by Glen Huser
The Saturday Mom and Uncle Hartley had their kitchen visit, I sought the library to idle away a couple of hours. Myron beckoned me up into a small loft where he sorted through boxes and bags of donated books. Removing some German volumes from a box, he revealed several nudist magazines, naked men and women playing volleyball, climbing mountains, posing with bows and arrows, unabashedly sitting around campfires. I almost fell into the box, my eyes riveted to the profusion of sexual revelations, although for every handsome young man or girl, there seemed to be a horde of fairly overweight adults and paunchy seniors.
I was so preoccupied with the contents of this trove that it was a few minutes before I became aware that Myron had stopped giggling and his breathing had become laboured. When I checked to see what was happening, I realized he had undone his trousers and was massaging what seemed to me to be an incredibly long, engorged penis. As he climaxed, his free hand grasped my shoulder in something that I imagined to be almost a death grip. A shuddering gasp escaped into the dead air of the loft. I think, throughout all of this, I sat stock-still as a Rodin statue.
Myron cleaned himself with a handkerchief and said, haltingly, “Take them. For you.”
The German nature-lover magazines were my secret companions for months, and I found myself thinking often of Myron Evington and his few small moments of ecstasy in the library loft. No one expected Myron to have a girlfriend, and, while I had a number of friends who were girls, I shied away from seeking one who might be steady in the way that Bonita, a girl in my class at school, had become Bradley’s steady.
Of course, whenever Uncle Hartley visited, he would wag his shaggy eyebrows at me and ask me what little girl I was stepping out with.
“Curtis hasn’t any time for romance,” my mother said when her brother broached the subject on his last visit. “Give him time, Hart. I don’t think you had any girlfriends yourself before you went overseas.”
I rarely entered into these conversations. They were really between the two of them, the kind of looping patter that adult siblings, to my continued astonishment, indulged in.
“When it comes to girls, I think he’s shy like you always were. He’d sooner keep company with a book or a drawing pad.” This led into a discussion about the family strands from which these predilections might be traced.
My mother remembered an aunt on the Martindale side of the family who painted on china.
“And our cousin Vernon,” Uncle Hartley rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Didn’t he like to copy comic strip characters? Was pretty good at it. I remember he practically papered his room with them.”
“So—artists on both sides,” my mother decided.
They talked on until the coffee pot was empty and the sun was beginning to set.
“I’d better get going. Hat will think I had a car crash.” Uncle Hartley pulled himself up from the kitchen chair with difficulty. He struggled to get his breath and gave me a little salute before heading out.
It was the last time we would see him.
CHAPTER 3
NEITHER BRADLEY NOR I ATTENDED OUR UNCLE Hartley’s funeral, coming as it did when we were serving time at a church summer camp. I was not to see my Aunt Harriet until some six years after our Edmonton visit to the dentist. At that point in my life, I had settled into a basement room close to the U of A campus and sunk into the course work that would cough me out, a teacher, in two years time. Bradley was working at the Treasury Branch in Yarrow. He handed over a third of each paycheque to my mother, contributions to the family coffer that took on a concrete reality in new living-room wallpaper and a sofa set.
“Maybe, once you’ve got your certificate, you could get on at King George High,” my mother mused. “It would be nice to have a chrome dinette for the kitchen.”
I was being sponsored by the family for the two years it would take me to get my Standard S Certificate, she told me, and then “it was up to me.” The phrase always hung in the air like some kind of suspension bridge. Somewhere at its other end it was secured by the prospect of my working at a school in Yarrow or at least within the district. Teaching English and art to the younger brothers and sisters of the kids I’d graduated with? It was a thought that filled me with unease. And, in fact, I was rather fond of the wooden drop-leaf table in our kitchen. Who knew what opportunities for escape the city might offer?
