by Susan Swan
“Very well, Pauline. You may have your way on this matter. But if I don’t see a change in your behaviour, you won’t be able to room with Tory next term.”
“You promised you wouldn’t do that!” Paulie cried.
“If you break your promise, how can you expect me to keep mine?” The Virgin walked out, her left cheek twitching.
I timidly put my hand on Paulie’s arm.
“Why don’t you go and see this doctor,” I said. “And get her off your back.”
“That’s just what she wanted you to say. Why do you always let her trick you?” Paulie shrugged away my hand and walked out, slamming the door.
I watched her go sadly and began to pack my bag. The Virgin had given me special permission to stay with my uncle, Reverend Holmes, at the Park Plaza the following night. I should have been excited about getting out of school, but I dreaded having to spend my precious “out” weekend with my uncle.
29
The Trouble with My Uncle
I know I ought to tell you about my life with my guardian and Uncle Rev Winnie Holmes, or the Rev, as his parishioners call him. Then you could understand how Paulie’s crime affected me. But there isn’t a lot to say about things in Point Edward, except that my uncle’s guest bedroom has a view of the St. Clair River, where, at night, the lake boats float out like lighted Christmas trees into the black water of Lake Huron.
1. He has an embarrassing name—Winston Churchill Frederick Holmes (Winnie for short).
2. He talks too much. And always boringly, on subjects that sound like homework assignments. Take, for instance, the six Humours. That’s his description of the six geographical parts of Canada, which he’s matched up with human characteristics—i.e., Newfoundland is synonymous with devotion, because, he says, one hundred percent belong to a church. (He always has his own statistics, which nobody else has ever heard about.) Quebec, with its large number of religious and educational institutions, represents scholarly aptitude. And Ontario, with its financial center on Bay Street, stands for avarice. (He says sermons on the last point are well received in the other provinces.)
3. He makes up embarrassing poems. I.e., “It’s the Rev here, to sing you cheer, to tell you what you need to know, and ask, God willing, for some dough.”
4. He puts on a father act.
5. He feels sorry for himself because Morley made more money than he does. (That’s the worst and scariest part, because I feel sorry for myself, too, on account of Morley, and I don’t want to be like my uncle in even the smallest way.)
6. He calls me Old Mouser and smiles like a cat swallowing a canary when he says it.
7. He likes me and spends time with me and he isn’t Morley.
The Moral of the Fuller’s Teasel
Alice was bothering me the morning of the Visitor’s Luncheon at Kings College. She was making my chest tight and my breathing hurt, and I sat in the back seat of my uncle’s jalopy gulping aspirins and pretending I was made of see-through plastic. That’s a trick I do when I don’t want to be where I am. For one thing, I slow down and almost stop my breathing, which makes Alice happy. And for another, I concentrate on feeling weightless, which is the next best thing to being invisible. Sad to say, my trick wasn’t working because in the rear-view mirror I saw my uncle watching me as if he were trying to figure out what was wrong. So I stared out the window with a nice fakey smile. I didn’t want that blowhard to notice how dread was filling me from the tips of my dumb Mouse feet to the top of my old Mouse head. I’d never been to a mixed party before, and I didn’t think the boys would like Alice or me. Plus I was a boarder, which was a strike against me as far as the day girls were concerned. I knew Tory didn’t think this, and I longed to see her, but I couldn’t exactly spend the whole time talking to her.
In the rear-view mirror, my uncle quivered his chins at me.
“Old Mouser, what do you want to do when you grow up?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. A rushing stream of buses and cars flowed up and down the hill around us as we climbed north, heading for the tall stone gates of Kings College, which sat at the top of the busy avenue like pharaoh’s monument.
“Now, Winnie. Mary Beatrice doesn’t want to hear the story of the fuller’s teasel today.”
“It will only take a minute, Margaret.” His chins acknowledged the pale green spire of the school’s clock tower. “She may meet an important young man up there today. Isn’t that right, Old Mouser?”
“I guess so.” I bent down so he couldn’t see me and sneaked another aspirin. My upper back felt like one single jammed muscle, and I wished I could shake it out the way Sal shook the sand out of Morley’s beach towel.
