by L. R. Wright
The desks were desktops attached to chairs, and for a moment Hamilton felt as though he were back in grade school: he wouldn’t have been surprised to see an inkwell in the corner. Jesus. He was old enough to actually remember inkwells and pens with nibs.
The instructor entered and began striding back and forth at the front of the room, his hands clasped, elbows raised. He was a big man in his fifties, a novelist and a teacher of creative writing. Hamilton, registering for his class, had been familiar with his name but hadn’t read any of his books. He’d found all of them on the shelves of the downtown library, borrowed them all, read them all, and hadn’t liked any of them. But by then he’d been accepted into the class.
“Okay, people—let’s get to know each other,” said the instructor, pushing his glasses higher up the bridge of his nose. He wore a gray vest over a gray shirt, unbuttoned at the throat. His pants were black, and he wore black socks and Birkenstocks. Jesus, thought Hamilton. The guy’s eyebrows were black and bushy, his large nose glistened, his thick graying hair was disheveled, but his mustache was sleek. “Okay,” he said, pointing. “You first.”
Heads craned, aiming glances at the poor sod at one end of the front row. He was a disconsolate adolescent who revealed that he hadn’t been able to get into the novelist’s regular daytime class. He then ducked his head and went on at some length, in a murmur. Hamilton strained to hear. He caught a phrase or two every time the guy looked up from his crotch: “interested in the narrative form,” he heard, and “married to linear thinking,” and “the legacy of structuralism.” The novelist was pacing, head down, listening hard, hands behind his back. When the young man stopped talking he sat back on his chair, squeaked a look upward, and got an approving nod from the novelist.
Jesus, thought Hamilton. What the hell was he doing here?
“Next!”
A man in his thirties, wearing jeans and a blue T-shirt, moved a disbelieving gaze from the teenager to the instructor. “I’m in advertising and promotion,” he said. “I want to learn how to write fiction.”
“Some would say that’s what you already do,” said the novelist. Laughter percolated politely throughout the room.
It was something to do, Hamilton reminded himself, while waiting for the results of his grant application. But Jesus.
The advertising man looked at the novelist wearily.
“Sorry,” said the instructor. “Okay. Good! Welcome aboard—you’ll be a challenge,” he added with a grin. “Next!”
Hamilton’s fingers drummed restlessly on the file folder in front of him, which contained the ten pages he’d had to submit in order to be considered for the course.
“I’m a short-story writer,” said the woman in the front row. She was maybe twenty-five. She had red hair that hung down her back in a thick braid. Her voice was throaty, assured, and melodious, and she was listing the publications in which her stories had appeared. The instructor was standing in front of her, turned slightly to one side, stroking his mustache with the fingers of his right hand, nodding.
“There is a black joy in sinning,” Hamilton’s pages began, “that is the real music of the spheres.”
“...and I’m curious about the longer form,” the short-story writer was saying. “Whether it offers a bigger challenge, or”—she shrugged and offered a complacent chuckle—“if it’s simply a short story that’s bigger than it needs to be.” She lifted her hand and flicked the braid over her shoulder and stroked it, smiling at the instructor.
The novelist was looking back at the short-story writer, expressionless. Hamilton could see him rummaging through his commodious vocabulary, sorting, selecting, rejecting.
“Next!” he called out, turning swiftly to the second row.
Also, thought Hamilton, he needed to be appreciated. It was time for praise. He needed it like a dying plant needed water.
“...a historical novel,” said the student, an elderly man dressed as if for church in a dark suit, shiny black shoes, a tie, and black suspenders that winked in and out of Hamilton’s vision as he leaned forward slightly to get a look at the old man’s profile. He was reaching down. Now he hauled onto his desk a large brown paper shopping bag. There was no writing on it. Hamilton wondered where he’d managed to find a shopping bag that didn’t advertise something. “I’ve been working on it on and off over the last ten years or so,” he said, taking from the bag a stack of typewritten pages. “Ever since I retired. I’d like your opinion. Your assessment.” He beamed around the classroom, twinkling behind his glasses. Hamilton thought for a moment that he was making a joke. Maybe he’d typed out the phone directory. Or copied one of the novelist’s own books.
