as in H,
or dealers doing sap of the moon plant,
crack and smack. I used to dial a vial
myself,
a little digital digitalis,
the speed I dropped
absorbing the absence
in the air
with a light so rare
it baked the shadow of despair
on a wall that wasn’t there.
God almighty, it was a time
in fields of asphodel...
In the early morning hours, after our friends had sung a last song around the piano and had gone home and C. Jane had gone to bed and the dogs were asleep, I stood on the upstairs back porch staring down into the darkness of the lane, the dark split by a shaft of light from the new high-beam lamp on the garage. The two thieves had come up on to the porch out of that darkness to break and enter into our lives, but as I stood there staring at the light I remembered my childhood and how at night when the light from a kitchen door fell across an alleyway, I’d crouch on one side of it – as if I were a mysterious traveller – and then I’d leap through the light and go on my way unseen, unscathed. The year had been like that light; we had leapt through it and with our secret selves intact we were now travelling on.
II
What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.
—JOHN BERRYMAN, The Dream Songs
THE BLACK QUEEN
Hughes and McCrae were fastidious men who took pride in their old colonial house, the clean simple lines and stucco walls and the painted pale-blue picket fence. They were surrounded by houses converted into small warehouses, trucking yards where houses had been torn down, and along the street a school filled with foreign children, but they didn’t mind. It gave them an embattled sense of holding on to something important, a tattered remnant of good taste in an area of waste overrun by rootless olive-skinned children.
McCrae wore his hair a little too long now that he was going grey, and while Hughes, with his clipped moustache, seemed to be a serious man intent only on his work, which was costume design, McCrae sported Cuban heels, and lacquered his nails. When they’d met ten years ago Hughes had said, “You keep walking around like that and you’ll need somebody to keep you from getting poked in the eye.” McCrae did all the cooking and drove the car.
But they were not getting along these days. Hughes blamed his bursitis, but they were both silently unsettled by how old they had suddenly become, how loose in the thighs, and their feet, when they were showering in the morning, seemed bonier, the toes longer, the nails yellow and hard. What they wanted was tenderness, to be able to yield almost tearfully, full of a pity for themselves that would not be belittled or laughed at, and when they stood alone in their separate bedrooms they wanted that tenderness from each other. But when they were having their bedtime tea in the kitchen, as they had done for years, using lovely green and white Limoges cups, if one touched the other’s hand then suddenly they both withdrew into an unspoken, smiling aloofness, as if some line of privacy had been crossed. Neither could bear their thinning wrists and the little pouches of darkening flesh under the chin. They spoke of being with younger people and even joked slyly about bringing a young man home, but that seemed such a betrayal of everything they had believed had set them apart from others, everything they believed had kept them together, that they sulked and nettled away at each other, and though nothing had apparently changed in their lives, they were always on edge, Hughes more than McCrae.
One of their pleasures was collecting stamps, rare and mint-perfect, centred, balanced perforations, and no creases or smudges on the gum. Their collection, carefully mounted in a large leather-bound blue book with little plastic windows for each year per page, was worth several thousand dollars. They had passed many pleasant evenings together on the Directoire settee arranging the old ochre- and carmine-coloured stamps. They agreed there was something almost sensual about holding a perfectly preserved piece of the past, unsullied, as if everything didn’t have to change, didn’t have to end up swamped by decline and decay. They disapproved of the new stamps and dismissed them as crude and wouldn’t have them in their book. The pages for the recent years remained empty and they liked that; the emptiness was their statement about themselves and their values, and Hughes, holding a stamp up into the light between his tweezers, would say, “None of that rough trade for us.”
One afternoon they went down to the philatelic shops around Adelaide and Richmond Streets and saw a stamp they had been after for a long time, a large and elegant black stamp of Queen Victoria in her widow’s weeds. It was rare and expensive, a dead-letter stamp from the turn of the century. They stood side by side over the glass counter-case, admiring it, their hands spread on the glass, but when McCrae, the overhead fluorescent light catching his lacquered nails, said, “Well, I certainly would like that little black sweetheart,” the owner, who had sold stamps to them for several years, looked up and smirked, and Hughes suddenly snorted, “You old queen. I mean, why don’t you just quit wearing those goddamn Cuban heels, eh? I mean, why not?” He walked out leaving McCrae embarrassed and hurt, and when the owner said, “So what was wrong?” McCrae cried, “Screw you,” and strutted out.
Through the rest of the week they were deferential around the house, offering each other every consideration, trying to avoid any squabble before Mother’s Day at the end of the week when they were going to hold their annual supper for friends, three other male couples. Over the years it had been an elegant, slightly mocking evening that often ended bittersweetly and left them feeling close, comforting each other.
McCrae worked all Sunday afternoon in the kitchen, and through the window he could see the crabapple tree in bloom and he thought how in previous years he would have begun planning to put down some jelly in the old pressed glass jars they kept in the cellar, but instead, head down, he went on stuffing and tying the pork loin roast. Then in the early evening he heard Hughes at the door, and there was laughter from the front room and someone cried out, “What do you do with an elephant who has three balls on him?… You don’t know, silly? Well, you walk him and pitch to the giraffe,” and there were howls of laughter and the clinking of glasses. It had been the same every year, eight men sitting down to a fine supper with expensive wines, the table set with their best silver under the antique carved wooden candelabra.
