by John O'Neill
“The Americans, at least they have wars,” he’d say.
His bitterness was exacerbated by the fact that neither Leonard nor his sister Ruth ever took any interest in joining the Legion, thus refusing to participate, even in such a suspect way, in their father’s legacy.
Yet his father’s legacy, Leonard believed, was itself suspect. James had been in the last year of training to be a WAG – Wireless Air Gunner – with the Royal Canadian Air Force (his bad feet kept him out of the army) when the war ended. Thus, he never saw any action and in fact never left the training base in Prince Edward Island. Still, because of the inherent danger of training, his father always insisted that he had served his country as legitimately as if he’d faced a whole squadron of Luftwaffe, Messerschmitt Bf-109s, in a blasted sky. Leonard had heard the story ad nauseam about how a plane his father was in, returning in January from a practice flight, hit a snow bank and rolled, killing the pilot; and how, on another occasion, a divorced man with whom James had shared a bittersweet conversation about family, the next morning, while wearing soundproof headgear, walked, accidentally or not, into the live propeller of a Bolingbroke plane. He knew his father felt a strong kinship with those who had served, and knew his father’s passion was real, though exaggerated, when it suited him.
The pleasant lethargy of cottage life infected Leonard’s parents like a poison, seeping through the screen door with the lake air. Eventually, James’ already claw-like feet had completely curled in on themselves. Leonard’s mother’s deterioration was not physical, though she’d lost weight, but manifested itself in a lethal forgetfulness; she began to leave elements burning on the stove, or the bath water running. Once, too, she had started to fry up some rancid pork chops, but their peculiar smell alerted Leonard’s father. After a number of fretful discussions with his sister Ruth, and one consultation with their mother’s doctor, Leonard decided it was for the best for his parents to move to the city where they could be more closely monitored. His mother was mystified, upset by the prospect, but James, recognizing his wife’s broken memory, agreed that, really, they had no choice.
Ruth found an apartment for them on Kingston Road near Main. There, James would be just a quick cab ride from his beloved Legion Branch 42 (where he’d been a member since the war, before they’d moved up north) and Ruth and Leonard could drop by frequently to help out. They decided, too, to hire a homecare worker. After the move, their mother’s mind deteriorated more rapidly, and she began to display odd behaviours. Leonard and his sister were at once relieved that this worsening state of affairs coincided with their parents’ new proximity and upset by the possibility that the stress of the move had accelerated their mother’s mental decline.
6
BLACK FEATHER
Leonard experienced one of these strange behaviours during his parents’ first week in their new apartment, just a day before his wife’s return from England, when he went over to cook a meal. After a pit stop at the convenience store across the street, and with a mumbled hello to his father, who was sitting in a formal position on the couch, very straight, Leonard disappeared into the kitchen. As he stirred the bullet shells of penne pasta into boiling water, he realized he’d bought no bread, no Parmesan, and had left the store without buying the Coke he liked to have with pasta. He walked out of the kitchen to ask his dad, who was watching a Sanford and Son rerun, if he should go back.
In mid-sentence, Leonard heard an awful noise that seemed to originate in the kitchen, like a drain backing up, water or something more viscous, belching up from the pipes.
“For Jesus body of Christ almighty’s sake,” said James.
Leonard looked at his dad for clarification, as the sound continued.
“It’s your mother. She’s been doing that since Sunday. I thought it had stopped.”
“Doing what, exactly?”
“Goddamned if I know. She keeps spitting up, spitting up, like something’s in her throat. But nothing comes. She’s gone through a dozen boxes of tissue. I can’t stand it.”
Leonard took a step toward the bedroom, hesitated, and asked: “Have you called the doctor?”
“Of course,” his father said. “Your sister took her yesterday, but he found nothing. Doctors don’t know their arses from their elbows. Said it’s in her head. Has to see a psychologist. He suggested we wait, that maybe she’d stop, once she settled into a routine. I thought she had. She hasn’t done it since this morning when the homecare worker was here. Ruthie said she’d take Mom to a clinic if it kept on. Jesus suffering body of Christ.”
