Valma Brenton seemed like an interesting person. You meet a lot of interesting people when you travel by boat, but I was already finding out that you meet just as many when you decide to tackle a medical detective story. Allan Thackray, for example. His name was everywhere in my father’s files. It was as though this one man had taken it upon himself to infiltrate every hole, however small, in the great smelly cheese that was the case against my father. Mr. Thackray was, strictly speaking, the Canadian Medical Protective Association’s lawyer, but my father thought of him as his. Very soon, so did I.
I wasn’t prepared to cut Mr. Thackray much slack at first, not when all I knew of the case was its out-of-court outcome that I couldn’t help thinking of as capitulation. If anything, the Allan Thackray I had in my mind as I began to trawl through the files was the generic barrister, an argument for hire, the kind my father habitually railed at. But there was way too much of Allan Thackray here for anyone to maintain that kind of image for long. His letters to my father were unfailingly respectful, but this was clearly the kind of respect that reflects immediately upon itself; it was obvious to anyone reading the letters, and especially to my father, that Thackray had done his medical homework on every relevant aspect of the case. He knew where the strengths and weaknesses lay, and he expected my father to grasp their significance. And so the two men developed a correspondence of careful camaraderie, at first only by letter but later, when the examination for discovery rolled around, in person.
I began to form my own image. The preliminary letters I imagined written by a big man, suited, in a corner office high above Vancouver’s photogenic harbour, aware of his power yet careful with his wording, the way a big man is careful of his bulk. When they met, I imagined, the lawyer would have towered over his client, and it was easy to picture him covering the room where the examination for discovery was held, a football lineman ready to protect his quarterback with a lightning dive for the knees of the opposition.
When Thackray went into court alone on the first day of the trial, the transcripts only strengthened that impression: clearing the way, sizing up tacklers in an instant, derailing or demolishing them, and then offering a sportsmanlike hand to get them back on their feet. And when it suddenly became clear that the star player would never take the field, my imaginary Thackray played the part of the benched player to perfection. In the final exchange of letters to my father, he produced a good impersonation of an athlete being interviewed after a loss: we gave it a 110 percent, the coach did what he thought best, time to move on.
It took me the better part of a fine afternoon in Westview to get through everything with Mr. Thackray’s name on it. When I’d finished, I knew that his neat summing-up couldn’t be the end of the story. The greatest athlete-diplomats leave you marvelling at their restraint while more than ever convinced that the real story is more complicated, and so it was with Thackray’s exit from the case and from our lives. When I closed the last file folders of his correspondence, I resolved to track Mr. Thackray down.
What prodded me to do this was the thorn of a single sentence buried in a spiral-bound exercise book containing twenty pages of my father’s handwritten account of the trial, all of it struck through with thick pencil, as though he had opened it one day, shaken his head, and leafed methodically from beginning to end, slashing diagonally as he went. Bottom left to top right, a backhanding of bad memories, like shooing a persistent fly. The sentence that sent me looking for Mr. Thackray was this: “My lawyer’s letters do not reflect his warm personality; they are polite, brief, cold, and to the point.”
Warm personality? I knew it! I had to wait until our trip was over to follow up on my hunch, but this is how it turned out.
Allan Thackray wasn’t hard to find. He was still in Vancouver, a retired judge. We met at a cavernous Japanese restaurant across from the Vancouver courthouse. I was early and nervous. Stuffed in my back pocket was a five-page memo Thackray had sent me a week or so before. He’d written thirty-two numbered paragraphs, starting with Billy’s birth records and ending with a reminder that settlements do not constitute an admission of liability (“Indeed, to the contrary”). Here was the case in thirty-two devastating nutshells, which I suppose I could simply have asked for before I dove into the mass of records and testimony. Here were the first stirrings of fear for a gravely disadvantaged child; the first operation; the infection; the second operation; the emergency procedure to reduce pressure on the child’s brain; the final operation; the gradual dying down of incident and record until the knock on the seventy-four-year-old surgeon’s door so many years later.
It was a hell of a story, and I wanted more than ever to meet its author. But there were no lineman-sized retired barristers standing to attention in front of the garish colour photos of sushi and donburi, so I did a quick circuit of the block, teeming at the noon-hour with men and women in suits. One of them had to be Thackray, look for a big guy, perhaps moving slowly from an old rugby injury. But when I re-approached the restaurant ten minutes later, there was still nobody there — unless you counted the little man in a moss-coloured suit who’d been there the first time. This time, he stuck out a hand and grinned.
So much for imagination. Allan Thackray would not have towered over my father; he was even shorter than me. The green suit had a stain or two on the lapels, and the purple tie might have been chosen by someone who was colour-blind, the way my father was.
