Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

  But they haven’t lived at close quarters for decades, so she hadn’t quite taken in the escalation in Lydia’s fastidiousness: the hand sanitizer pulled from her purse in the restaurant, the spoon for the nut bowl, the cellphone kept in—good heavens!—a ziplock bag.

  Had she been doing these things long? She can’t remember. She takes another sip of wine and wonders if any of this bothers Ray. Lydia has never told Ray about the child she bore all those years ago, and no rumours have reached him. Helen knows this to be true. She has kept Lydia’s secret—even from Joe, her own partner of umpteen years. But Lydia grows quiet every May, as she did that first anniversary of her son’s birth. If Ray worries, he doesn’t say.

  A rubber band, a thin one, tethers Helen to her old hometown. She can sense it stretching as the plane arcs southwestward to her new hometown, her concern for Lydia pulling along its length. Still pretty controlled, that girl. That philosophical telephone call when Marion died. Those efficient arrangements with funeral home and with the rector. That simple scattering of ashes at Assiniboine Park, just the two of them, Lydia’s face marked with only a few tears as she tipped the box. Well—Helen glances out the airplane window at the cold blanket of clouds—Marion had good innings, Lydia had lived away for so many decades, visited infrequently, and a kind of disenchantment existed between the two, mother and daughter. Was it because Lydia bore a child out of wedlock?

  Dear cousin Marion, pretty, vivacious, ambitious, self-absorbed. Marion was always so obvious, she would overhear her older cousins say. But it worked, the obviousness. She did well in the ancient bargain: Tender oaths of devotion in exchange for sex, sex in exchange for social position. However, Marion didn’t quite get down to the fine print. Helen’s mind wanders wonderfully; a kind of boozy mirth seeps over her as she recalls Marion’s thwarted ambitions for a bigger home, grander cottage, newer car, and lots of lovely travel. Helen recalls hearing about Marion putting her foot down over a wedding anniversary trip to Europe, but that was it, outside the occasional medical convention. Bibs honed to his two weeks in August and a few weekends at that isolated, ramshackle cottage on muddy Lake Winnipeg doing who knows what—puttering, probably. Like he was doing penance, Lydia remarked when the two of them were in Bibs’s den, sorting through his paraphernalia.

  The wine is doing a splendid job. Helen settles her head back in the seat, glances at her seatmate, at his movie selection, and closes her eyes. Her mind soon slips into the delirium of images at the edge of sleep, but a selection contends for attention: she is at a wedding reception—Bibs’s and Marion’s. She is in a back garden. It is late in the afternoon of August 26, 1948, searing hot. Helen has comported herself decently as flower girl. She loves her dress. She is eleven and the only child present. Kings and Cliffords fill the ranks of guests; Eadons are few. One of them is a looming square-jawed giant of a man, huge to her, anyway, when he steps near, remembered for the pocket watch he draws from a slit in his waistcoat and for shouting at an old woman. The child Helen recognizes domestic conflict. She sees this at home from time to time, though in this instance she’s too enchanted with her frock to pay much attention. She lifts the skirt by its hem and waves the satiny fabric back and forth, Cinderella, watching the sunlight dapple on the leaves of the crabapple tree.

  The big man, she later learns, is Henry Eadon, Bibs’s father. He’s a foreman at the CNR Fort Rouge Yards, where her father and most of her uncles work. The woman is May Askwith, Henry’s sister-in-law, who has travelled from Renfrew, Ontario, for Bibs’s wedding. She sacrificed her life—sacrificed her life, in Helen’s mother’s indignant words—raising Henry’s sons after his wife died, and then Henry sending her packing. Tried to reel him in, she did, according to Helen’s mother. Something happened. Didn’t work out. Those poor boys, losing another mother, and one of those boys, long gone, never right in the head. No wonder Bibs is so cold to his father, and Bibs himself often taciturn.

  But today, late on this wedding day, Bibs is coming out of the house resplendent in a navy double-breasted, followed by Marion, triumphant in her going-away outfit, a tailored suit of dusky rose gabardine with navy blue accessories and a corsage of pink roses. The wedding cake has been razed and the car awaits to take them on their honeymoon to Banff. Soon there will be a bouquet to catch. But that is not what Helen remembers well in her boozy airplane reverie. Henry and May blunt their argument, but two of Helen’s uncles keep muttering, forgetting that little pitchers have big ears. Later, at home, Helen will voice a new word to her mother and will find herself with a bar of soap in her mouth.

  “Henry Eadon, that arrogant fuck,” Uncle Fred sidemouths to Uncle Stan.

  It’s the first time Helen hears the word “fuck.”

  The rubber band snaps. Helen wakes and smiles to herself as the old wedding memories skitter away. Joe is picking her up at the airport. She’s missed him very much.

  12

  “I went to see the film. At the old Imperial. I must have been the oldest person in the audience.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes, alone. Anyone else would have thought I was clinging at straws.” Dix releases a small sigh and glances down at the menu. “And I suppose I was.”

