by André Alexis
From earth, ground, stories, dreams, language, and history. That’s
what a place is, Alfie. It feeds off us while we feed off it. It’s a bit
of a paradox, you know, like context giving context to a context,
but there you have it.
I’m sure the professor was right. But I remember his stories
more than I do some of the towns and grounds we passed through,
their buildings and streets. Whitchurch-Stouffville, for instance.
By the time we got there, we were both happy to be out in the sun
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and away from the city. So, it’s possible I was distracted. But the
town itself, the Stouffville part, was like any number of towns in
the area. It had a Chinese restaurant and a business of some sort
housed behind a red-brick facade. That’s about it. In trying to
recall its streets, I find I’m not sure I haven’t got it confused with
Concord or Nobleton. In fact, there are buildings in my memory
of Stouffville that, I’m almost certain, belong elsewhere.
We were there so Professor Bruno could talk to John Sken-
nen’s aunt, Moira Stephens, the last of Skennen’s relatives who’d
known him when he was young. Her house was at the bottom of
a street that ended in a cul-de-sac. The house wasn’t unusual –
single storey, its front porch coming away, slightly, a few of the
black tiles from its roof scattered on the front lawn – but it was
painted light green. The colour shimmered and the smell of paint
was strong. We were met at the door by a young woman whose
hair was, in streaks, blue. She was tall and willowy. She didn’t
smile, exactly, but she politely said
– What do youse want?
– Ah, said Professor Bruno. We’re here to speak to Mrs.
Stephens about her nephew. I’m Professor Morgan Bruno and
this is my travel companion, Alfred Homer.
– You’re from the university? said the woman. Good to see
youse! I don’t think youse are going to get much out of Gram.
She hasn’t been herself lately, eh? But it’s your own time youse
are killing. Didn’t you say something about a few bucks for
the inconvenience?
– You must be Roberta, Professor Bruno said. I’m happy to
make a contribution to your well-being.
He gave her a ten-dollar bill. She folded the bill, tucked it
into her brassiere, and led us to a living room where there was a
fuzzy yellow sofa whose cushions had worn down in places so
that, here and there, hernias of white foam came through. There
were two wooden chairs facing the sofa and, beside the entrance
to the room, a faux-elephant-foot umbrella holder that held an
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umbrella and what seemed to be a walking stick. The room had
an interesting smell, unexpectedly herbal. It smelled of basil.
After a longish while, Roberta led poor Mrs. Stephens in. I say
“poor Mrs. Stephens” not to be unkind but because the woman
looked tired and it didn’t seem as if she wanted to be there. She
was wearing a pink terry-cloth robe – strange, because it was
almost as warm in the living room as it had been outside. Her
grey hair, wet and sparse, must have been hastily done because
you could still see the grooves the comb’s teeth had left in it. She
had white bedroom slippers on her feet.
– She just got up, said Roberta.
For a while, it didn’t look like Mrs. Stephens would say
anything. She frowned when Professor Bruno introduced himself.
Then she stared at him when he asked questions about her nephew.
– When did you last see John? the professor asked. Did he
ever talk to you about his poetry? Is it true that the last place
anyone saw him was in Feversham?
Mrs. Stephens was provoked by the mention of Feversham.
Her answer was almost a complaint.
– I don’t know anything about that, she said. No one’s
supposed to know about that.
She moved her chair in Professor Bruno’s direction.
– Why do you want to know about it? she asked.
Inspired by her sudden interest, Professor Bruno was suddenly
exuberant.
– I love your nephew’s work, he said. I’ve studied John’s poems
for years. I think he may be our greatest poet. Our secret Akhma-
tova! Our hidden Hölderlin! It was time someone wrote a literary
biography – more about the work than the man, but still … I’m
looking for a few details from John’s life. Things to illuminate the
poetry. I’ll leave the real biography to a real biographer.
Mrs. Stephens moved closer to him, her left shoulder raised
to cushion her tilted head, but she didn’t say anything. So,
Professor Bruno went on.
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– John’s a wonderful poet, he said. I’m not saying he needs a
biography so the poetry can be understood. His work’s clear as
Waterford Crystal. But I think my work brings out facets of the
poetry and illuminates some of the obscurities. Not all of them!
A poem needs its obscurities!
Mrs. Stephens moved her chair closer, little by little, as if
she didn’t have the strength to draw close at once. It seemed
she wanted to hear Professor Bruno talk about her nephew. But
then she inched her chair past him, pulled the umbrella (bright
orange) out of the elephant’s foot, and hit him with it. The blow
was a surprise. Mrs. Stephens moved so quickly for an older
woman. She caught Professor Bruno on the cheek with the
umbrella’s nib and drew blood. Before I could come to the profes-
sor’s rescue – before he could defend himself – the umbrella
opened on its own, an angry frilled lizard, and Mrs. Stephens
started to cry. The sound of her crying was strange: the bleating
of a kid but softer and more lilting and with long pauses as she
drew breath.
