A Good Death by Gil Courtemanche Page A

school for two or three years, and everyone kept asking me why he was so backward, why he was so bad at skating or playing baseball, why he didn’t always understand questions that were put to him, and if I couldn’t duck the question I’d pronounce the fatal sentence, that my brother was a blue baby, he had a bad heart because he’d been deprived of oxygen at birth. I didn’t want him to be my brother, just as in the supermarket, as I walked behind my father, who was dressed like a beggar, I wished he wasn’t my father. I was ashamed of being my brother’s brother and my father’s son. I look over at Richard’s photo, at the timid smile playing at the edges of his thin lips, and I am ashamed. One day my mother told me that Richard was aware of his failings and that that knowledge was the greatest of his sufferings. That was when shame and remorse overcame me. I should have been his hero, the one who protected him, tolerated him, accepted his difference with generosity. But to be that person, I would have had to know who I was and be satisfied with it. I hated being my father’s son, hated being a member of his family, since the family was something he had created. When you feel small and insignificant, it’s easy to seek refuge in spite, which is the pride of the weak.
    “Yes, but what about Mother…” someone says.
    “Yes, but Dad…”
    I don’t quite know why I’m so insistent tonight on my father’s well-being and happiness. Normally our conversations about our parents’ happiness centre on that of my mother, as though my father’s happiness vanished forever with his diagnosis. Perhaps it’s because my father hardly ever talks anymore, and when he does he seems to be giving in, almost as though he’s trying to please us after so many years of arguing, grumbling and shouting. We know nothing of his desires, of his life—nothing. We make it up. My mother never hides anything from us. When she has indigestion, when she’s constipated, when she cries or feels sad or angry. But the longer my father lives, the less we know him. We are condemned to speculate about a human being, which is a dangerous exercise.
    “You should go over and talk to your brother. He looks sad. He seems to be somewhere else.”
    I find him hiding in the kitchen.
    “Everything all right?” I ask, steering him into a corner.
    “Yes, I’ve never been better in my life.” He hesitates. “I’m having an affair, I’m crazy in love for the first time in my life. But I don’t know what it is, with Mother I feel shy, as though she knows I’ve been cheating on my wife.”
    We’ve always known that we can keep no secrets from our mother.
    “Have a glass of wine and relax, Claude. That wasn’t what she thought. She thinks you’re unhappy.” But you’ll let her in on your secret soon enough, because lacking something—I don’t know what it is, maybe Dad—we vent ourselves on Mother, confide in her about our worst secrets, our most embarrassing weaknesses, we clamour for her help and understanding, her solicitude, her money, whatever we can get. Maybe that’s why she’s shrinking. With our wives and their lovers and our children and mistresses, it’s like we’re dumping fifty lives on her.
    On the walls of the family shrine everyone has his or her ex-voto, except my father. In the great hall we are all heroes, except him. When I asked my mother why there was no photograph of Dad on the wall, she didn’t hear me.

“ NOW CAN WE OPEN OUR PRESENTS? ” IT’S THE TRAGEDIENNE’S SON, THE ONE WHO EXASPERATES HIS MOTHER BECAUSE HE IS NOT doing well in school but amazes me with his gift for repartee and his sense of responsibility. When I ask him about his grades he pulls the universal adolescent face, which is a way of transforming embarrassment into a refusal to show any emotion at all. You’d think he was seeing the same doctor as my father. His name is William, in honour of Shakespeare. He’s standing in the doorway