Extensions

by Myrna Dey

  “What was she like as a mother?” Tessa asked.

  “She adored him. Could not take her eyes off him even when I was holding him. He brought a permanent smile to her face.”

  “And Jan?”

  She made a soundless whistle. “Maybe more. He worshipped Anton. The baby brought them together; they needed no one.”

  “Were they apart?”

  Vlasta looked across the showroom and waved at a well-dressed woman who had just come in the door. She answered before standing up, “Jan is European. Selena was North American long before we immigrated. He was crazy about her and swept her off her feet. At times his protectiveness was smothering, I believe, though she never complained of it. Anton removed any frustrations.”

  Which are back again, I thought to myself.

  “That will be all,” Tessa said. “Thank you.”

  In the car we discussed the conversation. All assessments of Selena were consistent: her sister’s, Greg McGimpsey’s, and ours. Intense, secretive, obsessive, to which Jan had added a delicate orchid quality she did her best to deny. As tempting as it was to imagine a woman like Selena was withholding something, her sister confirmed she had been this way all her life.

  “How about the other Mr. Kubik?” asked Tessa, who was driving.

  “You up for it?”

  “Why not?”

  We took the Iron Workers’ Memorial Bridge to North Van where the firm of Merrick, Fishman, Bell, Kubik, and Berger could easily have been missed on Marine Drive, set back as it was in a brick building behind a well-kept hedge. They clearly weren’t out to attract drive-by business. The subdued atmosphere of the reception area changed upon Marek Kubik’s entrance.

  “Come in, please come in.” He ushered us into his office with the manners of his brother magnified a hundred times. “Have a seat, ladies, or do you prefer ‘Officers’? I do not like to be politically incorrect. Can I get you some coffee or tea?”

  We shook our heads. Then we caught our breaths, for the oxygen in the room had been displaced by this dynamo. Marek Kubik was Caribbean-tanned, flamboyant, with a head of hair like Beethoven, and unless he was playing a role down to the smallest gesture, decidedly gay. When we told him the purpose of our visit, he exclaimed: “My poor darlings, Jan and Selena. They have endured more than anyone should have to in a lifetime.”

  “How often do you see them?”

  “Not enough. I am indebted to my brother for my education — no, for my life. It’s as simple as that. But we move in different circles. And the child brought another dimension to their lives, made them more insular. They both worshipped him, and I cannot bear to think of their loss.”

  Tessa asked the question about enemies and like Vlasta, he was adamant. “Never. It had to be random. A madman. A psychopath.” He sat down behind his desk on a maroon leather swivel chair.

  “Did you know Greg McGimpsey from the community theatre where Selena volunteered?”

  “Greg? Yes. I attended all Selena’s productions and met many of the others. What would you like to know about Greg? Surely you don’t suspect him in this terrible crime. He and Selena were good friends.”

  We explained that we were following up on all our evidence. I did not add “meagre,” but he was nevertheless quick to comment, in a tone just short of sarcasm: “So the police are stumped. I wish I could help.”

  “And none of Jan’s colleagues would be jealous and go wacko?” Tessa said.

  “They’re engineers, not postal workers. My brother has an overdeveloped sense of responsibility, you may have noticed. He makes sure everyone is taken care of, so no one in his firm could have felt bitter or neglected. First-born syndrome, in case either of you suffers from it. Sometimes I think it’s all my fault by being there for him to watch over when we were robbed of our parents by the Communists. He became prematurely staid and I, prematurely frivolous.” He expelled the last word with a hiss. “If there ever is a ripe time for either.”

  “And Selena?”

  “Enemies? No. Misunderstood? Always. I adore my sister-in-law probably for the same reason the world at large finds her inaccessible and taciturn. A half-laugh from Selena is worth a month of grins from someone who gushes all the time. Selena’s humanity is rock solid and she doesn’t have to broadcast it to the world. Besides, we share a love of theatre, so we have experienced many mutual delights.”

  “Does it bother Jan?” I asked. “Your ease with each other?”

  Marek shrugged. “Down deep? I don’t know. He jokes that I would have made a perfect mate for Selena, but he also knows I am not a threat.”

  Did he? I could see how Jan would envy his brother’s vitality, which he himself lacked.

  He leaned back in his chair, bending his knees against his desk. “And you two beautiful women are no doubt too young to be aware of the intricacies of partnerships that my brother and I have learned. Some women — and just as many men, for that matter — thrive on fantasy. When it becomes reality, they cannot bear it, even though they think they cannot bear it if it doesn’t. Jan is Selena’s reality and the theatre her fantasy.”

  I thought of Harry Potter on her bookshelf and her comment in the hotel room. Then I thought of Warren, wondering if I had the same problem. “We’re older than you think.”

  “Selena came from humble origins and wanted more,” he went on. “In choosing Jan, she bettered her opportunities in life. She is a woman who yearns to improve herself, fulfil her needs. Artistically, the urge was gratified by costume design.”

  “And personally?” asked Tessa.

  “Ahh…” Marek paused. “If the baby had not come along — who knows? Though she never complains, she is not one to hide her dissatisfaction, if you know her at all. But she — and Jan — were rescued by parenthood. A lifetime of new challenges.”

