Keeping Things Whole

by Darryl Whetter

  “I thought you should know as soon as possible that with a child coming I’m going to have to consolidate my finances. I can no longer splurge on indulgences like this,” I tapped the painted, plywood backdrop.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t worry. You seem to have a hit on your hands. I’m sure you’ll find another backer.”

  “Antony, I understand if you want to talk about the play or the pregnancy, but my show and its sponsors are not your concern.”

  “I am your sponsor, Mother.” I smiled. “I am Cronus Holdings. This,” I swept my hand from temporary backdrop to rented seats, “is all family money.” In the Williams’ lexicon, that meant smuggling money.

  “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she sputtered. “I’ll phone Gordon Clarke on Monday. If I have to have him show you receipts, I will.”

  “Gord already sends me receipts. His company is my company. Cronus Holdings is publicly registered, registered to me. Gordon’s just a subcontractor. You could have looked me up in an hour. But of course you didn’t. Not when you were busy getting what you wanted.”

  “Get out.”

  “You played that card long ago. This time you’ll hear me out before I leave. Even now, I’ll acknowledge your strength. You deserved the money, used it well if not fairly. Yes, you’ve landed some hits here, made a big point, but it also happens to be all for you. Don’t for a second say this play was for Kate. You’re always single because other people are too imperfect for you. Again, your choice to make. But that doesn’t give you the right to hand out report cards, not to me and certainly not to Kate.”

  “Love is a report card,” she replied. “No grades, no love.”

  “Well then yours needs other criteria than whether or not I’m you. Or Kate should become you. You’re more right than you know sending out those little girls to look like Mommy. Vanity and motherhood onstage together at last.”

  I did a little half-stroll before continuing, arced about on the thrust of the stage. “We may not speak again, so let me say two more things. I’ve given Kate more respect than I’ve ever given anyone, more than I knew I had to give. And yes, in part that means giving her a hard time. I learned this from you, admiringly. Respect cannot go untested. And that’s precisely why I’m willing, as you so charmingly put it”—I gestured at the set around us—“to dip my hands in blood. Because I know Kate can do better. That you have meddled in this so deeply is un-fucking-thinkable given why you’re doing it. You want a grandchild for an audience. Sure, you’ll gain a life here, but you’re taking one too. Kate’s. Here goes her career. And the best years of her brain.”

  She stepped towards me, the stun worn off. “You naïve little shit. You don’t have any idea what she’ll want in a few years.”

  “But I know what she’ll lose. And so do you. Motherhood fills your arms for a decade. Romantic love can do it for a lifetime.”

  She gave me some chin. “You’re just disappointed because now she might actually slip off your money leash. You say you love what she can do with her mind, so long as that doesn’t mean independence from you. You want her to have a big brain but an empty wallet so she’ll cling to yours.”

  “You of all people have lost the right to condemn my money.” I turned and tried to make that my exit line.

  “I could turn you in,” she said to my back, “make you grow up one way or another.”

  I turned to face her again. “We both know you’re not about to do that to your grandchild’s father.” I stretched my eyes open. In the suddenly still air all we did was stare, both of us knowing whose eyes looked back at her. When her silence became her answer, I walked downstage and climbed into the aisle, passing row after row of empty seats as I left. Halfway to the exit I did the tunneller’s worm with my hand then pointed my thumb back at her. Flood behind.

  39. Ambassador

  I walked out of the theatre and surrendered once again to my lifelong pull down to the river. The reflected lights of two cities, two countries, looked greasy on the rippling surface of the dark water. A plague on both your houses. How sad to walk alone when Voodoo lay somewhere beside Kate in our apartment. Once again the bridge turned on its magnet for me, pulled me towards its leaping metal. Another metre, another ten. I walked towards Gran’s house counting my ifs.

