The Redemption of Oscar Wolf

by James Bartleman

  Claire and Harold had a home in Forest Hill close to the houses of their parents and a summer home on Millionaires’ Row where they held their own Sunday brunches with family and friends and spent endless hours playing bridge and tennis at the nearby Muskoka Yacht Club. Every spring, they attended the races at Woodbine and Churchill Downs with friends who were horse breeders. Every winter, they spent six weeks at their home in a gated community in Grenada in the Eastern Caribbean where they hosted dinner parties under the stars with many of the same people who had estates on Millionaires’ Row. They went marlin fishing from their yacht and were regular guests at Government House, where the British governor held parties for the British, American, and Canadian seasonal residents, as well for the members of the white expatriate community running the sugar plantations and nutmeg and mace farms. Occasionally, Claire and Harold passed people in the streets brandishing placards calling for freedom from British colonialism, but the governor assured them that independence would not happen in his lifetime.

  Then, one day, Claire’s husband of fifteen years noticed the beginning of wrinkles around his wife’s eyes and upper lip and began to worry about his own mortality. Already forty-five, and wanting to be young again, he began having affairs with women twenty or twenty-five years younger than he was. Claire knew what he was doing but said nothing, not wishing to cause a scene, until one afternoon she returned home to find his clothes gone from his closet and a note on the dresser.

  Dear Claire,

  I have met someone else and I want you to give me a divorce. My lawyer will be in touch with yours.

  Harold

  Hoping Harold was just going through a temporary mid-life crisis and would soon be back, Claire did not give her consent. But Harold didn’t come back, and she reluctantly settled for a divorce in exchange for custody of the children, the boy now aged ten and the girl twelve, ownership of the house in Forest Hill, possession of the Mercedes sedan, shared occupancy of the houses on Millionaires’ Row and in Grenada, and fifty percent of his gross income.

  It was then her turn to confront a mid-life crisis. The years had passed and she had little to show for them apart from a generous divorce settlement. Although she had custody of the children, they had their own circles of friends at their schools, rarely came home on the weekends, and when they did, always gave the impression they could hardly wait to leave. With the benefit of hindsight, it had probably not been a good idea to make them boarders when the school was only five hundred yards away. Certainly, when they were little, they hadn’t wanted to live apart from their parents and there had been tears. But she had been a boarder and the experience had been good for her, or so she had once thought. Now she wasn’t so certain.

  Alone in a big house with no one to care for and nothing to do, she often thought of the idealism of her teenage years when she seemed to have more compassion in her soul. In those days, she had felt sorry for the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hungry people on the move in search of jobs or something to eat. She was strong in sciences in secondary school and had wanted to become a doctor and work for Dr. Albert Schweitzer who was running a hospital at Lambaréné on the Ogooué River in French colonial Africa. She had told her parents and they said they had no objection to her studying medicine. However, they didn’t want her to work with Negros, especially in Africa where they lived in mud huts and had leprosy sores on their bodies. In her parents’ opinion, Negros weren’t much better than the Indians everyone saw asking for handouts and drinking cheap wine in downtown Toronto.

  Maybe that was why she had been so attracted to Oscar back then. As an Indian, he represented the people she wanted to help. He was also the only dark-skinned person she had ever spoken to. And as she came to know him, she discovered he wasn’t so different from the kids at her school. He laughed, he joked around, and he was easy to talk to. At the same time, he also wanted to help people and was planning to go to university to study to become a missionary to his people in the north. He even liked Chopin, her favourite composer, and seemed to have a crush on her.

  Then she had this wild idea. She would invite Oscar to one of her family’s Sunday brunches and they would see for themselves that dark-skinned people were as charming as anyone else. They would see in him what she saw in him — a decent human being who planned to make something of his life. But it had turned out badly. Her parents were so shocked when they saw him they covered up their embarrassment by treating him badly. And Oscar reacted by spilling his orange juice on the living room floor. Her furious parents refused to listen when she tried to tell them about his good qualities and ordered her to break off all contact with him. They must have thought there was more to the relationship than there really was. Taking the easy way out, Claire had dropped her plans to study medicine altogether. She then met and fell in love with Harold, and before she knew it, the years had gone by and she had nobody.

  During all this time, she had never forgotten Oscar. She had tried to maintain a relationship in the beginning. She had telephoned him after the frigid reception she and her mother had given him at the general store, but didn’t blame him for hanging up on her. The last time she had seen him was when they were both lining up to register for their first year courses at the University of Toronto, but he either hadn’t heard her call his name or he had deliberately ignored her when he was leaving the building.

  Some years later, just before she got married, in fact, she asked about him at the general store in Port Carling and was referred to Reverend Huxley, who told her that he had gone to California. Each summer, Claire made a point of attending at least one service at the Presbyterian church to pick up the latest news about him afterward over a cup of coffee. Early on, Reverend Huxley told her with a note of pride that Oscar had written to say he had left his job picking cherries and had found work in the entertainment business. Although Oscar had not spelled out exactly what that entailed, Reverend Huxley assumed that since he was living in California, and since Hollywood was in California, Oscar was now an actor playing Indian parts in the movies. As the years went by, Reverend Huxley let her know when Oscar joined the army, when he won medals for bravery, when he started university, and when he joined the Department.

