The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  He’d wondered when he would turn to write on the board and find a baseball bouncing off the surface just inches from his head. Would he, like Miss Earley, fling it into the midst of the class and rush out of the room in tears? When would he open his desk drawer to find, as Mr. Barr had found, dog excrement smeared through the pages of the attendance register? Would he explode with rage, as Barr had done, and go up and down the aisles ripping pages from student notebooks, tearing the pages into pieces and tossing them over their heads? And when would someone refuse to read the next stanza aloud and challenge him to a fist fight, as Donnie London had done to Mr. Woods? Would he, like Mr. Woods, be foolish enough to agree? Probably not, but what would he do instead?

  To his own surprise, his most natural response to challenges, defiance, and distracting nonsense had defused most problems. He discovered that he was capable of a steady stare that somehow combined disappointment, disbelief, and disapproval with just a hint of sympathy for the impulse behind the behaviour. It was useful, he saw, to have a sense of humour even when there was little that could be considered funny. He suspected, too, that it was useful to be both young enough to identify with the students’ need to resist and old enough to see this as just as endearing as it was foolish. “One day you’ll remember today and your face will burn with embarrassment. Now take my attendance sheet to the office—it will give you time to think about what you just did.”

  He’d been only vaguely aware of rejoining the highway, the sprawling high school left behind. Mrs. Montana and her platinum Jaguar had not only achieved the posted speed limit but continued to accelerate in order to catch up to a large freight truck with “ON THE MOVE WITH JOEY KEUVE ” announced across its rear. An additional surge of speed sent them flying past Joey Keuve, who was less aggressively “on the move” than Mrs. Montana. With Joey Keuve somewhere behind them, she informed him that something had recently come up that could lead to a change of plans. “But I will leave that to Travis to explain when we get there.”

  Though he’d become almost unconscious of his throbbing forehead, “a change of plans” gave it fierce new life. A change of plans had not been mentioned at the ferry dock or in the drop-in clinic. “You waited to tell me now?”

  She laughed, her hand dismissing an old man’s alarm. “An opportunity of a lifetime is how Travis will put it. For him, that is. I don’t presume to know how it will look to you.”

  She would not tell him more. It would be up to Travis himself to explain.

  An “opportunity of a lifetime” could be anything—a visit to the manned space station. He could be asked to chaperone a weekend camping trip with fifteen adolescents of both sexes, their vehicles loaded down with booze, their radios blaring long after midnight—bears raiding the tents, cougars dropping onto necks, and the police charging him with the corrupting of minors. Had he left his island for an encounter with the complex and confusing ethics of modern juvenile sex?

  “I think,” he said, as calmly as he knew how, “I would like you to stop.”

  “Here? I can’t stop here.”

  “There is a wide enough shoulder. Unless you’d rather I threw myself out.”

  She laughed, but did not slow down. “I’m sure there’ll be a public washroom ahead somewhere, if that is what you need.”

  “I don’t need a washroom, Mrs. Montana. What I’m suggesting is that I can find my own way back to the ferry. I’ve hitchhiked before. I can do it again.”

  “Don’t be foolish!” Her hand dismissed the foolish one’s request. “Anyway, hitchhiking’s illegal on this highway.”

  “An old man with a bandage on his forehead will not have long to wait. An accident victim, they will think.”

  She drove on without slowing. Joey Keuve would not be given the opportunity to catch up. “For heaven’s sake, why would you go back now?”

  “Because I’ve obviously made a mistake. You mentioned a change of plans.”

  “Oh that!” She seemed genuinely relieved. Her voice took on a reasonable tone. “Please trust me, Mr. Thorstad. You’ll see a great improvement over what you’d expected. A privilege, really.”

  Since she obviously had no intention of stopping the car and he was not about to throw himself out onto the gravel shoulder at this speed, he folded his arms in a manner that suggested, if she should notice, resignation without pleasure.

  While a world of strip malls and used-car lots and occasional stretches of lumber continued to flash by in a blur, he made an attempt to think of compensations. It was a city he was going to, with a university that would sponsor visiting speakers. Neighbourhood libraries could be within walking distance. There was bound to be a symphony orchestra, and a concert hall, an opera company as well. He would be living in a family home with comforts that were taken for granted by city people. And, most important, he would have someone looking to him for help with his studies—which was, after all, what he had hoped for, putting himself back into his own best notion of Life.

