Stones

  Bud was a man who could deliver a two-hour tirade on almost any given subject, drop of a hat. His diatribes were unencumbered by reason and as time went on they became his only mode of conversation. Increasingly, the focus of these harangues was reality itself—though Bud, of course, would never have called it that. He would have called it the great conspiracy or the universal menace or the sinister intruder. Reality was anything—or anyone—that challenged the Tightness of Bud’s withdrawal from society. It was, of course, a psychotic withdrawal—but those who loved him, myself included, refused to see that. To us, Bud must not be thought of as insane—because he must always be seen as someone who, having gone astray, could return to the fold through an act of will. Our mother was always saying this in Bud’s behalf. His reason will bring him back to us, she’d say. He only needs to come to his senses and exercise his will. But alcohol—if not the alcoholic—repudiates the will. It has no tolerance for anything connected with the self.

  This way, as Bud went all the way downhill and finally took up residence at the bottom, I, too, became less tolerant of reality. I only mean where Bud was concerned. Reality was so predictable. It operated entirely without imagination. It might as well have been a textbook. Besides which, it had such bad taste. Imagine Thomas Cable, Jr.—Bud—ensconced in his suit and tie—his shoes highly polished—his hair and his fingernails impeccable—sitting in his darkened living-room at noon with his bottles of Beaujolais at hand—raising his glass to his lips and his gaze upon the flickering screen that has become his only companion. “What are you watching?” I ask, when I telephone.

  “Roger Ramjet,” Bud informs me. “Don’t interrupt me, now. I’ll talk to you later on.” And he hangs up. This was Bud, aged fifty-four.

  When Katie died, I had to tell him over and over she was gone and in the grave. He simply did not believe me. Not because he was obtuse—(perhaps the alcohol was obtuse)—but because the image of Katie dead could not be made to fit into what he thought was reality. Death was not proper. It couldn’t just walk in like that and take up residence. Bud had not accounted for it in his scheme of things.

  He refused to come to the lying-in. He said it was a put-up job.

  “You’re lying, Neil,” he said to me. “You’re only trying to protect her because you’ve always taken her side in everything…”

  “No, Bud,” I’d say to him—(we had this conversation at least four times)—“Katie had cancer and died.”

  He would look at me then, as if I was a traitor. Katie wasn’t dead. She wasn’t even sick.

  We had known she was dying for over eight months. The cancer was in her lung. Bud had not even gone to visit her in the hospital. He claimed she was “away somewhere.”

  “She’s having an affair,” he insisted.

  The grave, I’m afraid, meant nothing to Bud. It was just another of Katie’s wild excuses to ignore his needs.

  Here’s what happened—and the only reason I’m telling you this is that I want to put it on record. I want someone to know. The way some lives work out, you’d think the King of Cliches came in to write them. Bud’s life was like that: shabby; squalid, like Katie’s death.

  I am an actor—and because I am an actor, I have had—for almost forty years—contact with well-written lives. When an actor throws up his hands and cannot manage to play a role, his response is always going to be: I can’t do this because I don’t believe it.

  Katie’s death and the nominal “end” of my brother’s life were like that. No one in their right mind could make them believable. The facts and the images are too banal for words. Embarrassing.

  The worst of Katie’s condition came when she needed oxygen and nursing care at home. All this was seen as an inconvenience of monumental proportions from Bud’s point of view.

  A nurse, whose name was Sandra Ossington, came to give Katie baths and to oversee the regimen of pills and the supply of oxygen. Sometimes, when very drunk, Bud wouldn’t let Ms Ossington come in. He’d lock the door and shout at her: go away! Katie then had to barricade herself in her room for fear that Bud would come in with a cigarette when she had the oxygen turned on.

  The canisters of oxygen would be delivered by a man on schedule. He would always take away the expended tank and replace it with the new. He did this by rote according to a list that was given to him every day. He could hardly afford the time to say hello, let alone the time to argue about his right to enter the house. Once, when Katie was desperate to breathe and the oxygen man arrived, she had to phone the police in order to have Bud restrained. In the meantime, the oxygen man was forced to continue on his rounds because his other clients’ needs were just the same as Katie’s: a matter of life and death.

  After that incident, Katie left Bud and their rented house in Scarborough and came down into Forest Hill, where she stayed with her cousin Jean. Jean gave me a call and said: “we’re going to have to take Katie in. She can’t go home again.”

  So a system was devised whereby—to all intents and purposes—Katie played the fugitive, “hiding out” first with Jean and then with me and then with a friend from work whose name was Gloria.

  Gloria hated Bud with alarming vehemence. She once went up and threatened to burn the house down if Bud didn’t let her in to collect Katie’s things. This was about six weeks before Katie died and I guess we were all on Gloria’s side and cheered her on. That’s when Bud decided his wife was having an affair. He even went so far as to say she was having the affair with Gloria. Gloria had to be restrained.

  The image of Bud and Gloria shouting on the lawn is funny, I suppose. Or it would be—perhaps—if Katie hadn’t been so badly off. Shortly thereafter, she went into Sunnybrook Hospital—called every day for Bud—never heard from him and died.

