The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Elliot Evans had known what he was doing when he allowed Thorstad to deal with this, becoming the villain in his stead. Caught between Elliot Evans and Axel Thorstad, who would not want to cry out “I can’t stand this!” from a bottom step?

  Thorstad put a hand on Travis’s back. “It’s late. We’re keeping Oonagh from going home.”

  Travis shook the hand off. “Leave me alone.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, grow up!” Oonagh was with them now. “You think this is how you make your way in this town?”

  “I’m going back in,” Travis said. He stood and turned to start up the long staircase.

  Thorstad put a hand around Travis’s arm and held tight enough to stop him. “Evans is expecting you.”

  Unfair of course—to remind Travis who was pulling the strings around here. Not wanting to be the villain himself.

  At first it seemed the voices had nothing to do with them— youthful voices somewhere in the shadows beneath the trees on the far side of the street. Shouting had broken out. Car doors slammed and figures emerged into the artificial light. Three, four, five youths approached, yelling, probably working up their courage to crash the party. Perhaps the escorts had vanished so quickly because they had seen the car in the shadows and wanted to lock the doors.

  Now Thorstad was aware of the arrival of an Audi sport convertible crammed with too many youths, some of them standing up, most of them spilling over the sides and even the windshield, screeching to a halt too close to Thorstad and Travis. Most of them pushed by and rushed up the steps to the house, but some apparently felt a compulsion to deal with the abusive old man, pulling him away from the youth he’d been bullying at the foot of the stairs. None of these youths had visible features, their faces hidden within the dark caves of their hoodies. “Get your hands off him, you fucking swine!”

  There was a time when he’d imagined or dreamt or feared a whole class rising up out of their seats and attacking him—not only refusing to do what they’d been asked to do but determined to show him how powerless he really was. But this had never happened. He’d been a reasonable man. He’d had a sense of humour. He’d made it clear how much he’d enjoyed the students even when they misbehaved, though he’d been visibly disappointed as well. It helped that he’d been tall and obviously strong.

  It was necessary not to be impressed, or appear afraid. “All right,” he said, now, holding both arms out wide as though to welcome these youths rather than fight, to demonstrate his willingness to talk, even to laugh at himself. To acknowledge that he was outnumbered but not intimidated. “We’ll get out of your way. This is no place to solve differences. If you want an explanation we can—”

  But this was not his classroom. A stubby boy leapt high enough to throw his arms around Thorstad’s neck, to press his wedge-shaped beery face and weasel eyes to Thorstad’s face, to plant his feet against Thorstad’s shins and bash his forehead against Thorstad’s forehead—pulling him forward, bending him forward to collapse to the ground, and rolling him onto the brick walkway.

  These youths—children, really—were shouting for the sake of shouting. Thorstad might have been an escaped animal they must capture, or a friend who’d betrayed them. He might have been in the midst of a schoolyard brawl. He was pulled by his arm in one direction, by the neck in another, and dragged by arms around his waist into the dark garden shadows behind an evergreen shrub.

  He could hear Travis shouting for help, though he seemed to be still at the steps. The steady honking of a horn would be Oonagh raising the alarm.

  Perhaps these youths, these children smelling of booze, believed Thorstad was someone else. But it was no good trying to protest, he could not be heard. They were wild hunters beating the bushes. Yanking at his limbs, pulling at his clothes. His glasses flew out from his shirt pocket and disappeared into the dark. He had found himself at the centre of that terrifying scene in The Lord of the Flies, the novel he’d been required to teach so often he’d eventually hated it enough to show the movie instead, just to get it over with. Was an old man, evicted from a party, automatically a despicable creature, an outcast, and a taller version of poor doomed Piggy? D’you want to die, old man? The youth at the ferry dock had warned him of this.

