Would I Lie to You

by Mary Lou Dickinson

  “Were you married to Jerry Reid?” Thomas asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I was.” But her husband was, of course, a different Jerry Reid. He was not anybody’s father. And she told him so.

  “Could I meet with you?” Thomas asked, as if he had not heard her.

  “I don’t know,” Sue stammered. “I simply don’t know. Not today.”

  “Could I call you back? I’ll be in town for a few days.”

  “Where do you live?” she asked.

  “Stratford.”

  That left Sue speechless. The town Jerry had come from, where they had gone to the theatre and had shared picnics at the edge of the Avon River. Jerry had showed her the hotel his grandfather once owned down near the railway station where travelling salesmen had stopped to show their wares. They had gone inside to see the long curving bar with a wooden top below a tin ceiling with filigree design around the edges.

  “Why don’t you give me your number?” Sue did not know what else to say or do. Surely, if Jerry had a son growing up there, he would have visited him. Or if he had not wanted to, he would have been apprehensive about running into him or the boy’s mother. “Then I can call you in a couple of days?”

  “All right.” Thomas sounded nervous as he gave her the number. He did not ask any questions. Not if or when she would phone. Nothing.

  “All right,” Sue said. “I’ll think about it.” As she hung up, she tacked the number to the bulletin board near the telephone. If she’d had her way, she would have preferred to remain oblivious. Maybe Martin would know something more. She also wanted to tell him what Jerry had said about someone who might have a claim with regard to his will. Suppose the only reason for this call was to claim an inheritance? Her hands were trembling.

  “Martin,” she said when he answered her call. “Would you have time to drop by? I have something serious to discuss with you.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I … I guess so. But I do need to talk with you.”

  “I’ll be right over,” Martin said.

  When she hung up, tears ran down her cheeks again. For so many months, she’d had to feign strength. Now, she was alone in a house full of memories. Jerry’s clothes in closets; his muddy shoes on the sisal mat in the front hall. Photographs in frames throughout the rooms. His plaid umbrella at the back door that she could see from her seat at the kitchen counter. Still, she thought she would have regretted not being here when this Thomas person called. This surprised her. Her curiosity had, however slightly, diminished the seemingly ever-present grief, the despair that on one occasion had her pushing numbers on her cell phone as if it were a remote control that would open the refrigerator or turn on the television. Everything designed to make life easier, had, lately, seemed to conspire to confuse her.

  Martin had called at various times since Jerry died and had come by to sit with her.

  “Whoever would have thought it would be Jerry who would go first,” he had mused on one occasion. At their age, in their fifties, whoever died would still have been a surprise.

  She heard a knock at the front door and went to open it. It was Martin, who had arrived so fast she had not yet expected him. She smiled then, relieved. After he hugged her, he sat down in the pinstriped armchair in the same place Sue had last seen Jerry before he spent all his time in the hospital bed in the living room. That bed had disappeared the day after the men came from the funeral parlour and took away Jerry’s emaciated body. It was all a blur in her mind.

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  Martin’s face appeared haggard. He tapped the fingers of his left hand on the small redwood table beside him.

  “Is it made already?”

  “Yes,” she said. “It is.”

  He followed her out to the kitchen where he took cream and sugar from a small glazed set Jerry had bought for her. “I’ve been meaning to come round,” Martin said. “I know how difficult it is for you.”

  “One minute I think I might move to Vancouver to be near Maggie,” Sue said. “A condominium maybe, looking out over English Bay and up at the mountains. And in the next minute…” her voice trailed off. She did not think she would get around to moving or even visiting for quite a while. First, there had been the cremation. Later, there would be the scattering of ashes and the memorial. One day, she would have to return to teaching. And, as people kept dropping by, at times she would expect Jerry to appear also. She knew it was irrational, but she would forget momentarily and want to call up the stairs to him that their friends were there. All had stories to tell, stories that continued to connect her to the circle she and Jerry had shared.

  “You don’t have to do anything quickly,” Martin said. “It’s probably better if you don’t.”

  Back in the living room, they sat as they had before, he in Jerry’s favourite armchair and Sue on the sofa.

  “Did Jerry have a son?” she asked, studying his face for a reaction.

  “What?” Martin said, sitting up straight. He stared at her with an expression of disbelief that she could ask such a question.

  “Did Jerry have a son?”

  “What makes you ask?” Deep furrows continued to line his forehead.

  She told him about the phone call and about what Jerry had said about his will.

  “That’s most unusual,” he said. “I’m sure he would have told me. Not to mention something like that to either of us! I hardly think so.” That sounded final and his expression became calm again.

  “This young man says he has a birth certificate.”

  “What young man?” His tone was gruff now.

  “The one who called me earlier today.” She visualized again the stranger she had seen at the funeral.

  “What’s his name?” Martin asked.

  “Thomas.” Would Jerry have named him that? “Thomas who?”

  “Something like Crossar.”

  “Well, at least that’s what he’s telling you.” His impatience was palpable now.

  “Martin, he comes from Stratford.”

  Martin was silent then.

