“Cut it out.”
“Why? Tock. Tock.”
“It’s irritating.”
“It’s the sound your father’s heart makes at night.”
“Now, you are drunk.”
“I am not. Your father listens to his liver and his heart but he keeps his eye on you. He likes to laugh sometimes but he told me he thinks you want to kill him.”
“He’s who he is and I don’t want to kill him. I just don’t want to be him. That’s all. He thinks he’s gone missing in my life if I don’t end up like him.”
“Maybe in the morning I’ll be among the missing persons.”
“That sounds goddamn unhappy to me.”
“No, no. You’ve got it all wrong. My idea of hell is being locked up for life in a room with a happy man. A world of sunlight, with no moon. Who could stand it?”
“God?”
“Nonsense. God sneaks around in the dark in secret.”
His father, flipping open the gold lid to his pocket watch, called out, “Two o’clock. Watch the heat. The double peony blooms are spectacular, full of ants.”
“Oh good,” she said and stood up and began to waltz alone on the grass, holding the hem of her dress with one hand, circling Crede, singing, holding her whisky glass with the other,
My heart cries for you,
sighs for you,
Please come back to me…
as she pointed at his father with the glass that still had a swirl of whisky in it. “And don’t forget he’s a detail man,” she said, taking hold of Crede’s arm, “and such are the details of my love and disappointment.”
She laughed, as if her laughter were an admission that she had found satisfaction in an acceptance of who she had become while her husband, not knowing what she had said, came toward them, handling the weight of his pocket watch. With a look of approval at the laughter, he, too, began to sing:
Who threw the overalls
In Mrs. Murphy’s chowder,
Tell us or we’ll shout,
Shout all the louder...
Two weeks later, Madeleine was found in her bathing suit with her neck broken, dead, sprawled on the sky-blue tiles of the Rosedale Ladies Club swimming pool. The caretaker had drained the pool for repairs and had forgotten to lock the door into the room that glared with summer light from the wide glass roof.
“Sometimes,” the caretaker said, “even when it’s filled with water you feel you’re diving into the sky. She mustn’t have looked down.”
The coroner said, “She took a dive,” and ruled Accidental Death.
For two afternoons Crede sat in the garden under the apple tree. He had a feeling that just behind him, if he were to whirl around, he would find an open seam in the air, open to a silent scream he knew was there, a scream he was trying to hear. But he did not hear it. He waited, and torn between fury and lethargy, aching with loss, he sat hunched through two afternoons of drizzle, hollow-eyed, bedraggled, bleak, as close as he had ever come to what he thought was prayer or despair. On the second day his father stood for a while beside him in the light rain, but then said, “For Christ’s sake, man,” and went back into the house.
On the morning of the funeral, Crede showered, shaved with a straight razor, scrubbed his hands, and trimmed his nails until his forefinger bled. Sitting on the toilet, he licked the blood from his finger. He liked the taste of his blood. He had always licked the blood whenever he’d cut himself as a child. His mother had told him his saliva helped to heal the wound. He liked the idea of healing himself.
At the Requiem Mass in the cathedral he looked flushed, eager and enormously pleased as he tilted his head to look back over the crowded pews. “You look like you’re counting the house,” his father said sternly, admonishing him, but then added, as if happily content with a public respect being shown to his family, “It’s really quite a crowd.”
During the Mass, Crede stared straight ahead, moving his lips, but not, his father realized, to the lilt of the prayers. “Are you talking to yourself?” he asked, gripping the pew. Crede smiled and patted his hand. “No, not to myself.” Then he startled his father by leaving the pew and getting into the line going up to Communion. His father knew that no one in the family had gone to confession for years, and though he was not ardent in his faith, he nonetheless believed in rituals. After all, he said, the Law was made up of those rituals that had been codified through centuries of inquiry, just as the Church through its Councils and Encyclicals had codified itself, always looking back to and consulting its great Fathers, Aquinas and Augustine, as the Law looked back to and consulted its great Fathers, Gladstone and Holmes.
