by Susan Swan
For instance, I know Alice would feel better if I told you about my part in Paulie’s crime, because there is no one else who will listen. I can’t talk to Sal, whose shaming voice is more than I can handle. You see, Sal took me out of school when Paulie did what she did and sent me off to stay with my uncle in Point Edward (or Punk Edward, as Morley used to call it). Sal says it doesn’t matter that I did nothing legally wrong. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, so it’s better if I stay out of sight.
I wasn’t born with gross spinal curvature, or kyphosis, as doctors like Morley call it. Polio caused the muscles in my back to atrophy and made my spine torque to the left, as if somebody had twisted it too tightly with a screwdriver. Morley thought I might outgrow the torque in my spine, but the specialist the school sent me to said I needed chiropractic treatment. Morley meant to take me to a specialist sooner or later. Morley meant to do a lot of things.
As Sal likes to point out, shoemakers’ children don’t have shoes. She used to tell me this as she pushed me out the door of our kitchen in Madoc’s Landing, right after she’d muffled me in a headscarf wrapped around my mouth, like the veil of Islam. On the way to school my breath would coat the scarf with moisture, and the moisture would freeze into tiny ice balls, and the icy material would rub my nostrils, already raw and pink from too much nose blowing. I’d want to cry, but that would only make my nose wetter and rawer, so I’d lurch down our front walk, past the snowdrifts that rose as high as our windowsills, devising ways to raise my temperature. A fever was the only symptom Morley respected.
A half a line higher than 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit and I could stay home. When I turned twelve, I experimented with hot cloths and small mustard plasters on the forehead. Masturbating made my forehead hot, too. Only I wasn’t organized enough to pull it off. And I was afraid Sal would walk in and catch me with the evidence on my forehead or my hand where it wasn’t supposed to be.
The cold is a funny emblem for unrequited love, but that’s how it is with me. I get three doozies of a head cold a winter because of the unresolved feelings I have about my father. I guess some people have dead saints to worship, and I have Morley. At least the common cold isn’t as embarrassing as amoebic dysentery, whose description in Morley’s old medical text as a severe disturbance of the gastrointestinal tract sounds like a weather condition. I used to pretend I’d come down with the symptoms so Sal would take me to see Morley. It was hard to believe the huge, distracted man balancing on an office stool, his white coat smelling of starch and chemicals, was related to me.
At first, Morley went along with the charade. He’d wink at Sal and scribble out a prescription for me. I’ll say that for my father: he could relate to anything in a medical textbook. Then Sal told him he was training me to be a liar, and he stopped.
Whenever I start coming down with a head cold that would lay even the great doctor Morley Bradford flat, I hear Sal’s voice talking about shoemakers’ children. If I’m feeling hard on myself I’ll let her go on for a while. But if I’m in a nicer mood, I’ll say to myself, Oh, poor Mouse, have a good cry, you dear soul, bawl your heart out. And then, of course, I can’t cry a drop.
There are other things to know about me, but I wanted to bring up the main points first: my hopelessly unrequited love for Morley and my unsightly back. The other notable feature is my shyness.
Usually I don’t talk much, but when I do, Sal claims I go off on tangents, like a tomato plant that grows too many tendrils. “Back to the root now, Mouse,” she says whenever I get to the good part of my story. Sal likes me to stick to the main subject and avoid tendrils like the plague. I like tendrilling, but it’s a suspicious pastime to a farm woman like Sal, who grew up on the Elmvale flats and happened to be hanging around Madoc’s Landing after my mother, the first Alice, went and died on my father. But Sal has more imagination than you’d expect. For instance, she’s good at making up sayings you’d never think of yourself. Most of her sayings are about dogs. As in “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Or “It’s a dog’s life.” Or “You can lead a dog to water, but you can’t make it drink.”
When the scandal blows over, Sal says I can come back and help her ran the rooming house she’s made of Morley’s home and mine in Madoc’s Landing. Until then I have to stay here in Point Edward with my uncle and my companion Alice, who is like a mother to me. Except no mother I know tells off-colour jokes.
