by Susan Swan
30
November 25, 1963
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
I can’t believe you’re dead. None of us can. After Mrs. Quinn broke the news, Canon Quinn cancelled the dance, and we all went into the Quinns’ library and watched the American news on television. A man called Dan told us you had been shot three times. I couldn’t help wishing Governor Connally had been sitting up just a little higher in your bubble-top convertible. (No offence intended to the governor.)
What I don’t understand, Mr. President, is why couldn’t somebody save you? There was time. Well, a second or so between the second and third shots. Why didn’t Jackie pull you down into her lap then? That’s what Mrs. Connally did for her husband. I know Jackie climbed across the trunk of the limousine. I guess she was going for help, but it looked to me like a stupid thing to do. Like she was running away. And exposing herself to getting shot, too.
I like to think that if I’d been there, Mr. President, I could have done something for you. I would have stood up in my bulletproof vest and deflected the bullets. I’m just Mouse Bradford, and it wouldn’t have mattered so much to the world if I’d got hit. Except that I don’t think bulletproof vests cover your neck, do they? Which is where you got it. And in the back of your beautiful head.
I’m trying not to sniffle as I write this, Mr. Kennedy. I want to take it on the chin like you would. But the world doesn’t feel safe anymore without you. You made it a nicer place, because you always acted as if everybody had good intentions—or at least started out with good intentions, no matter what they did after. Nobody else I know does that. Sure, I’ve got Morley and Sal at home, but I told you the problems with them. Particularly Morley. He hasn’t written me since I’ve been here. You managed to send me one letter, and a very good letter it was, too.
I’m writing this in study. The Virgin is patrolling the halls. I hear the rat-a-tat-tat of her gunboats on the floor of the corridor. None of us have been able to study since it happened.
The night Oswald shot you, my aunt and uncle let me stay up to hear the late-night news on the CBC. Mr. Pearson (he is our nice prime minister—the one with the bow tie) said we all have to have a deeper resolve to be better ourselves, because a young and good man has gone from the face of the planet. It made me and my aunt Margaret cry a little, Mr. President, and even my stupid old uncle looked pretty sad.
Then we switched to CBS, the American channel, for man-on-the-street interviews.
I can’t remember what anybody said, but the mouths in the shuffling crowd opened and uttered one single despairing moan, as if somebody had hit all their heads at the same time with a big block of wood.
I’m trying my best, Mr. President, to get on with life. For instance, I have a physics test on Monday. But I feel like I’m not being loyal to you, having to think about other things.
In a few minutes study will be over, and I will practise my role in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. I play the office dandy who doesn’t do anything except fawn over his superiors. Ismay the Terrible plays one of the secretaries. Everybody giggles like crazy when Ismay has to say her line in the song about not being an Erector set. It’s just a ball to hear somebody like Ismay say something dirty. I have to (groan) hold her hand when we take our bows. Well, time to go. I can’t believe you’re dead, Mr. President. I hope I’ll wake up tomorrow and find that the events of November 22 were a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake.
Yours forever,
Mouse Bradford
31
A few weeks before the end of term, Paulie and I ducked out of games and hid near the ravine fence. Not far from us the janitors were digging a pit to bury the mysteriously poisoned pigeons, whose corpses now sat in the little cart attached to Willy’s tractor. And down on the empty basketball courts, a few day girls were hitting a tennis ball back and forth. You had to hand it to them—I’d never have had the energy to exert myself like that. I didn’t even have the energy to keep up with the boarders, huddled into little groups, walking around the hedge, their heads down against the wind. Basically, you understand, it was my unfav time of year—late November—and the leaves were off most of the ravine trees, blown into the school hedges, where they clung like tufts of badly matted brown hair. I was sitting next to Paulie in Virginia Woolf’s hiding place, although old Virginia would have wanted to do herself in then and there if she’d seen how desolate it looked now. One glance at the dead asters and withered grass all silver from the frost and she’d have waded as fast as anything out into the river Ouse with her stone-packed pockets. Poor Virginia. I like to think she might have picked out a stone as smooth and pancake-flat as a Lake Huron skipping stone and zinged it across the surface of the water, zip-zip-zip, before she did her Ophelia number. I was feeling pretty low that afternoon, because Sal had written with disappointing news about my Christmas holidays.
