He shut his eyes again and breathed desperately through his mouth. The old man in the story was his father, my grandfather.
“Nothing is perfect,” I said. I felt like standing up so everyone could hear. It wasn’t sourness but just the way I felt like reacting to my father’s optimism.
Some days he seemed to be getting better. After two weeks I was starting to wonder if they hadn’t brought me all this way for nothing. I couldn’t go home and come back later, it had to be now; but I couldn’t stay on and on. I had already moved to a cheaper hotel room. I dreamed I asked him, “How much longer?” but luckily the dream was in a foreign language — so foreign I don’t think it was French, even. It was a language no one on earth had ever heard of. I wouldn’t have wanted him to understand it, even in a dream. The nurses couldn’t say anything. Sometimes I wondered if they knew who he was — if they could tell one patient from another. It was a big place, and poor. These nurses didn’t seem to have much equipment. When they needed sterile water for anything, they had to boil it in an old saucepan. I got to the doctor one day, but he didn’t like it. He had told my father he was fine, and that I could go back to Canada anytime — the old boy must have been starting to wonder why I was staying so long. The doctor just said to me, “Family business is of no interest to me. You look after your duty and I’ll look after mine.” I was afraid that my dream showed on my face and that was what made them all so indifferent. I didn’t know how much time there was. I wanted to ask my father why he thought everything had to be perfect, and if he still stood by it as a way of living. Whenever he was reproached about something — by my mother, for instance — he just said, “Don’t make my life dark for me.” What could you do? He certainly made her life dark for her. One year when we had a summer cottage, he took a girl from the village, the village tramp, out to an island in the middle of the lake. They got caught in a storm coming back, and around fifty people stood on shore waiting to see the canoe capsize and the sinners drown. My mother had told us to stay in the house, but when Kenny said, to scare me, “I guess the way things are, Mum’s gone down there to drown herself,” I ran after her. She didn’t say anything to me, but took her raincoat off and draped it over my head. It would have been fine if my father had died then — if lightning had struck him, or the canoe gone down like a stone. But no, he waded ashore — the slut, too, and someone even gave her a blanket. It was my mother that was blamed, in a funny way. “Can’t you keep your husband home?” this girl’s father said. I remember that same summer some other woman saying to her, “You’d better keep your husband away from my daughter. I’m telling you for your own good, because my husband’s got a gun in the house.” Someone did say, “Oh, poor Mrs. Apostolesco!” but my mother only answered, “If you think that, then I’m poor for life.” That was only one of the things he did to her. I’m not sure if it was even the worst.
It was hard to say how long he had been looking at me. His lips were trying to form a word. I bent close and heard, “Sponge.”
“Did you say ‘sponge’? Is ‘sponge’ what you said?”
“Sponge,” he agreed. He made an effort: “Bad night last night. Awful. Wiped everything with my sponge — blood, spit. Need new sponge.”
There wasn’t a bed table, just a plastic bag that hung on the bedrail with his personal things in it. I got out the sponge. It needed to be thrown away, all right. I said, “What color?”
“Eh?”
“This,” I said, and held it up in front of him. “The new one. Any special color?”
“Blue.” His voice broke out of a whisper all at once. His eyes were mocking me, like a kid seeing how far he can go. I thought he would thank me now, but then I said to myself, You can’t expect anything; he’s a sick man, and he was always like this.
“Most people think it was pretty good of me to have come here,” I wanted to explain — not to boast or anything, but just for the sake of conversation. I was lonely there, and I had so much trouble understanding what anybody was saying.
“Bad night,” my father whispered. “Need sedation.”
“I know. I tried to tell the doctor. I guess he doesn’t understand my French.”
He moved his head. “Tip the nurses.”
“You don’t mean it!”
“Don’t make me talk.” He seemed to be using a reserve of breath. “At least twenty dollars. The ward girls less.”
I said, “Jesus God!” because this was new to me and I felt out of my depth. “They don’t bother much with you,” I said, talking myself into doing it. “Maybe you’re right. If I gave them a present, they’d look after you more. Wash you. Maybe they’d put a screen around you — you’d be more private then.”
“No, thanks,” my father said. “No screen. Thanks all the same.”
We had one more conversation after that. I’ve already said there were always women slopping around in the ward, in felt slippers, and bathrobes stained with medicine and tea. I came in and found one — quite young, this one was — combing my father’s hair. He could hardly lift his head from the pillow, and still she thought he was interesting. I thought, Kenny should see this.
“She’s been telling me,” my father gasped when the woman had left. “About herself. Three children by different men. Met a North African. He adopts the children, all three. Gives them his name. She has two more by him, boys. But he won’t put up with a sick woman. One day he just doesn’t come. She’s been a month in another place; now they’ve brought her here. Man’s gone. Left the children. They’ve been put in all different homes, she doesn’t know where. Five kids. Imagine.”
I thought, You left us. He had forgotten; he had just simply forgotten that he’d left his own.
“Well, we can’t do anything about her, can we?” I said. “She’ll collect them when she gets out of here.”
“If she gets out.”
“That’s no way to talk,” I said. “Look at the way she was talking and walking around …” I could not bring myself to say “and combing your hair.” “Look at how you are,” I said. “You’ve just told me this long story.”
“She’ll seem better, but she’ll get worse,” my father said. “She’s like me, getting worse. Do you think I don’t know what kind of ward I’m in? Every time they put the screen around a patient, it’s because he’s dying. If I had TB, like they tried to make me believe, I’d be in a TB hospital.”
“That just isn’t true,” I said.
“Can you swear I’ve got TB? You can’t.”
I said without hesitating, “You’ve got a violent kind of TB. They had no place else to put you except here. The ward might be crummy, but the medicine … the medical care …” He closed his eyes. “I’m looking you straight in the face,” I said, “and I swear you have this unusual kind of TB, and you’re almost cured.” I watched, without minding it now, a new kind of bug crawling along the base of the wall.
“Thanks, Billy,” said my father.
I really was scared. I had been waiting for something without knowing what it would mean. I can tell you how it was: It was like the end of the world.
“I didn’t realize you were worried,” I said. “You should of asked me right away.”
“I knew you wouldn’t lie to me,” my father said. “That’s why I wanted you, not the others.”
That was all. Not long after that, he couldn’t talk. He had deserted his whole family once, but I was the one he abandoned twice. When he died, a nurse said to me, “I am sorry.” It had no meaning, from her, yet only a few days before, it was all I thought I wanted to hear.