— That reminds me, Mouse. Why don’t girls have penises?
— Because they don’t want them?
— Don’t be a dope. Because girls think with their heads.
So you see, Sal is right: I’m going off on a tendril now when I should be getting back to Paulie Sykes and how she played her little game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey at Bath Ladies College.
2
Morley’s scalpel was Exhibit 3 at the trial. Paulie’s trial, of course. The trial between Her Majesty the Queen and Pauline Lee Sykes. Exhibit 1 was the photographs, seven of them, showing the deceased lying behind the old cycling trunk in the heating tunnel. I don’t know why the photographs came first, before the murder weapons. I’d have started with the hockey stick myself. As it turned out, the stick, whose long handle had been wrapped many times with black construction tape, was Exhibit 2.
HIS LORDSHIP: Those are photos of the room in which the crime was committed and the weapons used?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: That is correct, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: Seven photographs.
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Yes, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: And the body of the deceased was concealed behind the trunk at the extreme east end of the tunnel?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Yes, at first.
HIS LORDSHIP: It was hidden from view, then, was it?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: It was hidden from view because of the trunk being there, and also because of the way in which the body had been prepared for concealment. It was wrapped up in various garments—a lady’s skirt, and so on.
HIS LORDSHIP: And before that, it was placed in the trunk?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Yes, my lord, but it wouldn’t fit. So it was placed as we see here, behind the trunk.
HIS LORDSHIP: And the lacrosse stick? And the knife?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Two corrections, my lord. You are looking at a field-hockey stick and a scalpel.
HIS LORDSHIP: And placed in the trunk, were they, afterwards?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: That is correct.
HIS LORDSHIP: How would you describe the field-hockey stick?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Weighing about three pounds, my lord. A good blunt instrument that could be put to a variety of uses.
HIS LORDSHIP: And the knife? Is this the knife in the photograph?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Scalpel, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: And how would you describe, the, uh—scalpel?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: It looks like an X-Acto knife, only it’s more sturdy. A series of tiny curved blades that fit into a Bakelite handle, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: It’s plastic-handled—
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Bakelite, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: And the knife—blade, is about, what, five inches?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: I believe, my lord, it is only one and three-quarters. B-P Rib Back blade number twenty—very sharp, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: It was the property of another student, I believe?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: Yes, my lord. A student named Mary Beatrice Bradford, my lord.
HIS LORDSHIP: What sort of school was this? A training ground for doctors or psychopaths?
INSPECTOR GOSSAGE: I don’t know, my lord. [Laughter]
That wasn’t the only mention of my name at the trial. I sat at the back of the courtroom, glad Morley wasn’t there. It felt like I was at one of the endless morning services at Bath Ladies College. The voices of counsel addressing the judge intoning—yes, my lord—sounded as if they were addressing God himself.
3
I didn’t meet Paulie right away. Not as
Paulie, anyhow. If I’d had any idea what was going to happen, I’d have asked Morley to turn back the day he and Sal drove me down to Bath Ladies College. It began to rain as soon as we left the Landing. See, Mouse—pathetic fallacy, I told myself.
Nobody said a word as we rolled farther and farther south, passing farmhouses that weren’t really farmhouses but mansions, with high green hedges and white fences for horses to jump over, and little shops with wagon wheels positioned by the door to let you know they sold antiques. It was the sort of namby-pamby countryside you could imagine Virginia Woolf walking through in her long skirts. I often thought of Virginia when I felt low, because she was so depressed she drowned herself in a stream with her pockets full of stones. In my opinion, it always helps to remember there is somebody sadder than you.
All three of us were staring grumpily at the rain-soaked windshield of Blinky, Morley’s new turquoise Olds 98. I called it Blinky as a joke, because its convertible top went down slowly, like a hydraulic lift, instead of in the blink of an eye. Even Morley called it Blinky in his relaxed moments, but that day he was cross, because the rain was forcing him to drive without his beloved fedora. With its top up, Blinky didn’t have enough headroom to accommodate Morley in a hat.
His fedora sat crumpled and lonely on the top of my steamer trunk, which was jammed into the back seat beside me. The car trunk was too full of junk Sal had collected from the church rummage sale.
