The Company We Keep

by Frances Itani

  But the day they were entertaining their friends, the energy Lew had mustered in the early morning flagged all at once halfway through lunch. His shoulders drooped, the sacs under his eyelids became puffier, his eyes shone more brightly. His body was limp, his ankles beginning to swell. Misery showed on his face. The guests hurried through dessert, departed soon afterward. Lew walked upstairs to the bedroom, hand on the wall to support him along the way. He lay down in his clothes, this time on top of the bed. She covered him with a fleece throw, and he closed his eyes.

  But earlier in the day, Hazzley had felt the current of success, however brief, that had sparked between them. Maybe during the planning, maybe in the moments before their guests arrived, or when everyone was seated around the table. She recognized the feeling for what it was: a revival of their old selves, the Hazzley and Lew who had existed a half century ago.

  Escape

  GWEN

  Gwen heard the customary shrieks from outside.

  The moment the key touched the lock, the house fell silent. Every day, same pattern. Predator on doorstep. Predator sucks air from room.

  “It’s me, Rico. Who else?” She removed her jacket and walked through to the family room. “Look! I brought something for you. But not to chew. If you chew these pages, you’re off to bird camp. Permanently. You’ve heard of bird camps, right? They’re out there, so be warned.”

  She pulled several clipped-together sheets of paper from a folder and held them up to the bars of the cage. A bit too close, because Rico dodged and scurried back. Never turning away completely, because he was the scrutinizer of her: messenger, feeder, conversation provider, companion of sorts.

  He continued to stare hard. Head and neck hunched defensively so that two eyes looked out from under the tight-fitting grey hood.

  She stared back, trying to create an expression that might appear friendly. Relaxed her eyes, relaxed her jaw, smiled—but the smile was tight, she knew that. Would the parrot intuit how much effort this took?

  Rico came forward slowly. Tilted his head to the left, looked up, down, to the side.

  “Sorry if I startled you. I’m getting used to you, too.” She laughed. “I have the advantage, we both know that. I’m big. Bigger than you. And I can leave this house. Though I don’t mean to rub in the facts.”

  Oh, beady-eyed creature, she thought. And wondered, not for the first time, if he could read her mind, or if she was mad to consider this.

  Well, what about Sugar, the cat? When Gwen was a child in the late fifties, her mother had told her the story. Sugar’s owners were embarking on a permanent move from California to Oklahoma. The cat, who was supposed to accompany them, leaped from the car’s open window moments before they were to depart. To the family’s great sorrow, Sugar had to be abandoned because she couldn’t be found. After an amazing fourteen-month journey on her own, across varied terrain—desert, mountain, untold bodies of water—Sugar showed up one day at the family’s door in Oklahoma. Fourteen months! Family films had been made of stories like Sugar’s. Psychologists from parapsychology labs had become involved and interviewed pet owners whenever such an account became public news. Early experiments had been conducted in an effort to discern telepathy between animals and humans. Sometimes clairvoyance, sometimes telepathy and clairvoyance.

  And what about Beautiful Jim Key, the famous horse known to be of high intelligence? He’d known the alphabet, numbers; he’d solved simple math problems and toured widely, and his feats had included a performance in the presence of President McKinley. Reputable people—psychologists, scientists—had tested animals like these and published their results.

  Gwen wondered what would happen if she were to let Rico out of his cage while conveniently leaving the family-room window open. Would he fly after the Grands and locate them with accuracy in Los Angeles? Who knew? Maybe he could transmit telepathic messages to Cecilia Grand, or vice versa. A kind of telepathic radar.

  “Someday, Rico, when I’m certain-sure you’ll hop back in, I’ll let you out. But I don’t plan to open a window. In case you are reading my mind. Or Cecilia’s.”

  She changed the water, cleaned the bottom shelf of the cage, added pellets to the food dish, sat on the arm of an upholstered chair several feet from the cage and looked over the pages she’d brought with her.