When she could manage to speak, she cried out
– Don’t you dare talk about him!
At these words, Roberta came in to see what was wrong. Find-
ing her grandmother distraught, she tried to calm her. She wiped
her grandmother’s face with a tea towel and said
– There, there, Gram!
And added
– I’m sure there’s nothing wrong with Uncle John.
– It’s too much, said her grandmother. Don’t you talk about
him, either.
– I should of warned youse, said Roberta. Gram sometimes
gets skittish.
She helped her quaking grandmother from the room, returning
after a few minutes to say:
– She gets this way when she thinks about Uncle John, eh.
Why don’t youse come back tomorrow? She’s not always like
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this. It’s just sometimes she’s sensitive about it, like no one’s
supposed to say Uncle John’s name. She’s got a heart of gold.
Give you her last clean undies, most days. But she doesn’t like to
talk about certain things, poor Gram.
I thought it would be cruel to disturb Mrs. Stephens again,
especially as she was sensitive about the one subject that inter-
ested Professor Bruno. But the professor, not wanting to disap-
point Robert
a, agreed to consider returning once we’d visited
the other places on our itinerary. He held out a ten-dollar bill.
– Please take this for your troubles, he said.
Roberta refused.
– No, she said. We can’t take more till you get your first
money’s worth. Come back when youse are done your rounds.
Gram’ll be feeling better by then.
Professor Bruno wanted to go on to our next town straight
away. He’d found the episode with Mrs. Stephens embarrassing
and wanted to put it out of mind. But I stopped at the walk-in
clinic in Stouffville for a bandage and disinfectant. Mrs. Stephens
hadn’t done much damage, but there was blood on the professor’s
cheek and I’d have felt terrible if his cut got infected.
As it turned out, going to the clinic was, inadvertently, one
of the most helpful things we did, not because the professor was
in danger but because a sympathetic attendant at the clinic, Karen
Kelly by name, unexpectedly pointed us to new details about
Mr. Skennen.
– Mrs. Stephens doesn’t know any more about John Skennen
than I do, she said. I mean, maybe she did at one time, but the
poor lady hasn’t been right in the head for years. I’m not surprised
she stabbed you with an umbrella. But if you want to find out
about John Skennen, you should talk to my mom. She went out
with him in high school.
Professor Bruno was warily enthusiastic.
– This is wonderful, he said. A real find. And to think we
have an umbrella to thank for it!
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Ms. Kelly’s mother, Kathryn, was a surprising fount of infor-
mation. She’d kept high school photos of John Skennen and
seemed to remember every detail of their time together. And yet,
there was little in what she remembered that you’d call remarkable.
Mr. Skennen seemed to have been a normal young man, in the
throes of first love – they would love each other forever, he
wrote, and she was more beautiful than words could express,
and he would spend his life making her happy. Except that he
took poetry seriously, that he aspired to be a poet and actually
became one, Skennen was not unusual.
It was strange to hear the love-elation I’d recently felt so
nakedly expressed in the letters of a seventeen-year-old. It made
me wonder if love, whenever it hits you, is always the same. Like
the young Skennen, I couldn’t help thinking about my “beloved.’
But, unlike him, I could no longer revel in the longing my thoughts
of Anne brought.
Professor Bruno kept Mrs. Kelly talking for two hours and
was rewarded by the discovery of a poem John Skennen had
written as a seventeen-year-old. The poem was in one of the
letters Mrs. Kelly had kept. She wouldn’t tell us anything about
its meaning, but she allowed me to transcribe it:
Ticking tocks
taking clocks
before they
hurt me,
Train, unhinged,
is what I bid
toward me,
Sheet of earth,
I let you go
above me
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And limestone grey
is what I taught
to love me
Listening to Mrs. Kelly’s memories also brought my parents
to mind. What must it have been like for them, young and in
love, both God-fearing, as they called it, both wanting to get out
of Chatham, Ontario? They’d met in their teens, right around
the same age as Kathryn Kelly and John Skennen, but their love
had flourished and lived on to the end of their lives. How rare
that seemed to me now.
Maybe because I had my parents in mind, it occurred to me
that the young man in Mrs. Kelly’s photos looked like Professor
Bruno or that Professor Bruno looked like the young man: same
thick hair, same strong chin, and, in one photo, the same complicit
smile. The resemblance was so obvious that both Mrs. Kelly and
the professor admitted it. It made me wonder if Mrs. Stephens
had mistaken the professor for her nephew.
– But then why would she hit me? asked Professor Bruno.
