Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  “Blackbird?” She interrupts Briony, drawn by the word.

  “Yes,” Briony beams up from the page, where a drop of perspiration has fallen from her forehead. “The boy starts to sing the lines. From the song, you know, from the White Album.”

  Briony’s been keeping a dream diary since January 1, 1968 after a brief infatuation with Eckankar and soul travel and some guy who thought Eckankar and soul travel was where it was at. Lately, after dinner, she’s been bringing it out and reading bits to entertain Ted, who more and more has withdrawn into himself as his MS has worsened, his volubility shrinking as hers has grown. She’s quite used now to voicing the ramblings from the cavern of her dreams.

  “I wrote ‘boy.’” Briony’s attention returns again to the page. “I seem to be my teenaged self in the dream. I remember that. You know, I think the boy is … Paul. Do you remember him? Dorian’s … cousin, or whatever he was. Who came to the cottage that time?”

  Lydia stirs in her chair. She reaches for a pear slice. Dessert is fruit and cheese. She can’t lie. She can feel Briony’s eyes resting on her. She wonders sometimes if Briony guessed why she moved to San Francisco. “Yes, I remember him.”

  “I wonder whatever became of him? He was hitching to Vancouver. Or California. And wasn’t Dorian going to go with him?”

  “So long ago. Hard to remember.”

  “And then there’s the blackbird.”

  “Baked in a pie,” Ted contributes.

  “Actually, blackbirds in dreams are portents of death.”

  “Oh, honestly, Briony.” Lydia sinks her teeth into the pear.

  “They are, too.”

  “Well, the two of us will turn sixty next year.”

  “I’m sixty-three,” Ted says.

  “Oh, sweetie, it’s not about you.” Lydia notes a guilty blush cross Briony’s face. “Or us.” Briony gestures toward her. “Do you remember, Lydia, that blackbird flying into the cottage? Crow, whatever it was.”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you must!”

  “Oh … yes, all right,” Lydia concedes. “I do remember now.” She remembers perfectly well. Afterwards, after the events at Eadon Lodge, she thought of it, the bird, exactly as Briony described, as a portent. “I remember you shrieking. But then you shrieked every time a moth came near you.”

  “True.” Briony looks at Ted. “I couldn’t go to sleep until every moth in the cottage was killed. But a bird! It was horrible. The thing was panicked, flying blindly around the room, crashing into things.”

  “You ran out of the cottage, I remember.”

  “I couldn’t bear it. I thought it would come at me.”

  “And it got out?” Ted stirs himself.

  “Well, no, the poor thing died inside.” Briony closes the scribbler. “Shock, I guess.”

  For Lydia, the memory rushes back: Paul lithe, Paul cool, Paul in an electric blue Jantzen stepping off a ladder, swinging from the rafters with one hand, nabbing the bird with the other, landing neatly on the floor. The bird had collapsed, exhausted, on a supporting beam from which the electrolier was suspended. Another memory, suppressed then, awakened now: Had the bird been dead? What had Paul done, turned away from her for those few seconds? Her attention had been occupied by his backside. They wrapped the bird in a small Union Jack flag found in a drawer and buried it in a far corner of the yard.

  “Do you ever dream of Eadon Lodge?” Briony asks, tilting her head, taking a biscuit. She remains troubled by Lydia’s peculiar offer of the cottage to her and Ted as a gift. That, she thinks, may be behind her dream, so faithfully recorded.

  “I don’t dream.” The lie slips from her tongue.

  “Lydia, don’t be silly, everyone dreams.”

  “Well, I don’t remember them then.”

  Another lie. But she’s eager to end conversation of Eadon Lodge, eager to go home. Of course she dreams. But their function, she would say, is practical: to tell us enthralling stories so that we’re tricked into getting the sleep we need, then vanish before they become a weight upon our waking thoughts. But what of nightmares? What of dreams so harrowing they set you twisting and thrashing, breaking your sleep, leaving you staring with terror into empty darkness until your heart ceases crashing? What is their function? She remembers nightmares menacing her sleep all that autumn 1969.

  But now, these last weeks, though she should collapse, exhausted, into deep sleep from all the work preparing to sell the house on Oxford Street, the nightmares have returned with their shifting inventory of mad, gabbling images. She jolts awake and reaches for Ray but he’s not there, of course; he’s 5,000 miles away in Toyonaka, Japan. She huddles in her childhood bed—such an alien place now—chasing away the memories the dream lets swim into her mind. She falls back asleep only when the dawn light, so early in summer at Canadian latitudes, begins to flame the bedroom curtains.

