When Oliver was a boy, he used to wander with a stick through the family orchard, whacking at the high branches to knock down the best fruit. This is the image that came to mind whenever people asked about his writing. With pen in hand, he meandered through his thoughts, taking swipes at the best ideas, and if they were ripe, they dropped fresh to the page. Oliver knew he had only two novels left in him. As he knocked down those last ideas, he would polish the fruits and give them to his children, one for Jane, and the other for Tarzan. Heh, heh, heh. With one called Jane, it was inevitable that he should sometimes call the other one Tarzan, especially when the boy was so rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes all the time.
Oliver missed that first doctor’s appointment, the one where the doctor would tell him what he already knew. He missed the appointment because he took the southbound train instead of the northbound train and was halfway downtown before he noticed his mistake. He would have taken his car but had misplaced the keys. At his second appointment, which was really his first, he sat on that chaise longue you find in every doctor’s office, the one with the crinkly white paper on top, and swung his legs back and forth like he was a child. The doctor asked if he had meant to wear two different shoes. He said he hadn’t noticed and asked what earthly difference it made that his shoes didn’t match.
On Saturday evening, Oliver summoned his children to dine with him at the castle. He knew that he lived in a bungalow, but he liked to call it his castle. The meal went wonderfully well even though he forgot the salt, and when it was done, Oliver pushed back his chair and announced to Josh and to Jane that it was time to play Lear and divvy up his kingdom. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Ever since Mom died—He would have gone on with his rant, but Jane told him to shut up and listen for once. Oliver smiled and explained that he had been to the doctor’s and the doctor confirmed for him what he had long suspected: he was beginning a journey down a gentle slope into a world of cognitive befuddlement. Josh said: It’s just Dad and more of his crap. Oliver countered by producing brochures he had taken from the doctor’s office. There were brochures about the changes they could expect, and there were brochures about support services available in the community.
Jane cried. She had long known something was wrong, but used Dad’s grief to explain away the lapses. If he got lost, she said he was lost in his memories with Mom. It was romantic, not clinical. If he forgot names or words, she said he had more important things pressing in on his mind. And if he grew angry or bewildered, she said he was an artist; the usual rules don’t apply to great spirits like his. But when her father laid the brochures on the table, she set aside the excuses. It was time to be honest about his condition. Oh, but Josh was angry. He refused to hear any of it. Before he could trust anything Dad said, he would call the doctor himself.
On Monday morning, while Josh was speaking to the doctor, Oliver began the first of his final novels. Each day was the same. He wrote longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typed his work on a computer Jane had helped him buy two years ago. Every evening, Jane stopped by to make sure her father had saved his work and that it had been backed up. This novel was too precious to lose.
Once a week, Jane took her father to visit an occupational therapist and together they worked on strategies to push back the encroaching beast. The occupational therapist suggested a memory box. They would decorate a cardboard box with fancy papers and ribbons, then they would fill it with letters and photos and knick knacks that were meaningful to father. Every day they would sit for a while with the memory box, and as they pulled objects from the box, they would reminisce and tell stories. The objects in the box would anchor powerful associations. In effect, the objects would trap memories that might otherwise drift away.
Oliver wasn’t interested in making a memory box. The occupational therapist worried that this lack of interest signalled a greater deterioration than the doctor had suspected. But Jane thought differently. Oliver was anxious to write. He wanted to whack that fruit onto the page before it turned to rot. As he viewed it, the only use for a memory box was to hold bushels of rotten fruit. Jane didn’t press him to make the memory box. Instead, she spent more time helping him to finish the first novel.
The novel took seven weeks to write. Jane was amazed at how quickly it went. The idea for the novel had been ripening so long in her father’s brain that it was mostly immune to this slow creep of forgetfulness. Writing it wasn’t so much the invention of fresh material as it was the recollection of an old friend from years gone by.