IT WAS DURING MY SECOND MONTH AS AN EDUCATION student, on a particularly dispiriting day filled with classes on Educational Psychology and The History of Education that I looked up Aunt Harriet’s number in the phonebook. I wrote it on the inside cover of the scribbler I carried from class to class, its first few pages crammed with notes meandering through doodles and quick sketches. Over a cinnamon bun and coffee at the Tuck Shop, I flipped the cover open again, allowing a sprinkle of cinnamon to spill onto the name and the number so that I peered down on them as if through rust, the rust of all those years since I had seen her. What would happen if I called her? In my mind, I could see that strange, scarred face with its circles of bottle green glass, see her hands reaching for the telephone. Why would I want to call her? Where would it lead? A boy who always sat next to me in Sociology and was in the phys. ed. class I suffered through on a weekly basis crawled onto the vacant stool beside me and I closed the notebook quickly.
“Hi, Curtis.”
“Walter.” It was the first time I’d run into him outside of the classroom.
“Cramming away?” He was a large-boned, friendly boy with a shock of blond hair that looked to me like it had experienced a home-delivered peroxide treatment. “Double cinnamon buns.” He winked at the waitress and held up two fingers.
We began comparing notes on our classes and instructors. As we talked, I felt an easing of the mood that had driven me to the telephone book. Homesickness, loneliness. Was this all it was? I walked with Walter over to the Reading Room of the library, crowded in the afternoon with students falling asleep into their books. We agreed to meet for supper at a small restaurant on Whyte Avenue where it was possible to eat without destroying our monthly budgets. On the honeyed varnish of the Reading Room table, I opened the scribbler again. It was more than loneliness or homesickness, I decided. There was curiosity there too, something that had never left me since that summer day we had visited the Coleman house. I wondered if the picture of the naked lady still hung in that small, dim parlour.
During an hour’s break between classes the next day, I cornered the house phone in the Education Building and dialed the number. The voice of the woman who answered was familiar. The housekeeper who had met us at the door, I realized, must still be there. “Yes, she’s in.” There was that trace of an accent, perhaps a Scottish burr. “May I tell her who’s callin’?”
As I waited, I rehearsed what I’d say to her. “You probably don’t remember me. Surprise! Bet you probably never thought you’d hear from me. Remember your little nephews who visited you back in 1953?”
“Curtis.” The voice was melodic, as deceptively youthful as it had been six years ago. “I was wondering when you’d give your old aunt a call.”
“You knew I was in town?”
“Starting university?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
She laughed, the tinkly laugh I remembered. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “I’ve been missing male companionship.”
“Isn’t Phip around?”
“Phip’s been back in Toronto for the past three years. Working for an advertising firm. He’s remarried and comes to see me dutifully once a year. Here for three or four days and then gone again.” There was a hesitation. “And how are your parents?”
The phone conversation settled comfortably into a familiar mode, friendly, expository. I chanted all the news I could think of, ending with details of where I had found room and board, what my university schedule was like. When I stopped for breath, she said, “You must come by soon so we can truly visit. How is Sunday?”
“Uh. Fine. Sunday would be fine.”
“Dinner?”
I thought of the beetle.
“We’ll eat out,” she said with a slight laugh, as if she’d read my mind. “I don’t get out enough. It’ll give Jean a rest.”
IT WAS A SUNDAY IN MID-OCTOBER, A WARM FALL DAY with a cloudless sky broken now and then with the distant, clamouring calls of migratory birds. In a blue blazer and grey flannels that had got me through graduation at King George High in Yarrow, I walked south of the university to the stucco bungalow where Bradley and I had fought over the doorbell. The house seemed smaller, the elm trees flanking it larger. Virtually all of the leaves had fallen and lay unraked across the lawn and walk.
Again, it was Jean Abercrombie who answered the door and I felt she had shrunk since I’d last seen her. She squinted up at my face.
“They should have tied a brick on you,” she said wryly. “Your aunt’s almost ready.” She gestured me into the parlour. It was as I remembered, the walls filled with photographs, a few paintings and prints, the alcove with the small Tom Thomson oil and, among the chalk sketches there, yes—the naked lady. Jean Abercrombie exerted a gentle pressure against my arm and watched me fold into an armchair.