I was out of sorts myself. That afternoon Sal had made me dress in the school uniform, although there was nothing in the school brochure asking girls to wear it on the first day. But she bullied me into putting on the green tunic and white blouse. (I’d negotiated myself out of the dumb-looking tie.) Just look at yourself, Mouse, I thought. You’re as conspicuous as a convict. Set apart from normal people by a little dress that nobody in their right mind would wear.
Of course, Sal wasn’t happy, either. She always got carsick, although she didn’t think it was ladylike to say it out loud. Sal believed that suffering in silence was a woman’s lot. To look happy was a show of bad faith, a way of letting your sex down. Sal said we were born martyrs. Maybe we were even martyrs in the womb.
In front of me, Morley pressed his push-button window, and now the rainy breeze was tugging at Sal’s knotted black bun. It nestled like a furry slug under the silly pillbox hat she kept in place with a pearl-studded hatpin. She sighed and fidgeted with the black strands of hair that fanned out across the white skin of her neck like sea anemones in a current. Her little dark head was hardly higher than Morley’s shoulder. I liked to wonder how a woman her size could have sex with a man as tall as Morley. I often sneaked looks at him when he walked down the hall without his pyjama bottoms, on those mornings he thought I was still asleep, and the size of him shut down my imagination. I guess Morley’s penis set a standard—something for other men to aim at.
Morley accelerated over a small rise, and suddenly we were in a long, winding ravine. I saw a sign that said “Wilbury Hollow” and a parking lot where people carrying umbrellas were hurrying out of the rain onto red-and-grey buses. On the hill to the west, a medieval-looking stone house squatted in a grove of spindly trees. I recognized Bath Ladies College from the school brochure. It said the building had been commissioned by a Sir Jonathon Gilbert Bath, who’d hired a British architect to design it like a Norman castle, because he wanted a home in which to entertain Queen Victoria. Sal figured Sir Jonathon was a ne’er-do-well, because he’d only got as far as tea with the queen’s third son, Prince Arthur, before his debts forced him to sell the place. It was bought by a board of Anglican trustees who wanted to start a girls’ boarding school on the outskirts of Toronto. They kept the name of its original owner because the place was already known in the city as Bath Castle.
“My God! It looks like a prison,” Morley said quietly to Sal, who was sitting in my place, the seat next to Morley.
“All schools do,” Sal said, and she quickly turned up the radio so we could hear a news broadcast about the American president, John Kennedy, celebrating his wedding anniversary with his family. His anniversary was a little sad this year, the announcer said, because the Kennedys had lost their new baby son, Patrick, in August.
“The poor tyke,” Morley sighed, and Sal turned the radio off. Slowly we climbed the ravine hill, until we came to a green sign on tall metal poles that said “Bath Ladies College” in purple and gold letters. On a grassy field behind a tall wire fence, beefy women with curved sticks were whacking a ball in the rain. Then we turned into a narrow drive lined with weeping willows. Their wet boughs dragged close to our windshield, like the soggy ears of English sheepdogs.
Morley pulled up in front of the turreted building that we had seen from the road, and Sal and I stared at the front tower, which poked skyward like a disapproving finger. A flock of grey pigeons suddenly flew up from its roof and settled on the ivy-covered archway. The ivy had been partially cleared off over the door, and there, under a carving of the spiky tassel of a clover flower, I read the words, “Built in 1890 as a residence by Sir Jonathon Gilbert Bath and shortly thereafter converted to Bath Ladies College for the instruction of Christian gentlewomen. Our daughters shall be useful and ornamental, like the clover that smells sweet in the meadow. Anno Domini 1896.”
I noticed skinny black strips of metal strung across the school windows. Bars—the school had bars. I didn’t ask myself why. I’ve always been too suggestible for my own good.
The Trouble with Morley
I want to make this clear. I was sent to school for two reasons:
Its headmistress, Vera (the Virgin) Vaughan, was a distant cousin of Morley’s.
Morley’s unfortunate inferiority complex about bringing up females.
