The Life of Hope
Page 1
VINTAGE CANADA EDITION
Copyright © 1985 by Fizzy Dreams Inc.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Published in 1995 by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in 1985 by Doubleday Canada.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Quarrington, Paul
The life of Hope
eISBN: 978-0-307-36408-1
I. Title
PS8583.U334L5 1996 C813’.54 C95-932885-8
PR9199.3.Q37L5 1996
v3.1
for Peggotty
For man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are taken in an evil net, and as the birds that are caught in the snare, so are the sons of man snared in an evil time, when it falleth suddenly upon them.
Ecclesiastes, 9:12
Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.
Isaiah, 1:18
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five
Part One
Hope
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our Young Biographer flees the Great City.
I first came to Hope early in the evening of my thirtieth birthday, which is July 22nd. I arrived half-stewed and given my druthers would have been completely stewed. The train from Toronto, however, only took a little over two hours. In that time I’d managed to consume several bottles of beer and three shots of whiskey, the whiskey being supplied by Brian, a nice man who did something with computers and was eager that I have fun on my birthday. “Especially your thirtieth birthday,” Brian had said. “It’s the big one.”
“All grown-up now,” I’d mumbled without conviction.
At the same time as I was celebrating aboard the train, my friends back in Toronto were arriving at my apartment heavily armed with food and alcohol. They’d planned a surprise party for me, one I’d known about for weeks. Elspeth, I imagine, met them at the door grimly. She likely said nothing, just glared at them, or maybe she said two quick words, “Not here,” or “Fucked off.” Elspeth has an economy with words and communicates mostly with facial expressions. I’m sure the expression she assumed for my friends was a doozy, guaranteed to shrivel.
But I’d had big fun on the train with Brian and the Lorne Baxters. Lorne Baxter was a large man who, having introduced his wife and himself as The Lorne Baxters, immediately demanded that I call him Bosco. Mrs. Lorne Baxter, Bosco advised, I could call whatever I wanted.
It saddened me when I found out that Brian and the Lorne Baxters were traveling all the way to Ottawa. I was the only one who disembarked at Hope, and not really there either, but rather at the only town of any size near it. From there I’d taken a taxicab fifteen miles to the east, to Hope.
I studied the back of the cabdriver’s neck for a few minutes and then informed him, “It’s my thirtieth birthday!” Maybe he had a bottle of champagne in the glove compartment. Maybe he’d say, “That’s the big one,” and stand me to drinks in some roadside tavern. He hadn’t done any of that. The driver mumbled a strangely accented version of “Congratulations” and whistled the first few bars of “Happy Birthday to You.”
The countryside was gentle and rolling, cut quite often by small rivers. The farmers all seemed to cultivate the same crop, a plant I didn’t recognize, being a city boy. “What do they grow out here?” I asked the driver.
The cabbie had just finished a cigarette, tossing the butt through the no-draft. He pointed to where it was bouncing along the highway behind us, and I was made to understand that the big crop out Hope way was tobacco.
We passed a small church (Established 1889, a sign told me), and I was immediately filled with shame. After a few moments I felt better.
My destination lay two miles outside of the Hope limits, but the road went straight through town. Hope seemed a nice enough place—although the large green entry marker placed the population at a meager 1,000, I spied no less than three bars. My kind of town.
“Do you live in Hope?” I asked the driver.
The driver shrugged, perhaps misunderstanding.
Suddenly, and surprisingly, we passed a huge factory, a colossal thing surrounded by barbed-wire fences. A sign on its lawn announced UPDIKE INTERNATIONAL. The U had been fashioned to resemble a fishhook.
Then I was at my new home, or at least what was to be my home for the next little while.
I found myself (having paid the driver, tipping him extravagantly—sometimes I suspect that God invented alcohol to ensure that waitresses, bartenders and cabbies make a decent living) in a small valley, a basin surrounded on all sides by tall trees. In the middle of this green bowl was a pond, a small lake really, about the size of two football fields placed end to end. It was the gloaming, and the only sound in the air was that of fish flipping above the still surface for their dinner.
I turned around to look at my dwelling. The house was built up a piece from the pond, where there was enough flat land to accommodate not only it but a monstrous and ancient barn. I’d seen the house before, in one of those glass paperweights, the kind you flip over and it looks as if snow is falling inside. It was the same house, except it was now the middle of the summer and the house was nestled among trees, fat weeping willows and tall spruce.
Outside the front door was a wonderful flagstone patio, ideal for the consumption of mint juleps and gin and tonics. I studied it briefly, trying to figure out the best place to put my chaise lounge, to maximize sunlight and minimize the journey to and from the house. As I was doing this I noticed that years before someone had taken a stick to the wet cement and painstakingly dug out “GEORGE.”
This wonderful place was on loan to me by Professor Harvey Benson, who teaches English Language and Literature at Chiliast University. It is Harv’s belief that I am a young writer of great promise, and it’s good he has tenure if he’s inclined to believe such things.
“But in Toronto”—this is Harv’s standard speech—“there are too many distractions. There’re all the bars, and all the girls, and there’s that bitch you’re married to!”