  There is one particular dream, and it starts the same way. She is walking down Oxford Street. She is a little girl, hand in hand with her father, whose grip, unaccountably, is crushing hers. Overhead soars the vaulted cathedral ceiling of elms, so inescapably the enchanted forest of her childhood, but contracting now quickly, oppressively into a dark tunnel, the tree branches turned roots, exposed and twisted, stretching toward a distance ever falling away, stoppered by a bright disk of sunlight. As they walk, the light intensifies, draws nearer, and in terror she sees it’s a head, disembodied: the head is wreathed in a crown of candles, like a Swedish girl’s at Christmas, only the candles, imprisoning bars, fall upside-down over the face—a man’s—blazing and burning, uncommanded by gravity. Her father crushes her hand, won’t let her tear away to safety. He is furious with her for breaking the key to Eadon Lodge. She is being punished. Her terror dilates as the candles turn fiery snakes, the head a flaming Medusa head, a ball of writhing, hissing, glowing tendrils that somehow intertwine and fuse with the tree roots. She breaks free of her father and starts to run, the snakes in furious pursuit, curling and twisting around her body, the tunnel stretching impossibly further and further, growing darker and darker, narrower and narrower, the snakes vanishing, until she and black void merge in what can only be the moment of death, a scream building in her throat only to melt from her lips as she bolts awake—bursts into consciousness, really—to find herself stone cold still in bed, exhausted, the inky threads of the dream dissolving in the air.

  Lydia’s taken to afternoon napping lately. Mercifully, at that time of day, with the sun high and hot, her sleep is unvisited by ghosts.

  11

  Lydia runs her fingers over the silky wood of the Georgian desk. Along with the good china, the silver, and the crystal, this she will have sent to San Francisco—and that’s it! The desk was shipped from England, in the 1920s, a bequest to her grandfather when his father died. Bibs kept his personal papers in the old desk, but Lydia’s decided to leave them there. She can deal with them at home. She’s growing weary. She and Helen have been in Bibs’s den all morning. It’s the last room in the house to be sorted.

  When they came into Bib’s office, Helen targeted the room’s closet for inspection, always a place of treasure. It is crammed. From a top shelf, she pulled down an old briefcase—or perhaps luggage, something small enough for a child to carry, she wasn’t sure. She pushed at the locks each side, but the hinge wouldn’t spring. Locked, no key. She held it up for Lydia’s inspection. Lydia frowned, shrugged, and indicated a box for shipping to San Francisco she’d felt-penned Oxford Street Stuff.

  Helen would have been more disappointed to have her curiosity unslaked if her attention hadn’t travelled to the rows of LPs filed shelf upon shelf. She remembered Bibs as a lover of jazz. He’d even afforded a small combo at his wedding. A record player with a smoked plastic cover sat with patina of dust on a stand by a wall. Tilting her head to read the record sleeves, her eyes went to an irregularity—a photo album, not a reco
rd album. Odd, for a drawer in the dining room credenza seemed to be the official photo repository. Helen pulled at it—string bound its pages and a strand hung loosely over the shelf—and out fell a packet of photos, some spilling onto the hardwood. The top one, she noted when she bent to pick them up, was date-stamped December 1969. But the scene—girded in greenery—was clearly high summer. July? August?

  “Oh! The outhouse at Eadon Lodge.” Helen recognized the crescent moon door.

  Lydia strained to appear amused. There it was, half-remembered, the old biffy. How she loathed and feared it as a child—the stink, the flies, the cobwebs. It was gone by August 1969 when she and Briony arrived, only a board-covered, lime-lined hole waiting to be filled and sodded over.

  Bibs, at long last, had installed a proper bathroom in the cottage, and that’s what some of these pictures in the packet recorded. In the last one, Marion is wearing a yellow paper crown, sprung from a Christmas cracker, scissors in hand, about to bite into a red ribbon strung across the door to what was once was the tiniest of Eadon Lodge’s three bedrooms, now a three-piece bathroom. Her mother’s lips twist in that peculiar resigned smile she affected whenever Bibs unleashed his aggressive humour, but her eyes telegraph annoyance. Above her head, on the wall over the door, is the plaque embossed with the words, THIS TOILET OPENED AUGUST 8, 1969, BY HM THE QUEEN.