  It would end badly, he knew that. From somewhere behind the yowling rabble he could hear Oonagh’s horn still honking for help. If he was not to be stabbed, like Piggy, with pointed sticks, then certainly he would be beaten and left to die. It would have been better if his gentle civilized escorts had pushed him from the top of the stairs, as he’d expected, sending him flailing and stumbling down the concrete steps to suffer something as simple as a broken leg and some bruises.

  As he was dragged away from the steps he had the impression that Travis, thrashing about, was being held back by one or two of the juvenile goons. But the mob, or what felt like a mob, let go— having dragged Thorstad away from the street and the lights onto grass—and stepped back to form a circle around him. They had all, evidently, been forced to read The Lord of the Flies in school and were about to punish him for it. The damn book may have been meant as a call for maturity, order, and compassion, but it succeeded only in putting ideas into certain heads. The only thing they knew to do with it was imitate.

  One of the boys tossed Thorstad’s wallet to the ground, and counted the bills in his hand. Held his credit card high, perhaps in search of light enough to read.

  “Empty your pockets,” someone shouted.

  Thorstad turned out his pockets and let his folded white handkerchief fall to the ground. There was nothing else. A black comb.

  “C’mon, c’mon, where you got it?”

  He saw that the one who had raided his wallet was now pointing a handgun at him. Of course it could have been a toy. Did fourteen- or fifteen-year-old boys carry real guns? Did fourteen-year-old boys drive Audis? Apparently they did. Maybe this one with the gun, the smallest and therefore the cruellest, was actually a stunted adult.

  “Nobody comes out of that house without something on them,” he said. His face was unclear in the dark, but Thorstad could tell it was narrow and pointed.

  “I have nothing on me. I’ve just come to take someone home.”

  Why would they expect a seventy-seven-year-old man to have drugs on him?

  Because no one came out of that house without something on them, as the boy said. And presumably that must include the elderly. Perhaps they had watched here, night after night. Perhaps this was not a housewarming party at all, but a nightly debauch in a party house. And maybe they knew that at a certain time of night—when the danger of a police raid was greatest—someone old and respectable looking was sent out of the house with all of the unconsumed pills and capsules and powders, transporting them to wherever the party would move next. How could he have anticipated such a thing?

  But he should not expect it to make sense. They had attacked him simply because he was there, and because he was old. And so they thought they might as well take anything he might have on him.

  It might have been better if he’d had something besides his wallet to give them. They now had their disappointment as a reason to beat him. And indeed the little wedge-face with the handgun rushed at him, swinging the weapon, and cracked it against his head.

  19

  The cast on Axel Thorstad’s arm was his first since 1939, when he’d lost control of Johnny Dixon’s blue CCM bike and steered into a telephone pole. He’d forgotten what a nuisance it was to have a clumsy weight on his arm, though this plastic contraption was lighter than the remembered plaster. He dreaded the mirror and what it would tell him about the bruises on his face, the large bandage on his forehead. If a man his age must have wounds they should be hidden from public view.

  Of course the cast and the bandage were not the whole of it. There were aches and pains throughout his body, some of them visible bruises. Those wild youths had made sure that every inch of him carried a reminder of their power and brutal contempt. He was not about to ma
ke any sudden moves.

  Travis had not been in the guest house when he’d wakened this morning. He had gone with Camilla to meet Carl at the airport. Father and son were planning to accompany Evans while he visited a vineyard where they would shoot “on location” Monday morning. There was no real need for them to go but it was a way for Travis to keep his distance.

  Soon after arriving, Carl had knocked on the guest-house door and come in slapping a brown envelope against his pant leg as though urging himself on, as he might a reluctant horse. Looking at Thorstad with an awkwardness he probably wished to keep hidden, he’d resisted what must have been a temptation to comment on yet another bandage to Thorstad’s forehead. He regretted the assault, he said, but saw no reason for Thorstad to fly home when he could stay on and finish the job. “It’s not like you to throw in the towel at the first setback. It’s not like what I remember of you anyway.”

