Close to Hugh

by Marina Endicott

  Sometimes forgive me forgive me forgive me is in everything she says. Sometimes, it’s all your fault. Remembered from her violent childhood, things she has let slip or that he guessed.

  It kills Hugh. You can’t do anything about it; she could never set it aside. In a long, privileged life, she only ever felt betrayed and beaten and bad. How long life, how long childhood lasts. Mops and pails, water everywhere.

  He wipes her eyes, careful with the cobweb skin, and slides an arm behind her shoulders. But she turns away, maybe pretending that he is one of those who hurt her. Maybe thinking it, or knowing it.

  (DELLA)

  he’s in a fugue state

  he smashed into a tree rapelling in Elora Gorge

  and they don’t dare can’t bear to tell me

  I think that was a lie Elora Gorge

  he won the lottery can’t decide what to do with it

  he’s shopping for a present for our anniversary

  can’t find one can’t face me

  his other wife is sick he’s got to look after her his secret wife

  he got religion

  started speaking in tongues at a Kinsmen’s breakfast

  like Dad’s friend Phil Millman

  burly in a brown 50s suit

  then a clerical collar struck

  he hates me can’t bear to tell me he’s left me

  no

  none of those please

  3. WHIRLING AWAY FROM HUGH

  Okay, away from the hospice, running over to Della’s to get the January flyer settled. And for the collage course starting next month. Ian Mighton arrives tomorrow—wait, Thursday? Lucky turn of events, Mighton able to teach the class because he’s got to be in town to sell his old place. The house he let Lise Largely live in, while they were dating. You’d think (Hugh’d think) Mighton would have more sense than to fall for full hair and an empty, roaming eye.

  Hugh veers across the street in body, veers his mind away from Lise Largely, the realtor-slash-developer who has a bid in on Jasper’s place, who wants to buy Hugh’s too, who wants the whole building for a naturopath/allergy spa. Hugh could find another venue, or give up, give up, give up. A gallery is a mug’s game at the best of times and now is not the best time, no. Who’s to say she shouldn’t have it.

  Hugh’s to say. He says Never give up. Never give in.

  And Echo replyeth: Give up … give in.

  He strides along anyway in the fresh tangle of leafsmell, rainslick; the sun sulking, slumped behind a bank of fog climbing off the river. Red flash—a cardinal, flying low across his path. Another follows, a pair of bright crimson males. Some note from Audubon or Birds of North America slides into his mind, that males with brighter red have greater reproductive success than males that are duller in colour. Mighton is as bright a bird as you can get, except for Newell, the brightest, yet neither of them has had reproductive success. Does Newell mind? Does he mind the way Hugh minds? You never know. Newell is detached.

  At Della’s corner lot, a dash of coat out the back door—red and gold paisley lining flaring, not the solid funereal black of yesterday. Well-kempt, unkempt, verklemmt. The car, Della’s green Mini, flicks out the side drive and off downtown, without a glance behind to Hugh, jumping, waving his arms, a mad puppet dancing to yanking, tangled strings.

  He gives up. Goes to the house, to wait till she gets back.

  “Your mom on her way to see me?” he yells as he opens the front door.

  Up the short flight of steps, Elle’s head appears around the louvered kitchen door, nods. It’s nearly ten, don’t people ever go to school?

  “Does she have her phone?”

  Shake of the head, after a quick look at the kitchen counter.

  No, she never does. “I watched her drive off,” he says, begging pardon for busting in. “It’s the Mighton flyer. She knows his stuff better than I do.” He doubts Elle would know that Della and Mighton were once an item, as Ruth says.

  Elle holds up a coffee cup, queries. He nods and follows her into the kitchen. Which is a worse shambles than usual: dishes piled along the counter, long sideboard stacked with piles of papers, photos, brushes, books bristling with bookmarks, three unmatched shoes.

  On the built-in dinette table Jason lies flat on his back, considering a feather held up to the light. He drops his head to see who’s here and jumps up in one elastic burst, skinny legs wheeling briefly through the cool kitchen air. Colour flares around him in streaks and flows, weird, migraine-like—what’s that thing, synaesthesia? Then Hugh sees the colour is real, is cloth and feathers. “Hey, Jason. What’s all this?”

  Jason stares at Hugh, as if not understanding the question.