Having prepared all the raw vegetables, the cauliflower and carrots, the avocados and miniature corns-on-the-cob, and placed porcelain bowls of homemade dip in the centre of a pewter tray, McCrae stared at his reflection for a moment in the window over the kitchen sink and then he took a plastic slipcase out of the knives-and-forks drawer. The case contained the dead-letter stamp. He licked it all over and pasted it on his forehead and then slipped on the jacket of his charcoal-brown crushed velvet suit, took hold of the tray, and stepped out into the front room.
The other men, sitting in a circle around the coffee table, looked up and one of them giggled. Hughes cried, “Oh, my God.” McCrae, as if nothing were the matter, said, “My dears, time for the crudités.” He was in his silk stocking feet, and as he passed the tray around he winked at Hughes who sat staring at the black queen.
WITHOUT SHAME
Only one thing is more tragic than suffering,
and that is the life of a happy man.
—ALBERT CAMUS
Alice Kopff and her brother, Lyle, owned a bakery shop. He was thirty-six, she was thirty-three. He baked the breads. She was the pastry chef, a pale, plain woman who was so constantly bright-eyed and ebullient that Lyle said, “Sometimes I think you must be one of those happiness flashers for Jesus.”
“Not likely,” she laughed.
“But even after the funeral…”
Two years earlier, their mother
and father, who had opened the Kopff & Kopff Bakery Shoppe after coming to Toronto from Dresden, had died of smoke inhalation. A fire that had broken out behind the ovens had crawled quickly across the floor, trapping them in the kitchen. They had suffered severe burns to the face. Their coffins had been closed. During the funeral mass, Lyle, arms folded, holding on to himself, had said, “It is incredible to me that our mother and father who, as youngsters, survived the wartime firestorming of Dresden, who had then made of their life…not fire but bread…should here, among us, nonetheless die of fire…”
Alice, veiled and dressed in black, had wept in her pew as if she were inconsolable, yet after the service, standing out in the sunlight on the church porch, she had lifted her veil and looked delighted as she took hold of every hand extended to her. Lyle thought she had lost her mind.
The eager young parish priest, Father Dowd, was disarmed by what he thought was her avoidance of the vanities of grief and whispered to her, “I’m glad that you…”
“Yes,” she’d called out, “a gladness…”
That night, over a supper of cold meats, Lyle had asked, “What came over you?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean, nothing?”
“Nothing. Nothing’s nothing.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes, it is, plain and simple.”
“I just wondered,” he had said mournfully, “how, with both Mother and Father fresh in the ground, you could be so happy?”
Crossing her knife and fork on her plate, she said:
As I was going out one day
My head fell off and rolled away.
When I saw that it was gone
I picked it up and put it on.
Then Alice got pregnant. No one knew who the father was. She would give no name. Lyle was furious. “The shame.” He pounded the granite countertop beside the cash register with his fist: “This is a complete betrayal of everything Mother and Father stood for.”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe not.”
“Maybe yes. And who’ll look after the child?”
“There’ll be no problem,” she said.
She bought an old black wicker pram at a thrift store. She wheeled it, full of freshly cut flowers, up and down the street, to and from the shop.
“I think I’ll call the child Happy,” she said. “If it’s a girl, she can be a dancer, and if it’s a boy, he can play second base for the Yankees – Happy Kopff at second base.”
“Happy’s not a name,” Lyle said.
“You could try being happy yourself,” she said.
“I am happy. Who says I’m not? However, I’m no fool.”
“Meaning I am,” she said.
She folded her hands across her stomach, and then with a pouting, playful little smile, she said again, “There’ll be no problem.”
“Of course there’s a problem.”
“No, there’s not.”
“It’s awful, it really is, you’re without shame.”
When she told Father Dowd that she was pregnant, but there was no problem, he said, “No, no, there is certainly a problem, a problem that requires at least some regret, some weeping.”
“You mean confession?”
“At least.”
She said she would not go to confession, for she didn’t like confession, but promised Father Dowd that she would say an Act of Contrition alone in her room. “I’ll put penance to bed with me,” she said, smiling. And for four days she went without lunch and for four days she did not put flowers in the pram, and, when she said hello to neighbours passing in the street or to customers in the shop, she did so with a contrite pout. But then one morning she appeared at the shop with a little red tear painted under each of her eyes, like a doll’s tears, and she stood in the shop kitchen delighted to be laughing again, through her painted tears, tears that by the end of the day, because of the intense heat from the ovens, had run in streaks down her cheeks.
“You look goddamn insane,” Lyle said.
She shrugged and said, “Don’t be silly, I’m happy as a lark,” and she turned on the radio to listen to the baseball game while she worked. On the way home she bought two large bouquets of flowers for the black wicker pram. She did not, however, wheel it up and down the street. “That’ll come soon enough,” she said.
