All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  The payoff for the Triple would be enormous, and he gave a little pump of his fist, but then in sullen wonder he put his fist up to his mouth, muffling his voice as he said, “Shit,” suddenly suffering a chill. The Inquiry sign had come on, the thin red neon letters: INQUIRY. His father’s favourite word. An inquiry had been called. Under his breath he cursed the stewards and hurried downstairs to the clubhouse floor to stand among other shuffling men who were watching the replay on a television monitor – the horses coming out of the gate from three angles. It was clear to Crede before the decision was announced that his number 4 horse had bumped with the 5, taking the 5 out at the beginning, coming out of the gate and veering into him. It didn’t matter that the 4 would have won anyway, or that the 5, at 30 to 1, had no chance – the 4 horse had accidentally interfered. He said aloud to himself, “It doesn’t matter,” but someone close by snarled, “Goddamn right it matters,” because the stewards took the 4 horse down, and though he had won, he had lost. It was disqualified. “Just a minor detail, man,” Eli the Bat said bitterly, and Crede suddenly yelled, “I’ll fucking detail you, you bastards,” surprising the other men who were used to disappointment as he hurried out of the clubhouse filled with outrage, as if, worse than being cheated, he had been taunted and mocked by a promise unkept. “Fucking jockey probably went in the tank.” He drove home.

  When he came to the house, marching across the lawn and cutting through a flower bed, he tracked wet garden dirt into the front door and along the hall and up the unlit stairs. Filled with a desperate eagerness, a desperate anticipation – just as he had been ready to lose as the winning horses had come to the wire – he stood holding his breath outside his father’s closed bedroom door, listening to laughter and little whelps like goddamn puppy love. Suddenly the dark stairwell seemed like a vast hole he and his father had lived in and shared and gone up and down in each day, elbows flared to ensure breathing space. As he opened the door and crossed the line of the threshold to the dimly lit bedroom, that forbidden place from his childhood, a place of whisperings and broken breathing, in which the naked woman spun up and around and over his father, her hands held out, he felt a terrible sense of exhaustion and wanted to cry out some word of helpless remorse in his anger so that his father would understand that a cry at least could fill the emptiness that had been between them since childhood, but seeing Grace’s breasts and his bewildered father struggling, ungainly and sprawling under her in his marriage bed, Crede yelled, “You horse’s ass.”

  Grace, seeing who it was, sank back against the propped pillows and smiled. “Welcome to the scene of the crime,” she said, putting her hand lightly on the old man’s shoulder, but Eldon screamed, “What? You sonofabitch.” Crede, rocking on the balls of his feet, unsure of what he was going to do, stared at the white hair on his father’s chest. White, for Chrissake, as a lamb, and his skin hanging, his whole life hanging loose off his bones like he had the skin of an old woman. Crede suddenly wanted to reach out and cradle his father and rock him, as if he were a shrivelled child, but his father, as if slowly recollecting a rage, said, “You sonofabitch, you sonofabitch. You come in on me naked, you dare,” and he jackknifed up off the bed, both fists punching the air. As he fell back onto the sheet, Crede, who’d spun away astonished, said, “Jesus,” and when Grace leapt off the bed, landing in a crouch, he laughed, but then they both heard the rattle in the old man’s throat and stared at the gaping mouth, the wide eyes, and saw that his father was dying, if not already dead. “I didn’t ask for any of this,” Crede said, shaken, his eyes filling with tears as he drew the woman to him, holding her hard by the wrists. “I didn’t want this.”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said. She drew her hands together so that they seemed to be caught in prayer.

  For the funeral in the cathedral, motorcycle policemen wearing white crash helmets with plastic visors directed traffic, and despite a freak early snowstorm, heavy and wet, an overflow of mourners clustered outside on the steps of the cathedral. The mayor was there and senators and the deputy prime minister. A judge and the city director of roads were among the pallbearers.