  The last time I saw Katie myself before she went into Sunnybrook, she was standing off in the distance, unaware that I was there. This was at the White Rose Nursery out in Unionville, and I had gone to buy a fern or something. Katie always made a garden wherever she lived with Bud and she left behind about a dozen perfect flower beds filled with her need for sanity and peace. I guess that day in Unionville she was making up for the fact she would never walk in a garden again. I saw the look of loss on her face and turned around and walked away. It was unbearable: the loneliness.

  I’ve already said Bud wouldn’t come to the lying-in. A mass of others came instead—and that was the one good moment in all of this, the moment when all the twenty years of tension fell away and all the friends came through the door of the funeral home to say goodbye. I’m glad I was there; it gave me back—in that moment—something tangible of hope.

  The burial itself was sad. Bud stood shaking when he saw the coffin. That was the moment when it dawned on him: Katie is dead and gone forever. He sat down hard on the ground beside the grave and his mouth fell open when he tried to speak. I had to go and lift him up and lead him away because, when he started to move, he seemed to want to follow her.

  Later, though—and who am I to say it was not a blessing?—Bud denied being present at the funeral. How could he have been present when it hadn’t even happened?

  The phone rang twice every day all summer after that—(Katie died in May). By the fall, Bud was calling up at four o’clock in the morning, begging me to say he wasn’t going to die. Somehow, if someone said it, he seemed to be genuinely reassured. Afterwards, he would natter on about what meals he’d eaten, where he’d been and who he’d seen.

  The food was all-important. He could talk for hours about it.

  I don’t know why I believed him—but, like a fool, I did. He was so convincing, the way he told about the cuts of meat he would buy at Loblaws and the way he had cooked the potatoes—and all the herbs he used when making up the salad. His meals were almost poems to listen to. He loved the names of all the vegetables: broccoli, spinach, zucchini and he’d tell me which wines he’d drunk and he complained of all the prices.

  He also had a lot to say about the friends who had begu
n to return his calls—the houses he had been in and the restaurants downtown. His social life was picking up. He was a normal human being again.

  That was the trigger, of course: the word again. Bud had never been a normal human being in all his adult life.

  Just about then it was getting on for a year since Katie’s death and it was nearly May, Bud’s birthday month. The phone calls—now that I wanted them—stopped. I had thought, since he was going about in the world, I would take him out for supper. Bud and I had not been out together for a century.

  I waited for a week before I began the process in reverse. I called him three and four times a day. He didn’t answer. I telephoned our mother.

  I didn’t want to alarm her. I tried to say it diffidently, laughing because he was leaving me alone for a change. But I was interested…had she heard from Bud?

  No.

  Her story was more or less the same as mine. She had been receiving the same reports: the food—the outings—the friends. Now, for several days, there had been nothing.

  “I’ll go around and see what’s happening,” I told her. Finally, I was worried. Very.

  Looking at the house, I knew there was something wrong. Some of the lights were on. The car was parked in the driveway. I turned around and went away. I couldn’t bear the thought of finding him dead.

  I got the police and they had to break down the door. I waited on the lawn while they called for an ambulance. Someone barely alive had been found inside the house: almost a skeleton.

  The corridor was dark and filled with beds and between the beds a stream of people, most of them hospital staff, was flowing—it seemed—almost entirely in my direction. All of them were blank-eyed; busy. At the nursing station they had said that I would find my brother down this corridor somewhere near the end.

  I was walking towards a patch of vivid sunlight streaming through a window—almost blinding because the corridor was like a cave. There were three or four wheelchairs parked with their backs to me—facing this window—draped with rugs and ostensibly containing passengers, although I could see no evidence of this. There weren’t any legs or arms or the backs of any heads that I could see.

  “I’m looking for my brother, Thomas Cable,” I said to an orderly who had just been arranging the wheelchairs in the sunlight.

  The orderly said, without inflection: “you’re standing right beside him. That’s his chair you have your hand on.”

  I walked around and stood in front of Bud.

  Before me sat a man of almost eighty—whose mouth was hanging open and whose hands lay helpless in his lap—whose legs were so weak and thin they lay against each other, caved in against the side of the chair. His neck would barely support his head and his chin was resting on his collar-bone. I knelt before this man and called him Bud and told him who I was.

  He stirred—uneasy—and he tried to move his hands and lift his chin, but he couldn’t. I did that for him.

  Looking back at me, he struggled desperately to understand why I should know his name and why he should think I seemed to be someone he knew. But he could not manage this. I was a stranger to him.

  “How old is he?” the orderly asked.

  “He’s fifty-six,” I said.

  The orderly grunted.

  “He can’t have eaten in almost a month,” he said.

  I smiled. I thought of all the meals that Bud had described—and all the restaurants and all the wine.

  “He’s been on a liquid diet,” I said—as lightly as I could.

  The doctor—a knowledgeable, pleasant little man whose sunny disposition somewhat threw me until I got to know him better—told me that Bud was suffering from something called Korsakov’s syndrome. In short, this means that a part of Bud’s brain has been destroyed and that, while he might live for many years, he will never recover the whole of his past and never quite understand who he is. He will know his name and he will recognize, from time to time, some specific incident from his life. Otherwise, Bud is locked—and will remain so—in a time zone from which he cannot escape.