“I’ll see if Harriet is ready for me to phone the taxi,” she said, straightening an antimacassar I had dislodged in my descent.
Alone in the parlour, I tried to be impartial to the wall decorations, giving as much attention to the photograph of Uncle Hartley holding a trophy fish he’d caught, to Phip, caught by the camera in various stages of childhood and adolescence as I did the nude woman on the sofa, but finally I gave up and drank in every wondrous, reaffirming detail again. Was I getting a boner? Oh Christ, I thought. Who would believe this? The more I tried to pull my concentration from the sketch and what it was doing to me, the more my body became determined to acknowledge its sensuality. I crossed my legs and remained seated when Jean Abercrombie came back into the room. She looked at me oddly. “Your aunt’s ready. I’ll just go and call a cab now.”
Then she was at the door. Aunt Harriet. She was much as I remembered her but her hair had gone white and she wore it in a coil on the back of her head. The circular dark glasses had been replaced with a style that had been recently popular, their flaring frames tipped with rhinestones. There were more rhinestones at her ears and neck.
“Curtis?” The voice was exploratory, her hands left the door frame for an instant, checking the fur jacket draped over her shoulders like a shawl, the black velvet dress, a beaded handbag.
“Aunt Harriet.” It was safe to stand.
She bore the weight of a person who has been sedentary for many years but I was surprised by her long legs, her large feet in black patent slippers. A “Scandahoovian” I remembered now my mother had once described her. “Feet and hands like a lumberjack.”
“Come here and give me a hug.”
I came from a family of non-huggers. Goodnight kisses and impromptu hugs had stopped once I was old enough to attend school. Once in a while, at Christmas or on a birthday, we hugged one another, but always quickly and clumsily, like people at a rehearsal before they’ve got things right. I moved awkwardly to Aunt Harriet and wrapped my gangly arms around her fur-covered shoulders. There was a smell in the old, shedding skins of her jacket that made me think of our attic in Yarrow and the musty boxes of clothing goods I sometimes sorted through in my father’s second-hand shop. In that brief hug, I caught too the aroma of a perfume, a floral attar with a hint of lilacs to it. And face powder. Like my mother’s.
I felt her own arms go around me, pulling me close. “You’ve become very tall and thin,” she said, releasing me. Before I had a chance to step away, though, a hand lit gently on my face, fingertips tracing my brow, my cheekbones, brushing along my nose, my lips and chin. “Do you mind?”
“No.” I stood patiently.
“Are you handsome?” She smiled, the lipsticked rim of her lips suddenly impish.
“I wish I were,” I laughed. “Bradley got the looks.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re thin.” She patted my arm. Gesturing to me to return to my seat, she made her way to that same armchair where I had first been introduced to her. “Would you believe I was very slender at your age?” she said, her fingers searching the table for the carved box of cigarettes. I watched her complete the intricate task of lighting up. She drew in smoke and held it as if she were giving it an opportunity to visit all parts of her interior self. “Yes, I was thin and, I think, handsome. When you get to be my age you can say such things. Handsome rather than pretty. That figure study of me errs on the side of softness and femininity.” She gestured vaguely over her shoulder to the nude on the sofa hanging among the other sketches in the alcove.
“It was you?”
“Was?”
“I was remembering when we came to visit you when Brad and I were kids. I guessed then that it was you. Mom was a bit upset. She’d never seen a naked lady on a living-room wall before.”
Aunt Harriet exhaled a small chuckle with a wisp of smoke. “I have it there on purpose,” she said. “It helps me to figure people out. You need some small subterfuges when one of your senses is gone. Of course, I didn’t have anything on the walls for a long time—until after the war, I think—in Toronto. Jean hung some ornaments and Hartley had a few photographs around but then, in 1946, when Phip was going back to college and studying to become a commercial artist, he asked if he could look through his father’s sketches. A few that were the least damaged he had trimmed and framed. I think he always wanted to say to visitors, ‘The naked lady is actually a portrait of my mother,’ but he never quite got up the courage. When we moved to Edmonton, he arranged everything as close as possible to how it was back east.”