  Mrs. Montana’s right hand rooted around inside the red leather purse and eventually brought up a small cellphone that she unfolded and held up where she could see it while using her thumb to punch in numbers. Then she held it to her ear. At first there was only “Yes,” and “Yes,” and “Another hour or so,” and then a good deal of listening before she spoke again, adopting an authoritative tone. “Tell him he’s full of it. Nobody else will offer him that. Remind him of that swamp we’ll have to drain.” With her one free hand she manoeuvred the car around the flattened body of a racoon. “Tell him exactly how much it will cost to put in a proper road. Make sure he knows that his house will have to be demolished, in case he thinks it’s an asset we might sell where it stands.” Silence. “Unh . . . No, of course not.” Silence again. “Well, tell him he’s welcome to do that but it won’t make any difference.”

  Elena would have been shocked to learn that he hadn’t driven past the house they’d lived in for most of the marriage. She’d often claimed to have designed the building herself, he recalled, though in fact she had only pestered the architect into giving her everything she’d wanted—the sprawling villa of a Spanish aristocrat set down between temperate rainforest and the sea. She would see his refusal to drive by as a lack of courage, and would not of course be wrong.

  His courage was something she had remarked on shortly after they’d met, at the reception that followed the Topolski-Farrell wedding. This was shortly after he’d completed his first year of teaching, and was already looking forward to more. The exotic dark-haired girl in a pale green dress had been pointed out to him and described as a wickedly flirtatious and talented pianist who’d flown from Paris (in exile from her home in Madrid) to attend her cousin Topolski’s wedding. He’d watched her laughing as she danced, he’d seen how she flirted with one dance partner after another but refused to dance with any a second time. She was clever too, it seemed, and confident: he overheard her successfully argue a pair of History teachers down in a conversation about the causes of the Second World War, though they may have given in out of gentlemanly regard for her feelings and less-than-gentlemanly regard for her charms. Eventually he worked up the nerve to ask her to dance, then led her out onto the polished floor to whirl about the crowded room, where she laughed at every surprise turn, and shook her head (her dark eyes gleaming) when he tried out steps he had only seen executed by others. “You are a man of courage, I think,” she said, “or simply reckless,” and rewarded him later with a second dance. “I have been told you are a teacher but I see you have the hands of a musician.”

  “Be careful,” Topolski warned him. “She is a famous coquette. She will capture your heart and then return to Europe and marry a banker.”

  Later in the evening, after Thorstad’s third dance with the Spanish pianist, Topolski dropped into the empty chair beside him and said, “Jesus, Axel, I’d forgotten! I fell in love with her when I was thirteen—a distant cousin on my mother’s side—and swore I would marry her one day or kill myself. Ho
w could I have forgotten?”

  But Topolski had just that evening married Oonagh Farrell, who later left town with him and reappeared over time on theatre stages and television screens, and in the pages of celebrity magazines. Axel Thorstad had married Elena Rivero, who after many years had also vanished and could no longer be found on this earth. He had been left behind by them all, to disappear from the world in his own fashion—though he was returning now, too fast, in a platinum Jaguar sedan.

  Mrs. Montana continued to pass every car and truck that came into sight until they’d reached the summit of the mountain pass, and then was required to tailgate a cautious Camry down the long winding single lane on the southern slope, sighing impatiently all the way to the bottom. When level ground had been achieved and the Camry overtaken, the lanes soon multiplied and they began to pass scattered pockets of homes and new subdivisions still under construction. Before long, they became part of converging streams of bumper-to-bumper traffic about to enter the busy streets of a city in mid-afternoon. Transport trucks groaned past. Taxis recklessly shifted lanes. Traffic lights changed, cars sat idling, drivers spoke into hand-held phones and then moved across intersections without interrupting their conversations.

  Some distance ahead, a cluster of tall buildings rose above the surrounding roofs. This tidy provincial capital was considered to be a small city by modern standards, but it appeared to be a taller, more crowded, and much busier version of what he remembered visiting with Elena, to shop, or to visit the museums, or to attend a movie where they would not be surrounded by his students.