  Elle hands Hugh a cup of coffee, holds out cream; he dollops in enough to calm the black, to quell the bile.

  “Fashion project,” Elle says. Maybe her first words of the morning.

  “No FairGrounds this morning?”

  “Tuesday—school in an hour. I work tonight.”

  Elle’s schooling is complicated. Home-schooled for years, now in her grade twelve year she’s taking courses at the high school to get credits. AP Art, Math. She’s been doing Option Art there for years, all the extracurricular stuff and projects, because Della teaches at the school too. It occurs to Hugh that Della is a bit too thinly spread. Why all the jobs? Ken must do all right, lawyers—But he was a sessional at Trent for years, went to law school late, on student loans. And he’s expensive, all the hobbies. Wine, sailing, etc. Hugh remembers Ken on Friday, heading into the bank, looking hounded. Is money every trouble, for everyone?

  Elle is talking: “—first-unit project, he’s doing birds and virtues. Down is for November.”

  Hugh nods as if this makes sense. Down, down …?

  “Give me mine,” Elle says. Jason bends to his overflowing baskets. Like a magician slipping silks from a sleeve, he strings out shattered, glittery shreds until Hugh rubs his eyes, seeing each thing as feathered—more, plumed.

  Arms full, Elle vanishes back into the bedroom hall. Moved by avuncular over-politeness, Hugh looks the other way, and his eye hooks on an easel just inside the dining room.

  And another one, and another. He goes through the arch and finds two easels, three, six, seven; the art-class kind. Canvases propped on chairs and bookshelves, tacked on the wall, trailing into the living room. The pieces normally hung there stand stacked in the dining room arch. Hugh follows along the line of work. Each one is the same, or nearly the same, a series of seascapes, harbourscapes. A boat, a wharf, rocks roughed in. Charcoal, smears of tempera colour, glossy paper (cut from magazines?). What’s this—playdough? Pie crust? Some have small nudes in the boats, figureheads perhaps; some boats are strangely built. One is a whale.

  Twelve canvases march along the wall and into the living room, past Mimi’s piano, the last three crowded onto the mantelpiece.

  “What’s your mom doing with—” He stops. Elle is changing, she can’t hear.

  Jason slips through the archway, arms full of slick-sliding silks in orange, green, bright blue. “It’s—she says her mom says it’s homage.”

  Hugh turns to look at Jason. Why so shy, after all these years? When Hugh and Ann once were … what, Jason could not know. Can’t know, how Hugh knows Ann’s body so well, still, can see the skin under her clothes no matter what she wears, can feel the slight weight of her left breast in his hand. No matter how married she was, or isn’t, now.

  “Um, homage to her mom.” Jason looks at the pictures. “Was she a fisherperson?”

  Della’s mom was a hack painter who turned out seascapes a dozen at a time, factory-style. In between bouts of ferocious depression. Homage, right.

  The back doorbell rings. Jason lets Orion in.

  Hugh watches from the dining room as Jason works, draping Orion’s straight shoulders with more confections, concoctions, a concatenation of bird and person.

  “This one looks backwards.” Jason is serious and concentrated. “Tuck, see, the tail
comes around, wraps twice and then—unfolds, explodes—I’ll fix it when it’s on.”

  Orion disappears, Elle emerges, coated or clad in something black, blue. What’s the word—neoprene? Wetsuit stuff. Scales, sequins. Fish or bird? She turns, reveals a coxcomb hood with long blue feathers trailing down the back. Her legs appear, revolve, beneath the abbreviated hem, thin as Barbie legs. Too thin, he thinks. Pretty as all get-out.

  Disturbed to catch himself eyeing Elle’s pretty legs, Hugh recedes into the dining room to study Della’s array. But glances through to the kitchen from time to time. Observing teenagers in the wild.

  A girl slams through the back door and leaves it hanging, the screen door bangbanging behind her. The big girl, the blonde from the party last night. “Savaya!” Elle cries, clearing up that small puzzle. So the dark, thin one at the coffee shop is Ne-something, Naraya, Nivea … The blonde is headed for a fall if you ever saw one, and Hugh hates falling, in himself or others.

  They chatter as they try things on, Jason pinning and snipping with a pair of lefty scissors. Hugh approves. Saves the fingers, saves the wrist; everyone should have a pair. He wonders when he became such an old maid.