“Well done!” the instructor said heartily. “But we have to assess everybody’s work. So we won’t be able to take a look at the whole thing, you understand.”
The elderly man looked disappointed. There was a flash of sullenness in the glance he cast upon his classmates.
“Next!”
Hamilton, sitting at the end of the third row, pondered his new-hatched need to be read and celebrated.
The person on the seat beside him moved restlessly. He was young, too, another adolescent, and he kept drumming the heel of his right shoe on the floor. It didn’t make much of a noise, since he was wearing sneakers and the floor was covered in linoleum, but it was bloody irritating. Hamilton tried to keep his head averted enough to avoid seeing it, that tense shuddering of heel against floor, but this was difficult, and each time he got a glimpse of it his blood pressure rose.
There was laughter in the classroom again, but it sounded comfortable this time, genuinely spontaneous. Even the instructor was smiling. Hamilton leaned to the side, looking around the bulky man sitting one seat over in the row ahead of his, but couldn’t see the person who’d been speaking.
And now, “Next!” rang out again.
“I’ve been writing since I was twelve years old,” said a middle-aged man, balding: that was all Hamilton could see of him, except that he was wearing a jacket that announced him as a member of a bowling league.
“I’ve got a trunkful of manuscripts,” he told them. “Novels. I get up every morning at four, regular as clockwork, put in two hours at the computer.” He turned around to address the class, pushing on the arm that linked his chair to the desktop. “It’s totally amazing what you can accomplish putting in just two hours a day, five days a week.”
A trunkful, thought Hamilton, furious, both hands flat on his file folder.
The novelist stood at the front of the room, looking piercingly at the man with the manuscripts. Hamilton wondered if he, too, got up at four in the morning. He imagined the guy’s alarm going off. He’d reach out to quiet the clock and see 4:00. He would push back the bedclothes, swing his legs out onto the floor, and get up quickly and quietly, so as not to disturb his sleeping wife. He’d tiptoe into the bathroom, where he would have left his clothes the night before, dress, and head immediately for the computer, set up in his den. No, first he’d probably put on some coffee. And while it dripped, he’d get to work. And he’d work for two hours. By which time it would still be only six o’clock in the morning. Ridiculous.
“What are you doing here?” said the teenager at the desk next to his. Hamilton turned; but the kid was looking at the man in the bowling jacket.
“Say again?” said the bowler.
“What are you doing here? If you’ve got all these books already written?” The kid’s face was flushed and angry. “I mean, shit—”
“Now, Kevin,” the novelist-instructor said indulgently, and he kept looking at the boy, wearing an almost whimsical expression, until Kevin slumped back on his seat and resumed his heel tapping.
Hamilton thought it unlikely that his work would find among these people the thoughtful consideration it deserved.
“This is a class for writers,” said the novelist, stern, to the class at large. He brought his brows together in emphasis. “And do you know how we can tell who are the
writers among us?”
It was, Hamilton figured, a rhetorical question.
“Writers,” said the novelist, “are people who write.” He beamed at them.
Hamilton couldn’t imagine getting up to start writing at four o’clock in the morning. Hamilton wrote his poetry at night. He held the file folder in his hands, hefting it.
“Next!” cried the instructor.
Hamilton sighed deeply. Slowly he reached down. The objects dangling from his belt loops made a satisfyingly tinny jingle as he swept his knapsack off the floor.
“I’m a poet,” said a woman wearing pink sweatpants and sweatshirt, with a heavy white cardigan slung across her shoulders. “And I’ll always write primarily poetry. But lately I’ve gotten into short stories, and now I’d like to explore the possibilities offered by the novel.”
Hamilton slid from his chair, slipped behind it, reached for the door handle.
“Lost your courage?” said the instructor, who was smiling at him from behind his glasses and his folded arms.