“My wife insisted I dress properly,” he laughed, pumping my right hand with short, knobby fingers and touching my left elbow, gently propelling me inside. “Come on, let’s eat, but you’re going to have to do the ordering. I don’t know a thing about Japanese food.”
We sat in a gloomy corner and ordered gluey tempura and colourless raw tuna from a binder of greasy plastic pictures. The food was bad, but I was too busy revising my image of Allan Thackray to care. I caught him peering at me and wondered, was he looking for similarities between father and son? Were there that many to find?
“You know, I often wished I’d been a doctor. Are you surprised?”
“Nothing surprises me anymore,” I said.
“I almost was, too, but I had a terrible education. My father ran a men’s clothing store in Moose Jaw, and when the new government came to power — I was sixteen — my dad refused to live under what he called a communist regime. He took me out of high school, and we moved to Victoria. I worked in the store.”
“So . . . what happened?”
Mr. Thackray grinned, something he did easily and often. He didn’t look stern, or watchful, or respectful, or even ironic, any of the things I’d imagined. He looked twinkly.
“I got a girlfriend. She thought a man should be professional.”
“So, you got married?”
“Nope. She married a doctor. I went back to school and became a lawyer. But I ended up defending a lot of doctors, some of them multiple times.”
“All malpractice suits?”
“Oh, yes. There was one neurosurgeon we dreaded, the guy was so combative in court you had to be really careful.”
“Like my father might have been?”
But Thackray wasn’t ready to go there yet. “Maybe,” he said. “One thing I learned in all those trials: maybe we lawyers weren’t sensitive enough to the effects of these lawsuits on some of the doctors. There was one surgeon, we brought him to Vancouver for the trial, put him up in the Four Seasons.”
“Like my parents.”
Thackray ignored that one too. I realized that he was doing most of the talking. That was okay, but there had to be a reason. Maybe he was working up to something.
“I waited for this surgeon in court, and he never showed up. Finally, we called his family. They got to him just before he went out the window.”
Thackray looked down at his sushi. He wasn’t twinkling now.
“Well, my father never got over it, you know. I think he kept preparing for the trial, in his mind. Until he died.”
Thackray looked as though he had just bitten into something unpleasant. He spoke slowly and carefully, as though he had gone over the words already in his mind. Judging from the memo in my back pocket, I knew he had.
“In the two years I knew your father, he aged a lot. I think now that we should have pushed harder. Your father did very well in the examination. Perhaps we . . . should not have settled.”
I thought about the memo in my pocket. The pressure-relieving procedure done on Billy, properly called a lumbar puncture but better known as a spinal tap, had proved indefensible. But my father hadn’t done the lumbar puncture; Billy’s pediatrician, Dr. Beamish, had. Whether my father had authorized it, nobody would ever know, but in his discussions with Thackray he’d had “great difficulty defending the puncture.” So, if he had taken the stand, he might have cleared his own name, but the suit would probably still have been lost, and a colleague fingered. This case was full of rocks and hard places. Whatever my grasp of this exquisite dilemma, Thackray’s was probably better.
“I just wanted to tell you that,” he said.
I didn’t push it. We went quickly over the main points. The judge trying the case was known to frequently find for the plaintiff, including in cases involving children. The settlement was big — “huge, even today.” But the real question, the one that had got me started on that rotting cardboard box in the first place, clearly still eluded both of us: “Why couldn’t my father get over it?”
Mr. Thackray paid for the meal, although it would have been fairer if we had shared. As we got up, he said, “One thing has always puzzled me about your father.”
“Only one?”
He laughed. “I’ve always wondered, why did he stay in Victoria? With the kind of training he had? I just don’t get it.”
It was a fair question. His training in Chicago was second to none, so why confine himself to a minor Canadian city? It was as puzzling as his inability to get over the trial. If I solved one problem, I’d probably have the answer to the other; for now, they were both unanswerable.
“I’m working on that one,” I said. We stood up, and Thackray winced. “Knee replacement,” he said. Back in the bright sunlight of Hornby Street, he told me one final story. “I did some lecturing, you know. To doctors about lawsuits — how to avoid them, how to prepare for them. One time I came over to Victoria to talk to a group of doctors but, you know, it was the oddest thing. They couldn’t seem to pay attention. I finally concluded it was something to do with Victoria.”
He had the twinkle back. I sensed a punch line.
“They kept looking at a bunch of snapshots, really getting their heads together over them.”
“Girlfriends,” I asked, playing along. “Houses?”
“Sailboats,” said Thackray. “I couldn’t believe it. But then, I’m from Moose Jaw.” He grabbed my hand, touched my elbow again, and was gone, limping back toward the courthouse.