  Dorian and Dix are at Pastis having lunch. Dix flies to Palm Beach in a few days to spend the next six weeks avoiding the worst of Toronto’s grey, damp winter. She thought to ask Dorian to join her, if only for a week or ten days, but he’s travelling soon to Edmonton to start rehearsals at the Citadel for Twelfth Night, which will then run for three weeks. Their schedules, like their stars, don’t align, though Dix wishes she were a few decades younger and Dorian wasn’t, well, you know, that way. He looks so austerely handsome in the cold light coming off Yonge Street and imagines how fetching he would look across a sunny table at, say, Café L’Europe in Palm Beach. She breathes another small sigh—of regret, this instance—for her vanished youth and for a certain pleasure denied—that of seeing the expression on her son’s face when she told him who her travelling companion would be. Not for the first time, she asks herself why she takes an unmotherly pleasure in needling her only child—her only surviving child (she presumes, though three decades later she still holds onto a thread of hope), but Peter can be so hidebound, so judgmental. It’s true, parents do favour one child over another. Dix favoured her eldest, her firstborn, Paul, though he was, to be sure, a handful. Reckless, the school counsellor told her, but Dix preferred vivacious, and she’s never countenanced for a minute Peter’s—or anyone else’s—insinuations about him.

  As for Dorian, since Dix’s Christmas party he has lived in a state so febrile Duke Orsino’s lines won’t adhere to memory. The coincidence is electric; it seems implausible, but it is plausible in this cosmopolitan world where art meets money, where degrees of separation shrink from six to three: Here he is, on January 2, 1998, sitting across from the mother of the boy he once loved, intensely, too briefly, all too aware that a few words from him, only a few, would shatter her and ruin him. (It’s no mistake; Paul’s name is included in Dix’s entry in Canadian Who’s Who.) The menu items he has barely noticed. His hunger is for detail. What can she possibly know? It’s easy to extract the details. It’s early days in his and Dix’s friendship. He met her son Peter at the party. What questions hadn’t he asked before? One is, “Do you have other children?”

  “I have another son.” Dix looked away, a brief frown pinching her lips. “I always say, ‘have’, still, after all these years, thirty years—this year,” she added. “He may still be out there, somewhere in the world.”

  Dorian rolled through practised actorly expressions—perplexity, concern, surprise. But his heart beat a tattoo, as it still does in the seconds before he walks on stage.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “He vanished.”

  “Vanished?”

  “He went to Woodstock, that music festival, you remember, of course you do, you would b
e about Paul’s age … then. Now. He never returned.”

  Which is how the conversation travelled to the Imperial, a movie house on Yonge Street, itself vanished. Dix had gone there to see the film version of Woodstock, shot in August 1969, released to theatres the following year. She brought with her the slim hope of glimpsing her son somewhere in the enormous crowd panned by the cameras. Clinging at straws, yes. Dorian turns his head to the restaurant window, sees a ghost. He starts. Paul. No, his own pale reflection.

  “Are you okay?” Dix asks, closing her menu.

  “Fine. I was just … imagining your anguish.”

  Summers Dix spends at a family cottage on Lake Rousseau in Muskoka. Did then. Does now. She was there—she explains, after they order, that summer of Chappaquiddick and the moon landing with Peter while her husband—the boys’ stepfather and a corporate lawyer—remained in town working, though due to join them shortly for the last two weeks of August. Paul spent a little time with her that summer, but he had soon grown restless and bored and returned to Toronto. Her last words with him had been about Woodstock. She’d called. It had been a Wednesday. She remembered because of what happened the next day. He said he was driving with some friends to some concert or other in upstate New York. What friends these were she didn’t ask. If only she had asked. She never found out who they were. And she asked everyone she knew to be Paul’s friend.

  “I wanted him home. His father—his stepfather, Rory, my second husband—had died, you see. The day after Paul left for Woodstock. There was just no way to reach him. The news was full of reports of hordes of kids converging on this farm. I was able to delay Rory’s funeral a few days, but …”

  Dix sees herself once again in the living room of their house—they lived on Douglas Drive then—gazing in consternation at the old Philco and its images of the music festival turned mayhem, the phone in her hand, talking with the mother of one of Paul’s friends, one friend who did go to Woodstock, but hitchhiked, not drove. If your son phones and he’s happened to see Paul, please tell him to have Paul call me.

  Terrible days: The earlier call at the cottage that alerted her something was wrong came from Rory’s secretary: Is he with you? He’s missed several appointments and no one answers at home. That first flutter of anxiety. It’s not like Rory to miss an appointment. Then, in quick sequence, Florence, their domestic, finds his body. The ambulance. The police. Dix races back to town. It appears Rory slipped in the bathroom and hit his head on the rim of the porcelain tub. He was fifty-four. And if he wasn’t exactly the love of her life (her first husband, William, was), he was a decent man, if a little hard on the boys, a disciplinarian. He was a lieutenant-colonel in the Tor Scots in the war. Peter thrived under authority; Paul did not. These latter details she spares Dorian, not because she doesn’t want to appear forthcoming but because Dorian is regarding her with such peculiar intensity. Her hand reaches blindly for her glass of Chablis and nearly knocks it over.

