All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  The next day he sent her roses in the morning, roses in the afternoon. “Your father is crazy.” She was slicing bread with a long bread knife, wearing her leather racing gloves. “You know what’s the matter with him?” she said. “He feels he’s been overlooked. That’s what really gripes men like him. They’re all fascists, they feel they’ve been overlooked. That’s all Hitler was, a man who felt overlooked.” I watched from the window. There he was in the garden. I wondered if he felt overlooked. What did he really know? Did he know that she was soft, soft in love?

  It was Sunday afternoon. Every Sunday afternoon she put on a record of somebody with a Russian name playing Chopin’s polonaises. He was standing in the backyard by the peonies, wearing golfing trousers tucked up at the knees, leaning on his putter. He looked ridiculous, especially for a cop, a hard-nosed cop. I went out to talk to him, to ask him how his golf was going. “My game, my game,” he said. He whispered to me about holes, holes-in-one, rabbit holes, holes in space, holes in the heart, home being where the heart is. And about the menace of rootless, homeless men and women in the cities, and how the government was like the homeless, always looking for a place to roost in our lives. He hunched toward me as if he were afraid of the flowers, as if they were insidious listening devices. It was the first time that I ever felt sorry for him. “The walking dead are loose in the land,” he said. “Fucking bureaucrats.” My mother was at her window, smiling. I wanted to break the window, break her glass face. She was smiling as if she’d just looked in the Lost and Found and discovered that we were gone and she was glad. I was surprised at such anger in myself, particularly as I loved my mother more than my father. I hated him for the bullying yet seemingly sad man that he was. It was the sadness in him that made the bullying so false, so brutal, so much a cover-up. As he broke a man’s legs, I knew that his heart couldn’t have really been in it: he always wanted to cry when he hurt people, he was always feeling sorry, for them, especially for himself.

  Mrs. McGuane had a collection of ceramic frogs. They sat on her kitchen windowsill, on their haunches. They had bloated round bellies, small heads, mouthpiece lips, and holes in their haunches. Ocarinas. I learned to play them. I played Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Blue Moon, and Harbor Lights, Mrs. McGuane’s favourites. She said she’d bought the frog ocarinas in New Orleans, that she’d gone there after her husband’s death and had fallen in love with a black woman. “Actually, I wouldn’t call it love,” she said. “I just wanted to look at her, look at her naked. I didn’t want to touch her, didn’t want her to touch me. It was more like adoration.”

  She said she’d decided that she wanted me to look at her; and I agreed not to touch her. She led me upstairs to her bedroom. It was a long narrow room, pearl grey, the walls, the carpeting, the covers on the bed. All pearl grey. She told me to sit with my back to a big bay window that overlooked the garden. “That way I can hardly see you in the light.” She slipped off her dress and was naked except for the high heels. She had shaved off all her pubic hair. She stood about three feet in front of me with her hands on her hips, her legs apart, staring over my head into the light. She didn’t move. She had a bruise on the inside of her left thigh. She said, “You can do yourself if you want. Don’t young men like to do themselves?” I said, “No.” She said, “Good, you can just look at me.”

  The next time, she was waiting for me in the back sunroom with her makeup kit and she made up my face again – lipstick and eyeliner – and led me upstairs. After slipping off a silk robe with a shawl collar, she told me to put the robe on over my clothes. I sat wrapped in red silk, licking my red lips. Then she handed me one of the ocarinas. As she stood in front of me, naked, I played “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” on the frog.

  “You look very much like your mother.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Though not as beautiful.”

  Isn’t our soul the spider, which weaves its own body in the throat of the branch?

  My mother liked to pretend I was a singer, but she wasn’t stupid. She knew better. She just wanted to anger my father. I knew I was not a singer, though as a boy I had been a soprano, a beautiful voice in the choir at St. Peter’s Church. I sang the solo at Christmas and at Easter. It was the Seven Last Words that we sang on Holy Thursday that I loved best. It was a time when all the images in the church, all the crosses, were wrapped in purple shrouds. Seven last words inside the shroud. Eloi, Eloi lama sabachthani. It is finished. Father, forgive them, they know not what they do. “They know not what…” After Thursday’s Seven Last Words, on Good Friday, they took the mourning shrouds down, and there was the cross. The cross fascinated me – the rigid dove-tailed intersection of the lines, the precise intersection of pain, in suspension. And I saw that the hanging body made a different shape than the cross itself. The crossbar went straight out, east to west, but through the sag of his body his arms were uplifted, his body hung like a Y…feminine, in his dying he was like a singer, maybe Judy Garland, embracing her defiant silent note…