November 24, 1963
Dear Mouse,
Isn’t it awful about President Kennedy? I know you were a big fan of his, so I’m sending you some clippings from the Bulletin. As Lester Pearson said, he was a special friend to us up here in Canada, and we feel almost as bad as the Americans do. Our neighbours to the south may be ignorant showoffs, but they had a half-decent president, I grant them that.
Love,
Sal
P.S. I expect your Uncle Winnie told you the news about Christmas. I’ve arranged for you to stay with him in Point Edward for the holidays. I’ve already told Miss Vaughan you will be well chaperoned. Don’t get blue, now, Mouse. You know you have a tendency to be overly serious about things. Morley and I will come to visit you in the city before we leave. I promise.
I was angry with Sal for going away at Christmas, so her feelings about our mutual hero felt like a phony gesture. Maybe I was growing up. Maybe Sal had always been like that—good at confidences, so you thought you were thick as a pack of dogs (to use one of her sayings). And then, just when you least expected it, she’d do something that showed you didn’t mean a thing to her. Like sending you off to school when you didn’t want to go. Or leaving you behind on a holiday she’d promised was partly yours. Sal’s confidence didn’t say anything about her feelings for you. Her secrets just meant she liked telling secrets.
The Only Good Thing
The only good thing in my life was Jack O’Malley, the boy I’d met at the Kings College luncheon. He’d written me a letter, too.
November 29, 1963
Dear Mary,
How the h—(pardon my French) are you? I have a record player in our dorm, and we play rock-and-roll like crazy. Last night we had a huge dancing session with broomsticks, and Bo Johnson and myself got caned for making too much noise. Did the boy’s backside hurt or what! Well, we had to do something after the memorial service in the Great Hall for President Kennedy. You could have heard a pin drop when old Cannonballs quoted from Kennedy’s inauguration speech: “Let us never negotiate out of fear. But let us never fear to negotiate.” All kidding aside, it will be a long time before a man like that crosses our paths, Mary. By the way, I hope the food at your school is edible. We had toad-in-the-hole yesterday again. That’s twice in one week. The suffering we boarders go through in the name of education! Say, I was just wondering if you are getting out on the weekend of Dec. 2 to see It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World? If you could get out, I would love to take you.
Regards,
Jack
P.S. Tory said you are from Madoc’s Landing. How’s that for a small world? I’m from Orillia, birthplace of Stephen Leacock, the funniest dead Canadian! Har-de-har-har, as Jackie Gleason would say. And guess what? I’m showing Godzilla to the boys next Saturday. After the hockey game.
Two days after his letter arrived Jack called me up. He sounded all out-of-breath and nervous on the phone. To my surprise, I felt pleased and calm when I said I’d go with him, as if I could afford to be confident, although I’d never been out with a boy before and didn’t know what to expect. Would he try to feel me up,
like Paulie got me to do with the girl from St. Mary’s? The idea of kissing him was like kissing a star or the top of a pine tree. Not that I was interested in going all the way or anything. Sal liked to say that sex carne in two forms, hamburgers and lobster dinners, and if you had a choice between great seafood or ground chuck, why go for cheap food when you could have it deluxe? The only problem with Sal’s analogy was that if sex was like food, then wasn’t it better to have a hamburger instead of starving yourself? Why wait until a lobster dinner came along? Naturally, I didn’t want to discuss these problems with Paulie, who was sitting beside me, scowling at the janitors as if she hated their guts.
The digging of the pigeons’ grave looked like a tough job. The earth had already hardened from the cold, and Sergeant and Willy had to jab their spades into the ground as if they were attacking a layer of permafrost. Then, just after the pit was dug and the pigeons dumped into it, Sergeant suddenly lifted up his dog, Spruce, who was wrapped in a Glengarry plaid blanket. Poor little Spruce didn’t move. He must have eaten one of the dead birds and died from poison himself. Sergeant stood there cradling Spruce, tears running down his cheeks. Then Willy touched his shoulder, and Sergeant laid Spruce down beside the birds. I watched sadly as Willy shovelled dirt over Sergeant’s little dog and then did the same for the pigeons. The birds, their small heads as wobbly as Jell-O, made me think of the mass human graves the Allies had uncovered at Auschwitz. Then they were done. Sergeant heaved himself into the little car behind Willy’s tractor, and Willy drove off talking loudly in Czech, as if he were trying to console Sergeant.
