by Gail Bowen
I wonder now if Peter didn’t believe we all needed the healing power of those pictures when he suggested we carry our sleeping bags into the cool peace of the granny flat until Andy’s funeral. Whatever the reason, we moved. And in those still, hot evenings before the funeral, we turned up the air conditioner, ate ice cream from Bertolucci’s and worked hard at doing nothing. The boys watched baseball on the portable TV, and they brought the VCR over so they could watch movies when there wasn’t a game. Mieka and I read through a stack of old women’s magazines she’d bought at a garage sale.
It seemed in that cool apartment we could, for a few hours, seal ourselves off from the hot world of pain and insanity that surrounded us. And it was in those rooms that I decided to write Andy Boychuk’s biography.
It was a decision that almost cost me my life.
It began on the morning of the Taber corn. At around seven o’clock, somebody started pounding on the door. When I opened it, Howard Dowhanuik was standing there. Over his shoulder, Santa style, was a gunny sack of corn.
“Jesus, Jo, I thought you guys were all dead. I just about smashed down the front door of the house, and then I remembered this place. What’re you all doing up here, anyway?”
“It’s cooler for sleeping.”
“Well, it’s not going to be for long if we stand here with the door open. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”
“Howard, would you like to come in?”
“Yeah, I would, and I’d like some coffee. Look, I brought some corn for breakfast. A guy was setting up a stand at a gas station out on Dewdney. He drove in from Alberta this morning – first Taber corn of the season. Let’s get some water boiling. I’m starving. Peter, go over to the house and get a pot. Angus and I’ll start husking this. C’mon, c’mon. Let’s look alive, everybody.”
Laughing and grumbling, we began to look alive. The kids had always liked Howard, and since Ian’s death, they seemed to treasure his rough kindnesses. They liked to be with him. So did I.
I made coffee. Howard cooked the corn and it was wonderful, indescribably delicate and sweet. Mieka unearthed a half gallon of peach ice cream and a Mieka cheesecake from the deep-freeze. It was an oddly comforting meal, and after Howard left to go to the legislature, I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat back in the reclining chair.
The room was filled with sunshine and the sweet smell of corn and butter. The boys were playing canasta – that summer they’d exhausted the possibilities of every card game but that one. Mieka, barefoot and in her cotton nightie, was sitting in the window seat, a stack of Ladies’ Home Journals and Chatelaines beside her. It was a moment of rare peace.
Mieka’s glasses were balanced at the end of her nose. Suddenly she looked over them at me.
“Mum, did you know Margaret Trudeau made her own wedding dress?”
“Good Lord, Mieka, how old is that magazine?”
She flipped it closed and looked at the cover. “June 1971 – five months before I was born.”
“Yeah, I remember when you were born, and I also remember that dress. It was a caftan, white, of course, and he had a rose in his lapel. She was so beautiful. Livvy Scobey, who was our mp then, told me Margaret went all over Ottawa talking about how she made all her own clothes. The seams were all crooked and the hems were coming down, Livvy said, but no one had the heart to say anything. Margaret was so young and pretty and, of course, according to Livvy, everyone just felt so sorry for her being married to ‘that man.’ You know, all the years they were both in Ottawa, Livvy could never bring herself to say his name.”
“Oh, Mummy, you guys are awful.”
“Not me, Mieka. I thought he was terrific. He was terrific. At least, he was terrifically interesting. I suppose now that you’re grown up and going to university, I can tell you this. The first time I ever voted, I voted for him.”
Mieka twirled her glasses and grinned. “Oh, no. I was counting on you getting a nice cushy job when we get to be government again. But with that kind of skeleton in your closet, I don’t know … Of course, you do have friends in high places.”
“I’m not sure about that any more, Mieka. I’m not so sure about that at all.” Suddenly the golden morning was edged in black. I swallowed hard. “Pitch me one of your magazines, would you?”