“You’re in a state of sin,” Eldon whispered to Crede, who was back beside him in the pew, and then he went rigid with indignation as Crede stepped out and into the aisle again, going back up to the altar, to stand alone on the carpeted stair – something he’d obviously arranged with the Monsignor. But there’d been no consultation with him, no consideration of what he might have wanted; Eldon had been left out and he tasted a sourness come up in his throat. “Goddamn my bowels,” he said as Crede concluded the celebration of the Mass by singing in falsetto the Panis Angelicus.
Panis angelicus
Fit panis hominum;
Dat panis coelicus
Figuris terminum;
O res mirabilis!
Manducat dominum
Surprisingly moved, he thought to himself, Got to admit it. In Latin, his falsetto’s okay.
Eight months after his mother’s death, stepping out of the steaming shower stall in the morning, shivering with the shock of cold air, Crede put on his heavy white terry cloth robe with a shawl collar and his soft black leather slippers, brushed his closely cropped hair, and then paused at the head of the stairs below the stained-glass window, the strong morning light dappling his skin with rose and emerald petals. He listened to his father shuffling barefooted behind his closed bedroom door, getting on and off the scale that he kept beside his bed.
“First thing in the morning and he’s checking the weight of the world,” he said to himself, laughing quietly. He yelled out, “I think you’re getting slower and slower each morning,” as he went down the carpeted stairs to cook breakfast, which he now did every morning, cracking four eggs into a bowl and reaching for any one of the copper pans that hung from the steel hooks over the stove.
They ate across from each other at an old pine table, with a single pink rose between them in a pressed-glass vase that his mother had bought. The breakfast room had a sliding glass door to the garden and the door was full of morning sunshine, the soft light falling on his father’s flushed pink face.
“Well,” said Crede wryly, “here we go again, alone together.”
Eldon looked at his plate. “I must say,” he said, touching the yellowing pouches under his eyes, “I am not ready to be alone.”
They sat in silence, neither eating.
Then,“You cook a good egg, Crede. Your mother always cooked a good egg.”
“You make it sound like she was a good egg.”
“She was herself a damn good woman,” Eldon said, smoothing rosehip jelly onto his toast. “In her very own sweet way, she could deal with things. She could deal with me and she certainly dealt with you.” He bit into the toast and chewed slowly. “I’d call leaving you all her money a damn good nest egg.”
“I wonder what bothers you most,” Crede said. “Whether it was Mother leaving me the money, or not telling you she was going to give me the money.”
“What bothers me,” his father said, slipping his knife into the heart of the jelly jar, “is that you not only refuse to work but you don’t have to work.”
“I sing,” he said, lifting the pink rose out of the vase, putting it to his nose, and inhaling deeply with his eyes closed.
“You haven’t worked anywhere for over a year. Not even a church hall. Playing the gentleman punter at the track…”
“I sing my heart out every day,” Crede said, opening his han
d to his father:
With no star to guide me
And no one beside me
I go on my way.
After the day, the darkness will hide me...
He snapped the long green stem and handed the rose to his father. “Put this in your lapel.”
“A rose by any other name,” Eldon said softly, with stern control, then, buttoning his vest for the trip downtown to his office, he said: “Don’t forget, tomorrow is Wednesday. Wednesday night.”
Crede got up, giving his father a wry little smile. “I won’t forget. Maybe we should do a joint together before she comes.” Putting the rose in his lapel, Eldon said, “Ridiculous. Who in the world do you think I am? Do you know I spent yesterday afternoon with Senator Mulroney in my office? Life’s little fixer. He believes in nothing except his own smoothness, but there he was, courting me. When I looked at myself in the mirror this morning I saw what I believe in.”
“And what’s that?”
“Me, and I liked what I saw. I see a lot of me in my neighbours but I’m not so sure I see much of you in me.”
Eldon had quick darting eyes and a small cleft in his long chin that gave him an air of severity, which he himself saw as dignified and women seemed to find attractive.
