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Also by Russell Banks
Fiction
A Permanent Member of the Family
Lost Memory of Skin
The Reserve
The Darling
The Angel on the Roof
Cloudsplitter
Rule of the Bone
The Sweet Hereafter
Affliction
Success Stories
Continental Drift
The Relation of My Imprisonment
Trailerpark
The Book of Jamaica
The New World
Hamilton Stark
Family Life
Searching for Survivors
Nonfiction
Dreaming Up America
The Invisible Stranger (with Arturo Patten)
Voyager
Copyright © Russell Banks, 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.
FIRST EDITION
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Foregone / Russell Banks.
Names: Banks, Russell, 1940- author.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200372327 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200372351 |
ISBN 9781771963992 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771964005 (ebook)
Classification: LCC PS3552.A46 F67 2021 | DDC 813/.54—dc23
Cover designed by Zoe Norvell
Offset by Tetragon, London
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.
To Chase, the beloved
Recalling who I was, I see somebody else.
In memory the past becomes the present.
Who I was is somebody I love,
Yet only in a dream.
—Fernando Pessoa, The Past Becomes Present
1
Fife twists in the wheelchair and says to the woman who’s pushing it, I forget why I agreed to this. Tell me why I agreed to this.
It’s the first time he’s asked her. It’s not a question, it’s a light, self-mocking, self-pitying joke, and he says it in French, but she doesn’t seem to get it. She’s Haitian, in her mid-fifties, a little humourless, brusque and professional—exactly what he and Emma wanted in a nurse. Now he’s not so sure. Her name is Renée Jacques. She speaks English with reluctance and a French he understands with difficulty, although he’s supposedly fluent, at least in Quebecois.
She reaches over him and opens the bedroom door and eases the wheelchair over the threshold into the hallway. They pass the closed door to the adjacent bedroom that Emma has used for her office and for sleeping since Fife started staying awake all night with the sweats and chills. He wonders if she’s in there now. Hiding from Malcolm and his film crew. Hiding from her husband’s sickness. His dying.
If he could, he’d hide, too. He asks Renée again to tell him why he agreed to this.
He knows she thinks he’s only whining and doesn’t really want her to answer. She says, Monsieur Fife agreed to make the interview because he’s famous for something to do with cinema, and famous people are required to make interviews. She says, They have already been here an hour setting up their lights and moving furniture and covering all the living room windows with black cloth. I hope they plan to put everything back the way it was before they depart from here, she adds.
Fife asks if she’s sure Madame Fife—her name is Emma Flynn, but he calls her Madame Fife—is still at home. She didn’t go out without telling me, did she? He lowers his voice as if talking to himself and says in English, I fucking need her here. She’s the only reason I agreed to this goddamn thing. If she isn’t there while I do it, I’m going to shut it down before we start. You know what I mean? he asks the nurse.
She doesn’t answer. Just keeps pushing the wheelchair slowly down the long, dark, narrow hallway.
He tells her that what he plans to say today he doesn’t want to say twice and probably won’t have the chance to say again anyhow.
Renée Jacques is nearly six feet tall and square-shouldered, very dark, with high, prominent cheekbones and eyes set wide in her face. She reminds him of someone he knew many years ago, but can’t remember who. Fife likes the sheen cast by her smooth brown skin. She is a home-care day nurse and doesn’t have to wear a uniform on the job unless the client requests it. Emma, when she hired Renée, had specified no uniform, please, my husband does not want a uniformed nurse, but Renée showed up in crisp whites anyhow. It spooked Fife at first, but after ten days he has gotten used to it. Also, his condition is worse now than when she first arrived. He’s weaker and more addled—only intermittently, but with increasing frequency—and is less able to pretend that he is only temporarily disabled, out of whack, recovering from a curable illness. The nurse’s uniform doesn’t bother him as much now. They’re ready to add a night nurse, and this time Emma has not specified, please, no uniform.
Renée pushes the wheelchair across the kitchen, and as they pass through the breakfast room, Fife flashes a glance out the tall, narrow twenty-paned window and down at the black domed tops of umbrellas fighting the wind on Sherbrooke. Large flakes of soft snow are mixed into the rain, and a slick grey slush covers the sidewalks. Traffic sloshes soundlessly past. Gusts of wind beat in silence against the thick walls of the fortresslike grey cut-stone building. The large, rambling apartment takes up the entire southeast half of the third floor. The archdiocese of Montreal used the building to house the nuns of the Little Franciscan Sisters of Mary in the 1890s and sold it in the 1960s to a developer who converted it into a dozen high-ceilinged six- and seven-room luxury apartments.
Renée says that Madame Fife took one look at the weather and said she was glad to stay home today. Madame Fife is working in her office on her computer. She asked Renée to tell Fife that she will come out to see him when the film people start the interview.
Yeah, well, I can’t do this if she’s not here. You know what I mean? he asks again.
Renée says, since he will in reality be talking to a movie camera and the man doing the interview and the people who will someday watch the movie on television, can’t he pretend that he’s talking to his wife, the same as if she was there in reality?
He says, You talk too much.
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