But she didn’t pitch the magazine. She brought it over with a hug. “Are you going to be all right, Mummy?” I hugged her back, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice; besides, I didn’t know the answer.
The magazine she’d brought me had a picture of a very young Natalie Wood on the cover, and inside was a memoir of JFK. The date on the cover was February 1964, a time before the truth had made its cruel revision of Camelot. The article was uncritical and sentimental, and it brought a flood of memories: a grey November day in Toronto, coming out of political science class in the Sidney Smith building and someone saying Kennedy’d been shot and someone else saying they’d shot Johnson, too. Then numbness – walking across Queen’s Park with a boy from my class, both of us crying, plodding our way through sodden leaves while old newspapers whipped wetly at our ankles. Then a pub on Yonge Street that smelled of urine but didn’t check ID too carefully, and sitting at a table in the back near the television and drinking and drinking but never getting drunk. After that, a weekend of flickering black-and-white images on a television that had come from my grandmother’s basement. The vertical was stuck so you always had the top half of the picture on the bottom and the bottom on the top. It had seemed a reasonable enough way to watch what happened in the next few days. Now there was another loss, and I wasn’t eighteen any more.
It would be nice to say that the memoir of Kennedy I read that day in the granny flat inspired me to write about Andy. It would be nice, but it wouldn’t be true. The decision to write about Andy’s life and death came out of a need more jagged and more complex than nostalgia. I was at risk, and I knew it. If I was going to be safe again, I had to prove somehow that life, life with a capital L, was a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. Somehow I convinced myself that if I understood Andy’s life, I could make sense of his death. I had already lost a husband to the abyss. I couldn’t lose Andy, too. There had to be logic there – cause and effect. The alternative was unthinkable. And so even before my friend was buried, I was deep in the puzzle of his life.
CHAPTER
6
Andy’s funeral was Friday, September 2, in the morning, so people could get away for the Labour Day weekend. “No point,” said Dave Micklejohn, “in having it later in the day and ticking people off. Next week they’ll be over their grief and all they’ll remember is that Andy’s funeral loused up the last long weekend of summer.” He was right, of course, and we all agreed. But when the telephone rang that morning in the granny flat, I was disoriented. For one thing, it was still dark. I propped myself up on my elbow and grabbed the receiver. Dave Micklejohn was on the other end.
“Wake up, dear. It’s show time!”
I looked out the window. “Dave, it’s the middle of the night. It’s still dark out there.”
“Look again, Jo. It’s seven a.m. That dark you see is a rainstorm. It’s coming down in sheets.”
As Dave talked, I got up, picked up the phone and walked to the window. The sky was the colour of pewter, and the rain really was coming down in sheets. There were already pools of standing water in the backyard, and my sad, stunted tomato plants had been flattened.
“Dave, the sky’s falling in. What are we going to do?”
“Well, Henny Penny, when it’s a funeral you’re putting on, it’s a little hard to give people a rain check and call it off. Did Kelly get the marching orders to you? You know where you’re supposed to be and when?”
“They’re right on top of the suit I’m going to wear. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. And Dave, I’ll buy you a drink afterward.”
His voice sounded very far away and old. “There isn’t enough liquor in the whole world
to help with this. Damn it, Jo, I had such hopes for him …”
The receiver clicked down, and I was standing in the still, dark room listening to the sounds of my children sleeping.
I flicked on the coffee machine, walked into the bathroom and stepped under the shower. In an hour and a half the front doors of the legislature would be closed to the public. Twenty minutes after that a limousine would pick me up and take Eve and me to the legislature for her private goodbyes to her husband. Why Eve had chosen me for this painful and intimate duty was a mystery, but Eve was full of mysteries. She had asked, and I had agreed. So we two widows would accompany Andy’s body from the legislature to Little Flower Cathedral for the funeral mass then to a reception at the parish hall (catered, I had noticed on Kelly’s marching orders, by the ladies of St. Basil’s Ukrainian Catholic Church – one in the eye for Eve there; I’d bet my last dollar there would be perogies on that table) and finally to Wolf River for a private burial.