The sound was terrible, a retching, liquid scratch of sound, each retch lasting around four seconds, in quick succession, five or six in a row, followed by a brief pause. Leonard stood on the kitchen’s edge, listening, his mother’s spitting noise punctuated by his father’s equally annoying outbursts:
“For Chrissakes, Margaret, would you stop? God and goddamn it, there’s nothing in your throat.”
“It’s okay, Dad, she obviously can’t help it,” Leonard said. “We’ll just have to take her to see someone else. Have some patience.”
“You don’t have to live with it.”
Leonard went back into the kitchen. Planted both his hands on the counter, watched the steam from the boiling water rise and feather. Stirred the pan of puckering sauce. Wondered why Ruth hadn’t warned him about his mother’s condition, this strange new affliction, and his father’s agitation.
The whole apartment shuddered, as if some giant were lifting it; James had turned up the volume on the television. A deafening laugh track now competed with his mother’s spitting, and his father’s useless rants: “For Jesus’ shit sake, Christ almighty, I can’t stand it, Margaret.”
Leonard thought of sticking his face into the boiling water. Or hurling himself, arms spread wide, from the balcony. Instead, he went down the short hall and knocked on the half-open bedroom door.
His mother was in her yellow nightgown, sitting on the edge of the unmade bed. Around her feet, like discarded skins, were piles of tissue reaching up past her ankles. On the bed were three empty boxes, another two on the floor beyond the circle of white. His mother held a tissue over her mouth. She didn’t look up when he entered. Her nightgown hung loosely about her shoulders. Leonard could see the tops of the pale curves of her breasts. He walked over the fluffed white floor and adjusted her nightgown. Gave her a cursory hug, told her he was here to make dinner. She responded with a new bout of spitting, rocking forward and back, her eyes closed. After he spoke her name again, she stood and followed him, while continuing to spit into her tissue. Leonard pulled out a chair for her at the dining room table, asking his father to turn off the television and to come and eat. His father looked at him, the remote in his hand, with the expression of someone who’d been asked to cut off his own right arm. James often got this look on his face, one of revulsion and utter shock, even at the most trivial inconveniences. Sometimes people thought he was being ironic with his exaggerated expressions.
When James sat down after his characteristic shuffle across the living room, he fixed his wife with another look of revulsion, and said, “Please, mother, we’re going to eat. Put the tissue down.”
Leonard took some pleasure in his duty as server, dumping the rubbery pasta shells into the strainer in the sink, then tilting the strainer over the three plates he’d set out on the counter. He poured, slowly, the steaming sauce over the sticky mounds of shells. The separate columns of steam were simple, edifying, flags of accomplishment. His mother renewed her attack on her tissue. His father began to swear again.
Margaret got distracted by the plate placed in front of her and dropped the hand holding the tissue. With her other, she lifted her fork. But she paused for a long moment, unsure how to proceed. Leonard showed her what was required. James broke from his litany of profanities to comment on the meal.
“Do we have any bread, or Parmesan?” he asked. “This is pretty dull.”
Leonard came back f
rom the kitchen with a half-loaf of Wonder bread he’d found in the freezer and dropped it like a brick next to his father’s plate.
“Next time it’ll be better,” he promised, and returned to the kitchen to pour them all glasses of water.
His mother and father both finished their meals. Leonard’s gratification at having served as cook was short lived, however. Once his mother had gobbled up her last piece of pasta, she fastened a tissue against her mouth and began to spit, then went back to the bedroom. On cue, James started roaring the Lord’s name again, stretching it out, slicing it, chomping it, as if its utterance was a kind of profane dessert. And as if he were challenging the Lord Jesus and body of Christ to descend to earth to see if He could tolerate Margaret’s incessant spitting and her mental affliction.