“Harvey,” I say sternly at this point, but that’s as far as I go.
“But I have this place out in the country, and I hardly ever use it, and if you want to finish your second novel, you should move out there and goddam write!”
So when the shit hit the fan late the night before (I’d just officially turned thirty, although you’d never have known it from the way I behaved) I phoned Harv and said, “I’m going to Hope.”
Now, someone had been taking wonderful care of the place, and you can bet it wasn’t Harvey. His place in Toronto is squalid to say the least, a one-bedroom apartment filled with books, term papers and filthy magazines. This country home consisted basically of four rooms: a large kitchen/dining room area, a living room (with a huge stone fireplace) and two bedrooms on the second level, the second level being achieved via a set of stairs leading up from the kitchen. The bathroom was built under this staircase, and contained a wonderful old tub that had legs and feet like a dog’s. Everything about the place was so clean and neat that I suspected that the house had been used in some compe
tition for prissy ladies—it looked like a horde of old biddies had rampaged through, gathering up particles of dust for bonus points. I remembered that Harvey had given me some sort of note concerning the upkeep of the place, and I removed it from my shirt pocket and read:
MARTIN GOM COMES BY EVERY NOW AND AGAIN TO CHECK ON THINGS. IF ANYTHING GOES WRONG (PUMP FAILURE, ELECTRICAL DYSFUNCTIONS) CALL HIM AT 555–4587. IF LOUIS DROPS AROUND, DON’T BE ALARMED. ENJOY YOURSELF, BUT GODDAM WRITE YOUR NOVEL!
Thereupon followed a list of more precise instructions—how to prime the pump, how to check the generator, how to start any number of machines out in the barn (a lawnmower, a chainsaw, a weedwhacker, a tiny tractor), what mixtures of gas and oil I needed to fuel them (how did Harv know all this stuff?), and how to operate the moped, the wonderful little vehicle that was to spirit me in and out of Hope. Nowhere on the list did Harv tell me anything crucial, such as where he kept his liquor. However, a quick check through the kitchen informed me that the booze supply was kept in a cupboard immediately to the left of the big white fridge. There was a healthy collection there, and I selected, as a special treat on my thirtieth birthday (the big one), a bottle of Glenfiddich. I poured some into a tumbler and went back outside.
The sun was setting, burning the tips of the trees. A few frogs had started to croak, warming up, gingerly testing the equipment before getting down to some angst-ridden, truly horny bellows. The swallows were flitting above the barn, frantically using the last minutes of light to find some food for their peeping broods. And somewhere deep in the woods to the south, some dogs were screaming as they ran down a deer. I recalled Harvey’s strange bit of advice: don’t be alarmed.
The Stone Boner
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our Young Biographer makes his first Acquaintance of Joseph Benton Hope.
The pond on my property was a section of a stream called Round River, and this stream continued past the property, building in size and power, eventually feeding into Lookout Lake. I could get to Lookout Lake quite easily on my moped, it being about two miles away by gravel road. The fishing there, Harv assured me, was magnificent. Harvey seemed to know what he was talking about, and he confused me for almost an hour with a discourse on various techniques and stratagems. The walleye, he said, like minnows and tiny jigs (I nodded sagely, visualizing myself executing a subdued stepdance by the side of the water) and the bass like almost anything, being huge and piggy, but for the really big fish, Harvey concluded, what you need is the Hoper!
“Ah, the Hoper.”
So the next afternoon (having spent the morning trying to write despite my rumsick state; I’d managed to complete a single paragraph), I hopped on the moped and roared into Hope. The road to Hope was up and down and full of curves, and although I had to assist the vehicle by pedaling when cresting a hill, on the descent I could really fly, and the noise reverberating inside my motorcycle helmet was deafening. Gophers and rabbits, snoozing in the warm sun, would wake with a start, mumble animalese for “Oh, fuck!” and hurry off to the side of the road. I flushed any number of crows, ravens and red-winged blackbirds from the thickets; the birds would rise to a height of twenty feet and peer down apprehensively. Only a goshawk, alone and high in the sky, seemed indifferent, circling and not caring a tinker’s cuss about the asshole on the moped.
Sometime during the night, vandals had been up to no good, although not much of it. Whereas the green WELCOME TO HOPE sign used to record a round POP. 1,000, someone had crossed out the final 0 and added underneath a bent and hasty 1. In the middle of Hope, Ontario, is a tree-lined oval of green grass, perhaps one hundred feet long, that the townspeople perversely insist on calling The Square. I leaned the moped up against a tree, chained and locked it securely. There were benches and pigeons in the Square, garbage cans and a water fountain. I had a sip of water and spat it out on the grass. The water was warm, almost hot, and bitter.
At one end of the Square was a cannon, the barrel filled with candywrappers and condoms. At the other was a tall granite obelisk that announced TO OUR GLORIOUS DEAD. In the middle of the Square was a statue. I wandered over.