“A man shouldn’t break down like that,” Paulie said. “Not that you can call those assholes men.” Personally, I didn’t agree. Men were always breaking down, as far as I could tell. Look at the way Morley acted at hockey games, smashing the fedora of the man next to him (as if he was somebody Sal and I didn’t know at all) and climbing the wire-mesh fence behind the goalie when the referee made a wrong call on Dave Keon.
“Everybody cries sometimes,” I said. My own eyes were a little wet, so I tried to think of something funny, like Miss Phillips in her curlers, to stop me from imagining how uncomfortable the poison must have made Spruce feel.
Paulie lit up a cigarette and passed it to me. I hesitated.
“Go on,” Paulie said. “Nobody can see us here.”
“I’m in uniform,” I said.
“Be a scaredy-cat, then.” Beside me, Paulie spat one of her expert loads at my shoe, missing me by a fraction of an inch.
I sighed and held out two fingers. “Okay,” I said, hating myself for being afraid. “Give me one.”
“That’s more like it.” Paulie grinned and lit me a cigarette. “Listen, Bradford. I have something important to tell you. We have to finish the test today. Kong’s orders.”
“You mean there are more tests?” I asked, trying to exhale through my nostrils like Paulie.
“We have to cane each other, remember?” Paulie picked up an old blackboard pointer that was lying near the fence. It was just about in splinters.
“I stole this from the physics lab,” Paulie said. “We’ll flip to see who goes first.”
32
Paulie took off her tunic and pulled down her school bloomers. She was wearing a pair of boy’s boxer shorts underneath. She turned around and pulled down the boxers; then she bent over and touched her toes. “This is how they do it at Kings College, Mouse,” she said. “But the boys keep their trousers on. We’re going one better.”
I stood with the shabby pointer in my hand, staring at her small bare bum. I had no idea what to do.
“Okay, Bradford,” Paulie said. “Let me have it.”
I swung the pointer slowly, as if I were practising a baseball swing for old Hammerhead, and the tip lightly stroked Paulie’s bum. “Christ, Mouse! I can’t feel a thing!” she called. “Hit me harder!” I swung again but drew back at the last minute, afraid I’d hurt her. “Paulie, I can’t do this.” I put the pointer down and, honest to God, I started to giggle. I felt the same way I did when I used to tease Lady, covering her up with sofa cushions and then lying on her for the fun of hearing her growl.
“So you think this is funny, do you?” Paulie whirled around and grabbed the pointer out of my hand. Her boxers were still around her ankles, and I couldn’t help staring at the feathery blur of her pubic hair. I inhaled deep and hard. I guess I believed in Paulie so much, I was expecting to see a penis, for God’s sake.
“Keep your eyes to yourself,” Paulie snarled. “Bend over. I’m going to show you how it’s done.”
Now it was my turn. I took off my tunic and yanked down my bloomers and my cotton underpants. Then I leaned over, and Paulie pushed my head down, because I couldn’t bend over very far on account of Alice. Nothing happened, and I was sure she was going to stop and tell me it was a dopey idea. And then I heard a whooshy sound, and something long and skinny sliced deep into the tops of my thighs, like hundreds of stinging horseflies. My whole body jerked back toward Paulie, and Alice jerked, too, and I gasped. “Paulie, stop!” I yelled, and the next thing I knew the tops of my thighs felt raw and hot. I began to sob; pee was running down my legs.
“Shut up, Bradford!” Paulie yelled. “Show some guts for once!” She put her muscular hand back on my neck and tried to push my head down again, but I wouldn’t bend over, so she whacked Alice hard, and I screamed and toppled, weeping, to my knees. I heard another whistling whoosh behind my head, and this time the pointer cut me across my buttocks, spitefully on target. I shrieked and crawled off on all fours as fast as I could, but Paulie grabbed my hair. Schwaaak! She whacked my bum with all her might.
