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I kept myself from doing so, but just barely.
So it seems I was not entirely convinced of that safety.
Not long ago I got another letter. This was forwarded from the college where I taught before I retired. I found it waiting when I returned from a trip to Patagonia. (I have become a hardy traveller.) It was over a month old.
A typed letter-a fact for which the writer immediately apologized.
“My handwriting is lamentable,” he wrote, and went on to introduce himself as the husband of “your old childhood buddy, Charlene.” He said that he was sorry, very sorry, to send me bad news. Charlene was in Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto. Her cancer had begun in the lungs and spread to the liver. She had, regrettably, been a lifelong smoker. She had only a short time left to live. She had not spoken of me very often, but when she did, over the years, it was always with delight in my remarkable accomplishments. He knew how much she valued me and now at the end of her life she seemed very keen to see me. She had asked him to get hold of me. It may be that childhood memories mean the most, he said. Childhood affections. Strength like no other.
Well, she is probably dead by now, I thought.
But if she was-this is how I worked things out-if she was, I would run no risk in going to the hospital and inquiring. Then my conscience or whatever you wanted to call it would be clear. I could write him a note saying that unfortunately I had been away, but had come as soon as I could.
No. Better not a note. He might show up in my life, thanking me. The word “buddy” made me uncomfortable. So in a different way did “remarkable accomplishments.”
Princess Margaret Hospital is only a few blocks away from my apartment building. On a su
At the main desk I discovered that Charlene was still alive. When asked if I wanted to see her I could hardly say no.
I went up in the elevator still thinking that I might be able to turn away before I found the nurses’ station on her floor. Or that I might make a simple U-turn, taking the next elevator down. The receptionist at the main desk downstairs would never notice my leaving. As a matter of fact she would not have noticed my leaving the moment she had turned her attention to the next person in line, and even if she had noticed, what would it have mattered?
I would have been ashamed, I suppose. Not ashamed at my lack of feeling so much as my lack of fortitude.
I stopped at the nurses’ station and was given the number of the room.
It was a private room, quite a small room, with no impressive apparatus or flowers or balloons. At first I could not see Charlene. A nurse was bending over the bed in which there seemed to be a mound of bedclothes but no visible person. The enlarged liver, I thought, and wished I had run while I could.
The nurse straightened up, turned, and smiled at me. She was a plump brown woman who spoke in a soft beguiling voice that might have meant she came from the West Indies.
“You are the Marlin,” she said.
Something in the word seemed to delight her.
“She was so wanting for you to come. You can come closer.”
I obeyed, and looked down at a bloated body and a sharp ruined face, a chicken’s neck for which the hospital gown was a mile too wide. A frizz of hair-still brown-about a quarter of an inch long on her scalp. No sign of Charlene.
I had seen the faces of dying people before. The faces of my mother and father, even the face of the man I had been afraid to love. I was not surprised.
“She is sleeping now,” said the nurse. “She was so hoping you would come.”
“She’s not unconscious?”
“No. But she sleeps.”
Yes, I saw it now, there was a sign of Charlene. What was it? Maybe a twitch, that confident playful tucking away of a corner of her mouth.
The nurse was speaking to me in her soft happy voice. “I don’t know if she would recognize you,” she said. “But she hoped you would come. There is something for you.”
“Will she wake up?”
A shrug. “We have to give her injections often for the pain.”
She was opening the bedside table.
“Here. This. She told me to give it to you if it was too late for her. She did not want her husband to give it. Now you are here, she would be glad.”
A sealed envelope with my name on it, printed in shaky capital letters.
“Not her husband,” the nurse said, with a twinkle, then a broadening smile. Did she scent something illicit, a women’s secret, an old love?
“Come back tomorrow,” she said. “Who knows? I will tell her if it is possible.”
I read the note as soon as I got down to the lobby. Charlene had managed to write in an almost normal script, not wildly as in the sprawling letters on the envelope. Of course she might have written the note first and put it in the envelope, then sealed the envelope and put it by, thinking she would get to hand it to me herself. Only later would she see a need to put my name on it.
Marlene. I am writing this in case I get too far gone to speak. Please do what I ask you. Please go to Guelph and go to the cathedral and ask for Father Hofstrader. Our Lady of Perpetual Help Cathedral. It is so big you don’t need the name. Father Hofstrader. He will know what to do. This I ca
C. That must be her husband. He doesn’t know. Of course he doesn’t.
Father Hofstrader.
Nothing about me.
I was free to crumple this up and throw it away once I got out into the street. And so I did, I threw the envelope away and let the wind sweep it into the gutter on University Avenue. Then I realized the note was not in the envelope; it was still in my pocket.
I would never go to the hospital again. And I would never go to Guelph.
Kit was her husband’s name. Now I remembered. They went sailing. Christopher. Kit. Christopher. C.
When I got back to my apartment building I found myself taking the elevator down to the garage, not up to my apartment. Dressed just as I was I got into my car and drove out onto the street, and began to head towards the Gardiner Expressway.
The Gardiner Expressway, Highway 427, Highway 401. It was rush hour now, a bad time to get out of the city. I hate this sort of driving, I don’t do it often enough to be confident. There was under half a tank of gas, and what was more, I had to go to the bathroom. Around Milton, I thought, I could pull off the highway and fill up on gas and use the toilet and reconsider. At present I could do nothing but what I was doing, heading north, then heading west.
I didn’t get off. I passed the Mississauga exit, and the Milton exit. I saw a highway sign telling me how many kilometers to Guelph, and I translated that roughly into miles in my head, as I always have to do, and I figured the gas would hold out. The excuse I made to myself for not stopping was that the sun would be getting lower and more troublesome, now that we were leaving the haze that lies over the city even on the finest day.
At the first stop after I took the Guelph turnoff I got out and walked to the ladies’ washroom with stiff trembling legs. Afterwards I filled the tank with gas and asked, when I paid, for directions to the cathedral. The directions were not very clear but I was told that it was on a big hill and I could find it from anywhere in the heart of town.
Of course that was not true, though I could see it from almost anywhere. A collection of delicate spires rising from four fine towers. A beautiful building where I had expected only a grand one. It was grand too, of course, a grand dominating cathedral for such a relatively small city (though someone told me later it was not actually a cathedral).