  I would never have written all these posts if Franz Ferdinand’s driver hadn’t taken a wrong turn in Sarajevo or if Gavrilo Princip hadn’t shot Franz Ferdinand. If war and travel hadn’t shifted from muscle to machine. If division didn’t lead to conquer. If assembly lines didn’t have appetites. If Gran had lived in a time and place where an illegal career wasn’t the best one open to her. If Bill, Trevor, and I didn’t fall for women who run in the rain. If Canada hadn’t been ruled by an England which bankrolled its empire forcing Indians to grow opium it forced on the Chinese. If WW I hadn’t allowed Bill to quintuple his pay without ever learning to salute. If the US prohibition on alcohol hadn’t preceded a second world war which gave them the clout to prohibit marijuana elsewhere. If nations of sheep didn’t beget governments of wolves. If Henry Ford had been a mechanically gifted boy in Georgia, not Michigan. If Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac hadn’t recognized that the Atlantic gave him a licence to lie. If Michigan strippers could take it all off. If an Ontario government hadn’t put half a billion dollars into a Windsor casino owned by an American company. If slavery, unilingualism, mechanization, genocide, and a temperate climate hadn’t made the US an economic superpower. If Gran hadn’t lived so long and Victor-Conrad so briefly. If a hundred ifs hadn’t made the war in Vietnam. If my mother had killed her heart one man sooner. If I’d been born a girl. If Mom hadn’t discovered the half-lies of theatre. If the grass wasn’t greener on the other side of the border. If citizens governed government. If the pill was perfect, not close to perfect. If the global kajillions spent hunting sub-atomic particles hadn’t produced the Internet of the late 60s and the Web of the mid-90s. If Kate’s father had been from, and absconded back to, Barrie, not Scotland. If the world preferred beauty to guns, reason to rule, love to greed.

  What fraction of the Italian marble and cedar framing in Gran’s house would have existed without the wars? Without Prohibition? Someone is always getting squeezed, one class or race done by another. Walking in the October night, I could see the big patterns but not where I was going to spend the night.

  Physically, I could have slipped into Gran’s and slept there. I’ve had a key to her house ever since I had a key ring (we’re an escape route family). But what, I was going to risk scaring or waking a woman who was over a hundred and explain myself to her sleepy homecare worker? Two of my doors were closed to me, and I was reluctant to use my third. Maybe I’d just peek in the window.

  I crept silently onto Gran’s porch to stare into one home as I was losing another. Of course the house I had in mind didn’t have all the plastic trays and pharmaceutical boxes I actually saw through her windows. The doors to her new bedroom were closed, yet still I could see white health-care boxes, tubs of lotion, and vessels for various unwelcome liquids riding the antique tables in her parlour. I was fleeing diapers at one end of life only to meet them at the other.

  This is life, not art: no neat symmetries here. While leaving Kate and Mom, I didn’t peer through Gran’s windows and suddenly see her twiggy arm fall out of bed at an awkward angle. I didn’t rush in to hear a deathbed confession, didn’t tearfully say, “Go now,” or “I’ll miss you.” Still, she drew her final breath sometime that night. It would be a rare centenarian who gets an autopsy (cause of death: being old), so I can concentrate on the night of Gran’s passing, not its hour, and say that she left her life the same night I left our apartment.

  Where to go? What difference, if any, would it have made if I’d surrendered to temptation or spite and called Melissa? We’d chatted a little at Safe Sisters events, had been in the same room enough
to read the man/woman barometer. I’d occasionally needed to track Kate down at her place. Surely the jury can’t help but notice that I’d kept a hooker’s number in my phone. Truth be typed, I should’ve called. I spent the same amount of money on a hotel room, and I didn’t make it laugh even once. Hurt, alone, and unable to sleep amidst all the brass lamps and bland prints of a hotel, I couldn’t stop going over and over two competing yet extremely unwelcome thoughts. One: everyone thought me an asshole for being who I wanted to be. Two: nice guys do indeed finish last.

  Have a taxi-meter brain and you never lose sight of the fact that in life you have to pay for what you want. If Gloria and I had tried to care for Gran ourselves (not that she’d have let us), one of us would have had to hold back our post-Macbeth nastiness in the morning to call the other with news of the old girl’s passing. Hire a private health-care worker, and you can just tell them to try two phone numbers in case of emergency.

