo said, “the stage is set. Man is only mortal. You are faced with the ultimate choice. On the horns of the final dilemma.”

“To be or not to be,” Erik said.

“To be or not to be
what?”

“That is the question.”

“Wrong character,” Nemo said. “Your problem is that you’re not allowed to kill yourself until you’re alive.”

“And how do you get to be alive?”

“That
is the question.”

“And the answer?”

“Well,” Nemo said. “Who knows?” He walked back and forth across his tile parapets. “You know,” Nemo said, “I like you. Here you are almost thirty years old; your father is dying, your women abuse you, your brother would like to kill you, you have no money and you hate your job before the first day of work. An ordinary man would be swamped by such a tide of bad luck. He would be rushing about, attempting to save something, patch up his life in any way he could. But you stay calm. These things happen but you are barely aware of them. The events are like undelivered mail. While your house burns down you are sitting in the basement, pricking yourself to see if you can bleed.”

“All right,” Erik said. “That’s enough.”

“I don’t mean to insult you.”

“Of course not.” He tilted his watch towards the light: ten o’clock. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Erik said. He walked down the hall to his father’s room. The sign had been taken off the door and now it was left open at night, like the doors of the other patients. Miranda was still sitting in the dark room, beside
Richard’s bed. “It’s time to go,” Erik said. They stood in the hall before leaving. Mr. Zeller was sitting in the lounge, his legs crossed, holding his cane up in front of his nose. He signalled to Miranda and she waved back.

“He’s a nice man,” Miranda said.

“Yes,” Erik said. “But he has a sharp tongue.” Now that Richard was better they didn’t all have to go to the hospital every day. Tonight they had the truck. It looked out of place in front of the hospital, old and unwieldy, sandwiched between two new cars, towering above them, covered with mud and manure. Erik had to climb in the passenger’s side. The door on the driver’s side didn’t work any more, was wired shut, a temporary solution waiting for that mythical day when all these little things would be cleaned up. The odometer said only fifty-three thousand miles but the truck looked like it had lost a war. The dashboard was dusty and dented in over the glove compartment, which had then jammed shut so Brian had had to remove the door with a crowbar. The ashtray wouldn’t close properly, was overflowing with cigarette butts and Kleenex. Something had gone wrong with the original radio and it had been replaced by another, bigger model, one too large to fit into the radio hole so it was strapped under the dash with frayed binder twine and a big piece of old leather that had perhaps been stolen from the harness of a dead donkey. The windshield was pitted and cracked. Both outside mirrors had been sacrificed in forgotten battles. One front fender had grazed a gatepost and folded it in; so its headlamp was twisted off course, shone a firm beam across the front of the truck, illuminating the ditch on the passenger side as they went up the highway, wavering back and forth on the snow tires that should have been changed five months ago. For the steering wheel, Brian had bought a nylon fur cover and a knob with a tough two-breasted lady who had a whip wrapped round her waist.

“You should get married,” Miranda said. “A person your age needs a wife.”

T
he wind had started in the afternoon, circling in the courtyard, turning the blue sky grey and hazy. By evening it was stronger, a constant presence against the sides of the buildings, the closed-in court making it resonate in high whistling sounds. The yard trapped the wind; it had nowhere to go but round and round, circling like a tiny typhoon, filling the air of the yard with bits of dust and soot, slamming the empty cigarette packages and wadded-up tinfoil off the wall in an endless weather squash game. Sometimes there would be sharper sounds, small stones clicking against the windows. After supper, before they left, Erik and Miranda walked with him down to the lounge. August. The end of August and the sun was setting earlier. So it was almost dark now, grey-black at the top of the sky, red and uncertain around the rim. Beyond the lamps that lined the lakeshore road they could see the lake. The sound of the wind against the windows was not so loud here, in the open, and they could hear the roaring of the waves rolling into the shore. Mr. Zeller was in the lobby, blue and formal in his dressing gown, holding his pipe to his mouth and looking reflectively out at the lake, his shoulders slightly hunched, into the wind. He nodded at the Thomas family as they came in, gestured out towards the lake with the stem of his pipe. “Be rough out there tonight.” he said.

“Yes,” Richard said. “Wouldn’t want to be spending the night on a boat.” Or at the farmhouse, where wind always made him nervous, working the metal roofing in and out, squeaking
against the stainless steel nails, shaking the windows in their frames. The rain was just beginning, each drop seconds apart, each drop leaving a long bubble streak as it was driven across the plate glass surface.

“It’ll be a while yet,” Norman Zeller said. Then, after turning back to the window for one more look, he pulled his gown tightly around him, bowed his head in Richard’s direction, and made his way down the hall towards his room. He was much thinner now, his legs stick-like, far apart from each other where they emerged from the bottom of his gown, moving slowly, his slippers flopping up against his heels.

“Doesn’t look too good tonight,” Richard Thomas said.

“No,” Miranda said, and then, with the easy false optimism of the relative of the patient who has been cured: “Well, he looked worse last night.” Three days now and they would let Richard Thomas go home. He had already lost twenty pounds but, as he observed to Miranda when they weighed him, he didn’t seem to miss it. Now his stomach was small enough to be contained within the edges of his vision. He would have to stay on his diet, lose twice as many pounds again. But everything had been decided. He would go home and he would be retired. In the mornings he would stay in bed late. Miranda would bring him his small breakfast and he would read. Then, in the summer, he could sit outside for a while. It would be permitted for him to walk, on the drive and on the road. Maybe next year they would let him chance the fields and the bush too, when he was strong enough to right himself if he lost his balance. They talked about getting a new dog, a puppy; Erik would pick one out for him at the Humane Society the day after he came home. If they ran out of money they could maybe sell some of the waterfront. But for now there was the disability pension, and the farm would still bring in something. After all. The rain had stopped temporarily; now the streaks were drying on the glass, long cloudy trails. All the cars had their lights on, were moving slowly back and forth along the lake. Through the wind Richard thought he could hear something like a foghorn.

“It’s going to be bad tonight,” he said, “driving. Maybe you should stay in town.”

“Don’t worry,” Erik said. He was dark-tanned now, a thin line of sunburn running down the centre of his nose, like a child. But even with his tan and calloused hands he still seemed city to Richard, the way he avoided things with his body, wore his clothes as decoration, was always glancing nervously around himself, as if there was something about to bite. Simon Thomas would’ve drowned him, Richard thought. Would have drowned everyone if he could have gotten away with it. Simon Thomas would have made him fight it out with Brian, outside, no weapons, the way he had once tried to make him and Steven fight, Steven slow-moving and drunk, could have killed the two of them by sitting on them, didn’t even get angry, just tuned Simon out, said he didn’t want the farm and went upstairs to nurse his mother’s memory. Sitting placidly in the dark as he did every night, crying but not desperate, just quiet and placid sitting in the chair he had taken from his mother’s room and placed in his own, sitting until everyone else went to sleep and then getting into bed for the night.

“He’s sick is what’s wrong with him,” Simon said once, “and he’ll never get better. To see his own brother, like a tomcat, attack his father with a knife and almost murder him in cold blood, without provocation, as if God could forgive a man who attacked his own father who had conceived him and fed him and washed the shit from him when he didn’t know enough to keep himself clean. What a man has to go through to keep order in his own family.” Then grinning conspiratorially at Richard, slapping his shoulder and spitting all in one continuous motion. They had buried Leah Thomas in the cemetery but Simon never went back to see her grave, not once, not until the early spring day they took his pine-boxed body and stuck it in the ground beside her, lowered it with ropes while the housekeeper knelt and wailed and the minister earned his fee.