The Fields of Grief. Giles Blunt

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       4

      ‘Do those shoes hurt?’

      Kelly Cardinal was sitting at the dining-room table, wrapping a framed photograph of her mother in bubble wrap. She wanted to take one to the funeral home to place beside the casket.

      Cardinal sat down in the chair opposite. Several days had passed, but he was still stunned, unable to take the world in. His daughter’s words hadn’t organized themselves into anything he could decipher. He had to ask her to repeat herself.

      ‘Those shoes you’re wearing,’ she said. ‘They look brand new. Are they pinching your feet?’

      ‘A little. I’ve only worn them once – to Dad’s funeral.’

      ‘That was two years ago.’

      ‘Oh, I love that picture.’

      Cardinal reached for the portrait of Catherine in working mode. Dressed in a yellow anorak, her hair wild with rain, she was burdened with two cameras – one round her neck, the other slung over her shoulder. She was looking exasperated. Cardinal remembered snapping the photo with the little point-and-shoot that remained the only photographic apparatus he had ever mastered. Catherine had indeed been exasperated with him, first because she was trying to work, and second because she knew what the rain was doing to her beautiful hair and didn’t want to be photographed. In dry weather her hair fell in soft cascades to her shoulders; when it was raining it went wild and frizzy, which pricked her vanity. But Cardinal loved her hair wild.

      ‘For a photographer, she sure hated getting her picture taken,’ he said.

      ‘Maybe we shouldn’t use it. She looks a little annoyed.’

      ‘No, no. Please. That’s Catherine doing what she loved.’

      Cardinal had at first resisted the idea of having a photograph; it had struck him as undignified, to say nothing of the fact that the sight of Catherine’s face tore his heart open.

      But Catherine thought in photographs. Come into a room when she was working and before you could open your mouth she had taken your picture. It was as if the camera were a protective mechanism that had evolved over the years solely to provide a defence for elusive, breakable people like her. She wasn’t a snob about photographs, either. She could be as ecstatic over a lucky snap of a street scene as over a series of images she had struggled with for months.

      Kelly put the wrapped picture into her bag. ‘Go and change your shoes. You don’t want to be standing around in shoes that don’t fit.’

      ‘They fit,’ Cardinal said. ‘They’re just not broken-in yet.’

      ‘Go on, Dad.’

      Cardinal went into the bedroom and opened the closet. He tried not to look at the half of it that contained Catherine’s clothes, but he couldn’t help himself. She mostly wore jeans and T-shirts or sweaters. She was the kind of woman, even approaching fifty, who still looked good in jeans and T-shirts. But there were small black dresses, some silky blouses, a camisole or two, mostly in the greys and blacks she had always preferred. ‘My governess colours,’ she called them.

      Cardinal pulled out the black shoes he wore every day and set about polishing them. The doorbell rang, and he heard Kelly thanking a neighbour who had brought food and condolences.

      When she came into the bedroom, Cardinal was embarrassed to realize he was kneeling on the floor in front of the closet, shoe brush in hand, motionless as a victim of Pompeii.

      ‘We’re going to have to leave pretty soon,’ Kelly said. ‘We have an hour to ourselves there before people start arriving.’

      ‘Uh-huh.’

      ‘Shoes, Dad. Shoes.’

      ‘Right.’

      Kelly sat on the edge of the bed behind him as Cardinal started brushing. He could see her reflection in the mirror on the closet door. She had his eyes, people always told him. But she had Catherine’s mouth, with tiny parentheses at the corners that grew when she smiled. And she would have Catherine’s hair too, if she let it grow out from the rather severe bob of the moment, with its single streak of mauve. She was more impatient than her mother, seemed to expect more from other people, who were always disappointing her, but perhaps that was just a matter of being young. She could be a harsh judge of herself, too, often to the point of tears, and not so long ago she had been a harsh judge of her father. But she had relented the last time Catherine had been admitted to hospital, and they had been getting along pretty well since then.

      ‘It’s bad enough for me,’ Kelly said, ‘but I really don’t understand how Mom could do this to you. All those years you stood by her when she was such a loony.’

      ‘She was a lot more than that, Kelly.’

      ‘I know, but all you had to go through! Looking after me – raising a little kid practically by yourself. And all the stuff you put up with from her. I remember one time – back when we were living in Toronto – you’d been building this really complicated cabinet, full of drawers and little doors. I think you’d been working on it for like a year or something, and one day you come home and she’s smashed it to pieces so she could burn it! She was on some trip about fire and creative destruction and some manic rap that made no sense at all, and she destroyed this thing you were creating with such devotion. How do you forgive something like that?’

      Cardinal was silent for a time. Finally he turned to look at his daughter. ‘Catherine never did anything I didn’t forgive.’

      ‘That’s because of who you are, not because of what she was. How could she not realize how lucky she was? How could she just throw it all away?’

      Kelly was crying now. Cardinal touched her shoulder and she leaned against him, hot tears soaking through his shirt the way her mother’s had so often done.