  Elle gives Savaya a pair of boots. “The boots you bought at Value Villazh?!” Savaya shrieks, train-in-tunnel, but a melodic, feminine train.

  “Too big,” Elle says, tragic. Savaya starts to put them on her bare feet. “Remember there’s that yucky yellow stuff in them that—oh.”

  “What yellow stuff?” Savaya asks.

  “The stuff that got all over my socks. Now it’s all over your feet, dude.”

  “Oh that yellow stuff. How cute are these boots!” Hikes her skirt way up, showing shapely gams, then drops it in a series of frills and fillips. She cries, “Oh, see my skirt hoist itself up like that. How embarrassing!” and Elle shouts, à la Harry Belafonte: “Hoist those skirts up a little higher!” and they’re all singing “Jump in the Line.”

  Flying back in a sleek black suit like Lucifer, or a very duende Puck, Orion demands their input: “Hey, in Streetcar, do you think Blanche is Tennessee? Or is Stanley him; is he trying to macho up and kill off the weak, crazy part of himself?”

  Another girl dances at the door—Elle’s friend, Nev-what? Nevaeh. Sharp angles, soft skin, a sulky or unhappy look. She looks around the unkempt kitchen, the dishes, the shoes on the counter, and as Elle kisses her she says, “What is wrong with your family?”

  Elle, shocked upright, blanks for a minute, and then says, “We’re just … busy, I guess?”

  Orion waltzes the girl away, saying, “Are you judging my friend, Nevaeh?”

  Nevaeh’s laughing. She says, “No, no, that’s what my father—ugh, never mind!”

  She has long hands, long feet that turn independently; she is a dancer, gravely graceful or giddily gawky, depending on the tempo of the moment. Hugh remembers her: grade eight Kiwanis Remembrance Day art project—Nevaeh ordered to take part by her father, heavy-faced, sombre, a renowned international academic. Hers was an interesting piece, cable typeface on white slips, a chunky blue-grey background, the text some complicated cipher that Nevaeh declined to decode. Second prize, maybe should have been first.

  A waltz-dip finish, and Orion says, “Imagine the joy of having an artist mother.”

  Jason hands her a blue feathered thing. “Hope.”

  Nevaeh sighs and takes it away, plumage trailing behind her careful-stepping feet.

  Tiring, youth. Hugh stares at Della’s boats instead. He leans in: yes, Savaya stands at the prow of this one, hip tilted, arms akimbo, almost a figurehead; behind her, sketchy, reaching men and girls. She’s a piece of work, all right. He searches the boats for other people he knows: there’s Ruth, crouched on the rocks above the tidemark, scrubbing a boat clean of barnacles. Some pictures are only roughed in, some beginning to take real shape. In one, an empty boat called Beyond My Ken has drifted away from shore.

  Conversation comes from the kitchen in snatches as Jason shifts and pins his models, happy and at ease. Tucking up a shoulder seam on Nevaeh’s tight, seams-out bodice, stapling the neoprene, Jason says, “It’s just, Shakespeare is so overrated. I feel like he’s like the Beatles—it was, like, right place, right time.”

  As if in answer, maybe continuing an earlier train of conversation, Orion says, “Bikes are like part of my soul. I have a weird romantic love affair with my bike. It’s crazy.”

  Jason: “I wish I could ride a bike, but when I was little and I tried to ride bikes I got really frustrated and my dad said to quit.”

  “It’s not all that hard—it’s just—you’ve just got to go for it.”

  Gesturing with the scissors at Orion, set to trim the bottom edge of his glistening beetle-carapace vest, Jason asks, “But don’t you have to have a little bit of balance?”

  “Well actually, I don’t know—I’ve just always known how. I don’t remember learning. It’s the one thing I know I can do brilliantly, no worries, you know.”

  They are so serious. In his eavesdropper’s nest, Hugh finds himself on the verge of—what is this, crying? What is wrong with him?

  He looks up and sees Della, just outside the screen door.

  Her face is so sad. One finger scrapes the bottom of her eyes before she reaches for the handle. So it’s not just him. A rush of kindliness spills upward into his chest, his throat. Old Della. He calls to her across the kitchen, gesturing behind him to the long march of canvases—“The water is freezing, and there aren’t enough boats!”

