I had to leave Canada to be with my father when he died. I was the person they sent for, though I was the youngest. My name was on the back page of his passport: “In case of accident or death notify WILLIAM APOSTOLESCO. Relationship: Son.” I was the one he picked. He’d been barman on a ship for years by then, earning good money, but he had nothing put by. I guess he never expected his life would be finished. He collapsed with a lung hemorrhage, as far as I could make out, and they put him off at a port in France. I went there. That was where I saw him. This town had been shelled twenty years ago and a lot of it looked bare and new. I wouldn’t say I hated it exactly, but I would never have come here of my own accord. It was worse than Buffalo in some ways. I didn’t like the food or the coffee, and they never gave you anything you needed in the hotels — I had to go out and buy some decent towels. It didn’t matter, because I had to buy everything for my father anyway — soap and towels and Kleenex. The hospital didn’t provide a thing except the bedsheets, and when a pair of those was put on the bed it seemed to be put there once and for all. I was there twenty-three days and I think I saw the sheets changed once. Our grandfathers had been glad to get out of Europe. It took my father to go back. The hospital he was in was an old convent or monastery. The beds were so close together you could hardly get a chair between them. Women patients were always wandering around the men’s wards, and although I wouldn’t swear to it, I think some of them had their beds there, at the far end. The patients were given crocks of tepid water to wash in, not by their beds but on a long table in the middle of the ward. Anyone too sick to get up was just out of luck unless, like my father, he had someone to look after him. I saw beetles and cockroaches, and I said to myself, This is what a person gets for leaving home.
My father accepted my presence as if it were his right — as if he hadn’t lost his claim to any consideration years ago. So as not to scare him, I pretended my wife’s father had sent me here on business, but he hardly listened, so I didn’t insist.
“Didn’t you drive a cab one time or other?” he said. “What else have you done?”
I wanted to answer, “You know what I’ve been doing? I’ve been supporting your wife and educating your other children, practically single-handed, since I was twelve.”
I had expected to get here in time for his last words, which ought to have been “I’m sorry.” I thought he would tell me where he wanted to be buried, how much money he owed, how many bastards he was leaving behind, and who was looking out for them. I imagined them in ports like this, with no-good mothers. Somebody should have been told — telling me didn’t mean telling the whole world. One of the advantages of having an Old Country in the family is you can always say the relations that give you trouble have gone there. You just say, “He went back to the Old Country,” and nobody asks any questions. So he could have told me the truth, and I’d have known and still not let the family down. But my father never confided anything. The trouble was he didn’t know he was dying — he’d been told, in fact, he was getting better — so he didn’t act like a dying man. He used what breath he had to say things like “I always liked old Lou,” and you would have thought she was someone else’s daughter, a girl he had hardly known. Another time he said, “Did Kenny do well for himself? I heard he went to college.”
“Don’t talk,” I said.
“No, I mean it. I’d like to know how Kenny made out.”
He couldn’t speak above a whisper some days, and he was careful how he pronounced words. It wasn’t a snobbish or an English accent — nothing that would make you grit your teeth. He just sounded like a stranger. When I was sent for, my mother said, “He’s dying a pauper, after all his ideas. I hope he’s satisfied.” I didn’t answer, but I said to myself, This isn’t a question of satisfaction. I wanted to ask her, “Since you didn’t get along with him and he didn’t get along with you, what did you go and have three children for?” But those are the questions you keep to yourself.
“What’s your wife like?” my father croaked. His eyes were interested. I hadn’t been prepared for this, for how long the mind stayed alive and how frivolous it went on being. I thought he should be more serious. “Wife,” my father insisted. “What about her?”
“Obedient” came into my head, I don’t know why; it isn’t important. “Older than me,” I said, quite easily, at last. “Better educated. She was a kindergarten teacher. She knows a lot about art.” Now, why that, of all the side issues? She doesn’t like a bare wall, that’s all. “She prefers the Old Masters,” I said. I was thinking about the Scotch landscape we’ve got over the mantelpiece.
“Good, good. Name?”
“You know—Beryl. We sent you an announcement, to that place in Mexico where you were then.”
“That’s right, Beryl.” “Burrull” was what he actually said.
I felt reassured, because my father until now had sounded like a strange person. To have “Beryl” pronounced as I was used to hearing it made up for being alone here and the smell of the ward and the coffee made of iodine. I remembered what the Old Master had cost — one hundred and eighty dollars in 1962. It must be worth more now. Beryl said it would be an investment. Her family paid for half. She said once, about my father, “One day he’ll be sick; we’ll have to look after him.” “We can sell the painting,” I said. “I guess I can take care of my own father.”
It happened — I was here, taking care of him; but he spoiled it now by saying, “You look like you’ve done pretty well. That’s not a bad suit you’ve got on.”
“Actually,” I said, “I had to borrow from Beryl’s father so as to get here.”
I thought he would say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and I had my next answer ready, about not begrudging a cent of it. But my father closed his eyes, smiling, saving up more breath to talk about nothing.
“I liked old Lou,” he said distinctly. I was afraid he would ask, “Why doesn’t she write to me?” and I would have to say, “Because she never forgave you,” and he was perfectly capable of saying then, “Never forgave me for what?” But instead of that he laughed, which was the worst of the choking and wheezing noises he made now, and when he had recovered he said, “Took her to Eaton’s to choose a toy village. Had this shipment in, last one in before the war. Summer ’39. The old man saw the ad, wanted to get one for the kid. Old man came — each of us had her by the hand. Lou looked round, but every village had something the matter, as far as Her Royal Highness was concerned. The old man said, ‘Come on, Princess, hurry it up,’ but no, she’d of seen a scratch, or a bad paint job, or a chimney too big for a cottage. The old man said, ‘Can’t this kid make up her mind about anything? She’s going to do a lot more crying than laughing,’ he said, ‘and that goes for you, too.’ He was wrong about me. Don’t know about Lou. But she was smart that time — not to want something that wasn’t perfect.”