He always wore a dark double-breasted suit with a grey silk tie, and carried his gold pocket watch in his vest. He believed the only slight he’d ever suffered, a slight in the sense that someone had actually hurt him and laughed in his face, was the day after Crede had been born, when he’d felt something so close to a seizure of light-headed gaiety, a feeling of affirmation, that – in a moment of spontaneous playfulness – he’d worn a pair of his own father’s spats to his law office. His partner had laughed, telling him: “If only you were a nigger you’d look like a pimp.”
He’d never forgiven his partner his hoot of loud laughter, and unbuttoning the spats that night he’d decided – thinking what a fine judicious man his father had been – to call his son by the name of Crede – to make sure that what he stood for and what his father had stood for (if nothing else, a stern sense of decorum) would continue. But now they were both dead, his wife and the partner – a pair of spats in the ground, he’d suddenly thought at the requiem Mass, a little afraid of his own levity as he grimly held on to the pew, touched by an unfamiliar sense of pity for all their lives – as if for a moment he believed that their lives were only caprice, a coming and going, a buttoning and unbuttoning. Despite the indignation he’d felt alone in the pew, he had been moved almost to tears by his son’s singing at the end of the Mass, admiring his determination, his loyalty to his mother. Panis angelicus, he thought. Bread of the angels. He wasn’t quite sure what it meant. Bread was the body of Christ? Perhaps. And the Blood? He knew all about the blood. He felt pleased with the way he’d reasoned out the moment. He decided to drink a glass of wine.
At six o’clock on that afternoon, Tuesday, Crede – who had been to the racetrack and had come home and showered – stood on the veranda wearing his white terry cloth robe. Through the leaves of the dwarf cherry tree he saw his father step spryly onto the flagstone front walk. Eldon was in a very good mood. After two weeks in court, he had, that afternoon, completed the successful defence of two old friends, two well-known stockbrokers who’d been charged with embezzlement. He’d proved that the investigating detectives had lied, and had lied under oath. His two friends, set free, had been astonished, and together, the three men, arms around one another, had broken into a song they had learned as boys at camp, a Lake Simcoe summer prep school for youngsters whose parents intended them to become barristers, brokers, bankers, and perhaps politicians at a cabinet level.
And now, here he was, feeling almost giddy, at the front door to his fine home, being greeted by his son, who was looking so smilingly fresh and handsome. He even thought that Crede wearing the white bathrobe was amusing. Eldon lifted his right arm and heartily sang out his camp song:
Oh dear, what can the matter be,
Three old maids got locked in the lavetry.
They were there from Monday till Saturday.
And nobody knew they were there.
The first one in was Elizabeth Bender.
She just went in to find a suspender.
It flew up and hit her feminine gender.
And nobody knew she was there....
Eldon stopped singing. He shuffled his feet on the flagstone, looking pleased but sheepish. “Oh well,” he said, “the word is you’re the singer in the family,” and he strode up the veranda stairs, past Crede, and went into the house. Crede, taken aback, not knowing what to say, followed but went upstairs to his room where he sat down in a crouch, his robe falling open, legs apart. He saw himself naked in the long mirror on his closet door. He shook his head, as if seeing himself for the first time, startled by how dark his hair was against his pale skin, and how lost in the darkness was his cock. He said quietly, wistfully, “Mother.”
Within eight months of Crede planting flowers on his mother’s grave, within eight months of the silences he and his father had shared, feeling each other’s awkwardness, his father said, “Enough is enough,” and brought his new lady home for high tea, fixing Crede with a look of stern satisfaction as she’d said, “My name is Grace.”
She had thick black hair and a supple shapeliness, and though she was dressed in a tailored dark suit and wore black leather gloves – gloves that were out of fashion but gave her an air of professionalism – there was a sly impishness in the way she sat on the arm of an easy chair and, while smoking a gold-tipped Nat Sherman cigarette, said, “I never inhale, I just like the gold tips.”