  Crede walked down the centre aisle beside the burnished oak casket that had been mounted on an aluminum rolling caisson, the casket covered with calla lilies, and then he stepped into the front pew. The choir sang the Kyrie. The priest, an aged man with strong cheekbones and alert eyes in pouches of pale flesh, went up into the pulpit and read from a prepared text, praising what he called his father’s rare fidelity, that “uncommon bond to the common weal, that duty to oneself – such fidelity being a belief that can become a beatitude,” he said, “because this fidelity is a good life so arranged that it melds into all our lives…this fidelity, the virtue of the good soldier, leads us onward as intimates as we embrace each other in the shadow of death.”

  After the Miserere, the priest raised his hand and made a sign of the cross, then motioned to Crede, who stepped alongside the coffin and placed both hands on the dark shining wood and sang, all alone, by special dispensation, because it was not a Catholic hymn:

  Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,

  That saved a wretch like me;

  I once was lost but now am found…

  As Crede walked down the aisle behind the coffin, he nodded with the stern assurance of the deeply aggrieved to men and women he did not know, nodded as if they were old friends, or if not friends, then neighbours. He let people shake his hand and he stood on the curb beside the hearse, stroking his smooth cheek with his long fingers. The wet cold wind carried heavy flakes of snow that melted on his face and bare head, snow that refreshed him. Water trickled out of his hair, down his brow. He thought he caught a glimpse of Grace wearing a veil, making her way toward him between men and women bundled up against the wind and snow, clustered into small groups. It’s just like the track, he thought, clustering for comfort, and several well-dressed women reached out and offered their condolences.

  After riding out to the burial yard, past the Chick ’n’ Deli and U-Haul and Koko the Muffler King, the several limousines eased to a stop near an open grave. Surprisingly few mourners had actually come out to the grave, among them two women he’d never seen before, both young and quite beautiful, standing apart and apparently a little perplexed by each other’s presence. After a shovelful of dirt had been cast into the grave, Senator Mulroney took Crede’s hand in his and said, “Your father was a man of means who always meant well.”

  “Yes, yes, he was well-meant,” Crede said, and when Senator Mulroney looked puzzled, he added, “That’s what they say about a horse who tried really hard but finished last.” He turned away toward Grace, who had stepped out from between two grey turreted tombstones.

  “Well, Grace,” he said, “how are you?”

  “Never mind me,” she said. “How are you?”

  She held out her gloved hand and he shook it and saw that she was wearing a silver bracelet, inlaid with amethysts, that had belonged to his mother.

  “Well, everything went as he would have wanted,” he said, “and he’d be relieved.”

  “Your father would’ve liked all the arrangements.”

  “Yes, if he hadn’t been a lawyer he’d have been a flower arranger.”

  “Now, now. I thought you sang beautifully,” she said.

  “Not sure my father would have approved. To him, I was just doing black face.”

  “Black face?”

  “Never mind, private joke.”

  He looked down at her little ankle rubbers as she stood in the snow, and he laughed. “You should have boots,” he said. “I’m surprised my father didn’t buy you some boots,” and he took her arm, helping her as they stepped around the small polished marble modern stones that were laid flat in the ground, some lost under the snow. “I think it’s terrible,” he said, “the way they won’t let us put up real tombstones anymore.”

  “They’re so expensive, though,” she said, “and such a waste of real money.”


  “But each tombstone’s like a story,” he said, “a little story we leave behind about our lives. It’s terrible that he’s just going to have an ordinary marker – Eldon Doucet – like a little headline in a local news-sheet – like he was nobody.”

  “He certainly wasn’t a nobody,” she said as they turned along the lane toward the lead limousine.

  “It was awfully good of you to come,” he said. She lit a Nat Sherman cigarette.

  A gust of wind lifted loose snow over the tombs and a lone skier suddenly appeared gliding between Dutch elm trees, poling over a rise and down around a tall cylindrical black monument.

  “Jesus,” he said, “a cross-country skier.”

  “Now, I’ve seen everything,” she said.

  The skier, wearing a white suit and goggles, coasted down an incline, swooped around a russet marble slab, and then poled past the small domed crematorium.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said, bewildered by a sudden remorse, bewildered by a recollection of how he had wounded his father, and for a moment he couldn’t believe that his father was dead – that the tock tock tock had stopped, that he was standing there in the deep wet snow of the burial yard watching a lone cross-country skier, who looked like an arctic soldier, pass between the tombs. Close to tears he turned to Grace, gripping her arm.