  With some hesitation, because she didn’t know if Oscar was married or single or whether he was still upset with her for treating him so badly when they were teenagers, she looked up his name in the Ottawa telephone directory and called him. To her delight, he was glad to hear from her and they were soon seeing each other on a regular basis. Since Oscar only had a small one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa and a minuscule Foreign Service salary, she provided him airline tickets to fly to Toronto to spend the weekends with her at her place.

  It did not take long for their intimate relationship, cut short in the summer of 1935, to resume. Her friends and family, however, were scandalized that she would take up with an Indian. She tried to include him in her social set but her friends stopped talking to her. Worried about what their friends might think, her children came up with excuses not to go home, and spent their weekends with their father and his new wife. The neighbours on Millionaires’ Row did not include them in their Sunday brunches and the president of the Muskoka Yacht Club, someone Claire had known since she was a little girl, dropped by and told her as gently as possible that the members had asked him to tell her that they were not welcome to join their bridge games. When she took Oscar shopping at the general store in Port Carling, the villagers turned their backs on them. His friends and relatives at the Indian Camp, however, greeted them warmly when he took her to see them. Clem’s welcome was just as enthusiastic when Oscar took her to meet him, and he kept Claire amused with his jokes and witticisms. She was puzzled, however, when Oscar’s mother would not emerge from her bedroom to say hello.

  In the summer of 1955, Oscar’s staffing officer called him in and asked him if he would be interested in a posting to the embassy at Bogota, the capital of Colombia, three thousand miles away and nine thousa
nd feet up on the windswept, rainy Alto Plano of the Andes.

  “It would be a step up in your career,” he said. “You would be one of only three first secretaries at the embassy, and if you do well, there will be greater things in store for you the next time around.”

  Oscar eagerly accepted the offer, but Claire was not happy when Oscar told her the news, especially since he hadn’t consulted her before making his decision. She liked her house in Forest Hill; she enjoyed spending time at the homes whose ownership she shared with her former husband; and she didn’t want to be so far away that she would hardly ever see her children, even if they were now avoiding her. And while she was glad she had connected with Oscar again, there were some things about him she didn’t like. For example, when she took him to the opera, he was always asleep and snoring by the middle of the first act, whatever was on the program. When she persuaded him to accompany her to the running of the Queen’s Plate at the Woodbine Race Track, he refused to wear a top hat and striped pants as required under the dress code, and she had been embarrassed when the race steward told Oscar he could not sit beside her in the VIP section. There were also times when he disturbed her sleep, crying out and laughing in the night, talking about his grandfather and someone named Lily.

  Thus, while she was fond of Oscar, she certainly was not in love with him. And when he told her they should quickly get married to comply with the long-standing departmental edict that only married personnel could live together abroad, he mistook the look that came over her face as one of pure joy rather than one of utter panic as she contemplated spending the rest of her life supporting her husband in obscure diplomatic missions around the world and being treated as unpaid labour by the wives of ambassadors.

  “You go ahead to Bogota and get things ready,” she told him, desperately putting off the moment when she would have to inform him their relationship was over. And six months later, after mailing him letters every week saying how much she missed him and promising to join him when she had put her affairs in order, she sent him the following telegram:

  DEAR OSCAR. I am too much of a coward to tell you in person that I really do not want to get married. Not just to you but to anyone. I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have and so this is goodbye. CLAIRE.

  3

  In later years, Oscar would date the onset of his alcoholism, the start of his bizarre behaviour, and the collapse of his career to Claire’s message rejecting him for the second time. When the messenger who had delivered the telegram left his office, Oscar turned his seat around to face the window and stared out at the low black clouds hanging over the bilious green eucalyptus trees on the hills behind the chancery for the rest of the afternoon. From time to time, the telephone rang, but he ignored it. Occasionally, someone knocked on his door and called out his name, but he remained lost in thought.

  He saw himself back in the house on the reserve as a child of two or three again, unable to control his bowels, and his mother picking him up and shaking him, calling him a filthy animal, shoving him naked out into the snow and slamming shut the door behind him. Then he was six or seven years old at the Indian Camp. It was summer and his mother was chasing him, wielding a stick in her fist like a club, screaming at him to stop and take his punishment like a man after he upset her for some forgettable reason. Scared, he ran into the water to escape, and as he swam through the weeds away from the shore, he became entangled in what he at first thought was a thick piece of rope, but was terrified to discover was actually a long, thick black water snake. It thrust its triangular head and darting tongue at his face as it slithered and squirmed around his body trying to escape and he gave a great involuntary scream that he immediately regretted, because boys, he knew, were not supposed to be afraid of snakes. His mother called him a sissy for months afterward, never tiring of embarrassing him by telling the story to anyone who would listen. The blow to his pride, he remembered, had hurt him more than the beating she administered when he eventually went home to receive his punishment.