“Now, you just hold your horses and listen.” My uncle’s double chins quaked. “Because to see the fuller’s teasel, you’d think it was good for nothing. Its flowers are covered with bristles, but it’s these useless-looking bristles that can be used to raise the nap on blankets.”
To my relief, my uncle stopped talking as he drove through the gates and past a small guardhouse near a row of boarded-up hockey rinks. Like me, he was gawking at the buildings and the vast, grassy field beyond us, where boys in bulgy blue sweaters hurled themselves at one another with the assurance of the professional football players Morley liked to watch on TV. I stopped breathing totally now. Behind us the noise of city traffic faded, and I could hear birds chirping in the trees lining the long drive. My uncle stopped directly in front of the main building; up close, its six-story clock tower looked as grand and costly as the Peace Tower in Ottawa. A stream of girls in raccoon and camel’s-hair coats were staggering up the wide stone steps between two chubby Grecian columns. They walked slightly knock-kneed, the way girls walk when they wear high heels for the first time. Even with their stupid walk, they looked glamorous and better dressed than me. I had on the navy dress I wore for church and plain black shoes with low wedge heels. Only day girls knew that “dress casual” meant high heels.
“Aren’t they a little young to be wearing shoes like that?” my uncle asked. My aunt smiled. “You’ll have to keep up with the times, Winnie. They all wear high heels now.” I stared down fearfully at my feet. The shoe salesman had stuck in two extra soles in my right wedgie for support, but there was no way around it: I still walked favouring one side for every damn boy to see.
“As I was saying, Old Mouser, nothing else has ever been invented that can raise the nap on cloth this well.”
I groaned, and my aunt said impatiently, “Winnie, for heaven’s sake. Let the girl go.”
“Directly, Margaret. Only let me finish this first. You see, Mary Beatrice, if you start to think that there’s nothing you’re qualified to do, just remember the fuller’s teasel and ask, ‘What do I have that is special?’ Your aunt, for instance, used to ask this as a girl. Now she knows that taking care of me is what she does best.”
“That’s enough, dear. Have fun, Mary Beatrice.” My aunt opened the door for me, and I slid out. Several of the day girls turned to look, and I hoped they wouldn’t see who I’d come with, but my aunt and uncle both lumbered out of the car and walked me over to the school. My aunt wore a heavy brown coat with felt trim that matched her felt hat, and, in her low heels, she placed one foot after the other as if she expected the Kings College grounds to give way under her like thin spring ice. My uncle wore no coat, only a fedora, like Morley, and his black vest puckered in dimplelike creases over his stomach. I mumbled good-bye and slowly trudged up the steps after the day girls and into a large marble hall on whose walls I saw silver swords with maple leafs and pieces of faded material commemorating the school’s role in suppressing old rebellions in Upper Canada.
Just inside the entrance, I passed a full-length portrait of Queen Elizabeth and her husband, the duke. They called him the Visitor, and the luncheon was in his honour, even though he was back in England doing whatever it is dukes do. He wasn’t as cute as President Kennedy, but in his nice dark suit he looked a lot more fun than the que
en, who held her hands in a finky way in front of her silver gown as if she had a broken finger. I followed the stream of girls into a sitting room that was almost as big as our school’s gym. Its walls were lined with stiff wing chairs that looked as if nobody ever sat in them and shiny mahogany sideboards and lamp tables. Right away, I looked for the first thing on my mind: food. I spotted the starched white linen on the sideboards, where silver trays sat full of devilled eggs, jellied salad, and my favourite—chicken à la king in pastry shells. We got that at school, too. It wasn’t bad, even though the hot chicken had a habit of melting the jellied salad.