Jane printed a copy of the manuscript and placed it in a box. She took her father to a card shop where he chose a black and white photo of a boy on the front and a blank space on the inside. He wrote “To Josh. With Love. Dad” and taped it to the box. Jane went to Josh’s apartment but he refused to take the manuscript. It was more of Dad’s crap.
But Dad wrote it especially for you.
Bullshit, Josh said.
Sure he did.
I bet there’s another copy off to his agent.
He can’t remember his agent’s name.
Doesn’t matter. The damage is done.
Damage? What are you talking about?
Mining our lives—the intimate details—all for fun and profit.
Oh, Josh.
Even Mom’s death, for crissake.
That was a memoir.
Memoir? Is that what you call it?
When Jane set the box back on her father’s kitchen table, the old man smiled at it. Jane couldn’t read the smile. Did he understand what the return of the box meant?
I’d like a cigar now.
Oliver wasn’t supposed to smoke cigars, but there was still a stash in a humidor hidden underneath the guest bed where Jane now spent most of her nights. Inside the humidor was the last of the Montecristos Oliver had been working through when he finally agreed to stop. What the hell, and Jane fetched a Montecristo. She led her father onto the side porch and clipped and lit the cigar and took a few long drags herself before passing it to her father. Wait here, and she went inside where she poured out two tumblers each with three fingers of Scotch. Returning to the porch, she found her father rocking wistfully from side to side.
He’s my favourite son, you know.
He’s your only son.
I love him.
Oliver fell asleep with the cigar stuck to his lower lip. Jane stubbed out the cigar, then nudged her father up from his chair and inside to bed. She thought she might go back to the porch and finish her father’s cigar. On the way, she passed the box on the kitchen table. She had never read the novel straight through. She had only read it piecemeal as she helped to assemble it. Taking it up, she read until far into the next morning.
Jane couldn’t tell if the novel was any good. Critics looked favourably on her father’s works. They were literary. They were weighty. Although he had never won any major prizes, his work was regarded as solid and reliable. This novel read like all the others, so she presumed it, too, was solid and reliable. The plot drew the reader in like a gracious host. The voice was consistent and engaging. And the characters were full-bodied like the Montecristos and the Scotch. Even so, Jane had expected the novel to have more of Josh in it, or to address him in a more personal way. If the novel was for Josh, if it was crafted out of love, shouldn’t it read more like a memoir? or like an allegory of a father/son relationship? the tale of a dog and a pup, say?
The novel told the story of an ad executive approaching retirement who fears that the most he can say for himself is that he has devoted his life to the telling of lies. Once, he was an idealist. He joined demonstrations for the environment and marched for peace, but his interest in such things flagged as his career gobbled up his free time. Now, the aging ad executive finds himself haunted by an incident when he was a young father. He had a son named James who was rambunctious, jumping on the good furniture and breaking dishes. Exasperated, the young man struck the boy with the back of his hand and sent him howling to his room. In the days and weeks following this incident, the father grew morose and cynical. Mostly, he grew cynical about his own nature. All that marching for peace was hypocrisy. For his part, James forgot the incident. But memory is a funny thing. What we forget with our minds we sometimes remember in other ways. James seemed to remember the incident with a bitterness he carried into all his relationships.
Jane woke to the sound of banging at the front door and a woman’s voice halloo halloo. Jane started from bed—ten o’clock, oh damn—and cursed herself for reading late into the next morning. It was the neighbour three doors down, standing in the front hall and holding Oliver’s hand. Oliver had wandered off in his slippers and bathrobe. When he first woke up, there was no one in the kitchen, so he opened the front door, thinking it was the refrigerator. The neighbour found him rooting through her garbage cans looking for oranges.
Jane made her father a proper breakfast while he waited at the kitchen table and stared at the box that sat open across from him.
I read your novel last night.
Eh?
The book you wrote for Josh.
Josh.
Oliver drifted away. Because he was remembering less and less of recent times, Jane presumed that he had drifted into the world he once inhabited as a young man, or even as a child, maybe the orchard on the farm where he grew up.
