Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  There was the mystery of Doris calling her Joan, being inspired to call her this the first time she held her in her arms although Anne was the name that she and Gordon and Sonja had agreed on for a girl. Not until almost three years later, when Gordon looked up from his crossword puzzle and said, “Sonja is an anagram of Joan’s,” did anybody realize that Doris had unwittingly branded her with her real maternity.

  Her beauty was a kind of mystery, not just because it was genetically inexplicable but because it was so seductive. People always say, What a beautiful baby! but here was a baby who inspired adoration even in the blind. At Dearness the blind faltered their hands over her face and limbs and like everyone else compared her to the disadvantage of all other babies, including their own. The picture of her that the photographer took to show Callous Alice’s mother also appeared in three Vancouver newspapers and generated hundreds of claims that she was the reincarnation of this or that beloved relative, pleas and orders to hand her over.

  The newspapers were notified by Aunt Mildred, another curiosity when you consider that her hip broke when she fainted and she had to climb two flights of stairs to get to a phone. Fortunately, by the time the first two reporters showed up, Doris had everything more or less under control. No pictures, she said, no disturbing the mother or the baby, but as she couldn’t put a lid on Aunt Mildred, let alone the other residents, all of whom were declaring they’d heard something mighty eerie, she left it to them to answer the reporters’ questions. Nothing to worry about there. Thanks to her, everyone in the home was under the impression that Sonja’s last name was Gorman, that she was nineteen, and that she was the bride of a doctor who had been sent to the British Honduras as part of a U.N. relief effort.

  Until the to-do died down, Sonja and the baby should stay put in the guest apartment, Doris decided. She brought them their meals and otherwise took over, and it didn’t occur to Sonja to feel anything aside from off the hook. The ache she sometimes felt watching her mother give Joan her bottle she thought was her womb shrinking. “There it goes again,” she’d think and feel a reverential affection for the complicated workings of her body. When Joan’s whimpers made her breasts leak she went into the bathroom to squeeze the milk into the sink. Formula was better for babies, her mother said, which was just as well in Sonja’s view. She couldn’t imagine her breasts being sucked by an innocent baby, especially a baby who was supposed to be her sister. Who, for that matter, might still be Callous Alice, although most of the old people who had been willing to entertain that notion had changed their minds. With a few exceptions they now called Joan, Joan.

  Everybody bore gifts. Lots of knitwear and blankets, a red and orange hand-quilted blanket from the Negro nurse, which Sonja thought was a bit loud for a baby but which Doris went into raptures over. Some of the residents brought money. One old couple, old pals of Alice’s, showed up with a Black Velvet Chocolates box containing twenty-five silver dollars. This couple was one of the few exceptions. “Cold, hard cash, Ali!” the man said with a wink at Joan, and then he started pestering her with questions about the hereafter. “Blink once for yes,” he said.

  “It’s her huge eyes,” Doris said one night after the visitors had gone. Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers? she sang, venting the song in her mind. She cleared her throat (and Joan made a similar sound, imitating Doris, you’d swear) and said, “The way they seem to see right through you.”

  “Maybe they do see right through you,” Sonja said. Leaning over her mother’s arm, she lightly touched a finger to Joan’s bruise, a thing she did from time to time in case she picked up a message. “Ali?” she called softly.

  “Cut it out!” Doris said, and then cooed “Sorry” because Joan had flinched. Turning back to Sonja she whispered, “I’ve had it up to here with that mumbo jumbo.”

  And she meant it, even though she herself couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on with this kid. A few crossed wires from the fall. She’d had two babies, she knew the score. A newborn shouldn’t be able to focus on you the way Joan did, right across a room, it wasn’t supposed to follow you with its eyes like that. Then there was her extreme sensitivity to light and noise, and all those unbaby-like sounds she came out with. The throat-clearing, the droning, the clicking, hissing.