  “Suppose he’s after Jerry’s money,” Sue said. “I don’t mind if he wants what’s his. But how am I to know he’s really Jerry’s son?”

  Martin sighed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I need to think about it.”

  “Should I see him?” Sue asked.

  “Crossar,” he mumbled. “Crossar. I had a girlfriend with that name.”

  “Should I see him?” Sue repeated.

  “That’s really up to you,” he said. He seemed to have settled something for himself, perhaps some acceptance of mystery existing in a friend he had known so well. “But if you say no, you’ll always wonder.”

  And she would, Sue nodded.

  “What would you like me to do?” Martin asked. “I can stick around a while. Or you can call me if you need to. Of course, you know that.”

  “Thank you,” Sue said. “I guess I’ll arrange to see him.”

  And soon after Martin left, she dialled the number Thomas had given to her. There was no point in waiting.

  “Hello?” she said. “Thomas?” Part of her wanted to believe this might still be a hoax. If it were not, she hoped that it was not only money that had prompted his phone call to her.

  “Yes.”

  “What about the Second Cup on Bloor Street? Near Bathurst?” she asked.

  An hour later, the same man Sue had seen at Jerry’s funeral came into the coffee shop. In that first moment, all she could see was Jerry as a young man. Six feet tall, angular features, bushy eyebrows to match the reddish hair, a certain jauntiness about his gait. A slight bump in her husband’s nose, which she had always thought was an injury, was duplicated here. This was no impostor.

  “Hello,” she said. “You must be Thomas.”

  He nodded and put ou
t his hand.

  “Will you sit down?” she asked as she shook the proffered hand.

  “I’ll get something. I see you have coffee.” He put his gloves on the table.

  “Yes.”

  When he returned, Sue watched the dark liquid form tiny bubbles as he stirred sugar into it. It was awhile before he met her eyes again.

  “Thanks for meeting with me,” he said.

  Sue nodded.

  “I’m trying to understand why I never saw my father.” When his mother died recently, he told Sue, he knew he had to look for him.

  “I knew Jerry had been married, but he said she was killed in a car accident.”

  “Maybe there was someone else,” Thomas said. “I wanted to look for him sooner so badly. Mom begged me not to.”

  To Sue, he appeared genuine, but she remained detached. She felt awkward that she distrusted him when she would have preferred to like him. If she let herself, she feared it would leave her too vulnerable.

  “You know,” he said. “It’s not money I’m after.”

  “What then?”

  “I want to know more about my father.” Thomas reached into his pocket and pulled out a card.

  It was a birth certificate and, glancing at it, Sue thought about her own deception and could still scarcely believe that she and Jerry had both managed to conceal such significant matters from each other. In ten years of marriage, she had never offered even a clue, and with him, there had been no hint, no subtle reference or mystified tone in a phone call that might have alerted her. Nothing. Their secrets had still been buried in silence even as Jerry drew his last breaths.

  “He couldn’t have known,” she said. “He would’ve been involved in your life somehow if he had.”

  But would he have been? And would Jerry have married her if he had known about those months as a young teenager when her body grew and changed? Those months when her mother told her never to talk about it, never to tell anyone. Even after both her parents had died, she had kept her secret. Now, she knew that both she and Jerry had been far from honest with each other.

  “I don’t know,” Thomas said. “Mom only told me he lived in Toronto. She said he didn’t come back much after his parents died. There was no other family there after that. There’s a friend of hers called Florence who’s related.”

  “Did you ever meet Florence?” Sue asked, feeling doubts now about Florence also. What might Jerry’s older cousin also have concealed for all these years?

  “Yes, but she didn’t live in Stratford so I only saw her a couple times when I was a young kid,” he said. “Until after my Mom died. Then I saw her again.”

  Florence likely won’t know very much she can tell me either, Sue thought. Or might not want to tell what she does know. But what could be more compelling than this young man across from her? He could have visited her and Jerry. He and Jerry could have sailed together.

  “Mom never married,” Thomas said. “Maybe men don’t want to marry someone who already has a kid.”

  His wistful tone, the way his brows came together when he cocked his head, and the way his eyes lit up and the small specks of green in the hazel background glistened, started to reach her. He was so like Jerry, it was uncanny. She could also tell he had begun to feel comfortable with her. He would have been ten or eleven when she had met Jerry, possibly a little older. As these thoughts came to her, there was, as well, something hovering at the edge of her perception of her marriage, untangling the stitches there. As if the fabric of what was over with Jerry’s death could even so unravel with the onslaught of new discoveries.

  Jerry must have known about Thomas. She wished he had told her. It might have been catalyst enough for her own disclosure.

  “Mom always said I looked like my father.”

  “You certainly resemble Jerry.” No doubt about that, she thought.

  Thomas picked up the plastic card and handed it to her so she could read the name printed on it, “Thomas Gerald Crossar.” He also had a roughly drawn family chart that showed his parents as Joanna Crossar and Gerald Foster Reid. Sue’s eyes blurred. Could it possibly have been a pregnancy Jerry had not known about? He might have gone diving in the quarry, happily ignorant of the new life he had set in motion. She could not figure out how in a town like Stratford, he would not have known sooner or later. But no one in her family had suspected her predicament when she was a teenager either in an even smaller town. In those days, unwanted pregnancies were never acknowledged. So, perhaps Jerry was home from university for the summer and Joanna Crossar was a fling for him, a youthful exploration.