  They turn to the album. It’s old. Most of the photos predate Lydia’s birth, all of them are of Eadon Lodge. All of them are black and white. A few, from the ’20s or ’30s, feature Lits. Lydia studies his long face and big ears, known to her only through the studio photograph of her father and uncle, age twelve and eleven, holding hands. Here, they’re about eight and seven, perched bony-kneed on the cottage steps, squinting into the sun, into the camera. Lits is smiling, animated, pixieish. Curious, she’s not seen these pictures before.

  In the ’40s, Marion makes an appearance. In a single snapshot from the early Æ50s Dorian’s mother and father, Lillian and Jim Grant, are sunk into Adirondack chairs on the lawn. Is this the weekend when Jim went home, alone, and killed himself? Lydia closes the album before Helen can get any more tucked-in memories. Time is a’wasting. The image—imagined—of Dorian’s father taking his own life—it was in an attic, wasn’t it?—gives Lydia a sudden chill.

  Why, Lydia thinks, is this photo album not with the others, in the drawer in the dining room? Why is it half-hidden among record albums? Maybe it was intended for that old briefcase-suitcase thing Helen dropped in the Oxford Street Stuff box, only Bibs in his growing dementia had lost the key.

  Lydia’s unease is not allayed when something else slips from between the pages as she prepares to fit the album into the Georgian desk. It’s a half sheet of white paper, bottom frayed as if torn along a ruler’s edge. WINNIPEG GENERAL HOSPITAL, the lettering reads in arte moderne typeface along the top. The stationery’s old, the hospital’s name was changed to Health Sciences Centre—what? thirty years ago?—but the markings on it are fresher. Lydia recognizes her father’s characteristic hand, but the result’s shaky, sabotaged by senility. It’s a sketch, a quick, crude, hurried series of shapes and lines—a bird’s-eye view of the Eadon Lodge property, Lydia realizes quickly before tucking it back into the album, out of Helen’s curious sight. The shapes and their juxtaposition adhere to her memory like photoflash afterimages. There’s the rectangle of the cottage itself and the square of the sleeping cottage and bars for the caragana bushes that framed the property and circles for stands of trees.

  But what arrests her eye and sets her hand fluttering as she hurriedly stuffs the album into the desk drawer is a simple X, as in, “marks the spot.”

  Good god, had Bibs somehow known all along? Impossible.

  She must look at that paper again.

  She can’t bear it. She won’t look at it.

  These moments only add to Lydia’s unease. The estate matters move at the pace of an Ottoman court. The lawyer at Pitblado, a craggy, slow-talking fellow, tells her probate could take four or five months. It’s maddening. She and Ray will have to seek a bridging loan from their bank to purchase their house on Lincoln Way, with the expectation of an initial disbursement of funds early in 2009, with the estate settled not too much longer after that. A mortgage at fifty-nine? Ray is sixty-two. They talk about this on the phone when they can navigate the fourteen-hour time difference between Toyonaka and Winnipeg. Though he affects optimism, she can hear another strain in his voice, speaking of Ottoman courts: the saiban rikon, Erin’s court of last resort, is as fatuous as anything out of Alice. He and Erin are thinking of abducting Misaki, he whispers, and bringing her to the States. Japan, amazingly, never signed any international convention against parents spiriting their children away. Oh, god is all Lydia can say. They are, all of them, not at a cliff’s edge, but at a rabbit-hole’s.

  After ten days Helen flies back to San Francisco. Relief contends with guilt as Lydia waves off her mother’s cousin—who became more of a mother to her than her own mother—and watches the cab dissolve into a little yellow dot headed down the canyon of elms. Like Garbo, Lydia really does want to be alone. Yes, she can display her grief to Helen, to Briony. They’re delighted to offer their womanly comfort. But her agitation she must disguise and it is draining. After Helen went to bed the other night, Lydia battled her dread and looked again at her father’s scribbled diagram of the Eadon Lodge property. The “X.” Surely, the placement is wrong. But then, by the time he drew it, his mind was moving into darkness. Or at least that’s what Lydia tells herself.