  When you pay someone to care for a 103-year-old relative and they phone you at 7:00 in the morning, you call back thinking, Dead or dying? Then, inevitably, you circle up the family wagons. I phoned Kate while driving to Gloria’s.

  (Great-)grandparents, those ambassadors of death. Gran’s death was imminent as long as I could remember. She was history in a housedress. How could skin that dry even stay on a body? Now that she’d made her century and died in her sleep, I was suddenly more sad for the losses in her life, not the end of it. Her decades of mourning for two men she lost but couldn’t even bury. The indignation of her shrinking, leaking body. Glad to see her go before she worsened.

  That was my attitude as I approached Mom’s driveway. Apparently Gran’s flight was harder on Glore. For a start, she hugged me as soon as she saw me, hugged me then held me at arm’s length. “You fucking Williams men,” she said between sobs (and rationalizations).

  I can recognize forgiveness and need when I hear them. Forgiveness, need, loss, and complete denial of the fact that I still hadn’t forgiven her. But here too was another of my women in an empty nest. She’d lost her grandmother, her father, and her mother all in one go. I led her back inside and set two mugs of coffee onto the kitchen table (that drug for the heart of the house). Funeral home A, B, or C? “I’ll call.”

  I was worried about my uncharacteristically rag-doll mother until she got us with a joke. “I can’t help it. I close my eyes and think of England.”

  Gran had spent nearly eight of her eleven decades in Canada, yet you can’t bury an immigrant without thinking of the old country. Their ledger has an extra row at the top.

  Mom’s next comment wasn’t so funny. Like a toddler’s, her laughs suddenly tripped over themselves and became tears. She nodded at the phone. “Get your girl. If you still can.”

  “She’s coming.”

  “Lucky you.”

  Luck or work?

  The funereal paperwork was provincial. The thoughts were both international and personal. The funeral itself was social. Only Gran’s will was private. And it, not her death, was the surprise.

  The smaller the family, the more likely you are to inherit swag. I’d already inherited the gene for making money, so over the years I’d thought more about making my own than being handed any of Gran’s. While I certainly admired her house and its riverside lot, I’d spent the last decade keeping my green fingers off of Windsor real estate. Home ownership is coveted in civilian life but a problem in drug crime, easy proof that you’re involved. But Gran’s house was the only sacred ground I/we knew. For a start, it had always felt like our house, a house each of the three of us had a claim to, a haven in, and a use for. That’s why Mom had been mad when I was hired to paint it as a teenager, my getting equal billing.

  Mom didn’t object, even welcomed, Kate joining us for the reading of the will. Given that Gran wouldn’t have dreamt of hiring a female lawyer, I’m sure Mom wanted to even off the gender sides. The 3.4 of us sat across from Lawyer Don and listened as Mom was given the cash, all of it, then I was awarded the house. Ol’ Bill had left Gran substantial savings and no mortgage, and she had started drawing a national pension before the world knew of Pierre Trudeau. The cash wasn’t negligible. But it also didn’t have a sweet view of the river. When the lawyer announced my getting the house, Glore did some very audible huffing and some very visible looking away.

  I’d thought Kate was swimming with the team until she, not Gloria, asked when the will had been drafted.

  The lawyer replied, “Does it matter?”

  “We’ll decide that, thanks,” replied Kate.

  “Well?” Gloria echoed.

  “This is a recent will, but an accurate one, a very, very solid one. Margaret wanted this will respected.”

  ’Twas indeed the time of birth-certificate names. Gran’s will had been drawn up in September.

  The house was one blow, the timing another. Gran couldn’t have known about Kate. She’d recently been smoking more weed than Snoop Dogg. What, on the way out the old girl could smell pregnancy?

  “Let’s remember what we all know about houses,” the lawyer continued. “Antony may now own it, but it’s possible for everyone to use it.”