  Do you want to know the truth? For a while there, Doris was also looking at Joan and asking, “Ali?” Not out loud, but she was asking it. Later she’d look back and think no wonder. For one thing she didn’t know then that Joan was brain-damaged, added to which she herself was hardly in her right mind around the time that Joan was born. Doris was wild … an out-of-control, madly-in-love nymphomaniac but carrying on as if she wasn’t, like a murderer you find out was a clown at children’s parties. She was either keyed up or so absent-minded that she felt she went into trances. Take the night she was jiggling Joan to bring on a burp, and Sonja drew her attention to how red Joan’s face was turning.

  “She looks embarrassed,” Sonja chuckled. And only then did Doris realize not only that she was holding Joan but that she was shaking the poor kid like a ketchup bottle.

  This was when Joan was five weeks old.

  This was when Doris and Sonja had the same dream.

  It happened on the train ride home. What with all the money from the Dearness crowd Doris had splurged on a cabin again, one with a good-sized double bed this time. It was the second afternoon, and Doris had put Joan in her basket and then she and Sonja decided to have a nap along with her. After a few minutes, because Joan was wide awake, cawing and clicking, they moved her into the bed, and that calmed her down.

  They all slept—even Joan, who hardly slept at all, even Doris, who never slept soundly any more. When Doris opened her eyes about an hour later, Sonja was also blinking awake. At the end of the bed, over the sink, was a big mirror, and for a few minutes in the grey light the two of them lay there looking at each other… their pie-plate faces (identical except that Sonja’s was fatter these days), their corkscrew hair smoking out, and the train rocking them in time. And a little farther down, in the space where they had each lifted an arm to make room, Joan’s round, bald head like a planet.

  Doris, for once, was okay, despite having had a nightmare about Harmony. She smiled, and as if an invisible connection went taut, Sonja’s mouth straightened into a smile, too.

  “I had the nuttiest dream,” Sonja whispered, addressing Doris in the mirror.

  “Join the club, Sweetie.”

  “You know that Negro nurse?”

  Doris waited.

  “Melody,” Sonja said. “You know …”

  “Harmony!” Doris said too vivaciously, too loud. “Harmony!”

  “What?”

  Doris started pulling a thread from the sleeve of her cardigan. “Her name,” she said, trying to keep a grip on her voice, “is Harmony.”

  “Oh, that’s right, Harmony. Well, anyways, I dreamt she was in that play you were in when you were an actress. Julius… no, Romeo and Juliet. She was an old lady and she said, ‘I’m falling apart,’ and then she really did. Her arm fell off, and then her foot and her other arm. Then her head.”

  In the mirror Doris witnessed herself blanching.

  “And then … And then she changed into a big fish, one of those … oh, what is it…?”

  “A dolphin!” Doris burst out.

  “What?”

  “She changed into a dolphin!” Doris could hear herself—the crazy, tickled-pink gush of her voice.

  “How did you know that?” Sonja asked, turning to look at Doris in the flesh.

  Doris held her breath.

  “Mommy, how’d you know she changed into a dolphin?”

  Doris was unravelling her entire sleeve. “A guess,” she got out in an exhalation.

  “Well, jeepers, good guess.” She resumed looking at Doris in the mirror. “Anyways, she was a dolphin but with legs, black legs, and then… then I woke up.”

  At which point Joan woke up and turned
her head to stare at Doris while making tsk-tsk noises, just like scolding, and Doris thought, “It’s her,” by which she meant that Joan being between them was how the dream had passed from her to Sonja, or from Sonja to her. Joan had conducted it! And then the even more harrowing possibility struck her that Joan had made the dream up! A dream about Harmony! “She knows,” Doris thought, completely spooked, while Sonja, oblivious, touched Joan’s bruise and sang, “Bunny, little bunny,” but Joan was fixed on Doris, her eyes like ponds.

  Four

  A year before all this, one Thursday afternoon in early November while Gordon is eating a ham sandwich at his desk, an orange-haired giant swaggers into his office. At first sight Gordon is in love, so the young man is ringed in fireworks, but anyone would stop chewing. The office is suddenly doll-housed, and the young man is in it like a dreamer, blinking around, scratching his throat. His throat is alpine. His forearms are clubs fleeced with orange. Orange froths out of the V of his white T-shirt and is greased back in rivulets on his head.

  “Knock knock,” the young man says, knocking on Gordon’s bookshelf.

  Gordon swallows his food.