  But Mrs. Montana turned away from the main road and followed a street through block after block of residences occasionally interrupted by shopping malls and schools with fenced-in playgrounds. “We’re nearly there!” She called this out as though it were a surprise even to herself. So they passed through the city without fully entering it and came to something that looked like the beginning of country again, or leafy suburbs at least. They turned off a busy street and followed a paved road through woods, passing beneath an archway formed by the leaning trunks of arbutus trees. Visible only from their driveway entrances, the houses they passed were large, and far apart, some of them designed to look like Tudor mansions while others were surprisingly modern structures of cedar and glass. It seemed that most of the original trees had been kept but the forest floor had been tidied up and carpeted over with rich green lawns. A low stone wall ran along the side of the road, long driveways leading in past Garry oaks and blooming rhododendrons towards a porte-cochère or a three-door garage. The glittering strait could be glimpsed beyond the cinnamon-coloured trunks of arbutus trees. One of these estates had just recently sold for more than its listed price, Mrs. Montana said. “To some folks from Missouri.”

  Three old men walked slowly along the edge of pavement— on the wrong side. Obviously they’d lived their lives amongst sidewalks and hadn’t been taught that where sidewalks did not exist they should keep to the left, facing traffic. The tall slim one was completely bald and walked with shoulders thrown back in military fashion, his gaze trained on some point far ahead. The white-haired one leaned forward over a pair of long aluminum props attached to his forearms to become a second pair of legs. In his old age he’d learned to walk like a giraffe. They did not appear to be talking, perhaps because the third man—who trailed a few metres behind at the end of a leash pulled tight by a sleek black dog determined to close the gap—was shouting out words from the rear.

  “There are several assisted-living complexes nearby,” Mrs. Montana said, “for seniors—that is, for senior-seniors.” She swerved to go around the three senior-seniors without further comment, as though they were a regular feature at this spot in the road.

  If there was much more talk of senior-seniors and assisted-living complexes, Axel Thorstad would take a taxi to the Coachlines depot tomorrow rather than stay for her mysterious altered plans.

  They turned in between stone pillars and approached a large house of many gables and tall windows and french doors beyond an expanse of manicured grass that was interrupted here and there with islands of red rhododendrons and white bridal wreath. You might almost expect to see a Victorian Lady pensively crossing the lawn, the train of her long skirt whispering through the grass—though Thorstad supposed he was thinking of the movie rather than the E.M. Forster novel. Instead of Mrs. Wilcox or Vanessa Redgrave there was a slender youth in shorts and yellow T-shirt bouncing a basketball on the driveway. He stepped off the pavement to stand with one hand holding the ball against his hip and his free hand shading his eyes, watching his mother’s platinum sedan bring this stranger into his home.

  6

  The boy stayed where he was, with the ball against his hip, as though the stranger getting out of his mother’s car were merely an interruption to his basketball practice. A tutor may have been the last thing in the world he wanted, let alone a tutor with white hair and an old man’s craggy face. This was how it looked, at least, to Axel Thorstad. Perhaps to demonstrate his indifference, the boy bounced the ball on the pavement again and tossed it against the backboard, then watched it circle the basket’s rim. When it had fallen, he trapped it against his hip and waited, it seemed, for some signal, but paid no attention to the black Lexus SUV that pulled in off the road and quietly passed him to stop behind the Jaguar.

  “My husband,” said Mrs. Montana.

  Apparently they had decided to surprise him with this dark-haired man, who obviously expected to be recognized. A graduation date was mentioned, a class with a reputation for impulsive enterprise. “A friend told Carl about your move,” Mrs. Montana said. “He was convinced there couldn’t be two of you on little Estevan.”

  When you’d taught for more than forty years on an island, even one this large, you got accustomed to this sort of coincidence. Thorstad knew this from experience. Former students showed up behind counters selling insurance, real estate, or shaving lotion. They materialized at street corners with their children, their wives, or members of their hockey team. They became your mechanic, your optometrist, or your financial adviser. The surprise was that he had not run into Carl Montana long before now.