“Paulie! Stop it!” I cried. “Stop it!” I wrapped my hand around my bum to protect myself, and the pointer burned across my knuckles. Schwaaaaaak!
“It’s for your own good!” Paulie’s screeching voice sounded high and shrill, and I knew now she wasn’t talking to me but to herself, and the hatred I felt rushing out of her was coming from her phantoms, and those spooks had nothing to do with me.
“Liar!” I screamed. “It is not! It is not for my own good!”
“Kong lives! Long live Kong! Kong lives! Long live Kong!” Paulie pushed the side of my face into the ground, grabbed my hair, and yanked my head each time I tried to jerk away. Schwaaaaaak! Schwwwaaaak! The pointer cut into my bum and thighs, which were all stingy wet with pee. And then I stopped feeling the fiery pain, even though I could still hear the awful whistling sounds the pointer made in the air. I curled into a ball and wept noisily into the hard ground, which tasted of minerals and mud, cold and dark and earthwormy. Oh, Mouse, poor Mouse, a small scared voice in my head said from a long way off, nobody can help you now. And then Sal’s shaming voice added cruelly, And you deserve this, Mouse Bradford, you aren’t good enough to get our love. And then the pointer snapped. Paulie raised the broken-off stick to give me another whack, and I caught her eye, and we stared at each other without saying anything. Still glaring at me, she let her arm drop.
“Crybaby,” she said finally, and walked off cursing and smacking what was left of the pointer on every tree she passed. I watched her go in surprise, my cheeks still wet with tears. My backside throbbed, and my legs were stained with pee and blood. But the oddest thing had happened: the more she hit me, the more wicked she became, and the more innocent I was—of everything. Of looking ungainly, of not winning Morley’s love, of my lack of friends.
33
Why did I go along with Paulie when the tests got more serious? Why did I keep doing what she asked me? It wasn’t just my need for approval that made me do what Paulie said. I was enthralled by her imagination—which the court tried to deny. Especially Miss Whitlaw’s chief defense witness, Dr. Torval. But the Crown had to prove Paulie was not insane before she could be found guilty. The old Juvenile Delinquent Act defined a child as somebody under the age of sixteen. So Paulie, who was almost seventeen at the time of the crime, was tried as an adult. That meant the
crazier Miss Whitlaw’s defense witnesses could make Paulie look, the better chance Paulie had of avoiding a criminal conviction. I don’t think Miss Whitlaw or the judge liked Dr. Torval any better than I did.
HIS LORDSHIP: Dr. Torval, let us get back to the defendant for a minute. You have told us, I believe, that she was a victim of a gender disorder.
DR. TORVAL: Well, not exactly, my lord. She is psychologically unusual. This is what I was trying to explain.…
HIS LORDSHIP: Yes, I have noticed your efforts in that regard. But could you now address the question of the defendant’s sanity?
Was she responsible for her actions?
DR. TORVAL: Let me put it this way, my lord: she was and she wasn’t.
HIS LORDSHIP: Excuse me, Dr. Torval, but I don’t think you have responded to my question. Can you tell us whether Miss Sykes was responsible for her actions or not?
DR. TORVAL: That’s exactly what I’m trying to do, my lord. You see, we can measure schizophrenia through the proverb test. Now, the proverb test doesn’t measure intelligence but rather the ability to abstract. A clever and stable person will be able to interpret the proverbs. Can I read out the proverbs I gave Pauline Sykes, my lord? It won’t take long.
HIS LORDSHIP: Could you just get on with it, Dr. Torval?
DR. TORVAL: Sorry, yes. And if you can’t interpret these proverbs, my lord, don’t worry. To the proverb “Like carrying coals to Newcastle,” Pauline Sykes answered—
HIS LORDSHIP: I think you need to speak a little more slowly.
DR. TORVAL: I am sorry. To the proverb “Like carrying coals to Newcastle,” the defendant replied, “Coal makes fires burn.” To the proverb “Pride goes before a fall,” the defendant replied, “If you don’t watch where you’re going.” To the proverb “No man is an island,” the defendant replied, “An island is hard to get to.”
