Alice Munros Best

thing,” I said. “Don’t worry. If they’re going to charge you extra, they tell you about it.”
    “That’s likely it,” he said. “They wouldn’t want those doohickeys set up in the wards. I guess I’m covered for that kind of thing.”
    I said I was sure he was.
    He had wires taped to his chest. A small screen hung over his head. On the screen a bright jagged line was continually being written. The writing was accompanied by a nervous electronic beeping. The behavior of his heart was on display. I tried to ignore it. It seemed to me that paying such close attention – in fact, dramatizing what ought to be a most secret activity – was asking for trouble. Anything exposed that way was apt to flare up and go crazy.
    My father did not seem to mind. He said they had him on tranquillizers. You know, he said, the happy pills. He did seem calm and optimistic.
    It had been a different story the night before. When I brought him into the hospital, to the emergency room, he had been pale and close-mouthed. He had opened the car door and stood up and said quietly, “Maybe you better get me one of those wheelchairs.” He used the voice he always used in a crisis. Once, our chimney caught on fire; it was on a Sunday afternoon and I was in the dining room pinning together a dress I was making. He came in and said in that same matter-of-fact, warningvoice, “Janet. Do you know where there’s some baking powder?” He wanted it to throw on the fire. Afterwards he said, “I guess it was your fault – sewing on Sunday.”
    I had to wait for over an hour in the emergency waiting room. They summoned a heart specialist who was in the hospital, a young man. He called me out into the hall and explained to me that one of the valves of my father’s heart had deteriorated so badly that there ought to be an immediate operation.
    I asked him what would happen otherwise.
    “He’d have to stay in bed,” the doctor said.
    “How long?”
    “Maybe three months.”
    “I meant, how long would he live?”
    “That’s what I meant too,” the doctor said.
    I went to see my father. He was sitting up in bed in a curtained-off corner. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” he said. “Did he tell you about the valve?”
    “It’s not as bad as it could be,” I said. Then I repeated, even exaggerated, anything hopeful the doctor had said. “You’re not in any immediate danger. Your physical condition is good, otherwise.”
    “Otherwise,” said my father gloomily.
    I was tired from the drive – all the way up to Dalgleish, to get him, and back to Toronto since noon – and worried about getting the rented car back on time, and irritated by an article I had been reading in a magazine in the waiting room. It was about another writer, a woman younger, better-looking, probably more talented than I am. I had been in England for two months and so I had not seen this article before, but it crossed my mind while I was reading that my father would have. I could hear him saying, Well, I didn’t see anything about you in
Maclean’s.
And if he had read something about me he would say, Well, I didn’t think too much of that write-up. His tone would be humorous and indulgent but would produce in me a familiar dreariness of spirit. The message I got from him was simple: Fame must be striven for, then apologized for. Getting or not getting it, you will be to blame.
    I was not surprised by the doctor’s news. I was prepared to hear something of the sort and was pleased with myself for taking it calmly, justas I would be pleased with myself for dressing a wound or looking down from the frail balcony of a high building. I thought, Yes, it’s time; there has to be something, here it is. I did not feel any of the protest I would have felt twenty, even ten, years before. When I saw from my father’s face that he felt it – that refusal leapt up in him as readily as if he had been thirty or forty years younger – my heart hardened, and I spoke with a kind of badgering cheerfulness. “Otherwise is plenty,” I said.
    THE NEXT DAY he was himself again.
    That was how I would have put it. He said it appeared to him now that the young fellow, the doctor, might have been a bit too eager to operate. “A bit knife-happy,” he said. He was both mocking and showing off the hospital slang. He said that another doctor had examined him, an older man, and had given it as his opinion that rest and medication might do the trick.
    I didn’t ask what