  “Secretary said go right in,” the young man drawls.

  A few hours earlier a guy with a drawl phoned wanting financial backing to write a first-hand account of the stevedore life—“The real On the Waterfront.” Gordon told this guy to drop in around noon. “Yes, hello,” he says now, coming to his feet. “Gordon Canary.” He reaches across the desk to shake hands. It doesn’t often happen that he has to look up to look into another man’s eyes.

  “Al Yothers,” the young man says, smacking his palm into Gordon’s. “You done with this?” He lets go of Gordon’s hand and picks up the half-empty cup of coffee on the desk.

  Gordon gestures. “Uh—“

  Al strolls over to the window and takes a sip.

  “It’ll be stone cold,” Gordon says.

  Al kicks the radiator. “Air blocking the flow.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Air pockets.” He turns the latch on the window and shoves, the muscles of his arm leaping into relief.

  “It’s painted shut,” Gordon says. With a sound of splintering it opens. Al tosses out the coffee.

  “Hey—“

  Al glances at him. Now he’s trying to loosen the screw at the end of the radiator. “No can do,” he says. He sets the cup on the window ledge and withdraws a screwdriver from his back pocket.

  Gordon finally gets it. He drops into his chair. “I asked for someone to see about it two weeks ago.”

  “You know how they say ‘two weeks’ in England?” Al says. A few turns of the bolt, and air hisses out. “Fortnight,” he answers before Gordon can grasp the question.

  Gordon waits, but apparently that’s all Al has to say on the subject.

  Al squats, retrieving the cup. His thighs are like sandbags but his buttocks are as small as a boy’s. A ripple of spine where his T-shirt rides up. “It’s real backed up,” he says.

  Gordon is squatting next to him, saying something. Saying “How does the air get in there anyway?” or something, meanwhile sliding his hand around Al’s waist. No, he’s standing, they’re both standing. Gordon is behind him. He reaches around and unbuckles Al’s belt, unzips his fly. Al grips both sides of the window frame. Two strokes and he’s hard and turning. His eyes are closed, mouth open. The door is closed. Locked. Before going over to him Gordon has shut and locked the door and told Margo to hold his calls. No, he has sent her out for another coffee and sandwich, and to the bank …

  “When was the last time you had this drained?” Al asks, glancing at him.

  A split-second too late Gordon looks up. Al’s eyes narrow. What amazes Gordon isn’t just how far he has let his imagination go, it’s the sense of nostalgia that’s egging him on, as if in some life, and it isn’t this one, he has actually danced this dance. By the time Al turns back to the radiator Gordon’s legs are trembling so badly the change in his pocket jingles. “Last winter,” he says.

  Al doesn’t speak for a minute. Then he says, “Tell you what, Mr. Canary.” A jet of black water shoots into the cup, and he quickly tightens the bolt. “How about I keep this just loose enough so’s you can drain it yourself from time to time?” He straightens. Slips the screwdriver into his back pocket.

  “All right,” Gordon says too eagerly. “Good idea.”

  Al strolls over and sets the coffee cup back on the desk. There is a dime in Gordon’s paper-clip saucer, and he picks it up. “This here’s your screwdriver,” he says, flicking it off the end of his thumb.

  Gordon fails to catch it. Laughs. “Right,” he says, covering it with his hand where it has landed on a manuscript. “Good idea. Well, yes, certainly, I’ll do it myself next time.”

  “It’s a deal,” Al says.

  His smirk goes straight to Gordon’s heart.

  Gordon sits like a pillar of salt. A good five minutes go by and then he places both hands flat on his desk and looks around his office. Everything before his eyes he is homesick for. His phone rings and he waits for Margo to pick it up at her end but it rings and rings and with each ring it’s as if his chances of saving himself diminish. He reaches for his coffee. He has the cup tipped at his mouth before he realizes that that black stuff isn’t dregs. In the same second it hits him that it isn’t too late! This affair in the wreckage of which he is staggering, it hasn’t happened yet!

  He stands, goes over to the window and pulls it shut. Cracks his knuckles, paces. Sits back down at his desk and dials home.

  “Hello?” Marcy says in her high, expectant child’s voice.