Dad?
Eh?
You were going to write two novels.
I was?
One for Josh, and one for me.
Yes. Yes I was.
After breakfast, Oliver began the second novel. Jane sat him at his desk before a pad of foolscap. He took up his pen and, turning to her, said: My masterpiece. Jane was skeptical. The words didn’t flow as they had for the first. The ideas for this novel came from seeds he had sown later, and so they had less time to take root in his mind. Now, his ideas were as sparse as scrub in a desert. Sometimes, after finishing one phrase, he would stare out the window for thirty minutes before starting the next. Sometimes he merely copied a phrase he had already set down. Jane did her best to cross out the repetitions, to prod her father to write more, to keep his days as regimented as when he wrote the first novel, writing longhand on foolscap until mid-afternoon, then copy typing until supper. As the days proceeded, there was less and less to copy type.
The writing itself was odd. Oliver enjoyed periods of great clarity when he whipped off a page or two of cogent prose in a style that hearkened to his early days. But these periods were interrupted, and with increasing frequency, by episodes of disorganization that ran from top to bottom, skewering everything: theme, structure, syntax, even spelling. During these periods, his writing was a blethering mess. The contrast was unsettling to read.
After eight weeks, Oliver had written nearly a hundred pages of mostly unreadable nonsense. In the last several days, he had produced only a few sentences of material and all of it struck Jane as infantile. As with the writing, so with the rest of his life. He dozed more, became restless and argumentative, walked in his sleep, ate sparingly, and although he mostly knew who Jane was, he sometimes mistook her for his late wife, Jane’s mother. The nursing help that came to the house suggested perhaps the time had come to move Oliver into a residence where he could have round-the-clock support. Jane was a grown woman now, and wanted to be mature about the matter, but there was a part of her that resisted the decision, not because of guilt, but for a reason more childish. Josh had his novel; Jane wanted hers. She wanted to force her father to sit at his desk and finish what he had promised to do. She didn’t want a hundred-page record of a man’s last senile rantings; she wanted something with structure and form, with meaning and art. It wasn’t fair. What made things worse was that Josh rejected his gift. Somewhere in that mashed-up brain was a second novel—her father had said so himself—as fully formed as the first. But Jane was afraid she would never read it.
When they moved Oliver into the Oak Ridge Rest Home, Jane took a few things for his room, familiar items so he wouldn’t feel alienated and alone, pictures for his wall, photos for his night table. She also brought the manuscript in a box which she set on the desk, and beside it she set her father’s favourite pen and a fresh pad of foolscap. She understood that her father could no longer write, but it seemed somehow necessary to set out these materials. Necessary both for him and for her.
Oliver lived another year in the residence. Jane visited as often as she could. Every visit was the same. After she had kissed her father hello, she would lift the lid from the box to see if he had written anything new.
When Oliver died, the administrator of the residence arranged for Jane to gather his personal effects from his room. The staff had already boxed most of his things and had stacked the boxes on the desk. When Jane arrived, she experience a momentary flash of panic when she thought the manuscript had gone missing, but there it was, shoved to the back against the wall. As always, Jane removed the lid from the box and looked at the hundred or so sheets of foolscap. She drew out the ream and riffled the pages. She had hoped her novel would be the masterpiece, the culmination of a life’s work. The first time she had taken up this ream, in the days before she moved her father into the residence, she had tried to persuade herself that this was indeed a masterpiece. That explained why it was so different from everything that had gone before. It was expressionist ultra postmodern something-or-other. It was the very latest of the very latest. It was the manifesto for a movement as yet unnamed. Now, all she could see in it was the jibber jabber of a failing mind.
Jane returned the ream to its box and put the lid in place. She passed the box to the woman who had let her into the room: I don’t need this.
The woman dropped the box into the garbage bin.
Taking up her father’s pen, Jane slipped it into her purse. She could use it for cheques and grocery lists.