I towelled off, put on a robe and poured a cup of coffee, then looked through the rain across the yard to our house. From this angle, it always looked big and foreign. Upstairs on my bed was my outfit for the funeral, my “sad rags,” Mieka had said with a small smile when I showed them to her. But she approved. A creamy silk Alfred Sung suit that I’d bought from the “Reduced to Clear” rack at Drache’s, a shiny, cream-coloured Italian straw bag and a pair of leather pumps, miraculously the right colour and on sale. I had some good gold jewellery Ian had given me over the years, and the night before, when I tried everything on, I was pleased with how put together I looked. But today the thought of getting dressed or even leaving the granny flat filled me with an exhaustion so complete I wanted to sink down in the nest of sleeping bags with my children and drift back to sleep. I was tired of being responsible. I was tired of being a grownup. I wanted out. The rain continued to fall. The yard would be muddy under my bare feet. But part of being a grownup is knowing that most of the time there aren’t too many options. I pulled my robe tight around me, whispered to Peter to remember the dogs and went down the stairs that led to the rainy, pain-filled world.
When the limo from the funeral home pulled up outside my house, I was waiting. The undertaker, a sad-faced young man in a hot-looking wool suit, ran up the walk with a big, black umbrella to shield me. When I slid into the limo, the Alfred Sung was still bandbox fresh. Eve was already in the car. Surprisingly, she was dressed in green, a beautifully cut suit the colour of a new leaf.
She looked my outfit over thoughtfully. “Maybe white would have been better,” she said, “but green is supposed to raise the vibrations of the body above the vibrations of pain.” She tried to smile. “I don’t think it’s working.” Then without another word, she leaned forward, tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to go.
The rain was lashing the windows so hard that all I could see was the soft fuzz of the streetlights, still lit although it was almost nine o’clock. The limo was as quiet and set apart as the confessional.
“I like the rain,” Eve said, as much, I think, to herself as to me. “It rained on my wedding day, too. Do you know what my mother-in-law said?” She switched to a burlesque Eastern European accent. “ ‘Rain good. Means lotsa babies, lotsa babies for Andrue.’ Oh, God.” She laughed then choked. “Lotsa babies.”
“Eve.” I reached out to her, but she pulled away from me and pressed her face to the window.
We’d pulled into the circular drive in front of the legislature. Ahead of us, gleaming whitely in the powerful bank of lights that illuminated the entrance to the legislature, was the hearse that had come to pick up Andy.
No people – just that silvery hearse and the empty stairs in the rain. All week, from early morning till mid-evening, the stairs had been choked with people. The line, patient and endless, had stretched down Legislative Drive, past the banks of marigolds and zinnias fading in the baking heat, out onto Albert Street. Each time I went to the Caucus Office, I walked beside the line. I was amazed at how many faces I recognized. People I’d seen at party potlucks or rallies or picnics – people who, year after year, paid for their memberships and made a pan of brownies for a meeting or brought their roaster full of cabbage rolls for a dance and felt as connected to the party as any Cabinet minister. They were the people who defended the party to their neighbours and tore it apart at conventions. Political people sometimes call them the foot soldiers. The soldiers were at home this morning getting ready for the funeral, and Eve and I were going to be alone with the leader.
When I looked at those empty stone stairs I felt a spasm of pain as acute as a blow from a fist. I thought of all the times I’d seen Andy, always late, pulling on his jacket, bounding up the stairs to get to the House. And now he was lying in a box in that building, and it was over, and I’d never see him again. I couldn’t move. I sat there and let the sense of loss wash over me.
Eve had already climbed out of the limo when the man from the funeral home discreetly tapped at my window. All the way up the stairs he and his colleagues dodged around us with their black umbrellas, trying to keep us dry.