  “The story is taken from a scholarly paper written by my own mother, Rico. Late mother, who loved me, and I loved her. It’s about Arthur fighting Colgrim. Warring. The trade of kings—that’s how war is described. Dryden said so, though you won’t know Dryden. But think about that for a moment. War is the trade of kings.”

  Rico continued to stare.

  “Or tyrannical despots,” she added. “But King Arthur is a man—was a man—about whom tales were sung and stories told, invented, reinvented, written, copied, enjoyed for almost a thousand years. Maybe he existed, maybe he didn’t. His actual existence doesn’t matter when you’re privy to a sentence like the one I’m about to read. It was written by a priest whose name was Layamon. The priest was learn’ed, Rico. A clever man who wrote things down. And Arthur was clever, too. He sat his knights at a round table so that no one was below the salt. No one above the salt, either; everyone equal.”

  She glanced over at the parrot. “Okay, here goes. From Layamon’s Brut. This is about escape, Rico, make no mistake. You might not understand. But it helps.” She heard both sadness and apology in her voice. She stood the way she imagined an orator would stand before a crowd. “Up caught Arthur his shield, before his breast, and he gan to rush as the howling wolf, when he cometh from the wood, behung with snow, and thinketh to bite such beasts as he liketh.”

  Rico turned to one side and bobbed his head. She saw the white circles, the black pinpoint pupils.

  “Maybe your owners don’t read aloud? Maybe they don’t read at all. I don’t see any books around, do I? You’ve probably never listened to an Arthurian tale—any tale, for that matter.”

  Rico dropped to a lower perch and stilled as if waiting. No display of agitation. She turned a page. He cocked his head upward and investigated the ceiling as if he wasn’t a part of this at all. Not my scene.

  Social interaction is vital! Cecilia Grand had underlined.

  Did he want something? He didn’t seem to be in a hurry for seeds or pellets or treats. The water container was full. Could he be enjoying the sound of a reading voice? Gwen decided to continue.

  “Woe came upon the people,” she said, and set the pages down. She was thinking of the group at Cassie’s.

  Woe was what everything was about these days. Perhaps each person in the group was acquainted with a different version. Her woe was her life with Brigg. She had lied about him to the others. They probably thought she was someone who had buried herself for years in a dingy office at Spinney’s, and maybe she had. But she liked the group, the people who were part of it. She just wasn’t entirely comfortable there. Absolutely no one had mentioned the way grief could pursue: a scythe whipping through the air, closing in on the wounded. Was she the only one? She would not be able to explain this to the others. Her wounds. And maybe what was in pursuit was not grief at all.

  She plunked down in the chair and began to cry.

  Woe indeed.

  She had occasionally dared to talk back, but only when Brigg pushed too far. From the time they were first married, he had doled out household expense money as if she were the hired help. He didn’t want her to work, so she quit her job before their wedding—she’d been working as an accountant for a car dealer in town, her first job after university. Brigg insisted that he needed her at home. He wanted her to run the house and raise the children they both hoped to have. But she was quick to learn about his stinginess. He had no realistic idea of the cost of feeding and clothing two adults, paying utility bills, keeping fridge and cupboards full. He announced soon after they married that they wouldn’t have joint bank accounts because he would write cheques for whatever she needed. All this was, at first
, said in a good-natured way, a joking sort of way. And part of her had believed him. She wanted to believe that he knew what he was talking about. What did she know? She had never been married before. Maybe that was the way he’d been brought up. The husband controlling the money, the bank accounts.

  But then he began to push hard, to bully. When he came home from work in the evening, no matter where she was, she felt his will as it roiled and swelled within the walls of the house. After their sons were born, Brigg told Gwen he would not increase her household allowance because she needed to learn thrift. A few months later, he accused her of stealing bills from his shirt pocket before she put the clothes into the washing machine. Money she hadn’t bothered to return.

  There had been nothing in his shirt pocket. She was outraged at the accusation and fought back. But he fought harder, until she began to wonder if the bills had been there after all. Maybe she’d washed them away in the rinse water. But no, that wasn’t possible. Without fail, she checked every pocket on washdays.