  As for Claire, her message stung, but he harboured no strong feelings against her, certainly nothing to compare to the depths of the bitterness he felt toward his mother. But why couldn’t she have just told him to his face that their relationship was over? He would have felt bad but would have soon recovered if she had made an effort to explain her reasons. This time he was older and less able to cope than when he was a resilient teenager back in 1935 and better able to shrug off the damage she had inflicted on his psyche.

  That evening after work he went home, changed out of his suit, threw a poncho over his shoulders, went out into the dark, cold drizzle of Bogota’s perpetual winter and flagged down a cruising taxi.

  “Llevarme a un bar,” he told the driver. The driver laughed and drove him to a place he knew in a poor but tough part of the city where no diplomat would dare venture. A woman in a tight sweater and short skirt smoking a cigarette at the entrance greeted him like an old friend and offered to drink with him inside.

  “No, gracias,” he said. But on seeing the look of disappointment that crossed her dark-brown, acne-scarred face, he reached into his pocket and gave her a twenty peso note. The woman smiled at him through broken teeth and pushed open the door for him. If this generous customer had problems and wanted to be left alone, she would respect his wishes.

  Oscar stepped inside and waited a minute for his eyes to adjust to the bright lighting and low ceiling. The floor was wet and slippery from the water tracked in on the boots of customers, a duo was playing mournful Andean flute music, and there was a smell of damp ponchos, cheap perfume, and clogged toilet drains. With his dark skin, high cheek bones, and straight black hair, Oscar looked no different than the people who lived in the neighbourhood, and when he opened his mouth, he spoke with a local Spanish accent acquired from his live-in cook and maid. It was a perfect disguise. The waiter who led him to a table in the darkest corner of the room poured him, without asking, a shot of aguardiente, the cheap rot-gut anise-flavoured sugarcane liquor favoured by the vast majority of poor Colombians out for a night on the town.

  “Quieres que deje esta contigo?” he asked, and when Oscar nodded his agreement he left the bottle on the table and departed.

  Oscar raised his glass and tossed its contents down his throat, only to gag on the raw drink and spit half of it out onto the floor. He refilled his glass and drank from it again, this time slowly, letting the alcohol dull his senses. Throughout the evening he continued to drink, determined to drive Claire from his mind through an act of will, just as he had with the existential issues of belief and redemption that had plagued his life in the aftermath of the fire. But the more he drank, the more he thought of her and the more he realized he would never forget her. The initial impact of her message had worn off, but he missed her more than ever.

  One of the reasons he had so eagerly accepted the offer of a posting to Bogota, he now saw, was because he had expected Claire to ease his entry into the class-conscious society of Colombia. Now he would have to do it by himself, and wasn’t sure he was up to the challenge. He had become dependent on her. He was shy, withdrawn, and found it hard to make friends. She was outgoing and mixed easily with people from all walks of life. She could discuss fashion trends, gourmet cooking, and travel destinations, subjects of little interest to him but which were of never-ending fascination for people in the diplomatic world he now inhabited. The Canadian staff at the embassy, while friendly enough, spent most of their spare time socializing with each other and playing tennis at the local country club while their children swam in a heated pool under the watchful eyes of a lifeguard.

  An embassy colleague had once taken him to the club to meet the manager, helpfully explaining that the club rules denied membership to Negros and Indians unless they held diplomatic passports. While he was greeted and shown around courteously, he just couldn’t see himself spending his free time at a club that excluded people like him.

  By the time he finished his second b
ottle of aguardiente, Oscar was finding it hard to remain awake and decided to go home. He put a fistful of money on the table, rose to his feet, and stood for a moment until his head cleared enough to let him make his way to the exit without stumbling against the tables and chairs. Outside and looking for a taxi, he felt someone take hold of his arm. It was the prostitute he had met when he first entered the bar.

  “Cuidado, no estas solo,” she said, pointing at four men who had followed him outside, thinking he would be an easy mark despite his size. She hurried off as he turned and faced them. They pulled knives and surrounded him.

  “Tu dinero, Indio, y rapido!” the one in charge told him, coming close with his knife in his hand.

  Even with his senses impaired, Oscar was more than a match for his assailants. Reacting automatically, he drew on the hand-to-hand combat skills learned in the army to break the arm of his first attacker. He then turned on the others, kicking and beating them and driving them away. He calmed down on his way home in a taxi when he realized how close a call he had had. The police, had they been summoned to deal with the attempted robbery, would have submitted a report to the Colombian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and it would have called in his ambassador to ask what his first secretary had been doing brawling with criminals in such an unsavoury place. He might well have been fired; he decided to stay out of bars in the future.

  The next day, he bought half a dozen cases of aguardiente and began drinking in the mornings as soon as he woke up, in his office when no one was looking, and at home when he was alone in the evenings. He told himself that he could stop whenever he wanted, but he soon could not get through the day without his ration of alcohol. Fortunately, through trial and error, he learned that if he kept his consumption to one bottle a day, he could keep his depression at bay, remain steady on his feet, and not slur his words. Thus, although he began to display major errors in judgement at work, everyone assumed that was because he was basically incompetent, and no one suspected that it was because he had a drinking problem.