The statue was green and mouldy, especially around the base, and I suspected that dogs and drunks made frequent use of it as a leaking post. The man who was the statue had one arm raised, tiny fingers pointed at the clouds, and in the other hand he held a large book. He was dressed in a way that looked vaguely clerical, a stiff collar and a coat with long, mournful tails. The statue-man’s face was rather odd—one eye was made much larger than the other, and both were set well back, hidden by shadow underneath the forehead. The man sported a beard and long hair, giving him a stern, almost biblical aspect.
Then something about the statue caught my eye. It had a stone boner. At first I was sure that this was some trick of the sunlight and shadow, but a closer inspection proved me wrong. The statue was clearly possessed of an erect penis. It lurked underneath the marble trousers, cocked slightly to the right to avoid meeting the waistband. It was a huge thing, this stone boner, perhaps ten inches long and thick as a baby’s forearm. I giggled, reached out and touched the thing gingerly. “Poor guy,” I laughed out loud. I bent down to read the tarnished plaque, eager to find out the identity of this man with the eternal hard-on. It was:
JOSEPH BENTON HOPE
1824–1889
OUR FOUNDER
Special Boots
Lowell, Massachusetts, 1858
Regarding the life of Hope, we know the following: that he was born on January 14, 1824, in the town of Hadley; that he abided the state of Massachusetts until September of 1858; that at such time he journeyed northward into Upper Canada.
The reason for this emigration is obfuscated.
Even in the weak candlelight, the girl’s face was a startling red. She looked as if she might explode suddenly, like a shotgun shell that had been tossed into a campfire.
Joseph Benton Hope studied her, pleased though slightly alarmed. He imagined the Spirit of the Lord moving through her, flowing in her veins and mixing gloriously with the humors, activating the corpuscles to produce this brilliant hematic display. Joseph Benton Hope shifted slightly in his seat.
The girl’s chest was heaving, the shape of her bosom defined regularly and almost perfectly against the white fabric of her smock. J. B. Hope rose to his feet suddenly, leaping up as though his chair was aflame. The red girl merely raised her eyes to follow, obedient and calm.
The other young woman, dark and dour, reared back in fright and then giggled. Hope silenced her with a quick and jagged look, knowing how frightening his eyes could be. His right was large and blue and motionless (it was glass), the other small, dark and quick.
“And they brought unto him also infants,” J. Benton Hope intoned in his queer, croaky voice, “that he would touch them. But when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them …” Hope forgot his place. The red girl had taken to rocking back and forth in rhythm with his words, or perhaps he had taken to gasping them out in strict time to her rocking. Joseph Benton Hope remained silent for many moments before speaking again.
“But Jesus called unto them, and said, ‘Suffer naked children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.’ ”
Some small portion of Hope’s mind registered a complaint over the substitution of the word “naked.” The Lord Himself placed it on my tongue, countered Hope silently and with faith, for which he was rewarded by a Vision of the red girl naked. She was no older than seventeen, this girl, and the fat that rounded her belly and behind was still fresh and icily pink. Her breasts were swollen (Hope had a theory about the female bosom, that the right breast was the home of the amative soul, while the left housed the propagative—it was a complicated theory, and what it boiled down to was that in moments of excitement the breasts would become swollen) and her sex was silky. The Vision was gone in an instant, and left behind in Joseph Hope a strange, choking sensation. Wishing to dispel it, Hope clenched his ti
ny hand and stabbed it upwards toward Heaven.
The thunder alarmed even Hope, coming as it did at the instant his fist was thrust to the limit of his reach. It was a loud peal, as if the cloud that produced it sat on the roof of his own house. Hope shook his fist then, and the thunder seemed to boil and bubble at his command. Sensing it would die soon, Hope let his hand drop slowly. By the time it was once more at his side, the clangor had been replaced by another sound, the soft sound of rain falling to the earth.
Remarkably, it was the other girl, the dour and dark one, who seemed most affected. Her eyes were closed, and she seemed to be having some difficulty breathing. This girl parted her lips (the bottom lip, Hope noticed, was twisted in the middle by a thin, white scar) and whispered the single word, “Yes.”
“Yes,” Joseph Hope repeated, letting the word fall as softly as the rain.
And now the red girl did explode. She shouted “Yes!” with such vigor that two of the buttons on her tight bodice flew away. (J. B. Hope’s theory about the female bosom seemed beyond doubt at this point.) The red girl ran to the window and pressed her face against the glass. “It’s raining!”
Hope had to stifle a desire to snap, Of course it’s raining, we knew it was raining. Instead he beamed magnificently and watched the pitchings of the girl’s chest.
The dour and dark girl said, so quietly that it was almost inaudible, “To wash away the sins of this wicked, wicked place.” J. B. Hope thought initially that she was referring to his own house, number forty-two Dutton Street, but then realized she was being more general and meant the world, or at least the entire state of Massachusetts.
Meanwhile the red girl seemed to be losing more and more buttons, and the fabric had torn around one of her armpits. Joseph could see the crisp white of an undergarment and a thin slice of red flesh. The entire area around her armpit was damp (a huge area, Hope noted, a wet ring larger than he’d seen on anyone before), and large beads of perspiration sat on the girl’s forehead and upper lip.