  “Keep this in mind,” she told him in anger. “Your last shirt won’t have any pockets. Keep that thought in your miserly mind.”

  Maybe that worried him. Maybe when he conjured the image, he imagined himself in a shroud. If so, he hadn’t let on.

  For Gwen, the episode was a beginning: a turning point that had taken a long while to be met head-on. Her will began to clash with Brigg’s—she experienced this almost physically—but in brutal silence. Neither would back off. Confrontation was always on the verge, about to happen. For Gwen, it was like being one of two rival actors on stage, each locked in a role that could not be viewed by others but was known intimately by both players as necessary to their own death struggle. The most crucial action was yet to come, the climax inevitable, no matter how long it might take.

  She bided her time and put her energy into raising the twins. The year the boys turned six, she began to read professional ads in the Wilna Creek Times. She applied to Spinney’s for a full-time job as bookkeeper. She was hired immediately and arranged after-school daycare. Her salary was her own. She opened a bank account in her name only. Brigg didn’t stop bullying, but he couldn’t force her to stop working. Instead, he made fun of her; to him, her job was a joke.

  But the situation had changed: she no longer had to ask him for money to buy underwear for herself or the boys, or for twenty dollars to go out for dinner and a movie with a few women who got together occasionally after work. In those days, it was possible to partake of a meal and a movie for twenty dollars. She wondered if Brigg had enjoyed humiliating her, enjoyed forcing her to ask for money during the boys’ preschool years. He’d been successful, in part. She never invited friends home; she learned to rely entirely on herself. Gradually, whenever she went out, she went alone.

  WHEN SHE CARRIED in Brigg’s clothes to have him dressed for the casket, the director at the funeral parlour made no comment about the shirt pocket. Maybe he didn’t notice that the opening of the pocket had been stitched across—trouser pockets, too, also jacket. She’d sewed them all up tight. She could hardly have brought in a shroud, though she’d have preferred to see Brigg wrapped in one. He went to his grave without a single pocket; she made sure of that.

  In any case, what did she care about what the embalmer thought—the embalmer or whoever it was who’d dressed Brigg’s corpse? The people who work in funeral parlours must have plenty of inside stories. Gwen wondered about the topics of their conversations at conventions and family vacations. What, exactly, was discussed?

  “Arhh,” she heard.

  Or maybe the sound was hargh or haw.

  “Haw,” she said back. “Haw bloody haw.”

  “Haw,” Rico said. “Bloody haw.”

  Gwen started to laugh. She laughed and laughed while Rico stared. He began to run back and forth on his perch. Finally—perhaps intentionally, to staunch her outburst—he attempted to create the noise of the gasps she was making between breaths.

  Then silence.

  “You might save me, Rico,” she said. “You might save me yet.”

  She lifted herself out of the chair and began to scoop up her belongings. She hadn’t laughed like that for a long time. She couldn’t remember a time when she had truly laughed. She was still laughing when she went to the radio and tuned in CBC again, volume low.

  “So long, bird.”

  “Save me!” Rico shouted, in his beaky, birdy voice. And abruptly turned his back.

  As she was letting herself out through the front door, she heard him laughing like a parrot maniac in a voice that sounded uncomfortably like her own.

  October

  Stories, First-Hand

  TOM

  A side chair appeared in the shop. Tom knew Allam had carried it in because Allam was the only other person to know where the extra key was stowed. He had mentioned previously that he might bring in something Tom would find interesting.