  He knows me, now, but every time I visit, he behaves as if we were at home and children and he wants to know where I have been.

  You look so old, he will say to me. Why have you grown so much older than me?

  I do not respond to this. I simply acknowledge that I am aberrant and Bud accepts this fact as being sufficient explanation. Sometimes, he smiles. I guess he knows what aberrant means.

  He wants to see our parents and I have to tell him—every visit—that our mother has been ill and cannot come, just now, to see him. And then I have to tell him—every visit—that our father is dead and Bud is not surprised, but merely curious that his father could die and Bud not know it. He must have died while I was away, he will say. And I say nothing.

  Every visit, too, he asks me where he is and who these people are. I do not tell him he is in a clinic for the aged because this would distress him. He does not know that he will not be leaving. He recognizes it must be some kind of rest home because the nurses and the doctors come and go and, time to time, somebody dies and is taken away.

  On one occasion he asks me; “am I mad?”

  I tell him: “no. You have been ill and we don’t know why”

  “Will you come and see me?”

  “Yes.”

  “I get very lonely here,” he says. “But the food is good.” I smile.

  He looks at me, crooked—Bud grown old, a very old man—and he says: “I’m missing someone, Neil. And I don’t know who it is.”

  I hold his hand. He is greatly distressed and he rides along the edge of what remains of memory—peering out into the dark and trying desperately to see who might be there and to remember.

  “Never mind,” I tell him. “Honestly; no one is missing. Everything’s fine.”

  “Where has our father gone?” he says.

  I tell him. And I leave.

  Every so often—maybe fifteen times a year—we will hold this meeting until he dies.

  The day the police broke down the door and found him, I went with him to the hospital and gave him up in all his blankets and sheets to the doctors and the nurses in the Emergency Ward. Being told there was nothing to be done but wait and see if he would survive, I decided to return and await the news in Bud and Katie’s rented house.

  When I got there, it was nearing four o’clock in the afternoon and Katie’s black cat was sitting on the porch. His name was Bubastis and we had met before.

  Bubastis, however, would not come into the house. He seemed confused and wary and he kept his distance. I supposed he must be after food—he looked so thin—and I guessed that Bud had given up feeding him. Perhaps he had been coming for days to sit on the porch in the hopes that Bud would open the door and put down his meal.

  I wished then, fervently, that we could talk to animals. How else could I explain to this beast that Katie was dead and Bud was probably going to die—as I thought that afternoon—and I would be more than happy to take Bubastis back with me to my house…

  But no. He would have to wonder, perhaps forever, where all his people had gone and why they had deserted him. He went away and sat in the yard and I went into the house.

  I opened a can of cat food and put the whole thing, dumped on a plate, onto the porch and called him.

  “Bubastis!”

  He did not come while I was standing there, but he must have come in the next half-hour because when I returned to the porch both the cat and all the food had disappeared.

  Inside the house I found a wilderness of bottles and glasses and a maze of unmade beds, undusted furniture and piled-up cardboard boxes.

  I looked and saw where Bud had been found. He had been lying—dressed in slacks and shirt, bare-footed, facing Katie’s bed—in the hallway between their rooms. His own dark bedroom was behind him and the sheets on his bed were grey with age. On Katie’s pillow, a note was pinned with a safety-pin and the note was in Katie’s hand and it said: Bud—Hone
y—I am going now and I won’t be back. I’ve left a hundred dollars hidden in the hall closet. Look in the usual place and it will be there. I’m scared, right now, and I guess the thing is, soon I’m going to die. I wish you would come and see me. I will always love you, honey. Thank you for everything. Katie.

  She could only have written this before she made her escape to her cousin Jean, and that had been over a year ago. In all that time, the note had remained on Katie’s pillow—and her bed exactly as she left it: the coverlet thrown back—the nightdress abandoned—her glass of water spilled and fallen to the floor.

  In the kitchen, the smell was that of an abattoir; all the raw meat was so far gone it was alive with maggots. Bags of potatoes were sprouting in the corner. The sink was filled with dishes and the only evidence of food Bud might have truly eaten was a brace of opened and empty cans of Habitant pea soup. Four or five wide, flat boxes indicated that pizza had been delivered—but none of it had been removed and all of it was now a rotted sequence of red-and-yellow wheels.

  Bud must have had some temper tantrums. Several dishes were broken—cigarettes and ash had been scattered over the floor and a case of beer appeared to have been struck a dozen blows by a hammer.

  The living-room, which had once been charming under Katie’s hand, was the wilderness already described of opened and unopened liquor bottles and glasses. Ashtrays were sprouting mould. A mouse had drowned in a vase of flowers. The telephone sat beside Bud’s chair—unanswered all those days—and the television set was playing one of the soaps. I turned it off.

  There by the telephone, neatly printed in Bud’s distinctive hand, were Teddy Hartley’s telephone number, the date—April 2—and Dorothy Parker’s poem.

  I hoped, in that moment, for everyone’s sake—especially his own—that Bud would die. That was the option he had chosen. And I had screwed it up by sending in the police.