Naturally, this put me in a bit of a jam. Anybody related to Vera Vaughan was a traitor and a scum at school. And there was another problem: I didn’t want to be locked up with people I didn’t respect—i.e., girls, my least favorite gender. I didn’t know how to explain this to Morley.
You see, Morley had never had a sister, and my mother died of a brain tumor four years after I was born, and he’d been counting on her to bring me up. Not that Morley looked down on women, like I did. Maybe he thought in secret that my mother had let him down, but he never said an unkind word against the female sex; he was just guilty of a failure to understand them, which turned out to be no favour to me.
I wish I could say I felt neutral about them, like Morley. I wanted to be as reasonable as possible. But girls were only mock boys as far as I was concerned. My embarrassment started with the American cowboy movies I saw in Madoc’s Landing. I didn’t like it when the whiny girl star would trick Audie Murphy into kissing her; I wanted him to get on with leading the cavalry charge. I’d ask Sal why Audie allowed girls to be in his movie. And she’d say: “To upset complainers like you.”
Basically, you understand, Morley sent me to Bath Ladies College because Sal suggested it. He’d never have thought of it himself. She knew about his relative who ran a girls’ school in the city, and she wanted to get rid of me.
“Do you see what I mean, Sal? There are bars on the windows here,” Morley said. I felt smug. The school didn’t impress me. It wasn’t decrepit enough. And it didn’t sit in a nasty-smelling marsh like Lowood, the school in Jane Eyre where girls dropped dead like flies of typhoid fever. I knew Morley didn’t have time to read, so he wouldn’t know about Lowood, and Sal said the books I read were for people who went to university. Except for the Eaton’s catalogue, which she consulted each fall so she could order me a new winter coat, Sal is almost an illiterate.
Of course, my feelings for Sal are a little complicated. I needed her because she was the only person I knew who would take me shopping for a new posture corrector without feeling sorry for me. A little hump here or there was nothing to Sal. She’d been to Africa, where she’d nursed women with tapeworms, Dumdum fever, and lymphoedema of the breast. Once she’d treated a man with elephantiasis of the scrotum
. She’d shown me a picture of what he looked like in Manson’s Tropical Diseases. The poor guy’s privates swelled up like a garden hose tied in a knot.
And Sal needed me because she had a secret. She drank. Only in her “C” mood, of course. She also had “A” and “B” moods. In her “A” mood, when Morley was around, she trilled her voice like an Irish colleen (Sal’s word for anybody pretty). In her “B” mood, when Morley wasn’t around, she talked gruffly, like the farmers who came to town to buy hip-length waders for smelt fishing. It was her “C” mood, the nightmare mode, that caused trouble for me. In her C mood, she fell asleep by supper, and I had to tell Morley she was tired from waxing the floors. Morley saw so many sick people every day in his office, I didn’t want him to come home and face taking care of a drunk wife, too.
The worst thing about Sal, though, wasn’t her drinking but her shaming voice. She always found something wrong with me and Morley no matter what we did. Morley would shrug it off, as if he expected it, but I took it to heart. You see, nobody’s perfect. So no matter what Sal said, I felt she was right in general, even if she’d singled out the wrong thing specifically.
Meanwhile, in the front seat, Sal was turning her shaming voice on Morley. She tucked a large hunk of black hair back under her pillbox, her pearl hatpin between her teeth, and sighed. “Isn’t it a little late to be having a change of heart, Morley?” I sat up. Was Morley going to utter the one sentence he should have spoken when Sal had come up with the idea in the first place? My daughter will go to that school over my dead body.
Naturally, I didn’t want to go away and leave Morley. Maybe my father wasn’t everybody’s idea of Captain Courageous, but he came closer than anybody else to my all-time favourite hero, John F. Kennedy.
From what I’d read about Kennedy, I knew he’d never send his daughter, Caroline, to a girls’ boarding school. If Sal had tried that on him, why, he would have slammed the door of his bubble-top limousine and hurried up the steps in that way of his which kept people from noticing his sore, stooped back. Then he would have thrown himself across the entrance, barring the door with his body.