  Elle doesn’t notice her mother, but that line from Titanic is a family joke, and she swirls herself into a figurehead, arms outstretched, calling to Jason, “I’m flying, Jack!”

  Della has pulled the screen door open, red leaves of ivy framing her. Hugh sees her eyes close for a measurable beat, and open, and then she turns away before Elle sees her. Down the back steps and out of sight, crying too hard to come in to a teen-full kitchen.

  Many things might be the matter. The funeral yesterday upset her. Or Ken—Hugh never did check the messages on the upstairs phone. Or maybe just that Elle is the pearl of Della’s heart, and will take all this happy bustling life wth her when she goes. Very soon.

  Last week Della laughed about the pain, how unreasonable it is. “I want her to graduate, I want her to go! It’s the best thing in the world that she’s almost ready to leave.” At their regular table in FairGrounds, eyes welling then too. Cold morning sun lit the papery, welted skin around her eyes, small new lines above her mouth. Crying a lot these days.

  The kids are going upstairs to look at shoes, but Elle comes to the dining room arch where Hugh still stands, abandoned.

  She takes his empty cup. “Like my mom’s boats?”

  “I think they’re the best work she’s done in years.”

  “Me too. Is she any good, or anything?”

  “Elle. You know she is.” It comes out tutelary. He makes a face, as if that will fix it.

  Elle says “You know, it’s L, the letter L. Not Elle. I can hear the Elle in your voice, but you can’t seem to hear the L in mine.”

  At this little note, this slight correction, Hugh feels more abashed than he has for a long time. He nods, doesn’t say “L,” but forms it with his mouth.

  She grins, in both forgiveness and apology. “I’m still crabby this morning. Hey, I meant to say, that was a good punch you gave Newell’s old boyfriend last night.” So she saw that. “Orion liked it too. And Jason.”

  “It was a stupid thing to do,” Hugh says. “I’m ashamed of myself.”

  “Would you like to see the stuff I’m working on?”

  That surprises him. “I’d be honoured,” he says.

  She goes first down the basement stairs. Talking, although she’s got her fingers laced across her mouth. “I call it The Island Republic,” she says. “It’s just a set of—an atlas or—maps, or it’s just— Shit, I wish I hadn’t asked you …”

  They stand at the bottom of the stairs. A sign directs
him, under a decorated arrow:

  THE ISLAND REPUBLIC OF L BELVILLE

  DO NOT ENTER

  “You can, though,” L says. Hugh reaches out to the light switch.

  The large rec room is festooned, the whole space is occupied by paper, too insubstantial to fill it, exactly: lines strung in a maze, above head height, hung to varying depths with sheets of varying size. Many very small, some foolscap width but longer, a few much larger. Some strands of line are decked with tiny lights, but the room is bright enough to see the drawings, the—maps, L said.

  It’s not a maze, exactly, but a shape.

  Hugh stands still, looking at the whole thing, and then enters. He moves along the alleys between the paper. Every step makes them shake and move. Lines and colours sharpen, recede as he goes, even though he goes slow.

  First: a series of large maps on tissuey translucent paper. Street maps?

  Clean drawing on tracing paper, on onion skin or rice paper, sheets taped or sewn together to make larger sheets. Each of these eight or nine has a title at the top, or a name, in indecipherable script. But as Hugh looks at the first he sees a house emerge and a face in the house—and a street on which the house unfolds, an exploded 3D diagram that has been subtly translated into Della’s face, the planes and angles he knows very well.

  Then Ken’s.

  Jason, and that one Ann? And Ruth.

  This one: dark face, the paper dark, the ink silvery, the house a shadow, only one room truly visible above the eyes/the entrance to the house. An unmade bed.

  He was afraid that was Newell, but here’s Newell now. His soul in his eyes, in the sad set of his mouth, glossy box hedge ringing his mansion round.

  These are—Hugh feels a bit dizzy. These are strange. This is like—like the first time he watched an art video and saw the point of it. Filmy paper overlays the dark face (Nevaeh?) and Newell’s too. It’s almost transparent. Frail, weightless. Drifts upward in the small breeze of L moving into the maze behind him. This series ends. There is a gap, a blank space on the line where strange symbols have been drawn directly on the wall behind. Two columns, sketched literal meaning on the left, brush-stroke symbol on the right. Like a legend.