  “It’s Daddy, honey. Is Mommy there?”

  “Oh, hi, Daddy. Mommy’s outside hanging up the laundry. I’ll get her.”

  “No, no, that’s okay. Just tell her I phoned, nothing important.” He checks his watch. Twelve-thirty. “Are you eating your lunch?”

  “I just finished.” She breathes noisily. “You know what?”

  “What?” He presses the receiver against his ear. He wants to hear her blood circulating.

  “I forgot to say grace”—she’s whispering—“and my sandwich went mouldy.”

  “Honey, it would have been mouldy before, and you just didn’t notice.” What the hell were they teaching her at Sunday school?

  “No, it wasn’t mouldy before!” she cries.

  “Okay, all right. Did Mommy make you another sandwich?”

  “I ate the mouldy one,” she says piously.

  That evening at the supper table he feels like someone who hears that the plane he decided not to board has exploded in midair. Doris and the girls seem like apparitions, Doris’s round face infinitely alive and kindly, a guardian moon. In bed he clings to her capsized body, and as if Al Yothers were nothing more than the catalyst to return him at last to this sanctified threshold, he gets an erection.

  “Doris,” he moans.

  But she’s asleep.

  And there goes his erection.

  Not his high hopes, though. Not his feeling that everything is going to be fine, that this is only the beginning, etc. An erection, even a short-lived one, that’s something in this bed.

  The next day at the office, whenever he is in the corridors, he keeps an eye out for Al Yothers. To avoid him, he thinks. There is a proofreader named Tom Hooks, a surly kid with insolent little hips and fluttering blue eyes, whom he has taken mighty pains not to look at. Today, however, standing behind him at the Gestetner machine, he stares at the boy to reassure himself that his desire isn’t fatally pinned to one man but is spread out, restored to its old, harmless sprawl. Back in his office he sits at his desk and pictures Al Yothers over at the radiator, and feels, well, no more aroused than he is already. He wonders if he has ever been even half this aroused with Doris. He doubts it, although he remembers the first few years of their marriage as a time of perfect happiness. Maybe the way it works is, if you’re that happy once it vaccinates you against the possibil
ity of being that happy again. He sits there rubbing his thighs, and the part of him that is feeling how long and bony they are, experiencing them as if with the hands of another man and thinking, worriedly, that they’re like a pair of goddamn banisters, that part seems like the last of it. The little brush fire that will burn itself out.

  It’s just after four o’clock when the stevedore phones and says, “Hey,” and Gordon’s guts drain. He thinks it’s Al. “Al,” he says, and sees bombs blooming.

  “No, Frank,” the stevedore says. “Frank Amis. Say, about yesterday…”

  Yesterday he got held up. A shipment of pork bellies. He suggests a meeting tonight, five-thirty at the Lakeview Tavern, adding that this thing is big, real big.

  Gordon says, “Drop by the office tomorrow.”

  “I might not be alive tomorrow,” Frank says, which Gordon doesn’t fall for, but his head is in his hand and his heart is still banging, and so it happens that Frank is talking his kind of language. “All right, five-thirty,” he says. He then phones Doris to tell her he’ll be late.

  At five-twenty, as he is putting on his coat, Frank calls back and shouts over what sounds like a foghorn that he’ll have to take a rain check. Gordon phones Doris to say he’ll be on time after all, gets a busy signal, waits five minutes, tries again. Still busy. He gives up and leaves the office.

  A few minutes later he is standing at a red light across from the parking lot. The lot adjoins the cemetery where, filling the last available space on the Canary family headstone, his name, date of birth and a dash are etched. This was his mother’s doing, a deathbed effort at immortalizing her denial that he married Doris and created more Canarys. “You’ve got to hand it to her,” Doris laughed at his mother’s burial, while he reeled at the dash. He never visits the grave or even walks through the cemetery’s praised gardens, although tonight the place beguiles him. The sky above it is mauve and soft, frayed by naked tree branches, the moon like a place where the sky has thinned out, or like a moon long gone, a fossil moon. He toys with the idea of a stroll. He looks at his watch, then glances behind him for some reason, and there, hunched under the awning of a tavern, is a giant.