I got myself a glass of vermouth, though it was not yet noon, and I phoned my father.
“Well, of all things,” he said. “Fifteen more minutes and you would have missed me.”
“Were you going downtown?”
“Downtown Toronto.”
He explained that he was going to the hospital. His doctor in Dalgleish wanted the doctors in Toronto to take a look at him, and had given him a letter to show them in the emergency room.
“Emergency room?” I said.
“It’s not an emergency. He just seems to think this is the best way to handle it. He knows the name of a fellow there. If he was to make me an appointment, it might take weeks.”
“Does your doctor know you’re driving to Toronto?” I said.
“Well, he didn’t say I couldn’t.”
The upshot of this was that I rented a car, drove to Dalgleish, brought my father back to Toronto, and had him in the emergency room by seven o’clock that evening.
Before Judith left I said to her, “You’re sure Nichola knows I’m staying here?”
“Well, I told her,” she said.
Sometimes the phone rang, but it was always a friend of Judith’s.
“WELL, IT LOOKS like I’m going to have it,” my father said. This was on the fourth day. He had done a complete turnaround overnight. “It looks like I might as well.”
I didn’t know what he wanted me to say. I thought perhaps he looked to me for a protest, an attempt to dissuade him.
“When will they do it?” I said.
“Day after tomorrow.”
I said I was going to the washroom. I went to the nurses’ station and found a woman there who I thought was the head nurse. At any rate, she was gray-haired, kind, and serious-looking.
“My father’s having an operation the day after tomorrow?” I said.
“Oh, yes.”
“I just wanted to talk to somebody about it. I thought there’d been a sort of decision reached that he’d be better not to. I thought because of his age.”
“Well, it’s his decision and the doctor’s.” She smiled at me without condescension. “It’s hard to make these decisions.”
“How were his tests?”
“Well, I haven’t seen them all.”
I was sure she had. After a moment she said, “We have to be realistic. But the doctors here are very good.”
When I went back into the room my father said, in a surprised voice,
“What?” I said. I wondered if he had found out how much, or how little, time he could hope for. I wondered if the pills had brought on an untrustworthy euphoria. Or if he had wanted to gamble. Once, when he was talking to me about his life, he said, “The trouble was I was always afraid to take chances.”
I used to tell people that he never spoke regretfully about his life, but that was not true. It was just that I didn’t listen to it. He said that he should have gone into the Army as a tradesman — he would have been better off. He said he should have gone on his own, as a carpenter, after the war. He should have got out of Dalgleish. Once, he said, “A wasted life, eh?” But he was making fun of himself, saying that, because it was such a dramatic thing to say. When he quoted poetry too, he always had a scoffing note in his voice, to excuse the showing-off and the pleasure.
“Shoreless seas,” he said again. “‘Behind him lay the gray Azores, / Behind the Gates of Hercules; / Before him not the ghost of shores, / Before him only shoreless seas.’ That’s what was going through my head last night. But do you think I could remember what kind of seas? I could not. Lonely seas? Empty seas? I was on the right track but I couldn’t get it. But there now when you came into the room and I wasn’t thinking about it at all, the word popped into my head. That’s always the way, isn’t it? It’s not all that surprising. I ask my mind a question. The answer’s there, but I can’t see all the connections my mind’s making to get it. Like a computer. Nothing out of the way. You know, in my situation the thing is, if there’s anything you can’t explain right away, there’s a great temptation to — well, to make a mystery out of it. There’s a great temptation to believe in — You know.”
“The soul?” I said, speaking lightly, feeling an appalling rush of love and recognition.
“Oh, I guess you could call it that. You know, when I first came into this room there was a pile of papers here by the bed. Somebody had left them here — one of those tabloid sort of things I never looked at. I started reading them. I’ll read anything handy. There was a series running in them on personal experiences of people who had died, medically speaking — heart arrest, mostly — and had been brought back to life. It was what they remembered of the time when they were dead. Their experiences.”
“Pleasant or un-?” I said.
“Oh, pleasant. Oh, yes. They’d float up to the ceiling and look down on themselves and see the doctors working on them, on their bodies. Then float on further and recognize some people they knew who had died before them. Not see them exactly but sort of sense them. Sometimes there would be a humming and sometimes a sort of — what’s that light that there is or color around a person?”
“Aura?”
“Yes. But without the person. That’s about all they’d get time for; then they found themselves back in the body and feeling all the mortal pain and so on — brought back to life.”
“Did it seem — convincing?”
“Oh, I don’t know. It’s all in whether you want to believe that kind of thing or not. And if you are going to believe it, take it seriously, I figure you’ve got to take everything else seriously that they print in those papers.”
“What else do they?”
“Rubbish — cancer cures, baldness cures, bellyaching about the younger generation and the welfare bums. Tripe about movie stars.”
“Oh, yes. I know.”
“In my situation you have to keep a watch,” he said, “or you’ll start playing tricks on yourself.” Then he said, “There’s a few practical details we ought to get straight on,” and he told me about his will, the house, the cemetery plot. Everything was simple.
“Do you want me to phone Peggy?” I said. Peggy is my sister. She is married to an astronomer and lives in Victoria.
He thought about it. “I guess we ought to tell them,” he said finally. “But tell them not to get alarmed.”
“All right.”
“No, wait a minute. Sam is supposed to be going to a conference the end of this week, and Peggy was planning to go along with him. I don’t want them wondering about changing their plans.”
“Where is the conference?”
“Amsterdam,” he said proudly. He did take pride in Sam, and kept track of his books and articles. He would pick one up and say, “Look at that, will you? And I can’t understand a word of it!” in a marvelling voice that managed nevertheless to have a trace of ridicule.
“Professor Sam,” he would say. “And the three little Sams.” This is what he called his grandsons, who did resemble their father in braininess and in an almost endearing pushiness — an innocent energetic showing-off. They went to a private school that favored old-fashioned discipline and started calculus in Grade 5. “And the dogs,” he might enumerate further, “who have been to obedience school. And Peggy…”
But if I said, “Do you suppose she has been to obedience school too?” he would play the game no further. I imagine that when he was with Sam and Peggy he spoke of me in the same way — hinted at my flightiness just as he hinted at their stodginess, made mild jokes at my expense, did not quite conceal his amazement (or pretended not to conceal his amazement) that people paid money for things I had written. He had to do this so that he might never seem to brag, but he would put up the gates when the joking got too rough. And of course I found later, in the house, things of mine he had kept — a few magazines, clippings, things I had never bothered about.
