by Dennis Bock
Most of them looked impossibly old to me, beyond ancient, with their skin loose and their bones buckling them to a near-simian crouch, though later I learned that the oldest person there wasn’t yet sixty. The older people had already died. Despite their relative youth, they moved with difficulty, hunched and drawn. Their hands shook with tremors as they ate. The Latin scholar, Mr. Mulligan, whom I’d seen playing dominoes on my first visit, was confined to a wheelchair, as were almost half of the people there. Those who could still walk made their way with the aid of a cane Muriel called a Hoover stick, a number of which I’d seen collected in the ceramic vase at the bottom of the main stairs on the day of my first visit.
Within the hour I’d learn the real reason she’d brought me there. But as she took me around the dining hall, introducing me as if we were old friends, I wondered if this wasn’t what she’d intended to show me. The surprising camaraderie, the casualness of it all. The mood wasn’t at all what I’d expected. These people were sick and some looked terribly old, but none demonstrated the sort of anger or self-pity I’d prepared myself for. I was simply an innocent visitor invited in by Sister Catherine and approved by Dr. Ridley to be a friend to the unfortunate girl they’d known since her birth. I wasn’t expecting them to show anger or to be suspicious of me. None of them had any idea that I was the son of one of the German girls who’d worked there years ago. The reception they gave me would have been different if they had, I’m sure of it. Under the terms of service there she’d been a nonentity, and as I walked through the dining hall with Muriel that morning it hit me as if for the first time that this place had been as much a prison to my mother as it was to these survivors of London.
“You’ve brought a friend along!” one of the ladies, a certain Mrs. Hastings, said. “I’ve heard from the sisters.”
Muriel turned to me and rolled her eyes as if to say, Isn’t this a hoot?
“His name is Graham,” she said, using the name I’d provided Sister Catherine the day I walked up the laneway for the first time.
It was hard to imagine this woman as a sighted person, which she’d presumably been before the flash of the bomb blinded her, and harder yet to imagine why Muriel had done her best to make fun of her.
“Well, dear boy,” the woman said, “we shouldn’t keep you two a moment longer. Run along with your friend now and enjoy the day.”
“He’s left the room already, quick as a jackrabbit!” Muriel said, rolling her eyes again. She raised a finger to her lips to silence me.
I was stricken with shame for my part in the conspiracy. But I didn’t say anything. I held still, afraid she might discover Muriel’s lie, pinned there by this unpleasant game.
“Well, dear,” she said, “boys can be timid creatures, after all. Especially at that age. Perhaps we’ve overwhelmed him with this display of our misfortune.”
Muriel may have liked these people, even loved them, but this was how she entertained herself in a world that was otherwise mirthless and static. That was the only explanation that occurred to me as we silently exited the dining hall; I tried to remember that I was an outsider and knew nothing of these people and the rules of the house.
We found a spot by a big maple and shared another bun that Muriel had taken from the buffet table. I was pleased she’d done so. I was still hungry. It was probably past nine o’clock and I’d had my own breakfast early. She was more relaxed than when she’d first met me at the gate an hour or so earlier, and I wondered about my own nervous thoughts that had possessed me. Thinking this made me feel even more ashamed, and I was relieved at least to have witnessed something shameful Muriel had done too. We were in the same boat, and now we could start our morning over again fresh.
She was testing me—I know this now—and I’d passed the test, though to what end I still had no idea. I’d not betrayed her in the game she’d played on her housemate. I could be trusted. Still clueless, I wanted to ask why she’d done such a spiteful and humiliating thing to poor Mrs. Hastings. It was a fun thing to do, I imagined she’d tell me, and just because everyone was blind here didn’t mean you couldn’t have a sense of humour. That was what I suspected was behind the deceit. But I was wrong. It was a test for what was to come. Without knowing it, I’d proven myself trustworthy, and to my own shame I’d passed her shabby examination.
The day began to feel different to me as we sat there, talking and eating. My serious nature did not allow me to find anything funny about what she’d done. I’d not suffered a scintilla compared to what she’d suffered, yet she was able to find irreverence and humour here. This was nearly as great a puzzle to me as the looming question of sex was in these early days of my adolescence. I felt the beginnings of something I would never properly understand, which was the uneven nature of suffering in the face of tragedy. We were both liars, granted, but my lies found their origin in the shame that ruled me. Hers were for sport, it seemed. She’d deceived the lady in some attempt to poke fun, to find strength perhaps in the pleasure of controlling the people around her. I lied about my identity every day I came to be with Muriel. In my head I’d created a sympathetic story for her that might accommodate a girl who’d grown up in a place like this. But all I had on offer was sympathy. I couldn’t fit that girl into what I knew of Muriel now. She didn’t seem as torqued out of proportion as those hands of hers suggested she might be.