  “My Mom said she knew Jerry when they were kids,” Thomas said. “They were in their thirties when they met again. He was in court for an old friend and met her there. Mom was a clerk in the court. She said he stayed a week for the case. They had dinner and talked about old times. After he left, they didn’t see each other anymore.”

  “So when she discovered she was pregnant, didn’t she let him know?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Money came from somewhere. More than a court clerk would have made.” He paused, and then added, “We had a small house and I’m in university now. She left me everything.”

  “I find it hard to believe the Jerry I knew would never have seen his child.”

  “Maybe it made it easier for him.”

  If Thomas had found Jerry still alive and well, she was sure she would not have objected. She would probably have been baffled. Still, it would have been better, for both her and Thomas, to have heard all of this from Jerry. What they were left with was conjecture. A few facts. A birth certificate. His resemblance to Jerry.

  “Grandma and Grandpa Crossar are both dead,” he said. “I remember Grandpa. I was fifteen when he died. Grandma had cancer when I was really little, maybe three. I do remember her a bit, sometimes. Mostly from pictures. I think she read, The Wind in the Willows to me.” He smiled. “Of course, I didn’t know my father’s parents.”

  So here they were, she and Thomas, joined by Jerry.

  She studied him for awhile as one would in such a situation. Would he turn into a grasping stranger? She did not think so, convinced now that he was genuine.

  “What do we do now?” Sue asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Would you like to come back to the house?” she asked finally.

  “Oh, yeah,” he breathed out the words quietly.

  “Let’s go then,” she said.

  Out on Bloor Street, past small shops and restaurants, Thomas kept pace with her. When they arrived in front of the house, she rummaged in her purse for keys. They went into the front hall and from there into the living room where she invited him to sit down.

  “I’ll look for some photographs,” she said.

  While she searched for albums, he sat on the sofa with his coat draped awkwardly across his lap.

  “Look at this,” Sue said.

  A photo of Jerry on his sailboat with one hand on the tiller, the blue-and-white sail unfurling in the wind. Another on the island on the boardwalk by a bench where he sat looking out at the lake. His framed law degree, his university graduation photograph. Some genealogy charts.

  “Maybe you’d like to have this,” Sue said, holding out a watch with a wide brown leather band. She was surprised at not feeling a need to hang onto everything of Jerry’s.

  Thomas held the watch carefully, running his fingers over the face. “Thank you,” he said. Then he put it on, still looking at it.

  “I’m thinking of studying law,” he said after awhile.

  Maybe one day she would give him the law degree also and the photograph. At this moment, she could not do more than imagine that.

  She brought out some soup and crackers to the small table in the sunroom where she and Jerry had taken most of their meals. He followed her, holding an albu
m and placing it open beside him on a shelf. Sometimes they talked. At other times, he stared at photographs or out the window. Long silences were punctuated by short bursts of conversation.

  When they parted, Sue stood at the front window and watched Thomas walk down the street. Would she let that psychic know about this unexpected appearance?

  “Of course,” he would say. “Someone like a son. That’s what I told you.”

  But it was not Hans Jonker she wanted to tell. Something so strong welled up that it was like being engulfed by waves in a storm even as one runs for higher ground. With one hand to her throat, she stood holding onto a scream. All that emerged was a loud, raspy whisper.

  “Jerry!”

  How could he have ignored this young man’s existence? If she could grasp her husband’s scrawny neck right now, she might throttle him.

  *

  A week, a month, two months later, Sue had heard nothing from Thomas. As suddenly as he had come into her life, he seemed to have disappeared. She had imagined giving some of Jerry’s clothes to him. Her late husband’s closet was still full of jackets, shirts, sweaters, ties. She still could not bear to look at all of it, but if Thomas could have used some of the clothes and accessories, that might have made it slightly easier. She could hear him calling it “stuff” and then being delighted to find some item fit. Perhaps Jerry’s dark winter coat or a tweed jacket.

  As long as she kept Jerry’s clothes, Sue could imagine Jerry might return. Oh, what foolishness. She knew by now that was never going to happen. Had Jerry considered this sort of scenario happening after he was gone? That she would meet his son? No, he must not have known. But then, why had he tried to warn her about someone else who might have a claim?

  Sue knew it would be simple enough to trace the lad. There would be a listing in Stratford. But if he did not want to hear from her, she felt she had no right to disturb him. As his late father’s wife, she would likely be perceived as a nuisance. It surprised her that it mattered to her. But meeting him had taken the edge off her sadness for a while and she had begun to paint a little again. If her mother were alive, she would say that Sue had begun “to pick up the pieces.” She could hear her mother’s voice, rife with the clichés of her generation, the clichés that had ensured Sue’s silence. Her mother’s voice telling her never to talk about why she had been sent away to the city for a few months awakened her at night now with endless questions about what might have been. And what she might still do about it.