The Endless Knot

The lepidopterist’s preferred technique for killing a butterfly is to pinch its thorax between the thumb and forefinger. The action stuns the specimen immediately and prevents it from damaging itself. In chronicling the troubled lives of the sons and daughters of a baker’s dozen of Canada’s most prominent families, Kathryn Morrissey did not display the lepidopterist’s humanity. Her subjects hungered for redemption, and Kathryn, an interviewer who was as skilled as she was silken, had seduced them with the promise that confession would bring salvation.

Confess they did. By the time Kathryn’s subjects realized they were damaging themselves irreparably, it was too late. She had pinned them to her mounting board and there was no escape. While her subjects flailed, Kathryn typed her notes, submitted her manuscript, and banked the advance from her publisher.

Next to her pitiless exposes of children who had become thieves, brawlers, druggies, drunks, or garden-variety creeps, Kathryn’s disclosure that Glen Parker, the only son of Samuel Parker, the new messiah of the fundamentalist right, was a transsexual seemed like small potatoes. However, the revelation that Glen, a theatre major at our university, had changed his name to Glenda and was quietly making the transition from male to female devastated his parents.

The morning after Kathryn’s chapter about the Parker family was excerpted in one of our national newspapers, Glenda’s lacquered mother, Beverly, appeared at the entrance of her Calgary home and confronted the media who had assembled to record her reaction. Beverly’s announcement was to the point. “I no longer have a child,” she said, and then she turned on her heel, marched back inside, and slammed the door. Reeling from her mother’s rejection and her own public humiliation, Glenda called her father and told him she’d found a way out for all of them. She had a gun, and she wasn’t afraid of death. Sam Parker convinced his only child to wait until they talked; then he boarded his private plane and flew to Regina. Later that day, Kathryn Morrissey was sitting on the deck behind her condo having a celebratory glass of wine when Sam approached her and pleaded with her to have the publication of her book postponed. When she refused and laughed in his face, he fired a bullet that grazed her left shoulder.

The bullet came from the gun that Glenda Parker had planned to use to kill herself. Whether the firing was deliberate or accidental would be decided by a jury, but for Kathryn, it was the luckiest of shots. The pre-publication drumbeat for Too Much Hope had evoked answering drumbeats, and they were not friendly. Most of Kathryn’s subjects were in their twenties – old enough to talk without a chaperone present, but young enough to be foolishly voluble when an ostensibly sympathetic listener was salving their wounds and stroking their egos. Some of Kathryn’s more principled colleagues had wondered publicly about the moral code of a journalist who would insinuate herself into people’s lives then betray them. There had been critical commentaries and columns so relentlessly negative that even the most diligent publicist couldn’t mine them for a blurb.

But the bullet that scratched Kathryn’s shoulder silenced the naysayers. It turned out that Kathryn had a flair for the dramatic, and she morphed seamlessly into the role of martyr for a higher cause. Eyes moist with unshed tears, Kathryn admitted that she had left a few bodies in her wake, but lower lip trembling, she explained that she had been searching for truth, and truth had a price. Given her obvious suffering, only the most heartless cur would have pressed the point. Suddenly, Too Much Hope rocketed to the top of the best-seller list, where it stayed throughout the long and languid summer. The week before Sam Parker’s trial on charges of attempted murder began, Too Much Hope was still number one – proof positive that there was no slaking the appetite of readers who hungered for reassurance that the children of the powerful were as fallible, flawed, and fucked up as their own.

Rapti’s research was both thorough and depressing. As I closed my laptop, I knew I was in need of fresh air and diversion. Luckily, I had a legitimate excuse for heading out. My copy of Too Much Hope was in my office at the university. It had been six months since I’d read the book. One of the gifts of late middle age is the ability to forget what you don’t choose to remember. I was going to have to revisit Too Much Hope. But there was a more pressing reason for driving out to the university. The Faculty Club made the best picnic lunches in town.

By 11:30, I had picked up the book, cleared out my mailbox, and was at the Faculty Club. The dining room was already filling up. Friday was the Thanksgiving buffet. The air was redolent with the smell of roast turkey, and the chef’s pumpkin cheesecake was famous. My friend Ed Mariani, who was head of the school of journalism, was sitting in the lounge. When he spotted me, he leapt to his feet. “Perfect timing,” he said. “My colleagues and I have reserved a table in the window room and there’s a place for you right by me.”

“I’d love to, but –”

Ed raised his hand. “Don’t let the prospect of breaking bread with Kathryn Morrissey keep you away. She’s not speaking to any of us.”

“That must make for harmonious department meetings.”

Ed winced. “I’ve made some boneheaded decisions in my life, but hiring Kathryn was the worst.”

“Stop beating yourself up. On paper, she was a catch – an experienced journalist who’d written two successful books and was willing to move to Regina.”

Ed smoothed the front of the shirt he had specially made to hide his ample girth. He owned at least two dozen of these shirts in fabrics of varying weights and colours. Today’s was cranberry cotton. “I’m supposed to pick up on subtext,” he said. “That media mogul who sued Kathryn for libel was such a preening turd that everybody I knew was glad to see him humiliated, but the truth is that what Kathryn did to him was a disgrace. She wormed her way into his trust, promised him one book, and wrote another.”

“Exactly what she did with her subjects in Too Much Hope.”

Ed shuddered. “Unspeakable. Every time I think about Glenda Parker I want to weep. His father, of course, is another matter.”

“Her father,” I corrected. “Glenda came to this university to start afresh as a woman.”

“Point taken,” Ed said. “But my point is that, as much as I empathize with Glenda, it’s hard to root for a champion of enlightenment like Samuel Parker, especially when he’s also a crack shot.”

“Kathryn’s a crack shot too,” I said. “But when she took aim at her targets, she knew exactly what she was doing.”

“You really believe Sam Parker fired that gun accidentally.”

“I imagine that will be the defence,” I said.

Ed raised an eyebrow. “Pillow talk?”

I shook my head. “Just a guess. Zack and I don’t talk about the case.”