As I shuffled over, I snapped down another aspirin and noticed several Kings College boys in grey flannel pants and zigzaggy blue-and-white ties staring at me. I just knew they were looking at my shoulder, and when they whispered among themselves my stupid old Mouse heart stopped, as if somebody had pulled the plug. Now, Alice, don’t take it personally, I thought; those snobby boys aren’t worth the nail on your baby finger. But I could tell she didn’t believe me. I was about to pick up one of the porcelain plates when a stout woman in a white uniform like a nurse asked me to wait until I was invited. Mortified, I slouched past a group of boys and girls waiting to shake the hand of a man with a face like a skull. He stood at the end of a line of masters and wives, and I realized he must be the lieutenant governor, the old queen’s stand-in when the duke couldn’t make it. A lot of the girls wore white gloves and actually curtsied when he shook their hand. Then somebody called my name, and there was Ismay sitting with a group of boarders from Bath Ladies College on a long green leather sofa next to a cavernous fake fireplace. They had come on Sergeant’s bus. I hurried, lightheaded with relief to see Ismay, of all things, and sat near my poor old fellow boarders in one of the enormous wing chairs. We huddled together like lost souls, mumbling among ourselves and staring enviously at the day girls, who strolled through the crowded hall with the confidence of adult women in stockings and high heels and knee-length tea dresses or tight wool suits.
And then the skinny woman I’d seen the day Tory hurt herself—the woman who looked like a gorgeous blond fish—waved at our little group. She wore a Chanel suit with braided trim and an enormous pair of sunglasses in the shape of butterflies. We all stood up awkwardly.
“Oh, my darling girl. How super! To meet you at last!”
I looked at the other boarders to see who she meant; then her pink minnow mouth tickled my cheek.
“You have no idea how grateful I am to you for helping Tory the day of her accident. She’s my favourite child, you know. Even if I can’t get her to stick to a diet!”
“A diet?” I said stupidly.
“Oh, yes, you darling girl! You can’t be too rich or too thin, you know. Now, where is the silly child? Oh, yoo-hoo! Over here, you two!” Canon Quinn was walking toward us with a very tall boy whose pale, bespectacled face made me think of the giant pandas Morley and Sal and I had seen at the Detroit zoo. I’d got into an argument with Sal that day because she said the pandas were mean. Mrs. Quinn immediately threw her arms around the tall boy. “This is Jack O’Malley, the school projectionist,” she said. “We couldn’t do without him, could we, Bruno?”
“Do you ever show the movie King Kong?” I asked.
I don’t know how I had the nerve to ask him about Paulie’s and my favourite movie, but he seemed very pleased as he shook my hand with a funny, formal little jerk of his head and said he’d just shown it the week before. As far as he was concerned, it was the greatest monster flick of all time—way better than Godzilla. And I said I’d never believed in Godzilla for a minute, even though the Japanese were wizards at special effects. And then I realized I was tendrilling right under the noses of Tory’s parents, and I shut up like a clam.
Tory’s mother giggled. “Well, well,” she said, and hugged me into her Chanel suit. She smelled comforting, the way I imagined a real mother would smell, of face powder and lily of the valley.
“You mustn’t be too free in front of the girls, Panny,” Canon Quinn said. He rested his hand on his wife’s shoulder in a possessive gesture that was totally unlike the way Morley touched Sal or me. “They like to think we’re old nincompoops.”
“Speak for yourself, my pet,” Mrs. Quinn said. She handed him a paper and motioned for the room to be quiet. Then she announced that the boarders from both schools who had blind dates arranged by the teachers should line up on either side of the rotunda. A long straggling line of us marched back out into the large hall. We stood on one side, next to a glass case that displayed a tiny silver woman on her knees reaching up imploringly to a tiny silver soldier on a horse. And the boys stood on the other side of the crowded room, next to a large doorway that led to the classrooms.
If there’s one thing I hate, it’s having to go through with something you know isn’t going to work in the first place. People do it all the time, of course. Look at Sal and Morley. Sal goes to her bridge lessons every Thursday and comes back mad as a wet hen, because she hates Charles Van Goren’s rules for bidding. She doesn’t like to play cards by the book, she says. As for Morley, his whole life is something he doesn’t want to do, and does, over and over. So why should I mind when I have to put up with getting a blind date? I ask you. Why should I care if some finky boy likes me or hates me?
