Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [197]
“What if there wasn’t time?”
“In all these years.”
“The remains were found not far from where Daddy used to have that lean-to he once told us about. They found broken glass nearby. From a bottle of Scotch.”
“So what?”
“Kate, we know how you feel, but —”
“They were both drunk. He could have killed him accidentally. I’ll give you that much.”
“He never stinted on any of us, and we owe him the benefit of the doubt. So you believe what you want, but if I live to be a hundred, I’ll still know he was innocent. Furthermore, I happen to know that he never gave up the idea that Boogie was alive somewhere, and would turn up one day.”
“Well, he has now, hasn’t he?”
We had gathered at the cottage to come to a decision about Barney’s incomplete manuscript, which we had all read; and also to salvage whatever mementos that appealed to us, and to close the cottage, which we had already put up for sale. The omens weren’t encouraging. The real-estate agent said, “The day after the referendum, I had calls from forty-two people out here wanting to sell their properties, and I have yet to see an offer for any one of them.”
This wasn’t our first family conclave, or our second, since we had learned that Barney was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. At the time, Saul had reminded us that our grandmother had also been stricken, so we were all at risk.
For starters, said Saul, we shouldn’t use underarm deodorants that have a zinc base, or cook in aluminum pots, which are also suspect. A subscriber to both The Lancet and The New England Journal of Medicine, he went on to point out that nicotine had recently been adjudged a brain stimulant, and that smokers were less likely to be afflicted.
“Only because they die of lung cancer first,” said Kate, “so you can put that cigar out right now.”
“Period?”
“Period,” said Kate, falling into Saul’s arms, sobbing brokenly.
The Alzheimer diagnosis had been confirmed four months earlier, at a meeting in the offices of Totally Unnecessary Productions, on April 18, 1996, with Dr. Mortimer Herscovitch, and two specialists in attendance, as well as Solange and Chantal Renault, and of course Kate, Saul, and me. Saul went on to Toronto by train to tell Miriam. Reduced to weeping by the news, she phoned Barney as soon as she could trust her voice, and asked if she could come to see him.
“I don’t think I could handle it.”
“Please, Barney.”
“No.”
But he started to shave again every morning, cut back on his alcohol and cigar intake, and jumped whenever the phone or the doorbell rang. Solange phoned Miriam. “Come as soon as you can,” she said.
“But he said no.”
“He won’t even go out for a short walk in case you should turn up and find him out.”
Miriam arrived the next morning, and the two of them went to lunch at the Ritz, where the maître d’ didn’t help matters, saying, “Why, I haven’t seen you two together here for years. Just like old times, isn’t it?”
Later Miriam told Saul: “I could see that the menu baffled him, and he asked me to order for both of us. But, to begin with, he was lighthearted. Even playful. I’m looking forward to games of hide-and-go-seek, and spin-the-bottle, with the other loonybins in whatever hospital I end up in. Maybe they’ll have tricycles for us. Bubble gum. Triple-scoop ice creams. Stop it, I said. He ordered champagne, but what he actually said to the waiter was bring us a bottle of, you know, with the bubbles, what we used to have here, and the waiter laughed, thinking he was trying to be witty, and I was so insulted for him. When my husband, I wanted to say, intends to be witty, he is witty.
“Wouldn’t it have been grand, Barney said, if I had agreed to fly to Paris with him on his wedding night. We recalled the good times, our salad days, and he promised not to be sick as he had been at our first lunch together. Although come to think of it, he said, it would make for a certain symmetry, wouldn’t it? But this needn’t be our last lunch together, I said. We can be friends