  Thorstad’s aching wounds did not encourage him to be careful. “Meaning, you don’t want to lose patients by staying here yourself?”

  Carl was dressed today as he dressed for work, in grey wool slacks and a white dress shirt open at the collar. He shrugged off Thorstad’s rude suggestion. “The young dentist we’ve brought in can take care of my appointments, but I’d really rather you didn’t quit.” He spoke with his back to Thorstad while looking out through the glass towards the ocean. “I guess I saw you as inexhaustible, with enough resources to keep any young actor riveted to the books. I remember how we’d miss basketball games in order to trail after you to some amateur play in a community hall.” He turned back, smiling. “We’d be late for Math because we were up the hillside reading the Romantics.”

  “I was younger then. And didn’t have to compete with a television studio.”

  Because he felt foolish talking with a former student who stood over him while he was sitting up in bed with his legs straight out before him, Thorstad insisted that Carl sit on a chair. “This is not what I’d call a mere setback, as you put it. It seems more like a wake-up call, a bonk on the head to convince me I’d taken on more than I can handle. Maybe I’m too old. I should have known I’d be no match for your son’s real masters.”

  Carl sat at the front edge of his chair, obviously anxious to get away, yet he had assembled all the facial requirements to suggest sincerity. “It may have been a wake-up call for Travis, too. He feels bad about this, and promises to try harder.”

  Axel Thorstad had little patience for this. “He doesn’t have the liberty to try harder. We’ve both been put in a position where what you ask is impossible.”

  Carl stood again. “I’m keeping the others waiting. All I ask is that you reconsider. I understand you’ll be up and about in a day or so. Any help you can give is better than no help at all.” On his way to the door, he tossed the envelope onto the bed. “Your mail.”

  Lisa Svetic had scrawled the Montanas’ address in turquoise ink.

  When he’d torn the large envelope open, a smaller blue-lined envelope fell onto the bedspread. A flower fell out as well, dried up and pressed flat by its journey—some kind of aster, he imagined, disintegrating into yellow powder.

  There was also a pair of lined pages torn from the sort of school notebooks Lisa Svetic sold in her store, folded over once. Opened up, they seemed to be covered with the too-careful handwriting of a child, and yet, at the bottom of the second page was the postmistress’s signature—sprawled wide and decorated with flourishes, looking as important as any prime minister’s name on a legal document. No doubt she saw the forwarding of other people’s letters as an opportunity to scold him about something, or bring him up to date on some local event he was meant to regret missing.

  The return address on the blue-lined envelope was a village a few miles north of the school where he’d taught. The handwriting suggested haste, or someone who did not write often.

  Dear Mr. Thorstad,

  I was in your English class the year you invited that so-called “famous” poet to visit us and he was so drunk he could barely stand up straight. Sat on the corner of your desk but slipped off and fell to the floor. You scowled at us when we laughed. He read us one of his so-called poems. Filthy stuff. I never seen you looking so uncomfortable. The boys loved it, especially the descriptions of his first seduction of a Grade Nine classmate when he was fourteen. That may be the only thing I remember from my time in school.

  How could he forget Rudyard McKenzie’s visit! Not too long afterwards the man had published a long poem that bluntly outlined the charms of specific girls in Thorstad’s class, detailing the fantasies they’d inspired in him, and ended by mocking the notion that a mere high school teacher could possibly have the talent, insights, and sensitivity to teach poetry to adolescents. The poem did the rounds of the staff room of course. Miss Mavis Hinds was apoplectic. The principal suggested Thorstad choose his guests with more care. Of course the poem did not mention that MacKenzie had kept Axel and Elena Thorstad up late into the night tolerating his stories of fellow poets he’d knocked senseless and the women he’d bedded. He would be the last classroom visitor to sleep in the guest bedroom.

  Anyway somebody heard about an ad you put in the paper and found out you’re living up on Estevan Island, enjoying your hefty teacher pension.