When she was taken to hospital and went into labour, she was three weeks early. It was a breech birth, the boy child coming out feet first, dead.
She overheard Father Dowd say to Lyle, “The child’s soul has gone to limbo.”
At the undertaker’s, she told the priest, “He’s right here in my heart. My heart’s alive in him.”
One week after the burial, she came into the bakery in the morning, her long hair tied in a single thick braid. She was wearing a smock that was baby blue. She said she was going to come to work wearing her baby-blue smock every day, like she was going to wear her tears. She laughed a shy little laugh. Lyle said sternly, “Why not wear normal white? Wipe the slate clean.”
By closing hour at the end of that week, when the kitchen and counter staff were convinced she was going to be as easygoing and cheerful as ever, as Lyle stood with his arms buried up to his elbows in a vat of flour, they circled around her and rapped their pastry brushes, spoons, and even a rolling pin on the granite counter and gave her a clap of hands.
She was so moved by the applause that she untied her braid, letting her hair hang loose. Then, once she was at home, she wheeled the pram out to the centre of the front lawn and filled it with potting earth. The next day she bought and planted an ornamental dwarf pine – “a pine that will grow green all year” – and she surrounded the fingerling branches of the pine with red and white impatiens.
“The colours of the resurrection,” Father Dowd said, trying to cheer Lyle up.
“The pram’s morbid,” Lyle said.
“A touch, it is that, perhaps,” the young priest said.
“Morbid,” he told Alice.
“Not at all,” Alice said. “Everything can be made to be happy,” and then she broke into a grin, with her hands on her hips, as if she were challenging him.
He said nothing. But he told Father Dowd, “I think she’s maybe hysterical.”
Father Dowd said, “I don’t know. Perhaps something quite profound is at work in her, not just the acceptance of God’s will, but out of the darkness, out of the sin and death that was the birth, has come the renewal of a joy that is inherent in death. It is the mystery of the Cross, is it not?”
That weekend, on the feast of Corpus Christi, Alice baked a five-layer chocolate-mocha cake for the priests at the parish church of the Blessed Sacrament. She carried the cake in a white cardboard box to the parish house. Father Dowd, standing in slippers at the door, said he would offer a prayer of thanksgiving for her at Mass.
“For my child, too,” she said.
“Of course, and if there’s any need, any emergency, call me.”
“Life is an emergency,” she said, eyes bright.
A few weeks later, she had the shop delivery man carry five cakes to the Knights of Columbus church basement Friday night supper. After some confusion, the Knight Exemplar, realizing the cakes were a gift from Kopff & Kopff, doffed his plumed hat and happily ordered that the cakes be carried to the kitchen for cutting.
“Isn’t Alice Kopff a Christian to contend with?” the Knight Exemplar said to his fellow Knights, as coffee and her cakes were served.
“Isn’t Kopff a German-Jewish name, the two F’s?” one of the Knights asked.
“As far as I know she’s completely Catholic.”
“Not that it matters.”
As the Knights seated in the round, ten to each table, discovered coins in their cake and cleared icing away from their prizes, the Knight Exemplar, moved, said, “I have always liked to think that we men, as Knights in the army of our Lord, have not lost a sense of where we come from, that God’s dirt is
under our nails. But suddenly I realize what it is that some of us have lost, and that is – the delight at finding a penny in our cakes, the delight that a child knows in discovering there are grace moments in life…”
“Alice is a wonder,” Father Dowd said, and after Sunday Mass, as Lyle waited for her in the emptied church, he thanked her from the altar for what he called her “generosity, her infectious irrepressible lightness of spirit,” smiling down at her as she, seated alone in the pew that had become her usual place at Mass, smiled up at him.
“I think I might go to confession,” she said.
Over lunch, Lyle said, “That priest, Father Dowd, he’s got some kind of thing about you.”
On some nights, particularly weekend nights after they had worked hard all day in the heat of the kitchen, Lyle heard, after supper, what he thought were moans from her bedroom, and he was sure that she was talking to herself. He couldn’t tell by her tone, as he stood at the bottom of the stairs, whether she was angry or not – or perhaps she was praying – but he gave no thought to going silently up the stairs to listen: that would have been an invasive intimacy, and he shied away from any intimacies if he could (there had been women in his life but he’d liked best those who had expected the least from him). He stayed at the bottom of the stairs. Her moans sounded almost sexual, or like she was in pain, yet there was certainly no one with her in her room (he’d spent several hours, off and on, wondering where, in what room, she had bedded down with an unknown man, and when – and for how long? When had she been out of his sight, and could it have possibly been in her own room – under his eye, so to speak – without him seeing? The possibility filled him with panic; could he, in his own house, have had no idea of what was going on?). Rattled, he didn’t know what to think, especially in the morning when she appeared for her toast and coffee looking well-slept, refreshed, with no clouding of sleeplessness or pain in her eyes.
“I must remember to water the flowers in the pram,” she said. “My little dwarf pine.”
All the Lonely People Page 4