  Then my voice had changed. The hair on my body turned black, abdomen, knuckles, toes. I waited for my voice to deepen, and it did, but when I tried to sing it slipped in and out of alto, falsetto, baritone. I’d lost my voice. It could not be found. That’s when I began to sing along with other singers, especially my father’s favourite, Engelbert Humperdinck (his other favourite was Zamfir, the man who played echoing wooden shepherd flutes), and my mother joined me. We were a duet. She had a throaty, husky voice for a small woman. Standing by the window in my bedroom we’d sing Time After Time, A Sunday Kind of Love and What a Difference a Day Makes,

  twenty-four little hours,

  only sun and the flowers

  where there used to be rain…

  My father resented it. I had no talent. He’d said so. I had the aptitude for talent. That’s what he said. “The world’s full of men who’d like to be Lucky Luciano but they can’t cut it. They hold up one gas station and spend the rest of their lives in jail. All they got is an aptitude.” He’d come home and stand on the lawn and stare up at the window. I sang. One day, he went to the garage and got out the old lawnmower. As I stood there singing, he scowled as if he’d been sullied, as if someone had dumped dirt on his head. He put his head down and began pushing the old mower across the lawn, the blades clattering, pushing it faster, louder, till I stopped singing but he didn’t seem to hear that I’d stopped and he kept pushing the mower till Mother stepped out onto the stoop and cried, “Jake, your heart, you’ll hurt your heart.”

  It was right around then that I acquired a limp. It was like a hitch in my thoughts. It was quite funny. Every time I had a serious thought I had to laugh, I was limping so hard. That was also the time I saw an old black blues singer, Brownie McGhee. And he had a huge limp, one leg shorter than the other, from polio it looked like. And when he left the stage he was singing Walk On, riding his hobble leg up and down. Everybody wanted to cry at his pain but I wanted to laugh because he knew how to play his own pain into a performance, into pleasure. I went out of the blues club limping a huge limp, and laughing, and someone told me I should be ashamed, imitating a man with a mockery like that, and I was ashamed, not because I was limping, but because I couldn’t sing. So I went home and sat in total silence in the empty house and I remember saying to myself, “All I want is to be happy.” I was in my mother’s room, staring at one of those glass globes of hers, those glass balls, and inside the globe there was a house under a perpetual falling snow. I realized I was never going to be happy, not in that house. Still, it was my home, my family, even if in the summer time the snow still fell. But the swans would never duck their heads and look for me. That was clear. There were three tall urns sitting on the floor at the far end of the room, filled with dried flowers and bulrushes. I picked up the globe, rocked on the balls of my feet, took a stride, and bowled the glass house down along the carpet, crashing the ceramic urns. Kapow, a dead hit.

  That summer, I read the following statement in
a book. “Dying each other’s life, living each other’s death.” – Heraclitus. I didn’t then know who Heraclitus was, and frankly didn’t care. A few pages on in the same book I found a diagram. I liked it, though I’m not altogether sure why. I took it to a copy shop and had a copy enlarged 300 percent and pinned the copy up on my bedroom wall.

  Mrs. McGuane phoned and said the sky was a strange teal blue. I still haven’t bothered to find out what teal blue is. She asked me to bring one of my mother’s silk robes and a pair of her sunglasses to the house. “You mean a dressing gown?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “and her pink bedroom slippers that you just step into, with the little pump heels.” I didn’t know how she knew about those pump heels but I brought them in a Shoppers Drug Mart plastic bag. As soon as I stepped inside the back door she told me to take off my clothes. I did, and then she slathered my cock with a clear liquid grease from a tube, H&R Sterile Lubricating Jelly. It was exciting, the slipperiness. Then she led me up to the bedroom. The drapes were drawn, it was a summer afternoon but it could also have been winter in that air-conditioned shadow-light, except that I could hear cicadas in the heat. She was naked under her own robe, wearing only a garter belt, which she took off and put on me. I was surprised that it fit me so well around my waist, and looking down at myself, so erect between the loose black straps, I felt an intense rush of pleasure in my loins, a satisfaction with myself. She draped my mother’s blue raw silk robe over my shoulders, closed a little clasp at my throat so that it was like a cape, and then told me to put on the sunglasses as she carried the slipper-pumps to the full-length mirror on her closet door and set them down on the carpet facing the mirror. I stepped into them and wobbled for a moment because they were too small. She stepped between me and the mirror, with her back to me so that she could see us in the glass, so that she could hold my eye as she bent forward while reaching back between her legs, drawing my cock toward her buttocks, one of her hands up on the mirror. Then with my cock up against her, she put her other hand to the glass and said with a fierceness that almost frightened me, “Fuck me.” I took hold of her hips and entered her, reached for her breasts, and began to fuck her. I had to kick off the slippers. She didn’t notice. She was smiling, and as I really began to hump her from behind, she cried, “Fuck me…” and began to sing almost blissfully, at least it sounded blissful to me, “Georgia, Georgia, the whole day through…”

  Georgia, my mother’s name.