  “I didn’t want to hurt him, you know, not at all.”

  “No, I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “Anyway, to tell you the truth, I thought I’d die laughing when you said, ‘Welcome to the scene of the crime.’”

  “It was something my mother used to say.”

  “Your mother went in for crime?”

  “No, no. She was very prim, very proper, and very poor. It was words she picked up from the movies.”

  He touched her gloved hand and she took off the glove as the driver opened the limousine’s door. She touched his cheek. Crede helped her into the back seat and then stood looking off through the bare trees, looking at the trail of the arctic skier. “What are you looking for?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” he said. “It’s just, for some reason, I remembered my mother telling me that ‘It’s God who’s a sneak. He’s sneaking around in our lives.’” And then, “She liked to talk about a necessary dignity. Anyway, I think you should go on alone. I need to walk.”

  He leaned into the limousine, toward the driver, and said, “Take the lady to wherever she needs to go.”

  He closed the door and walked away, going toward the other side of the burial yard, deliberately taking very deep breaths, opening his lungs to the crispness in the air, realizing that by the time he got out to Yonge Street and hailed a taxi, his own shoes would be ruined, he would be soaking wet from the slush, and would probably have caught a cold.

  At home in the empty house, soaked to the skin, he stood in the hollow of the stairwell, shivering. He went upstairs to his bathroom, stripped off his clothes, and stepped into the shower stall, twisting the shower head to MASSAGE so that the pelting water would loosen his neck muscles, cranking the temperature dial to HOT, not just to burn the chill out of his bones but to steam himself clean of the glad-handing at the funeral Mass, the perfunctory piety displayed at the grave, and of Grace, who had expected him to want her.

  After he showered, he put on the white terry cloth robe and stood in front of the bathroom wall mirror, drawing a large C into the steamed glass, and then he watched as a tear slowly formed on the glass and slid down through the C, leaving a trail glistening with mirrored light, like scar tissue, he thought.

  “A mother knows when her boy is naked,” he heard his mother say as he ran his tongue along the quick of his forefinger, the cut almost healed.

  At last, the steam disappeared, leaving a ghost of a C on the glass.

  Though he had shaved at seven in the morning, he shaved again – drawing the straight blade back and down his jaw and neck – till he was satisfied by the suppleness of his skin to the touch of his long fingers, and then, as if it were necessary for him to actually hear himself say words about his father that he had kept to himself: “You lousy backstroker. All your life you were swimming on your back, belly-up, swimming with the current, a dead fish,” and he sang out,

  The harder they come,

  the harder they fall,

  one and all…

  His robe fell open. He was standing straight up. He stepped back from himself in the mirror, startled again by his pale skin and how dark his crotch hair was. Taking hold of himself in the mirror light, he felt a hardening rush of exhilaration.

  “It’s in the blood,” he said. “It’s in the blood.”

  BUDDIES IN BAD TIMES

  Arthur Aneale stood over the body of his friend, Trent. For two years Trent had looked sallow, hollow-eyed and frail, and yet now, lying dead in his casket he seemed only to be sleeping soundly, in the flush of health. That’s a neat trick, Aneale thought, and wanting to talk about Trent, he drifted through the clustered men in the room, most of whom were dour and sullen, with some looking sick themselves. There was no one who seemed to be openly amiable, no one who seemed to want to catch his eye. By the front door, he sat down on a straight-back butler’s chair and stared at his feet. Whenever he was by himself and feeling lonely he stared at his feet because they always seemed too big, as if they weren’t his feet. His big feet reminded him of how lonely he was, and how cold it was by the door. He could feel the cold on his ankles. A burly man wearing a black leather Harley-Davidson jacket came hurrying in out of the wintry night and said, “You’ll catch your death sitting here by the door.”