When we opened the doors and stepped into the warmth of the building, everything was still. The premier, in response to one of Eve’s televised pleas, had given everyone who worked in the building the day off. Without the knots of tourists and the click of heels on the marble halls, the building was alien, like a house after a family comes back from a long holiday. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much that building was home for me.
Andy was in the rotunda. There were pots of marigolds and chrysanthemums banked along the far wall, and their smell, acrid and earthy, was reassuringly familiar – a smell to come home to on a wet September day. Except for a commissionaire sitting in the corner reading a newspaper, Andy was alone. His casket was oak, and it gleamed warm and golden like the woodwork around it. The top half was covered with the provincial flag, bright yellow and green with an orange prairie lily blooming at its centre. At the foot of the coffin was a spray of prairie lilies. Three years before, when Ian died, I had counted the panels of the disciples in the altar behind his coffin, and I had been able to shut out reality for a while. But there was nowhere safe to look here. The staircase to the left led up to the opposition offices – our offices. The one to the right was the one Andy and the kids would sit on for pictures when a school group from our constituency came to meet their MLA. He used to do a nice thing with them: after the pictures and refreshments, he’d take them outside and show them how they could use a paper and pencil to make rubbings of the fossils embedded in the limestone walls of the legislature. He had been a good man.
A good man, but not a perfect one. He was reluctant to offend, to make enemies. He didn’t want to be the bad guy. Often, too often, when the hard decision was made, one of us was left to enforce it. It was a serious flaw in a human being and a worse one in a politician, but death seems to bring a moratorium on critical thought – at least for a little while. I sat staring at the casket gleaming dully in the soft light. After a while, a terrible sob cut through the silence. I was surprised to realize that the cry was my own.
For me, Andy Boychuk had two funerals. There was the one I went to with the chief mourners, Eve Boychuk and her son, Carey, an event so painfully emotional that it will always exist for me in jagged and surprising flashes of memory. And there is the funeral on videotape I saw rerun many times on television, a coherent ceremony in which all of us seem to move through our parts with a grim composure. On that day, more than most, there was a gap between perception and reality – between the way things seemed to me at the time and the way they were.
Double vision. What the camera shows first is a sullen sky and a street that, except for the police van on the north side, is empty. The white hearse, shiny with rain, and the mourners’ car, also white, arrive at the cathedral. Eve and I walk behind as the men from the funeral home carry the casket up the endless stairs. Two women alone, one in white, one in green. Incongruously,
there is indoor-outdoor carpeting on the cathedral steps. It is sodden with rain. The honorary pallbearers are inside and dry; the working pallbearers must climb those endless steps slick with water, and the load they carry is a heavy one. I can hear them talking to one another under their breath.
“Shit, I almost fell.”
“Watch that one.”
“Have you got him?”
Later, I learn that they are not from the funeral home; they are city cops. Eve and I plod after them, the water squishing under our shoes. The camera shows none of this.
When the door to the vestibule is opened, a gust of wind comes out of nowhere and sweeps us inside. Roma Boychuk is there – all in black, of course. She is with an older man, a distant cousin, we learn later. She and her daughter-in-law do not speak. The casket is placed on its carrier, and we stand behind it, waiting. None of this is televised. Instead, the camera picks up the priest and the servers as they process down the middle aisle to meet us. I recognize Father Ulysses Tilley – Mickey to his friends. I’m glad he’s the one. He would never have voted for us in a thousand years, but Andy liked him, and I did, too. Across the coffin, Mickey Tilley smiles at me and begins.
“The grace and peace of God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ be with you.”
The casket is sprinkled with holy water. Mickey Tilley has a good voice, an actor’s voice that projects without strain. “I bless the body of Andrue with holy water that recalls his baptism.” On television, Eve is magnificent, chin high, grey hair coiled regally under the lace mantilla, spine ramrod straight, gloved hands smartly at her sides, every inch the graceful public widow. But up close, I can see the muscles of her athlete’s body tensed for flight. As the white pall is spread over the coffin, Eve begins to tremble.