When she finished the last of the bun we’d torn in half, she tilted her head back and closed her eyes, as if appreciating the powerful energies around her. She waited like that for a minute or two, eyes still closed, as I inched my way through these confusing thoughts. I recognized my need now. I wanted her to tell me how sad she was, what a terrible fate it was to be stuck here, and that she didn’t like making fun of the people she’d known her whole life, that being around sick people made her want to cry all the time, and now she was ashamed of herself. There could be no other reality running through her mind, I decided. I was preparing to love her then. I’d commit to her every last ounce of sympathy available to me because I didn’t understand love, or that those you profess to love need more than I was able to give, hobbled as I was by my incomplete and selfish sympathy. It was all the love I could find, though, what I felt for her at that moment, and I wanted to give it to her, and for her to keep it and to use it to help her understand who I was.
She reached into a small side pocket of her jumper and produced a cigarette and matches, and struck a match against the tree bark. The flame jumped to life. She brought the flame to the cigarette she held at the side of her mouth.
“I’ll bet you’ve never smoked, right?”
I told her no, I hadn’t.
“Everybody here smokes. I have lots of these. I get them from the ladies. The men usually carry theirs everywhere. In their shirt pockets and all that. The ladies leave them in their rooms. Easy pickings. I help myself.”
I’d never stolen anything from anyone as far as I could remember. I didn’t know what to make of the fact that she’d told me this, like it was nothing at all, even though it was just a handful of dumb cigarettes. I watched her take a few puffs, practising in my head how I’d do it. I knew she’d expect me to try one. Even with hands as disfigured as hers she knew how to hold a cigarette better than I could. I couldn’t think of a single thing I’d do better than her—other than simply being a kid with normal hands. She closed her eyes when she held it to her mouth, then sent luxurious puffs over her head. I liked how the ember lit up when she drew on the cigarette, and how she seemed to chew and then to swallow the smoke and finally expel it when she was good and ready, with no rush at all, in rings that quivered for a moment before they broke apart. When she offered to teach me she extended the cigarette in a conspiratorial fashion, looking this way and that. I still wasn’t used to her hands. I made sure not to touch her when she passed me the cigarette. I took a puff, coughed, and gave it back to her.
She didn’t seem to care one way or the other that I didn’t know how to smoke. She wa
s two years older than me. I wondered if she just didn’t expect much from a kid my age.
She blew another cloud of smoke between us, and went on to say that dozens of people had died there since she was born. “That’s why I’m like this,” she said, wiggling the cigarette between her fingers. “I guess you figured that out.”
I didn’t tell her that my brother and I called it Radiation Row down here, but I can’t imagine that would have surprised her.
“There’s probably ghosts, too. With all the people who’ve died here. I’ve never seen any. But it makes sense. If there’re ghosts anywhere in the world they’d be here.”
She took one last puff and flicked the cigarette away, then stretched out an arm and laid her hand, palm up, on my knee. I didn’t know what she was doing. She took my hand in hers and rested one of my fingers against her skin, on her arm, and closed her eyes. “You trace your way up and down, and I’ll stop you when you come to the inner elbow.”
I was glad I had Muriel to myself. Thomas was always much better at everything we did together, and I knew he would’ve taken over our time together. But I was terrified now. The back of her palm was still lying in my lap. I didn’t know what to do. I pointed somewhere on her forearm.
“No, no—touch me. Like this,” she said. She took my wrist, just as the Russian inspector had, and told me to shut my eyes. “You tell me when.”
Of course I was afraid to touch her. But suddenly it wasn’t her hands I was afraid of. It was the age-old reason: she was a girl and I was a boy, and I didn’t know what she wanted with me.
I’d played this game before. It was a fun way to see how eager your arm was to trick you into believing the other person’s finger had found the inner crease of your elbow. I was always fooled in the end, tricked every time. So when her finger touched my arm I jumped a bit, wanting to tell her that she was already there. But I knew enough to wait. An intense sensation was gathering there. It was different from when my brother did this. Now it was a conspicuous feeling. It was pleasurable. I liked it. I closed my eyes. I’d not thought of her like this until now, as a girl I’d maybe like to kiss, and who might like to kiss me, and then, just as suddenly, she told me she was ready to show me that surprise she’d mentioned at the gate.
I was too afraid not to follow her. By now I was convinced this surprise had something to do with me, or us, and I was eager and terrified in equal measure to find out what it was. I followed her to the east side of the house and in through a mudroom door that led to the corridor she’d taken me down that day she showed me the library. I knew where she was taking me now, but I had no idea what she had in mind for us in the basement scullery where my mother had spent her days here. It was abandoned now, she’d said, unused and forgotten.
The way was lit by a naked bulb that hung from a wire at the bottom of the stairs. I followed her, hand gripping the wooden rail. The air smelled of wet stone and dirt and mildew. My heart was racing. When we got to the bottom of the stairs I saw another light coming from a room at the end of a short passageway. I felt relief at seeing this, thinking that the place was not as abandoned as I’d thought. Perhaps she came down here often and it was not so forlorn as I’d felt it to be. The walls were of the same stone as the walls that bordered the estate itself, taken from nearby fields, I imagined, before people came and put houses there, and they were lined with warped wooden shelving cluttered with cardboard boxes and pots and dusty glassware. The floor was packed dirt.
“This way, just in here,” Muriel said.
