Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler [199]
Saul undertook to consult our mother. Before hanging up, all she could manage was, “Yes. That’s how it should be.”
Following the settling of his affairs, my father’s decline was precipitous. From an increasingly frequent inability to find the right word for the most commonplace objects, or to remember the names of those near and dear to him, he might waken unaware of where or who he was. Summoned again to Montreal, Kate, Saul, and I had another meeting with Dr. Herscovitch and the specialists. A pregnant Kate offered to have Barney move in with her, but the doctors cautioned that unfamiliar surroundings would only compound Barney’s difficulties. So, to begin with, Solange moved into the apartment on Sherbrooke Street with Barney. If he addressed her as Miriam, and denounced her as an ungrateful whore who had ruined his life, she continued to feed him and to wipe his chin with a napkin. When he dictated a letter to her, the words incoherent or mispronounced, jumbled phrases repeated, she promised to mail it at once. If he turned up at breakfast with his left arm in his right shirtsleeve, or his trousers back to front, she didn’t comment. Then he began to rant against his reflection in the mirror, taking the image to be somebody else’s, addressing it as Boogie, Kate, or Clara. Once, mistaking his own mirrored image for that of Terry McIver, he butted his head against it, and required twenty-two stitches in his scalp. So Kate, Saul, and I came to Montreal again.
Over Solange’s objections, on August 15, 1996, we had our father committed to the King David Nursing Home. Although he is now beyond recognizing anyone, his children included, we have not abandoned him. Kate comes once a week from Toronto. As luck would have it, she was playing Chinese checkers with Barney on an afternoon when Miriam appeared, Miriam, who had only recently recovered from a minor stroke. She and Kate had a fearful row and would be estranged for months. They weren’t even on speaking terms when Saul brought them together for a lunch in Toronto. “We’re still a family,” he said. “So behave yourselves. Both of you.” His gruff manner, so reminiscent of Barney’s, won them over. Saul visits the hospital frequently. Once, sending Barney’s building blocks flying, he hollered, “How could you let this happen to you, you bastard,” and broke down and wept. His visits are dreaded by the nurses in attendance. If he detects an egg stain on Barney’s dressing-gown, or bedsheets that don’t appear freshly laundered, he threatens mayhem. “Shit. Shit. Shit.” One afternoon, arriving to find the TV set turned to Oprah Winfrey, he yanked it off its perch and smashed it on the floor. Nurses came running. “This is my father’s room,” he shouted, “and he doesn’t watch such crap.”
My younger brother is the one who has inherited something of our mother’s beauty as well as our father’s hot temper. Between Barney and Saul it was always a gladiatorial contest, strength pitted against strength, neither one ever yielding an inch. Barney, who had secretly adored the teenage left-wing firebrand, and never tired of telling the story of the 18th of November Fifteen, later came to abhor his shift to the unforgiving right. All the same, he remained the favourite son, if only because he was the writer our father always longed to be. On the opening page of my father’s memoir he ventured that, violating a solemn pledge, he was scribbling a first book at an advanced age. This, like a good deal of what he went on to write, was not quite true. Going through Barney’s papers, I discovered several attempts, over the years, to write short stories. I also found the first act of a play and fifty pages of a novel. He was, as he claimed, a voracious reader, an admirer of stylists above all, from Edward Gibbon to A. J. Liebling. Flipping through his “Noter’s Write Book,” I saw that he had transcribed