After Leonard had done the dishes, he gave his dad a brief, half-hearted pep talk. Said goodbye to his mother, embraced her as she sat on the edge of the bed. Carried a green garbage bag filled with wet tissues to the garbage chute. He was glad that Ruth had taken on the responsibility for schlepping their mother to another clinic. The image of Alison entered his mind the moment he closed the apartment door. On the elevator ride to ground level, his desire increased as each floor number blinked, the descent corresponding to a current that moved down his spine, finally crackling in his groin. When he left the elevator, he was hard. He walked half sideways, turned away from a smartly-dressed elderly woman who sat on the couch in the apartment lobby, her wrinkled fists kneading a trendy crescent-shaped purse that went perfectly with her dark turtleneck and jacket. She stared at Leonard with an inexplicable wide-eyed astonishment that unnerved him. He concluded that she was experiencing a kind of sixth-sense disapproval at how he, callous young man, could let lust overtake him so soon after having witnessed a disturbing new aspect of his own mother’s deterioration.
7
QUEEN OF HEARTS
Cynthia and her mother, Candace, were returning from London the following day. As Leonard drove home from his parents’ apartment, the sad movie of his mother played in his head: wilting on the edge of the bed, her breasts partly exposed, her thin, liver-stained calves disappearing into a lake of tissues. The anguish in her eyes when he asked her why she was spitting up, tears squeaking out as she explained: “There’s something horrid in my throat,” as if a black feather from some winged, snub-faced demon had lodged there. How she had managed a smile just before Leonard closed the bedroom door, as if to reassure him, as if he was the one in difficulty. These things made Leonard want to change direction and steer the car toward downtown, so he could see Alison, surrender to her thin, vital darkness. His wife, though he missed her, seemed maliciously absent. He began to feel, like a headache in his eyes, that she was responsible for what was happening to his mother and for his own recent lapse of judgement. After he’d pulled into the driveway of the ghost of the house, he paused while remembering how Alison had slid from her seat to face him. He looked at his hands, and thought of his father.
The next day, Leonard picked them up at the airport. Cynthia had phoned him several times during their four-week holiday, each time to share her frustrations. Leonard knew that after a month with Candace his wife would be happy to get home, anxious to exercise their intimate bond – the bond of familiarity, strengthened by the sharing of stories: how her mother had embarrassed her in a tiny Piccadilly souvenir shop, loudly commenting on how the portrait of Princess Diana on the expensive commemorative plate: “Doesn’t even look like her”; how her mother had angered Cynthia by rushing her through the tall rooms of the British Museum, complaining of sore feet, after Cynthia had suggested that her mother meet her there after she’d had a chance to explore some of the larger exhibits; how, while Cynthia wanted to experience the miraculous dexterity of the London Underground, Candace kept offering, aggressively, long-sufferingly, to pay for cabs, as if it were just a matter of money; how, when Cynthia suggested they spend a few hours apart, her mother had responded with: “We’re apart when we’re asleep.”
Leonard knew that, after the challenges of the trip, his wife would require him to play the role of confidante, of attentive, sympathetic husband, to reassure her that she was not a terrible person for being impatient with her mother. For being tempted, on more than one occasion, to shoulder her into the Thames. This role, which in the past Leonard had enjoyed, now seemed a burden, and he felt that his reluctance in this case would be an obvious sign that something was up.
He wasn’t sure how he’d react to the sight of his wife and mother-in-law, or how well he’d maintain the idea that all significant events of the last month had occurred on their summer vacation. But first, in a kind of perverse initiation, he had to endure the displays of affection in the Arrivals section: the convergence of an East Indian family around a tiny, beaming, impeccably dressed man, the pecking order of tradition: parents first, kids, then wife. A young, unwashed, black-clad couple, whose lust tore open a hole in the fluorescent concourse, with their long, groping kiss. A slightly older couple, blue-jeaned, hippy-ish, whose embrace was cursory, separation perhaps not long enough to have rekindled desire. Leonard found himself seeking ambivalences in the welcomes: here, a formal handshake between two suited men that suggested inconvenience. There, the cool embrace of two pencil-thin almost identical women that hinted at years of sisterly competitiveness. He wanted to believe the endearments, the little glad dramas of human realignment, were illusory. That, and his feelings of guilt, represented the hard reality of human experience. Displays of love were false rituals to which people surrendered in airports, trains and bus stations, anyplace where journeys come to obvious ends, to disguise the malaise of the true journey we all experience perpetually, forlornly, from cradle to grave. As he waited for the faces of his wife and mother-in-law to take shape amidst the throng, he congratulated himself for being the only true bastion of substance and truth. He anchored the whole terminal, prevented it from lifting into the air like a love-drunk balloon.