  Aneale turned into the room and saw that a tall young man was shuffling back and forth beside the open casket. He had a lean, pale face and he smiled as he paused to look into the crowded room, the eager smile of a man hoping someone would talk to him, and so Aneale got up and walked to the casket. “Are you one of his? Are you a relative?”

  “Sorry, I’m not attached.”

  “Don’t be sorry. It’s too cold tonight to be alone, colder than a witch’s tit,” he said. “Let’s get a drink.” As if he’d been in the funeral home before and knew it well, he took the young man by the elbow and led him to a sitting room across the hall where there were tall stainless-steel coffee urns standing on an oak sideboard. “I’ve got a real drink here,” Aneale said, grinning as he slipped a silver flask from inside his suitcoat pocket. He got two cups from a serving rack beside the urns and poured whisky into the cups as they sat down side by side on a small sofa.

  “My name’s Arthur Aneale.”

  “And mine’s Jeff Trainer.”

  “I just could not tolerate it in there any longer,” Aneale said, “all mope and no flounce. I mean, what is beyond belief is how he’s lying there looking absolutely puckish. Like, I mean, toujours the little prince in his casket, whereas the real dead, let me tell you, are all those angry sluts skulking around in that room.”

  “I’m glad you look at it like that,” Trainer said, his eyes shining. “It’s exactly how I feel. But it’s not for me to say.” He leaned toward Aneale, and Aneale, loosening his tie, tapped Trainer on the wrist. “I don’t know why when we die we agree to get laid out in a box so that a bunch of busy little bitches can gawk at us.”

  “It’s certainly the custom,” Trainer said, smiling.

  “It’s not my custom, not my little frisson, just in case you happen to be around the avenue when I die. It’s bang the coffin shut for me, and bang the drum slowly,” he said. “Here’s to Trent, he was a peach.”

  “Here’s to him,” and Trainer raised his cup.

  “He certainly would like this, the two of us sitting here so absolutely très vite, drinking to his health even if he did just die.”

  “That’s how I feel,” Trainer said. “I had my own intimacies with him but I certainly didn’t know him like you must have, but he came across to me as being strong. Very strong. Of the earth. I certainly felt the earth in him.”

  “He loved his gardening,” Ane
ale said.

  “Really?”

  “The last time I saw Trent he was looking lean as a whippet in his tank top in his garden, clomping around in his Greb boots, deadheading.”

  “Dead who?”

  “Cutting dead heads off the flowers. Cut back, cut back, he always said, and they’ll bloom better that way, come the spring.”

  “Really?”

  Trainer, settling into the sofa, crossed his long-slender legs.

  “Such is life, he used to say,” Aneale sighed. “Cock of the walk one week, deadhead the next. Trent said that to me every time we took a trip.” He told Trainer about a summer holiday that he and Trent had taken on the Gaspé Peninsula. “I remember there was a boy, just a kid, not exactly a chicken but close, we picked him up outside a ruined old church and this little sweetheart of a kid cottoned on to Trent, and the next thing we knew we couldn’t get rid of him for the life of us and so we had to take him along.” Trainer was listening with his head tilted to the side, as if he were comparing Aneale’s memories with his own impressions of Trent. “I mean, the crazy thing was, we couldn’t even talk to the boy, he only spoke French.”

  “I could have spoken French to him, parlez-vous le ding dong,” Trainer said, laughing, as he held out a hand for no reason, just holding it out, letting it hang there, as if he were always ready to be helpful. Aneale saw that he had soft, very white, puffy hands. Though he was dressed in a severe black suit and a silver silk tie and white French cuffs, he was wearing a red Mickey Mouse wristwatch. Aneale found the watch endearing. Trainer saw him staring at Mickey Mouse and said, “It’s 9:15 in Disneyland. Mickey’s going out to meet Pluto.” He giggled and then, as if he didn’t want any break in their conversation, he asked Aneale if he ever watched the afternoon soaps and Dr. Oz and Dr. Phil. “I’d like to think that we like the same things,” he said, touching Aneale’s knee, and he seemed so considerate, so unassuming and available, that Aneale said, “I’ll certainly be on the avenue for a couple of weeks more. I mean, why don’t we see each other? You, me, and Pluto?”