  He stood up, apologizing. “But I digress, Officers, unless this is what you came to hear.”

  I was mesmerized, but I could see Tessa shifting from foot to foot.

  Marek continued. “We are quick to condemn discontentment in today’s society — they give courses in happiness now, for God’s sake — but it is also the root of all progress. Often it becomes bleak and ugly and turns on itself and those around them, but without dissatisfaction and the urge for something better, we might still be chiselling our letters on stone tablets, except there wouldn’t be any letters. And everyone would stay with the first person he or she kissed.”

  I wondered if he were talking about himself.

  “Thank you, Mr. Kubik,” Tessa said, handing him her card in case anything occurred to him later that might be relevant.

  Back in the car she said to me, “You could have stayed there all day, couldn’t you?”

  I had to confess I missed talk like that. Sara was the philosopher in our family and served up analyses of people and life as naturally as peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Dad had inherited enough of his father’s practicality not to indulge in any kind of navel-gazing. If a need for improvement was the gauge, Mom must have been as dissatisfied as Selena Kubik. And I questioned my own motive to take another course: was it to keep self-loathing at bay? Not out of the question.

  “You’re in the right job if you’re fascinated by peculiar people.”

  “I guess I am. My mother had to drag me off buses when the crazies stood up and preached in the aisles.”

  Tessa laughed. “There’s still time to visit Selena today, if you want more.”

  “I’ve had enough for now. And I have to figure out a way to see her without Jan.”

  We were on the bridge, heading back to Burnaby. Tessa looked at me skeptically. “You think you’ll learn anything? There hasn’t been much new insight today.”

  Ah, but there has, I wanted to say. I’ve had a refresher course in self-awareness from Wanda and reality checks from reality Czechs. Instead, I said, “Feel like going for a drink at Squires after work?”

  “Sure.”

  By the time we changed, we had decided on
the Shark Club; we felt more in the mood for its upstairs fireplace than crowded sociability. Both of us had prowled the bar scene in our day and neither felt like it tonight. Tessa had just met a guy who “didn’t depress the hell out of me.” After failed relationships we were both gingerly tiptoeing our way back into the realm of possibility, as if it were studded with landmines. Tessa said her father kept threatening to find a nice Guyanese boy for her — in Guyana. But she wanted no more blind dates. We debated the merits of arranged marriage and agreed that making our own romantic decisions might not guarantee any more lifelong fulfilment, but it was the principle of the thing.

  “But I’m caving in on the no-cop rule, so why not everything?”

  Her new prospect was in polygraph in North Van. Members married each other all the time, even gay ones, but I too had made a pledge to avoid dating them. There were advantages in co-ordinating shifts, understanding the pressures of extra hours and working with the criminal element, but to me it was too much of the same. Ray dealt with my clientele once we were finished with them, but we didn’t sit in cars and offices together all day.

  “Who knows where it’s going?” Tessa couldn’t conceal an adolescent smile that disclosed where she wanted it to go. “How about you?”

  “Same. I feel I’m watching it unfold from the sidelines, wondering why our timing is always off. A warning?” My nose had started dripping, but I had tissues this time.

  “Men,” Tessa declared with a long drink of vodka cranberry, shaking her thick spray of curls pushed back in an orange headband. Like Vlasta O’Brian, Tessa was a woman of lush textures and features: creamy mocha skin, teeth an advertisement for whitening strips, long lashes on dark, compassionate, but shrewd eyes. Even her nails were strong and well-shaped compared to my stubby, broken ones. With a mouthful of ice, she gurgled, “I’m not making any stupid compromises this time.”

  I nodded. “My mother always said, ‘Never be with a man you have to make excuses for.’ The thing is, I didn’t have to for Ray, and it still didn’t work.”

  Tessa shrugged. “In the meantime, I am actually going to Guyana with my dad. I’ve never been back to my birthplace and would like to see the island he came from in the Essequibo River. And my grandparents’ graves. I want to know more about them. I’ve had a sudden burst of interest in my black heritage after living all these years on the white side. And Dad won’t be around forever as a tour guide.”

  “That’s cool.”

  “He says he’s taking me for security purposes against all the killing and robbing going on down there. It’s become a big-time drug stop from Colombia.”

  “You’ll be ready for Whalley when you get back.”

  The mention of Tessa’s unknown grandmother filled my mind with thoughts of Jane Hughes, but I was too tired to share them with Tessa at this hour. The mystery of human bonds and bondage had reached its fill for the day. I wiped my nose again. “And you might just meet someone to give your polygrapher a run for his money.”

  AT FIRST, Jane thinks it’s her usual catarrh. She takes it as a reminder to wash more handkerchiefs, soon forgotten in an impatient crunch of the warped back door. Roland enters with a newspaper in one hand, a letter in the other. He nods and gives her the letter.

  The childish handwriting prompts Jane to tear open the thin blue envelope recklessly. To see better, she stretches her arm out and reads aloud:

  September 15, 1918

  Dear Mother,

  I have just been discharged from a medikal unit in Pikardy. I lost a thum from blood poisoning in the battle of Amiens and my comander says I must be lucky. Many others did not survive. This was a big viktory and the next one shood bring the Germans to their nees.