Wouldn’t she be happy to see her nephew?
– You know, said Mrs. Kelly, I haven’t spoken to John since
we broke up, but there must be a reason he changed his name
from Stephens.
– I suppose that’s true, said the professor. And Skennen is the
Ojibwe word for peace. I’ve always wondered if he ever found it.
– Oh, I don’t think John ever found peace, said Mrs. Kelly.
So few of us do, on this side of the lawn. Anyway, if his aunt
didn’t beat him with an umbrella, it would be one of the few
things she didn’t use. That generation liked to hit.
While we were in her home, Mrs. Kelly made sure we had
lemonade – a clear lemonade with mint leaves crushed in it –
and that we were comfortable and that the air conditioner was
not too cold for us. Her kindness struck me. Though her living
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room was cool as a larder, it was still welcoming, because she
was herself so generous.
Sometime later, Professor Bruno spoke of his admiration for
Mrs. Kelly’s beauty. I must have looked at him as if I weren’t
convinced. Mrs. Kelly was in her sixties, maternal in my eyes.
The joints of her fingers were slightly knobby. She was thin but
big-breasted so that her body looked weighed down. Her face
had, I think, once been what’s called “beautiful,’ but it was now
gaunt and a little intimidating.
– Was she beautiful? I asked.
Professor Bruno was annoyed.
– No, she wasn’t beautiful. She is beautiful. Her spirit is as
warm as a sauna. And I mean a good sauna. Not one of those
overheated contraptions where you can’t breathe. I’m surprised
at you, Alfie, observant as you are! You know spirit is as important
to beauty as physical appearance, don’t you? There’s a difference
between a leaf on a tree and one that’s dead, isn’t there?
– Yes, I said, but dead leaves are beautiful, too, aren’t they?
Professor Bruno took a dark leather pouch out from somewhere
in his suitcase. Our vicinity immediately smelled of moist and sweet
tobacco, like tar, cinnamon, and oranges. He took out a brown pipe
and, after he’d filled the pipe and lit his tobacco, he said
– I wonder what you mean by beautiful. Dead things aren’t
as beautiful as living ones. I mean, you can’t be interested only
in surfaces, can you? It’d be a great mistake if you were. I under-
stand you artists and your natures mortes. You’re fascinated by
geometry. But all those still lifes with their skulls and flowers
can’t touch a well-done portrait or a vivid landscape. And do
you know why? Because with still lifes you don’t have to capture
the spirit that animates a person or a place. It’s an easier job, isn’t
it? I wonder if you know the story of Apelles, the Greek painter?
He was drawing a horse, a running horse, and he’d got the paint-
ing’s background and the horse itself perfectly. The work was
going to be his greatest, except for one thing. The only detail he
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couldn’t get right – a small detail – was the froth coming off the
horse’s mouth. For months, he tried everything – every brush,
every way to apply paint. And despite all his skill, he couldn’t
get the froth right, and the fact that he couldn’t get it right ruined
the painting for him! His greatest painting! Ruined! Out of frus-
tration, he took a sponge he’d been using and threw it at the
canvas. It hit the painting at exactly the right place and got exactly
the right effect: the froth on the mouth of the horse! I’m sure
you’ve heard the story, Alfie, but people don’t talk about the
lesson in it. The living and spontaneous in the work of Art – the
horse’s froth – can only be caught by the living and spontaneous
in the artist. True beauty, Alfie, perfection in Art, has spirit as its
object and as its subject and as its substance. Do you see?
– But doesn’t all Art have some of this spirit in it? I asked.
– Most works of Art, he answered, don’t have enough of it to
justify their existence!
– So then, are you mostly disappointed by Art, Professor?
– Oh no, he said, not at all. I live for a perfection I’ll never
find! That’s the human condition in a nutshell, isn’t it?
I wasn’t sure what to say. I’m not any kind of artist. Far from it.
And, where plants are concerned, I’ve always been happy with
surfaces. The idea of perfection or even “true beauty” had never
occurred to me because I’ve always enjoyed what’s there in front of
me. I’ve never thought that’s a perfect lilac or here’s the true beauty of
celery. In the same way, I wouldn’t have said Mrs. Kelly was beautiful
any more than I’d have said she was ugly. She was as I found her. In
the end, I had no experience with separating the spirit from the
thing. I wasn’t even sure what the professor meant by “spirit,” but I
believed he was on to something, and it pleased me to think that
one day I might understand what he was talking about.
We drove toward Concord along gravel roads. We were going to
see one of John Skennen’s childhood friends, Ron Brady. Mr.
Brady lived on the outskirts of town on a farm, or what seemed
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once to have been a farm: a dilapidated barn, a stone farmhouse,
fields overrun by weeds – Queen Anne’s lace, mostly, the land