“Do you have any of the artwork Phip has done?”
“No. Sometimes he’d describe a piece he was working on to me. But I could never keep the pictures in my mind the way I could those of Phillip’s that I had actually seen, looked at over and over again. I think he had some of his paintings up—mainly in his bedroom—but after Hartley died he took all of his stuff with him when he left June and moved back to Toronto.”
Her cigarette had burned down and she carefully snuffed it out in the glass tray. “Of course, I’ve always had the Thomson up. I like to feel it as I walk by.”
Jean appeared at the doorway, dressed now, herself, for going out. “The taxi’s here. If you don’t mind, I’ll tag along to my bus connection.” She carried a stack of magazines to donate to the hospital where her diabetic sister, she told me in some detail, was recovering from an amputation.
After we had let her out, Harriet sighed and said, “We are of an age when parts of us must be lost. Jean was in the hospital herself a year ago for two months. Some doctor taking out a good portion of her inner workings. I hired a university student for the time she was gone. That was an unqualified disaster.”
“How long has Jean been with you?” The cab was onto the High Level Bridge and its grillwork fell in patterns of shadow across us.
“Since she was a young woman. Since we were both young women.” The repeating intervals of shadow seemed, I thought, to mark time, its quick, regular flight. “She was the housekeeper when Phip was born.” I felt her hand grasp mine. “Curtis, I’m so glad you’ve come,” she said. “I’ve been waiting.”
I didn’t know what to say so I cleared my throat and, seeing her struggle with a package of cigarettes in her handbag, offered to light one for her. She smoked in silence as the cab eased its way from light to light along Jasper Avenue, drawing up finally to the MacDonald Hotel. “We may discover some new cafés,” she told me, almost conspiratorially, “but I thought we should start with something sure.”
I had never before eaten at a restaurant with cloth napkins and candlelight playing off heavy silver cutlery. Aunt Harriet’s rhinestones wakened, glinting as she nodded at the waiter, ordering wine. “Hartley liked to come here,” she said matter-of-factly. “For special occasions
, you know.”
Bringing the wine, the waiter reviewed the menu. I mumbled assent to Aunt Harriet’s choices and we settled down over the claret. In my experience, red wine was sweet and fruity, stuff my father bought by the jug. The MacDonald Hotel claret caught in my throat.
“How do you like the wine?” Aunt Harriet seemed to be playing with it in her mouth. “You must be looking very sophisticated. They didn’t ask to see your birth certificate.”
“It’s not very sweet.”
“I should hope not,” she laughed. Again her hand found mine. “Bear with your old aunt,” she said. I took another mouthful. “So you’re going to be a teacher. What happened to the writing and the drawing?”
“Oh, I still do those.” The verb “do” seemed suddenly silly. “I’m still interested.”
“Are you working on anything at the moment?”
“Not really.” The claret was going down more easily. “I’m taking an art option and I just write when I have a chance. Not very often since courses started.”
“Do you keep a journal, Curtis?” The question, I felt, had more import than the words put to me.
“No,” I admitted.
She released my hand and sank back in her chair.
“Phillip Pariston did,” she said, her voice soft and distant. “For almost a year.”
“I should keep one,” I laughed. “But nothing interesting’s happened to me yet. Nothing heroic.” She urged me to tell her about the unheroic episodes of my first few weeks in the city. Through the salad and the chicken cordon bleu, I entertained her with an account of finding a room, after a gruelling search, in a building with a caretaker who would have been snapped up by Roger Corman for one of his horror movies if Edmonton had been Hollywood. I followed this up with a blow-by-blow description of registration, a scenario that I dubbed “Curtis Hayseed tackles the Big U.” She laughed politely, at times maybe even with genuine mirth.