  For her response, Gloria walked out. In the parking lot, she barely glanced at us, muttering, “I need to be alone,” before she drove off.

  On the other hand, Kate was fun and business both. “Let’s go.”

  Gran, how could you?

  Driving over we were one more vehicle funnelling down to Riverside Drive. I assumed the viewing would be banal, tedious, domestic. I’d simply stare at all the cleaning that needed to be done, the plastic things to be discarded, count the walls thirsty for a coat of paint. The smells of urine and mothballs would repulse and embarrass. But arriving there with Kate once again at my side, the feeling of ownership swamped me instantly. Imperfect, isolating, and fictitiously elating ownership. At least until we got separated on different floors. She gravitated to the upstairs and its riverside view. I headed down to the basement.

  Only a fool would take his pregnant, exish lover who runs in the rain to view a riverside house with a forest of hardwood floors, acres of tile, antique pocket doors, a perpetually rising value, and a gorgeous view. Whatever you do, don’t do that.

  III. Up

  40. Width, Height

  While Kate wandered around upstairs, I went down into the basement, the one place in the house I had always been discouraged from going. I could hear Kate pulling out drawers while I finally got to thoroughly examine Bill’s crypt.

  Down there. What a self-effacing euphemism. Notice there’s no my in down there. I simply can’t imagine referring to my tackle without calling it mine. Also, crucially, down there isn’t here. Down becomes away even though it’s down a woman’s own body. As Kate sought me out in Gran’s basement, we both saw that I had no confusion over whether or not down there was mine.

  I’d been pacing the basement, half-ascending the stairs for multiple views of the riverside wall. Even in my suit I stroked it repeatedly, traced one or both hands over the cool cement, trying to press against or cradle all that terror and wonder. What fucking balls on ol’ Bill. What lethal fucking balls. After three days of funeral-home clothes and government forms in triplicate and old lady kisses, my hands were itching for a sledgehammer. I loosened my tie and took another look at the width of the staircase, the height of the windows.

  Generally I agreed with the math of Kate’s classmates about an LLB vs. DIY. When you’re about to earn $200/hr copying obscure words onto long paper, why balk at paying a plumber or mechanic $90? But generationally, hold on. Ol’ Bill had tunnelled under the German trenches when he was the same age as an Antony unable to tunnel under one university degree. He built most of the house, both in the beginning then with additions and renos in fits and starts. Deepened the basement. Expanded the second storey. Added a garage. Why could most twentysomethings in the 1920s build a versio
n of a house when today they can barely build a fire? Kate’s classmates were great managers of their music collections, yes. Great survivalists? Won’t we all see.

  Granted, Bill’s training and experience were extreme and nothing to be envied. World War I was hell in cold mud. But the man could get things done, either by himself or with a few borrowed hands. Deepening a basement was par for the local course. Tunnelling into another nation to smuggle booze was extreme, but forget the act for a second and remember the location and the man. He’d tunnelled through generations and history then sailed across the deep water to wind up looking at just a kilometre of mud between him and a fortune. Why work the line when he could dig his own and found a dynasty? His big prong into the yanks. His grave. All from the family basement, a wife and child above him. The Detroit River was his Rubicon. Staying in the house after her man crawled in and never came out—that was Gran’s. She too had defined her adulthood with the wind at her back, the literal and the legal. When Bill died she could have packed up again, returned to England with the money for a new life or pressed west, headed to Vancouver or Victoria, the end of the white world. But she held out and held on, lived life in a mausoleum.

  The basement Gran had all but forbidden me to enter had a doubled riverside wall. She’d waited some time after Bill crawled out without returning—a month, maybe twelve—then had a second wall laid over the top of the first and what must have been his tunnel entrance. Bill had masons instead of pallbearers, local hands who had received favours from him or were paid by Gran or remembered the Battle of Messines. Immigrants who could keep their mouths shut (or veterans that were proud to) had sealed him in. They’d have known they were sealing off a goldmine, but imagine the wailing above them.