  I got four children now, between the ages of 11 and 17. The second is named Axel but we call him Marty. You probably remember Con McGahan, always in trouble, brought his shotgun to school once to throw a scare into Pete Boyle who wanted to date me. As if! Well, he went and left us a year ago and hasn’t sent a single penny or even a letter since. I’ve had to move us all to a low-rent shack miles up Caspar Road near the dump but can’t always afford gas for the rusty old Honda Civic to get us in and out to shop for groceries. Not that I have much to shop with. Three of the four kids got something desperate wrong with them I can’t afford to get fixed. (One with crossed eyes—in this day and age!) So I’m swallowing my pride to ask if you could help me out by

  “Oh no!” He didn’t know whether he should read on and have to deal with the request or act as though the letter had never arrived. When correspondents boasted of swallowing their pride, it was usually a reason to proceed with caution. The letter was signed “Taffy McGahan nee Tupper” two pages later—two pages that appeared at a glance to be filled with disasters. The phrases “house fire” and “overturned truck” and “multiple fractures” stood out, each of these underlined with three obviously violent strokes. Taffy Tupper had become pregnant during Grade Eleven, he recalled. It appeared her life had not improved much since.

  The question was: How to help Taffy Tupper—or her poor children at least—without giving the impression he was an easy mark who could be bullied with further appeals? It made more sense to alert the social welfare people once he got home, though surely she would have done that already herself.

  Strange, how it was possible to worry about a faraway hypothetical mess even while in the midst of a disaster of his own. He could imagine Oonagh’s laughter if she were to learn that he had not dismissed this letter out of hand. But Oonagh was flying to New York today, to present someone with an award she’d won herself twenty years ago. “I suppose I’m to represent Living History—a shock for those who thought I’d gone to my ultimate reward!” She would be there for ten days—there were several shows to take in, many old friends to look up—before going home to her architect in Toronto.

  She had accompanied Thorstad to the hospital, and, not surprisingly, attempted to keep him distracted with her mockery. “My God, Thorstad, do all your dates end up this way? Has every woman in your life had to stand by and watch you tossed out of parties?” Of course she laughed and wheezed and showed all her perfect teeth. She said she’d never known a man so quick to make enemies. “What the hell did you do in that house? Can’t we take you anywhere?”

  She’d rescued his wallet from the grass once his attackers had scattered, and had later reported the theft of his credit card to the company. Other cards we
re still in their tight leather slots.

  Because he was a man “of a certain age” with a head wound, they’d kept him in for observation through the following day. Oonagh had visited again, and again had tried to distract him from the memory of the beating if not its wounds. She may have guessed that he now believed he’d been escorted down the coastline in order to meet his death in Beverly Hills. Even while he lay on the dark grass outside the party house, with Oonagh and Travis crouched over him, he’d been convinced that the flowering oleander crushed by his face would be the last scent he smelled on this earth.

  Instead of dying he had been burdened with the humiliating trappings of a boy who’d fallen from a bike. Anxious that he not take the beating personally, Oonagh had assured him that while he was being pushed around, the rest of the barbarians had rushed up the stairs to tear the party house apart. “Trashed it, as they say down here. Probably just for the fun of it. Others were hurt as well.”

  She’d called this morning before boarding her plane—to remind him she was leaving and, she said, to reassure herself that he hadn’t died of self-pity. “And, if Evans doesn’t fire the boy, and the boy’s parents don’t fire you, and if you come down again at a time when I’m here—well, we never did get to the Huntington. And there’s the gorgeous Getty museum. And, who knows, I may drag you off to a classier restaurant next time where you can see faces you almost recognize while you discover just how ordinary we really are down here.”

  Confident he would never see her world “down here” again, he had not responded to this but stumbled over words to thank her for the time she’d spent with him. “I’m just not sure what to say.”

  Of course she’d laughed. “My darling Thorstad, all you have to say is: ‘That’s all right, Ludie. I’ve had my trip.’”