When I’d confessed to my father that I’d kept all his papers, I hadn’t gone into detail. But before we actually detached Vera from the dock and pointed her north, there was one last thing I’d had to check off my list: “sort F’s records.” The cardboard box marked The Trial was too big to stow on Vera. We needed every available nook and cranny for legitimate provisions.
So I had to winnow. I was interested in the effect the experience had had on my father — on all of his family — not in establishing right or wrong, fairness or injustice. That would be the criterion. I decided to begin at the end. After all, that’s why the story was in a box: it had ended badly. This wasn’t a whodunit. I already knew how the story ended; what I desperately wanted to find out was why it had ended that way, and why my father had never recovered.
A single photocopy said it all: the order in the Supreme Court of British Columbia, dated 1987, for a settlement of $1.5 million. Liability was not admitted by any of the defendants, who were never heard in court. Attached to the order with a rusted paper clip was a nice letter from the Canadian Medical Protective Association — my father’s insurers — wishing him “many pleasant retirement years.” End of story . . . except that it wasn’t.
I spent a few minutes with the clutch of newspaper stories that came out during the trial itself, but the idea of my father not responding to phone calls about a patient, of offering to “find another baby” for the distraught mother seemed as ridiculous as it had in 1987. Facts were what I needed, not newspaper stories. Having reasoned my way soberly to this point, I took the media stuff on the trip anyway; those articles were like the gory illustrations in a book that you just couldn’t help looking at.
Next came the “patient records.” There were several slim folders, one to a patient, and then Billy’s gargantuan file. I knew why Billy’s file was there, but who were those others? So many people had passed through my father’s hands, but for some reason, I had seven of them in front of me — a curious little collection of hangers-on. I had no idea who most of these people were, but I figured they might tell me something about Dr. Harvey. Welcome aboard.
That left Billy. What I did with his file was up to me, but I knew I had to watch myself. Condemnation or vindication were not only irrelevant, they were probably risky as well; if I wasn’t careful, I’d be looking at a lawsuit of my own.
Billy’s file could be subdivided into categories, which I arranged more or less on a scale of believability. If one assumed that things written on a form were believable, then the six inches of “hospital records” had to come first. Here was the official record of every encounter between Billy and the medical system in British Columbia, from the moment of his birth to the trial almost ten years later. Of those hospital records, nursing records took up the most space. Each day of Billy’s life presented a cluster of boxes to be filled in, for intake and output, temperature, blood pressure, medications. Many had sections for the nurse’s comments, and these were often filled in by two or three different people. This child passed through many hands. The doctors themselves contributed history sheets, consultation records, and progress notes. Laboratory reports summarized tests on blood, urine, and cerebrospinal fluid. Actual operations were described in consent to operation forms, the doctor’s own report of operation, and anaesthesia records. Much of the doctors’ reports was narrative, and they ran to several pages, often in the dry, laconic style of an airline pilot. Most were in the first person, perhaps because they were dictated into a machine. “I presume this is a hydrocephalus,” said my father to his Dictaphone, right at the start.
Once out of the hospital, Billy moved to a special-needs clinic, yielding five years’ worth of psychological evaluations, physiotherapy, and social work notes. The sense of urgency running through the hospital records was gone now; instead, it looked like a methodical charting of one boy’s progress through a smoothly running system.
All in all, the official records comprised a formidable brick of paper. Some poor soul had spent hours over a photocopying machine, dizzy with ozone, hand-feeding flimsy pink carbons. Without knowing anything about the case, you could start at one end and emerge, days later, at the other, cross-eyed but theoretically knowing as much as anybody about what happened to Billy. You could also come to about a hundred different conclusions as to why, and I imagined the legal staff for the plaintiff and for my father doing just that, forcing themselves through the smudgy, often illegible pages, staggering out for coffee breaks, then diving back in to look for weaknesses. Bulky or not, the records had to come along on Vera.
Next, and decidedly lower on the believability scale, were the expert opinions. The opinions were also written by doctors, but they were based not on their own actions, but on the pile of photocopied hospital records I’d just gone through. The doctors who wrote these opinions had read exactly the same material I would read on Vera, except that they had been paid for it. Some, it turned out, had been selective; one hadn’t bothered with the nurses’ records at all. All the opinions were written long after the events took place. I decided, after a quick look, that the six expert opinions about Billy (three on each side of the case) would be an interesting read, like one of those novels where the events are retold through several points of view.
The opinions fed into the next category, the “examinations for discovery.” These are when plaintiff and defendant sit down with the opposing lawyer for a good grilling while their own lawyer hovers, ready to dart to the rescue at the first sign of weakness. Finding weakness is what examinations are about, and cases are won or lost in discovery. There were six examinations in the pile. My father’s was by far the thickest. I packed them all.
Next were the trial transcripts. What people said in the trial was probably even less believable than the examinations, and these records were a long way from the black and white of the hospital records. Thinner too, because this trial only lasted a few days before a deal was struck and everyone went home. I could bring the trial transcripts along without sinking Vera.
The final category was my father’s writings about the trial. Unlike all the others, this one was open-ended. It started soon after the writ of summons was served, and he added to it until he could no longer operate a computer or even a pen. It was to be the story of his experience, a diary expanded into a book, a “stream of thought record” describing his encounter with what he called “the armoured tanks of the law.” The project was never finished, fading out like his handwriting and finally wandering off the page. I selected the latest draft and added it to the “take” pile which, I now realized, dwarfed what I would leave behind.
In all, I had about ten inches of paper to go cruising with us. My father’s life, wedged under the floorboards. But there was one folder that didn’t seem to sort with anything else, portentously labelled “Truth.” I decided to get truth out of the way before we left. There was only one thing in there, but it said everything about my father’s values. It was a long essay called “The Search for Truth,” by Justice Marvin E. Frankel, a bulldog who seized truth in his jaws and never let go. It must have been heady reading for my father, and his orange highlighter had squeaked across nearly every page. Here was the way to trump incompetence, criticism, and calumny: truth was what mattered!
Except that, according to Justice Frankel, an advocate’s main loyalty was not to truth but to his client. So, the conventional skills of adversaries include the techniques of truth-bending. Few lawyers, Frankel wrote, believe their clients tell them the unvarnished truth.
For my father, this was just what the doctor ordered. Frankel’s description of judges as “passive moderators” viewing the case from a “peak of Olympian ignorance” must have made his heart turn; it certainly brought his orange highlighter out. Maybe this was what he had been up to, all those bleak years after the trial, downstairs in his study with the curtains drawn and the heat cranked up, pouncing on high-minded sentiments as though they could somehow justify what had happened to him. Psychologists talk about “confirmation bias” when people seek out information that confirms what they already believe. Well, here was the textbook example, and it didn’t do him much good.
Hospital records, media stories, expert opinions, and the unimportance of truth: these were the murky waters that closed over my father’s head. All that was left of his naïveté was a page of Four Seasons Hotel notepaper floating on the surface. On it was written, “Did A.T. believe me? Would anyone have believed me?” A.T. was Allan Thackray, his lawyer, who we will meet later. My father probably wrote these words on the way back to Victoria, while the skyline of Vancouver and his aborted trial receded in the widening V of the ferry’s wake. They weren’t the words of someone who had been planning to lie.