He avoided eye contact with Cynthia. His shifting eyes and limp hands made their kiss a commonplace. She sensed his distance. Her smile bloomed, wilted. Leonard told himself that his wife would assume that he was being reserved in the presence of her mother, and that his enthusiasm had been blunted by his wife’s series of unhappy long-distance phone calls. But he embraced his mother-in-law with exaggerated vigour and began to ask a series of questions about the last days of their trip, focusing particularly on a Jack-The-Ripper tour he knew they’d taken in Whitechapel.
“I didn’t realize he was so vicious,” Cynthia said. “But it was a fantastic lesson in the history of the place.”
“And did you know that Whitechapel was filled with prostitutes, so the police didn’t do anything?” Candace said. Cynthia threw a quick, perturbed glance at Leonard.
“Well, no, Mom, remember our guide said that that was what the public thought at the time, but that the police really did do a thorough investigation.”
“Yes, right, maybe. But you wonder if they really did try very hard.”
This was an instance of how Candace would sneak in a small disclaimer, a last-word jab whose content usually had no basis in truth, or even reflected what she believed. It was a small annoyance, but Leonard knew Cynthia’s patience had all but disappeared. She closed her green eyes (the cool green of faded, wintry leaves), but her eyelids flushed with the red that coloured the rest of her face. Then, as they walked toward the car, and though both Leonard’s arms were occupied, Cynthia put her free arm around his elbow. After a few awkward steps, she withdrew it.
Once they were on the highway, they lapsed into silence. Leonard felt that he was the one expected to talk, to ask questions. But he was constrained by the thought that Cynthia was sitting in the same seat that Alison had occupied just a few days before, and by the fear that any more questions about their trip would allow Candace to irritate Cynthia further. He noticed through the side window, above the crawl of cars in the westbound lanes, a family of deer on
a patch of grass just beyond the shoulder. At once he thought of two things – first, Cynthia’s dream (Leonard saw himself dead, pulverized in a car wreck, a startled but unharmed deer loping off into the woods) and a fact he’d read once in a book on animal behaviour; that, in the animal kingdom, a sick or wounded animal, even when surrounded by healthy members of its own species, will give off signs to predators, signals that it’s injured, in a kind of weird surrender imposed by the rigours of natural selection. This particular thought made him worry that his indiscretion was as obvious from his behaviour as if Alison had left a series of quarter-sized hickeys on his neck, or her panties hanging from the rear-view mirror. He saw with relief that Cynthia had closed her eyes and let her head drop onto her shoulder. Leonard wondered if he’d even seen any deer by the highway. Were the four-legged creatures just ghostly, white-tailed manifestations of his own flashing anxiety, his fears wearing glistening jackets of fur?
But it was late in the day, and the slow traffic on the 401 sapped whatever residual energy Cynthia and her mother had left after their flight. Once they’d dropped Candace off at her house, Cynthia didn’t have the strength to elaborate on tales about her mother. Instead, she wound herself more tightly into the passenger seat and let her face relax. The crow’s feet at the edges of her eyes softened.
At home, Cynthia perked up in a burst of practical energy and began to unpack her bags. Leonard disappeared into the washroom. In the bedroom, in his pyjamas, Leonard watched as Cynthia transferred all her clothing into the laundry hamper (got the smell of London all over me), then carefully placed a number of other items on the bed, things wrapped in coloured paper or knotted in plastic bags.