Hamilton imagined himself on the backseat of the novelist’s car, hiding on the floor with a long metal skewer in his hand. One poke in the butt, he thought, when you’re halfway over the Granville Street Bridge, and we’ll see whose courage goes flying. He laughed out loud. Shaking his head, still chuckling, he left the room, letting the door close softly behind him.
Chapter 21
“YOU’RE A HANDSOME GIRL,” said Nadine. “Are you married?”
Maria nodded.
“Do you have any children?”
Maria nodded again. “A daughter. Belinda.” It was difficult to speak.
Her mother hadn’t taken her eyes from Maria’s face. “I asked them what had happened to you,” she said. “They wouldn’t tell me. ‘She’s in a good home.’ That’s all they’d say. Were you in a good home?”
“Yes.”
“Good.”
The rain had lessened and was now sheeting down the windows in coats of transparent silver.
Maria asked, “Why did you do it?” She felt an astonishing flood of relief.
Her mother sat back on the wooden chair, lifting her disfigured hands into her lap. “When did you find out?”
Maria heard nothing in her voice. It was as dry as dust. “Yesterday,” she said.
Her mother shook her head slowly and looked away. She was small, frail, crippled—it was hard to imagine her having the strength to stab anyone. But she had struck her husband in his sleep and the biggest child, too.
Maria put her arms on the counter and bent close to the wire. “Please.”
Her mother glanced behind her, at the attendant who waited by the door through which they had entered.
“Please,” said Maria. Her thoughts were in disarray. She tried to marshal them—she needed coherence. “Oh, God,” she whispered, struggling for control. She felt the director’s eyes on the nape of her neck.
Nadine looked at her impassively. “I don’t know why you think I could answer that. Is it the only thing you want to know?”
Maria looked down, blinking rapidly, freeing her eyelashes of tears. “Yes. I guess it is.” Nadine studied her, and Maria tried to see in her mother the young woman in Edward Dixon’s photograph. “No. It isn’t the only thing. Tell me about my father.”
She watched pain flicker across her mother’s face and wondered what Nadine had felt as she drove the knife into her husband’s chest. Had his eyes opened? Had she wanted too late to change her mind?
“Did you love him?” she asked. Her mother continued to look at her but didn’t respond. “What was he like?” Nadine gave an impatient shrug. “Please,” said Maria, leaning close to the wire divider again. “I need to know.”
“It’s very unsettling to have to deal with you,” said her mother irritably.
“But you must have expected that I’d show up eventually. You must have at least thought about it.”
“For a while I did, yes. But not recently. Not for years.”
The rain had stopped, and through the window Maria saw clouds rapidly scudding eastward. She didn’t want to be here any longer.
Would she tell Richard and Belinda? Nadine wasn’t anybody Maria wanted as a grandmother for Belinda. Though Richard might find her a more interesting mother-in-law than even Agatha had been, she thought.
She examined her mother, looking for familiar things. Would she, Maria, get arthritis, too? she wondered. Or would Belinda? Nadine had had heart attacks—would Maria and Belinda have them, too?
“Why are you still in this place?”
“Because I want to be.”
“Why?”
Nadine looked at her with distaste. “I’d have to know you a hell of a lot longer than fifteen minutes before I’d—”
Maria slapped the counter and half rose on her chair. The attendant looked over at her but stayed where he was. “Listen! You took my family from me. I thought I was somebody I wasn’t, because of you.” She jabbed the air. “You owe me.” She sat down again, slowly, trembling.
“I owe you what?” said her mother, with contempt. She sat stiffly on her chair, cradling her hands in her lap.
She probably suffers, thought Maria. Still trembling, she looked through the wire at her mother. She tried to remember Belinda’s birth—but her head resonated with the sound of screaming. Maria put her hands carefully over her ears, pushing firmly, then took them away—and the sound was gone.
She probably suffers, she thought again, looking at her mother.
“Nothing,” said Maria dully. “You don’t owe me anything.” She looked around for her handbag and picked it up from the floor.