  On her first visit to San Francisco, in 1967, Lydia fell, almost like one in love, for Helen and her unsentimental ways, her sophistication, her unwillingness to give a damn about crabbed hometown sensibilities that seemed to hedge Lydia’s teenaged life. It was to Helen two years later that she turned when she could no longer quell the rising dread as her body succumbed to the new life growing inside her. With Helen, she devised a plan. But first: A girl might confide in her mother, but while her mother was out shopping in stores transitioning from Halloween to Christmas, Lydia made the long walk down the stairs from her bedroom to the den to face her father. She remembers Sinatra singing “Here’s That Rainy Day” on the record player when she pushed through the door. She remembers her hand shaking when she lifted the tone arm because her misery didn’t need a soundtrack. She remembers Bibs, being Bibs, saying little when she croaked out her shame in the three classic words “I’m in trouble”, but his body language—the tense shoulders, the downturned mouth, the drooping eyes—showed his dismay. Who’s the boy? he did ask and Lydia was prepared with a lie. She couldn’t say I don’t know and turn her father’s dismay to disgust. But she could read the disbelief in her father’s eyes when she offered her answer.

  Bibs’s disbelief swelled to astonishment when Lydia spurned a termination. She was lucky: the law legalizing abortion in Canada had passed five months earlier. But, moreover, she was privileged: No, his hospital had not yet established a de jure therapeutic abortion committee, but surgeons at big-city hospitals had always banded together and approved abortions if a pregnancy was deemed dangerous to a woman’s health or—and let’s be frank—a colleague’s daughter or mistress found herself in a tricky situation. And that was Lydia’s remonstrance: She knew a couple of these privileged girls. They went to her high school. She could name them. There were no secrets in this little town. This wouldn’t be kept secret. And she wanted, desperately, secrecy. Bibs, of course, misunderstood. He thought his daughter strangely out of step for the times, for even he dimly recognized the world of women was changing rapidly. But what Lydia wanted, but could not say, was that no one—no one!—turn a thought to those August days at Eadon Lodge.

  And more, her plan: she would go to San Francisco, stay with Helen, have the child there, give it up for adoption, and resume her young, promising life. Lydia sensed her mother would seize upon any solution that preserved the veneer of respectabil
ity, but her father? She watched him in agony as he worked his way through her reasoning and wept with relief when he acceded, taking her in his arms. She remembers his single editorial whispered in her ear as he hugged her. He’d murmured it when she stopped piano lessons. You may be sorry one day. She never regretted finishing with piano; she had no musical aptitude. But his words would burn like a comet across her memory whenever she took a baby—someone’s else baby—in her arms.

  Helen welcomed and supported Lydia, asked few questions, kept her doubts to herself. Lydia’s unbreakable approach to her delicate state (as they used to say) kept her in awe. A termination in the illiberal U.S. was out of the question—Helen didn’t even broach it, and why would she when Lydia spurned it in progressive Canada? But she did suggest to Lydia, after Bibs and Marion had departed, that they raise the child, together, she and Lydia. It was a flight of fancy, really, born of her own sense of loss, for she, never revealed to anyone, had had a termination in London, in 1959, a year that seemed like another country from Lydia’s 1970, but so botched that she could never have another child. But Lydia wouldn’t entertain the notion. Helen witnessed her surrender nothing to the forces of a society predisposed to stigmatize. Her arranging everything to do with the adoption was, Helen could only think, the difference between an intelligent, educated twenty-year-old and a confused, frightened fourteen-year-old, but she worried at Lydia’s fierce self-control. She saw her break down only once, after delivery, head propped against pillows, her face streaked with tears. She had told Helen earlier that she would not take the baby in her arms, because she knew she would never be the same. But she had glimpsed her baby son and wept. How could you carry a child for nine months and not bond?

  Helen orders a glass of white wine on the plane, closes her eyes and allows her mind to play over the days she’s just spent in Lydia’s company. In the early seventies, they’d shared the Jackson Street flat in San Francisco while Lydia found her feet, finishing her degree, finding work—compensating, Helen thought, by overachieving. They had rubbed along well enough in those few years. Helen adjusted to Lydia’s newfound fastidiousness then, a quirk she guessed was some small way to reassert control over her life. She fell in with it. What else was there to do? Helen’s the first to admit she’s an indifferent housekeeper. She would much rather read a book than tidy a coffee table.