  Tom inspected the piece and understood that this was not just any chair. Victorian or perhaps pre-Victorian, cane seat, papier mâché backrest, wooden legs, unusual beauty. Slight scarring at the rear of the backrest. Tom liked the scars, part of the provenance. A touch of expert repair work had been carried out to reinforce the back. This long-ago repair had been supplemented by a thickness of ancient leather, which added extra support. The most striking features of the chair were feather-like designs within the curves, inlaid mother-of-pearl, highlights of gold leaf, delicate hand-painted leaves and flowers—the whole being lacquered, or “japanned.” The chair was solid, fabulous. Tom immediately thought of a couple who might be interested: a man and woman who loved objects from the Victorian era, that long period of history that spanned so much of the nineteenth century. The same couple often purchased mercury glass, as well as vinaigrettes—each with a special hallmark—from the Georgian period, the 1830s. Those small secret boxes fit tidily into the palm and were fashioned from sterling silver, with a fine layer of gold inside to keep the interior surface from corroding. Plain on the outside, beautifully intricate on the inside, with a pierced grille under which tiny pieces of scented sea sponge had once been placed. Tom seldom came across vinaigrettes, but when he did, he acquired them for the same two collectors. As for the papier mâché chair, he’d never seen one of this quality except in photos.

  Allam came in moments after Tom turned the Open sign on the shop door.

  “You have the chair,” said Allam, a new edge of propriety in his voice. “A work of beauty, yes?”

  “But you haven’t paid for it, surely?”

  “Not yet, Toe-mas. If you find a customer, we have an arrangement? I pay my source, you pay a commission—is that what you say? The owner told me the chair could come here to your shop. You are trusted in the town.”

  “Indeed. But where . . . ?”

  “I walk in the city, Toe-mas. It is how I know this place; I am a walker. I make my way through streets and alleys. Old sections that are new to me. New sections—you call these developments? So many things are young in this country. But there are old things inside homes, things that come from far away. I get to know where people are, where they work, where they live. I go to coffee houses. I set”—he corrected himself—“I sit, listen. I try to learn more English. Sometimes I do not know expressions. ‘See you,’ a man said to me one week ago at a coffee shop. I did not know this man. I did not know his meaning. I was on my way out after drinking coffee. I asked myself, Does he watch me? Am I followed? I worried for two days about what he was seeing until I understood that for him he was saying goodbye.”

  “I would never have considered that,” said Tom. “If you need an explanation for any other turn of speech, let me know.”

  “Turn of speech is good. I like that, Toe-mas. Also I tell you that I continue to learn English in a warm room of the library. Some mornings I read. Then I walk more. I stop at a business. I talk to merchants, owners. If I mention your name, they know right away about Rigmarole.”

  “I could have a r
eady customer for this chair, Allam.”

  “Good. A man? Woman?”

  “Both—a married couple.”

  “If they want this chair, perhaps they also want a tray, papier mâché. A scene after Chinese, maybe Japanese. That detail is not of importance. It was made in England, not China, not Japan. It tells the story of a procession. Some revered person—perhaps a dictator. Yes, dictator for certain; when I see one, I know. He sits on a platform, a lion throne, and others fan him with big leaves. There are musicians—a flute player, drummers—men who carry gifts. I think you will like the tray, Toe-mas. It is black and gold except for green robes and sashes. Sky is black. Dying sun is made of golden rays. And”—Allam paused here, for effect—“the tray can be used. Cared for. As in the past. Which makes it beautiful.”

  “Bring in the tray and I’ll phone the couple to see if they’re interested. They might as well see the two together.”

  “Tomorrow I will return to the owner of the chair and I will ask for the tray.”

  “And Tuesday evenings? Have you thought any more about joining the group?”

  “Yes.” This with no hesitation. “Until now I have not been free, but I will come soon. I thought about what you told me. I am interested.” A pause. “To know how things happen.”

  “Excellent.”

  Tom hoisted the new acquisition to a wide ledge where it would not be bumped into or knocked about, and the two men took up their usual chairs: Tom behind the desk, Allam keeping an eye to the entrance.

  “The Tuesday past,” said Allam, speaking precisely—was he disappointed that he hadn’t been asked?—“I could not come because my fambly had a celebration. Birthday of husband of my daughter. Small fambly, small celebration,” he added. “At a bistro. My grandchildren, two girls, one boy, were present. Is that correct? The sound is not right, I think.”