“Wait.” Nadine leaned closer, and Maria saw the pink skin of her scalp where her white hair was parted. “You asked about your father.”
Maria put her handbag in her lap and faced her mother.
“Everything else you want to know—it’s too late,” said Nadine. “But—” She looked down at her hands, resting grotesque and helpless on the countertop. “Your father—” For the first time she spoke with an effort, and Maria thought there might be pain in her voice. “He was—strong. Healthy. Intelligent.” She gave Maria a wry glance. “Good genes, on one side, anyway.”
Maria was incredulous. “But how could you do it? How could you kill him?”
Nadine was silent.
“Why?”
“I didn’t kill him.”
Maria wanted to believe her. For a second she did believe, for a second she thought, I will spend the rest of my life finding a way to prove she’s innocent. My mother. Innocent.
“I killed Ira Gage,” said Nadine. “I didn’t kill your father.”
Maria sat there, across the counter from Nadine, looking at her through a wire divider.
“Tell me,” she said.
THE PRESENT
Chapter 22
ALBERG WAS SITTING on the edge of his bed in a motel room in Calgary, the same motel he and Cassandra had stayed in just a week ago, when Janey had gotten married. The days had been blue and gold and the sun warm, a week ago; and now tonight the snow was falling here as it had fallen yesterday in Saskatoon. Alberg knew it wouldn’t last. But next month it would.
He had come to Calgary in search of the hired man who had rescued Maria.
He realized that he was staring at an ashtray in which there was a book of matches with the motel’s name on it. He moved it from the bedside table to the desk. But that was where the phone was. He moved it again, to the table on the opposite side of the bed—but that wasn’t good enough, either. Finally he stashed the ashtray in the bottom of the chest of drawers, which he wouldn’t be using.
Then he went to the desk and dialed Janey’s number. The musician answered. Janey, he told Alberg, was not at home. Home, thought Alberg, marveling. Her home was with this musician, now. He left a message and then called Diana and got her machine. Finally he tried his own number in Gibsons, and here he had better luck.
“I’m sorry I had t
o make this trip,” he told Cassandra.
“Look, Karl. I can’t live the rest of my life in somebody’s pocket. I’ve got to get over this, and I will.”
“I know. But still. I’m sorry.”
“It would be better if we were in another place.”
Alberg’s heart sank, despite the fact that he’d been steeling himself for this. Preparing for it. Even planning it.
“Every time somebody knocks on the door—”
“I know, I’ve been thinking the same thing.” Not anyplace on the goddamn prairies, though, he’d decided, and he hoped she would agree.
“So when you get back,” she said, “let’s go house hunting. Okay?”
“House hunting?”
“Yeah. How about it? I’ll sell my place and we’ll buy a house together.”
“A house? Where?”
“I don’t know where. Here in Gibsons. Sechelt. Wherever.”
“Are you sure?”
She didn’t speak for a moment or two. “You mean you aren’t? I thought you wanted to get married, for God’s sake. Now you don’t know if you want us to buy a house?”
“No no no.” He stood up, but the cord was too short, so he had to sit down again. “No no no. No.”
“Karl, what’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing, nothing. I misunderstood you, that’s all. Yeah. House hunting. Terrific! That’s terrific!” He felt himself beaming.
“When are you coming home?” she said. “I miss you.”
“Me too,” said Alberg, still smiling. “I don’t know exactly. It depends on the guy I’m seeing in the morning. It’s possible I’ll be able to get a flight back late tomorrow.”
“Have you learned anything useful?”
He hesitated. He wanted to tell her the story, but there wasn’t enough of it yet. He was filled with expectation. He wanted to cradle that to himself, for the moment, until he knew more. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s been a useful trip.”
***
Cassandra, standing in the darkened kitchen of the directors’ house in her nightgown, said good night and hung up and stood there, listening to the rain pelting the window and the wind rattling in the eaves trough. She wondered if she wanted a glass of milk or a cup of tea.