  Sometimes I cry like a baby to be back home. It is not brave but I do it alone. All my close friends have died from bullets or bayonets or poison gas and now spanish flu. Pray for me to be back in Nanaimo by Chrismas. I have pressents for you and Sara and Janet and Papa. In the new year I will find a job in the building trade. Never in the mines. They are dark and dirty and damp like trenches.

  I hope you and our family are going fine. I miss you.

  Your son,

  Llewyllyn

  Jane presses the letter to her heart and closes her eyes, tears escaping down her cheeks. “September 15. That’s five weeks ago. Where is he now? Oh, where is our poor boy now?”

  “He’s a man, wherever he is,” says Roland, removing his jacket and revealing the camphor pendant he wears at his wife’s insistence. “And the war’s as good as over, if you can believe the papers and the talk. He should be home soon.”

  “Sure enough, he’s been through more than many men, but he’s still a lad of eighteen. How can he build houses without a thumb?” Jane thinks of her own infected thumb that almost killed her. Why was she spared hers and not her innocent son?

  Night shift behind him, Roland settles back on the couch where he opens the Nanaimo Free Press with shaky hands. A two-bits bucket of near beer, the only legal beverage now, does not pack the punch of even a pint of what he needs to still his tremors. From the corner of his eye, he watches his wife reread the letter three or four times before relaying the news he brings daily from the mine and bar.

  “Heard your old neighbour Gertie Salo died of flu in Chase River.”

  Jane shakes her head in dismay. She remembers young, slow Gertie, now the mother of five, who still cares for her mother because she speaks only Finnish. “That’s a houseful of dependents who won’t know where to start without her.”

  “And Milt’s packing up.”

  Jane clears her throat with a dry cough and looks sadly toward the house next door. “When?”

  “First of the month. Got a buyer for the property and says we should like our new neighbours. He works at Wakesiah but takes jobs in the bush when he can.” Miners who owned their own homes were permitted to farm or work in the lumber industry when there was a slowdown in the mines, rare as such opportunities were during wartime demand for coal.

  “Married?”

  “Just. Milt said the wife seems shy, but he told them you’ll make her welcome.”

  Oh did he now? Who says she has to welcome another woman living in Marjorie’s house? She cannot look in that direction since her best friend died and her mother took the twins’ favourite playmates back to Comox with her. She sends food for Milt with Roland because it is too heart-wrenching to pass the empty swing and hear the laughter again in her head. “Where’s he going?”

  “Vancouver. New Westminster, maybe. Marjorie’s sister is likely to take the girls and he wants to be close. Might work on the wharves to start. Strong as he is, he won’t have a problem. He can’t take it here alone.”

  He’s not the only one, Jane thinks. When Suzanne and June left with their grandmother, Sara and Janet were listless for so long Jane feared they had the flu. But they are playing quietly in their bedroom at the moment, both healthy. She looks in to find Sara reading Black Beauty aloud to her teddy bear and Janet crocheting a bracelet for her doll.

  Their school has been converted to a hospital and she feels safer having them at home. She has already done lessons with them this morning, marvelling at how quickly Sara picks up all her studies, even numbers. Her curiosity reminds Jane of herself at that age, and she makes a pledge that Sara will get all the schooling she wants. Janet learns just enough not to disappoint her mother. At the end of lessons they sing songs: “Li’l Liza Jane,” “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag,” and “Oh! How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” saving the silliest ones for last, like “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” “K-K-K-Katy,” and “Oh Johnny, Oh Johnny, Oh!” to finish with giggles. Since Llewyllyn’s letter, “Roses are shining in Picardy…” is now running through Jane’s head, her twins always coming to mind as the roses in any song. Longer now, their dark hair tied back in a ribbon is silkier than ever; Jane has never seen such beauty before. Her gasp of gratitude gets caught in her throat as a rasping cough.

  Jane
t looks up from her bracelet. “Mama, drink some milk and ginger.”

  “Not now, it’s suppertime.” Jane shivers, pulling her woollen cardigan around her. “It’s cold in here.” She turns to Roland, who puts down the paper and adds a half-scuttle of coal to the burning embers in the stove, shrugging. She files her son’s letter with the others in the desk drawer, then stands in the kitchen, rubbing her hands in front of the warm oven until Janet comes out to set the table for supper. Sara remains reading in the bedroom.

  Jane hands Janet a knife and two tomatoes to slice on a plate. “Mind your fingers,” she says, more from habit than real concern. With the war dragging on and the flu raging, she feeds her family frugally from provisions she herself has put up. She takes a barley, mushroom, and bacon casserole from the oven along with a fresh loaf of bread. A sealer of pickled green beans completes the first course and will be rewarded by pumpkin pie.

  The calmness of the scene also prompts Jane to give thanks for a healthy family with enough to eat, adding silently, “and no drunken ravings,” once commonplace before Prohibition. She regrets her son cannot see his father this way, just once. “Let us pray Llewyllyn is also well-fed, warm, and whole at this moment and will be back with us soon.”