She sat smoothing her dress on her thigh, artfully detached and drawn into herself, aware that in her silence both men were watching her. “You’re staring,” his father said, and Crede said, “Yes, I suppose I am. Sorry.”
She rose and offered Crede her gloved hand and then, kissing him lightly on the cheek, said, “There’s no need to be sorry. Only men who don’t know what they have done should say they’re sorry.” Her hair caught all the light from the sitting-room bay window. Then she said: “The wallpaper in this room looks just like a bank manager’s suit.” She smiled, amused by her own audacity, and his father seemed to be amused, too.
“That wallpaper was thirty years in the making,” Crede said, “but never mind.”
It was Wednesday evening – his father’s time to be alone in the house with Grace. As dusk came on, Crede had taken a glass of white wine with pâté and Cumberland sauce and then he smoked a joint before driving east, past the soybean mills and courier depots, and a spray-painted scrawl on a precast concrete wall: GOD IS DEAD AND HE DOESN’T CARE, out to Ashbridges Bay, to the old gabled racetrack on the lakeshore. He had a reserved chair in one of the clubhouse boxes. He sat with his arms folded as he watched the line of horses and their leads come up out of the dark tunnel from the paddock onto the track.
He loved, in the closing light of dusk and the light from the overhead flood lamps, the sheen of sweat on the chest muscles and forelegs of the horses, and was certain he could tell, as he peered through his big army war-surplus binoculars, whether a horse was ready to run well or whether it was washed out, dripping sweat. He liked to see a prick to the ears of a horse and never bet on fillies.
Sometimes he left his box and went onto the clubhouse floor to feel the mood among the players. Wearing one of his elegantly cut double-breasted Milan linen jackets, he stood listening among men whom he had casually come to nod hello to over recent years, familiar faces with no names. He liked the brief intimacy of their shared intensity that required no names, that required only a willingness to listen and then to play and then forget among fast talkers with their pocket computers who fed each other fractions and formulas, their fingertips smudged with ink from the Racing Form, all locked into their own systems of speed ratings and past performances, as if somehow – in trying to win – there were ways to locate a length lost in a past race that would, if
found, correct and ordain the future and save them from disappointment. And he laughed, thinking of the blackness that welled out of these men after each race, after each loss, the acceptance of disappointment, the yearning for pity, and yet there was a resilience, too, and a courage, the resiliency his mother had shown playing double solitaire.
Crede, standing among these men, heard two of them agree that the favourite, the 6 horse, was going to win. He said out loud, “Only dead fish swim with the current,” and a wiry little man who was known as Eli the Bat said, “Welcome to the fish market.” There was tight-lipped grim laughter. Still, Crede knew that there was something luxurious to be felt in even the smallest win, a glee, and Crede believed he was going to win: You think you’re dead in the water and suddenly you’re afloat and it’s like a blessing. I can see that. A confirmation of oneself. He made his bets without hesitation but none of his hunches fell into place. He swallowed hard when he lost the third race by a neck.
All that evening, as the track became an oval of light suspended in a vast darkness, he had to fight off an increasing sadness as, inexplicably, he lost race after race. Yet with each loss he also felt a desperate eagerness, a determination to keep on playing in anticipation of a win until – at a point in the ninth race, he suddenly leapt to his feet, ready to lose, yet throwing his hands into the air as the horses lunged around the turn into the stretch, unable to stop himself from yelling as the horses pounded toward the wire, and then, when the numbers of the first three horses crossed the wire, he could hardly believe what he knew to be true – there were his three numbers, three numbers that he had bet, and as he stood there, alone, flooded with a feeling of affirmation, as if some truth deep within himself had been confirmed, he could see the winning horses set in a stillness apart from the rest of the field as they had crossed the wire. It was as though they had been positioned there at the wire at the beginning of the race, foreordained, as if he had tapped into the order of things, as if life were not just caprice and consternation played close to the vest but life could be a moment of long shots, too.
All the Lonely People Page 19