We entered what once had been the scullery but now seemed a catch-all for everything the house had decided to discard. It was littered with stacks of newspapers and piles of what looked like old clothing and pillows and shoes heaped against the far wall. A kerosene lamp burned at a low flame on a table in the centre of the room. The thought that my mother had spent so many days in this dreary place was a depressing one.
“No one even comes down here. It’s all mine,” Muriel said.
When I noticed the ratty old mattress on the floor in the corner I wondered if that was where I was supposed to sit her down and kiss her. By now I felt convinced that this was why she’d brought me here. I feared that I was supposed to show her that I was more than the boy I appeared to be, that I had some experience in these things.
And then, taking the apple from the dining hall out of her pocket and shining it against her jumper, she told me she had something to show me. She got down on one knee and rolled it towards the heap of clothing.
The apple bumped and bounced over the dirt floor and came to rest at the bottom of the pile. The clothing had been worn by patients who’d died since coming to Mercy House, I decided. The pile probably glowed in the dark when that kerosene lamp wasn’t lit. That’s why it was burning now, I thought. To hide the glow so I wouldn’t turn and run.
I didn’t know what she wanted from me. The kiss I’d imagined seemed impossible now, and I wondered if she wanted to make me as sick as her by bringing me here and exposing me to all that radiation-soaked clothing. At the very least she was making fun of me, the way she’d made a fool of that poor old lady in the dining hall, telling her I’d left when I was standing right there in front of her.
I looked across the dim room to the apple, about to tell her I was leaving. It was sitting there at the edge of the pile of clothing. And then the pile shifted slightly and a small hand emerged, took hold of the fruit, and disappeared again.
SHE WAS A SIX-YEAR-OLD Jewish kid from Ilium, New York, alone now but for me and Muriel, who’d brought her down here to wait while she figured out what to do before introducing the girl to a frightening houseful of nuns and blind people. I saw now why it had taken her so long to come to the gate to greet me, and why the hem of her dress was wet. I imagined her wading into the lake, her sandals and socks left on the beach, to guide the Jewish girl’s raft to shore, achieving in a breath what Thomas and I had spent our whole summer planning to do.
After the girl finally emerged from that pile of old clothes, we watched her eat the apple and another bun that Muriel produced from her jumper pocket. She barely knew what it meant that she’d made it all the way across the lake to Canada. Whoever had put her on that raft would be happy she’d made it here, we said. We told her this was a good place for her, and that she’d be safe from now on.
She looked like any other girl to me, which was odd to realize at first, with her braided hair and pudgy face, blue skirt crumpled up around her. I’d never seen a Jew before, let alone met one. If the films they showed us at school were to be believed, they were a rare and tragic race, a people to be mourned, an eternal symbol of man’s cruelty to man. She stared at us with a look of suspicion and fear on her face, staring at Muriel’s hands, then mine, and I saw by the way she studied us that she wasn’t sure who the freak was here on this foreign shore and who wasn’t—the girl whose hands looked like they’d been burned in a fire or me.
MY FATHER WAS SITTING on the front steps when I got home later that afternoon. I wanted to tell him about the Jewish girl. I was bursting with the news. I was happy for her, of course, terrified though she was, because she’d be safe now. But I was happy for my family, too. I thought this rescue might reflect well on us, at least partially, and I wanted him to come with me to Mercy House and help her understand that she’d be safe here in Canada. But he had news of his own now.
I didn’t sit down beside him when he told me that our mother had left us. I stood facing him, still panting, and listened to what he had to say. She’d left first thing in the morning—I’d not noticed, so taken by the promise of seeing Muriel again—and by now she was halfway to Montreal to board the ship that would sail tonight for Bremen, Germany.
He held the note she’d left in his hand, the same wafer-thin blue stationery she used when she sent letters to my uncle. It was folded into thirds, and worn already where my father had been gripping it too tightly between thumb and forefinger. He told me what she’d written. I imagined the
re was more to the note than he was willing to share with me—maybe a second reason for her departure, something that a boy could never understand. But what he told me was this: she believed her absence would be the cure for what ailed us. It was her all along, she wrote—the reason we lived as we did, in shame and always fearful—and in leaving she would remove the stigma that hovered over us. It was her greatest gift to us. Without her we’d have a chance. He said she was wrong about that. She was trying to accept blame where there was just blind ignorance. “I don’t know if you know that about your mother,” he said, after letting this sink in. “We’re supposed to suffer for the sins of others. She was always ready to do that.”
He offered the note for me to read myself then. I refused. I didn’t want it to be true. If I read it and saw that it was, I’d be denied the opportunity to pretend none of this was happening, or that they’d simply argued, as parents did, and that she’d gone away to a hotel for a night and would be back in the morning.
Thomas was upstairs stretched out on his bed, head in his hands, staring up at the model airplanes hanging from our ceiling. He already knew she was gone. I asked him what was going to happen now. He said he could see that she’d been saying goodbye for the past few weeks. He hadn’t noticed, but he saw it now, the way she’d been talking to him about the future and how brothers should look out for one another. Twice in a week she’d told him that people have to make sacrifices for those they love. He hadn’t thought much about it. It was just Mom in one of those sad moods that came over her.