  “You could have had me kicked out of school any number of times,” Carl admitted, with obvious amusement. “But instead you steered me into a corner and made me feel embarrassed for myself. I don’t know to this day how you did it.”

  Axel Thorstad was surprised that Carl wanted to recall his high school days. The Carl he remembered was the clown who’d shot him in the chest with a water pistol during patrol duty in the cafeteria, the sort of situation where it seemed wise not to overreact while others were watching but to insist the boy step into the hall for a private talk. He’d known that Carl was not malicious, just fond of making people laugh. In the classroom, Thorstad had had to decide which of his comments to challenge and which to ignore.

  He noticed a few white hairs had invaded the area above the ears of middle-aged Carl—a dentist, according to Mrs. Montana’s letter. He’d come home from work in grey slacks and a pale blue shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows. Now he examined the bandage on Thorstad’s forehead. “She told me you’d agreed to this of your own free will, but I see a little force was needed.”

  The pain had all but faded away, but there it was again, as though it had been waiting for someone to notice.

  Perhaps Mrs. Montana had signalled a warning. Carl changed the subject. “I’d forgotten how tall! Or maybe I thought you’d have shrunk.” He stood up on his toes, perhaps to compare heights. “But . . . aha! Your forehead has made serious inroads into your hairline.”

  “Ridges of scar tissue now.” Thorstad bent to display the evidence. “From coming up too fast from under things.”

  “Well, you’ve got a lot of body to manage—most of it far from your brain.” He removed Thorstad’s luggage from the Jaguar’s trunk but made no move to carry it anywhere. “We used to watch you heading for the classroom door, convinced you’d eventua
lly bash your head and fall back, cursing. We hoped for it, actually.” He tilted his head in the direction of the boy with the basketball. “You can see we’re a compact lot in this family—all bones and muscles close to Control Central.”

  Only now did the boy come forward to shake Thorstad’s hand. Also, apparently, to conduct an interview with the ball still resting on his hip. “You play soccer?” He’d removed a small plug from his ear and allowed it to dangle on a black wire from the pocket in his shorts.

  Presumably he meant “in the past.” Hoping this would not lead to a cross-examination, Thorstad admitted that he’d been bullied into coaching a soccer team once when the school was desperate. “But I was not very good and wasn’t asked again.”

  “He was a human torpedo in the pool,” his father said. “Or so we heard.”

  The boy was slighter than his father, with a head of wheat-coloured hair, closely cut and lying forward to a sort of point on his forehead. No tattoos were visible, no ring penetrated his bottom lip or the dark, perfectly shaped eyebrows. The black-and-white chequered tops of his runners may have been his only eccentricity.

  He made it clear that finding a tutor was not his idea. “I told my friends my grandfather’s coming to live with us. You okay with that? Escaped from a village of cannibals and wandered for months in the jungles of Brazil.” He bounced the ball between his feet, captured it with both hands, and looked up at Thorstad aslant. “If I’m forced to have a tutor I want one who’s had a poison arrow in his back.” This was an invitation to join a conspiracy perhaps, though possibly also a threat.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” His mother clapped hands together. “Pay no attention to his nonsense, Mr. Thorstad. Carl?”

  Appealed to for help, Carl looked down at his feet and smiled. The boy ran his free hand over his hair, pushing it upright and then letting it fall back into place.

  “You’d better watch yourself with this one,” Elena cautioned. “He’s exactly the sort of student you had a soft spot for, imaginative and mischievous and likely to drag you into more trouble than you could have anticipated just because they know instinctively the minute they meet you that you will enjoy their hijinks and even find a way to accommodate them despite the rules of the school or family or even country—like your little escapade with the school newspaper, for instance, where that principal hauled you into his office and demanded you stop having the newspaper club meet at your mother’s house at night where all sorts of things could be going on behind your back, which was exactly what happened if I remember you telling me about that girl who kept leaving you her poems under a vase or behind a book with barely disguised confessions of the crush she had on you, one in a long list of such would-be poets probably all dead by now of their own hand, so be careful with a young fellow who’s only just met you a minute ago and already imagines an arrow sticking out of your back, cannibals at your heels, probably a veiled warning against trying to stop him from doing just about anything he wants to do, just as those parents have probably let him get away with for years.”