  Pale, pale footprints of the barefooted trying to find their pale way in the snow. I dreamed that. A step, a step, toward something someone might call a truth, a word or a glance. A bullying curse. The bite of truth. Sometimes that’s the way my mind worked, and works. Still. Bop. Bop. Bop. Word. Word. Word. That afternoon I went down the hill to the pond. The swans were swimming. There were several old men sitting on benches and children playing along the walkway and a Mister Softie ice cream vendor was parked under a weeping willow. The old men were smoking White Owl cigars. One was wearing a paper White Owl wrapper as a ring. In the two o’clock heat the still pond had an oil-like sheen. Hues and tones of pond-slime green and yellow. It was very peaceful. Standing beside the Mister Softie machine, there was a life-sized Coca-Cola bottle. It was made out of some kind of vinyl, except for the cap, which was wood. It came walking toward me. I could see the shoes underneath the bottle bottom. It walked right up to me, and just above the hyphen, there were two eyeholes. I was sure I could see two eyes inside the eyeholes. Eyes. I heard a deep, not harsh, but gravelly voice. “You tell your father, we’re gonna get him. He won’t see us coming any more than you saw me coming, and he’ll get his.” Then, the Coca-Cola bottle turned and walked away. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t call the police, or attack a bottle. Maybe he had a gun. I went back up the hill and into the house and sat in silence in my room for a long time. I put on Engelbert Humperdinck and opened the windows. Just before six o’clock as I was singing, my father came striding along, looked up, went into the garage and got the mower, and started mowing the lawn. He seemed to be furious with me, thinking whatever he was thinking, gu-thunk, gu-thunk. Whereas I had felt only afraid for him, hardly thinking at all, and so I went downstairs and out onto the lawn, the Humperdinck song still blaring out into the street. I told him about the warning from the Coca-Cola bottle. He looked at me a long time, a direct, almost disdainful, disbelieving look, and then he punched me hard on the shoulder, a short crossing punch that sent pain shooting down into my fingertips. “I told you when you were a pipsqueak kid, never talk to strangers and now I’m telling you, above all, never talk to Coca-Cola bottles. And if you do, then make sure they take the Pepsi Challenge first.” He laughed loudly at his joke.

  Mrs. McGuane blamed everything on sunglasses. She said that Aristotle didn’t wear sunglasses. Luther didn’t wear sunglasses. But her husband did. He was John Cletuse McGuane, a Presbyterian preacher, and he wore sunglasses. That’s what she finally told me. He wasn’t a mining engineer whose bones were now encased somewhere in the ice. She said he’d risen quite rapidly in his church, both as a preacher and because of the pamphlets he wrote, especially about Judas. In one of his pamphlets that she gave to me to read while I was sitting in the sunroom, he wrote: “In the early Church, in Egypt – and mind you, the early Church was much closer to the present spirit of Pentecostalism than anything in Catholicism since the authoritarian Council of Trent – Judas was regarded as a saint. The argument was simple and straightforward. Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God on the Right Hand, was all-knowing, and therefore knew what He became Man to do; His end truly was His beginning, His intention was to die, and so early believers said that He came to kill Himself for our sins. In His own mind He was a suicide. The apostle who understood this was Judas, who took upon himself the mantel of scapegoat, and out of love for Jesus, and in perfect imitation, hanged himself. As a matter of fact, the great theme at the heart of sacrifice – running through Judas to Jesus to Peter – is the efficacy of betrayal.”

  I could hear frogs running for their lives across the pond water. Mrs. McGuane said that after he delivered a sermon like this on Judas on Easter Sunday, a shouting match took place in the church. Though the sermon was startling to the parishioners, it was nothing compared to the shock of his suicide a year later. His body was discovered at dawn in Gzowski Park on the lakeshore, facing the water, hanging from a tree. His hanging had its own peculiarity. He had climbed into an old maple tree, had tied his ankles to a branch so that when he fell into the air he was hanging upside down. He’d then slit his wrists with a razor, his blood draining out of his outspread arms. She showed me some newspaper clippings. Someone had suggested that his suicide was an imitation of the death of Peter, who had asked to be crucified upside down because he was not worthy to die as his Lord had died. Someone else said his suicide was a deliberate mockery of the Cross and the Church by a man who’d lost his faith or his mind or both. Several neighbours were interviewed and among them, my father, who said enigmatically, “Rien de rien, he must have no regrets.”

  My father had discovered, of all things, Edith Piaf. He’d started singing La vie en rose around the house. I didn’t know what to say.

  When I was a kid, I used to go down to the pond and catch frogs. Every ten minutes I could catch a frog. I’d rub my finger down its back, soothing it, and then put a straw up its hole and watch it swell and swell until it was swole up. Then quick as a whip, I’d stuff a little cherry bomb in where the straw had been and I’d light it and lob it out over the still pond, toward one of the swans, like a hand grenade. If I’d got the timing right it would explode in mid-air. I didn’t know why I did it. I didn’t know why I enjoyed it. I just listened to the shrill cries of the frogs at dusk and knew I’d never run out of frogs. One day, an old man stopped by the water’s edge and told me I was evil. I knew I was not evil. Whenever I came home from the pond I felt heartbroken. All I could see before they exploded were the little arms of the frogs, wide-open, embracing the air, full of hop
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