The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [38]
I thought I could make her happy by coming home, but clearly haven’t. Maybe a nursing home would be better. I phoned Uncle Phil, who returned from Bermuda today, left a message. And a long e-mail.
December 27. Uncle Phil and Aunt Helen both e-mailed back, apologising for not being able to come up for a visit. They could put Mom on a waiting list at a home in Long Island if I liked. “A very good one,” said Aunt Helen. “Oyster Bay Manor, it’s called. Let me know.”
As I was changing the battery on the fire alarm, Uncle Phil phoned, saying that he had found a bed at the Babylon Beach House on Yacht Club Road. But it had to be filled this week. The cost: $780 a week. I said I would think about it, then called him back and said no. (We don’t have the money and I don’t want to do it anyway.) I explained to him that things were getting a lot better lately.
December 28. Phoned the Beaumont Health & Rehabilitative Centre in Outremont—$98 per day—therapy and medicines extra.
December 29. Did something rash this morning. After finding the top burners on the stove glowing red and a raw roast of lamb in the oven, I called Beaumont and told them we’re ready next time they have an opening. I’m running low on gas and patience. Can’t do anything more for her. With regard to her memory, I’m beginning to grasp the meaning of the word “irretrievable.” Time to let go. Besides, it could be six months or more before they have an opening.
At 5 on the nail they called back: they have an opening on January 2. In three days.
December 30. Mom’s been agitated all day. She knows something’s brewing, something cataclysmic. Ten minutes ago, at midnight, I opened her bedroom door to see if she had managed to calm down. A shaft of light crossed her sleeping form. I was about to close the door when I noticed something else, something scrawled on the tilted mirror of her dressing table. I tiptoed closer. There were two words, written in dark-red lipstick, the colour of drying blood: HELP ME.
December 31. Cancelled at Beaumont. It’ll be all right, I’ll find a way. For the first time in my life I feel clear. And unafraid. I know what I’ve got to do. At dawn I went downstairs, through the locked door, to my father.
Chapter 8
Henry & Noel Burun
By his late twenties, in Edinburgh, Noel’s father was a blazingly talented chemist. By his late thirties he was head of a pharmacology department in New York, with two dozen researchers working under him. When his company, the Swiss-based conglomerate Adventa, relocated from Long Island to a Montreal suburb for tax reasons, he was asked whether he would accept a transfer, at twice the pay. He would accept the transfer, he said, but at half the pay—as a drug rep. The company’s chief executive officer laughed, then recommended a psychiatrist, then threw up his hands. And thus Henry Burun ended up not combining chemicals for the betterment of the world, not devising new drugs to cure its maladies, but rather … selling them. A travelling pharmaceutical salesman. What does your father do? they’d ask Noel at school. My father sells drugs. And everyone would laugh.
At first Henry liked the new job, travelling from town to town in lower Quebec and upper New England, but eventually it ground him down trying to see doctors and pharmacists who had little time to see him. When he was granted his five minutes, he told the truth about the drugs—which ones were hyped, which ones had failed clinical trials, which ones had withdrawal problems or crippling side-effects. He was an abysmal salesman and he knew it. Which is why he drifted from company to company, let go in turn by Adventa, Pfizer, Merck Frosst and NovaPharm. So why didn’t he go back to the research lab, which would have rolled out the red carpet? Because he couldn’t take the stress, the responsibility