Still, I couldn’t see a way to avoid what was going to happen next without dropping dead on the spot, so I trooped over to join the girls, and that is when I saw him standing outside in the courtyard by the statue of an old war hero whose sword was lifted to the heavens. I should say “her,” but Paulie looked so much like a boy in Lewis’s clothes that only the masculine pronoun will do. He was dressed in his hunting cap and navy windbreaker—the same clothes he’d worn on our outing to the Old Mill. He was smoking, of course, and shuffling through the leaves. As I watched, he stopped and stared at the school, as if he wished he were inside with us, and the next thing I knew I’d stopped breathing again. Not on account of Alice, but because of the longing I saw on Lewis’s face.
In the center of the rotunda, Canon Quinn was reading out a list of names, and, one by one, nervous-looking boys in navy blazers walked across the long hall and stood waiting with the principal for one of our boarders to join them. The boy and girl then shook hands while everybody stared at them. The teachers hadn’t attempted to pair them off according to height, and the boys’ line snickered every time a couple looked mismatched. I wanted to reassure Alice that we’d do okay, but I didn’t have the energy right then, so I closed my eyes and pretended I was back in Madoc’s Landing cutting onions for Sal because she didn’t like it when onions made her cry and I loved to bawl my eyes out when I could get away with it.
And then I heard my name. I opened my eyes, but I couldn’t make my feet move. Somebody in the boys’ line laughed and said, “You got a no-show, Perce!” Canon Quinn called my name again, and this time I walked slowly to the center of the room. I could feel the boys and girls looking at me, but I kept my eyes on my new wedgies. I felt a firm tap on my shoulder—the non-Alice shoulder.
“Shake hands with Percy Longfellow, Mary Beatrice!” Canon Quinn said.
From the boys’ line, I heard somebody whisper, “Perce struck out!” And another boy whispered back, “Longfellow’s got a hunchback.” I looked down. Percy Longfellow was three inches shorter than me and covered with zits. Blushing, he shook my hand. It was even wetter than mine.
We silently made our way over to the group of boys and girls now matched into pairs. Beside me, Percy Longfellow swayed strangely and shuffled his feet. He had a headache, he whispered. “Here, take this,” I whispered back, and gave him an aspirin from the bottle in my purse. But he only shook his head, and I knew the worst had happened, the way it always does, and I felt a flat, sad feeling all mixed up with relief, because the worst is what I know how to manage best.
I looked back out the window again. Lewis had changed his position. He stood now on the tall base of the military statue, looping
a roll of toilet paper around its head and shoulders. Below, a girl in a raccoon coat stood, watching. It was Tory. I didn’t recognize her out of uniform. She looked foreign—like a day girl. Then Lewis jumped down, and the two of them walked slowly out of the quad, Lewis waiting as Tory took little hobbling hops on her crutches. I mean, they just looked totally happy and absorbed—the way Lady looks when she begs for date squares. Behind them, the threads of toilet paper on the statue blew backwards in the slight wind. I felt so moved by the sight of them together, with Lewis looking so patient and kind, that I didn’t notice the girls and boys around me banging on the window. One of the boys was swearing, and then one of the masters rushed out of the room, and another boy ran after him, and now I saw Lewis and Tory looking our way with startled faces, and then Tory put her hand on Lewis’s cheek, and Lewis kissed it very tenderly and then ran off as fast as he could through the quad, while Tory just stood on her crutches watching him go. I knew just how Tory felt, because it’s how I feel after Morley pats me on the cheek and drives off in Blinky. And that’s when something happened that made all of us forget Lewis. Down the hall I heard a radio, and a woman cry out, “Oh my God! Who would do such a thing?” Canon Quinn opened the tall wooden door of the reception room, his batwing brows flaring. Mrs. Quinn stood in the doorway, looking sad.
“Somebody has shot the president of the United States!” she said. “A madman has shot him!”
“President Kennedy has been shot?” one of the masters asked.
I forgot all about Percy Longfellow’s headache and cried, “It’s a mistake! I don’t believe it!” Canon Quinn only nodded, very gravely, and boys and girls around me started to say they didn’t believe it, either. And you know the rest. Except for this: I’d seen the world of men, and nobody there was as nice as John F. Kennedy. And he was dead.