  “Anyway,” she continues, deciding this time not to ask Dorian if he is okay, “I waited. That concert was extended, I think, an extra day, but it was a nightmare for all those kids to get out. It seemed to create a national emergency in the States. By the Wednesday or Thursday after, I began to wonder a little. But he was that age, you know, when you don’t communicate with your parents, and he’d spent the previous school year travelling around Europe and we barely heard from him. But as he was starting his next year at U of T in September I expected him home before long … Dorian?”

  She slips her hand across the linen tablecloth and delicately slides it over his.

  The touch, unexpected, is electric. Dorian recoils. “Sorry,” he says, returning his hand to hers to allay the suspicion that an old woman’s touch is repulsive to him. “I was thinking how awful all this must have been for you.”

  Dix removes her hand to her wineglass and lifts it to her lips. She regards Dorian speculatively as she does so. He is peculiarly intense this afternoon, though his words are meant to soothe, the sort of thing she’s heard through the funerals of three husbands. In fact, a friend once suggested a memorial service for her missing son, a way to acknowledge, though it wasn’t voiced, that Paul must be dead. Dix refused. She clings to the possibility of her son’s vibrant presence somewhere in the world, with all the vigour of mother love. Of course she does. What mother wouldn’t? Every scenario has been entertained in her time, from accident to amnesia to abduction. What would keep him away? Had she driven him away? Had Rory? Someone else? Had he fallen into terrible trouble? He was her wild child, a terrible terrible two, a little demon at nine, a tearaway in adolescence. And Rory’s unexpectedly dying at home led inevitably to a report to the coroner. The police sought to question Paul, who was most likely the last person to see him alive—after all, there was no one else inhabiting the Douglas Drive house those weeks—but it was only routine, they were just doing their jobs. In part because Jack Cook, the chief coroner, was an old family friend, a potentially embarrassing inquest was ruled unnecessary. The truth was, apparently (Jack told her this with some discomfiture), Rory had been, ahem, pleasuring himself at the bathroom sink and had somehow lost his moorings in the intensity of the moment with a freakishly fatal result.

  Dix doesn’t respond to Dorian’s remarks. Paul rarely enters her conversation with anyone now, but then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s when he failed to return home or communicate with her in any way, his name slipped into speculation (funny he vanished the same time Rory had his accident), whispers of which eventually reached Dix’s ears—and which she refused to dignify with a response. Dorian, oddly enough, is the first person she’s told about going to see the Woodstock film. She sat through it twice, and in the mid-eighties, when a VHS version was released, she made good use of the VCR pause button, looking, looking at the faces.

  “I even got in touch with a cousin in Hollywood,” Dix continues. “Have you ever heard of Edgar Rusoff? Gone now, I’m afraid.”

  Dorian nods. Edgar Z. Rusoff, the King of the B’s, he remembers well. Rusoff was at the heart of his and Paul’s plans to drive to L.A. This—what seemed almost too good to be true at the time—is true. Paul did have a relative in Hollywood. But Paul never mentioned he’d intended to go to Woodstock. Not once. Never mentioned it, even when they were lying in Dey’s bed watching the TV coverage of it. He said—and later told the others at Eadon Lodge—that he’d set out for the Maritimes but changed his mind on a whim.

  “A cousin of mine married him,” Dix continues, as the waiter arrives with their meals. “I thought she might have an ‘in’. They always talk about a cutting-room floor, don’t they? I thought there might be miles of unused film footage sitting somewhere that I might look at. I’m afraid she wasn’t much help.”

  Dorian glances at the steak he ordered as the waiter places it in front of him. The aroma of the meat suddenly sickens him. He can’t bear to think of Paul in this moment. He says, “I’m sorry about your husband. He can’t have been very old. How did he die, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  Dix lies. “Heart attack.”

  “Comme Jean Paul Belmondo in Breathless,” says Dorian, placing his grandfather’s fedora on Paul’s head.

  Paul pushes a single eyebrow into the shadow of the brim and tilts his head toward Dorian.

  “You know the film?”

  “Non.”

  “French New Wave.” Dorian readjusts the hat on Paul’s head for raffish effect, though it doesn’t quite work with Paul’s pagan curls. “Belmondo plays this guy who kills someone—a policeman, I think, a pig, un cochon.” Dorian burrows his head into Paul’s naked armpit and makes a snuffling noise. “He spends the rest of the film on the lam, but he’s just so cool about it.”

  Dorian withdraws his head and matches Paul’s smile with one of his own. They are in Dorian’s grandfather’s bed in Dorian’s grandfather’s bedroom. Interestingly, Dorian’s grandparents have separate
bedrooms. (Dorian thinks it has something to do with Nan’s drinking.) Dey’s room smells of tobacco and lemon-oil polish and something indefinably fuggy and masculine. It, with its adjoining dressing room, is his sanctum sanctorum, a place Dorian is never invited and rarely penetrates. But it has a television, which is the salient point. Paul pushed him over the threshold, laughing. Dorian resisted, at first. Jesus, what about the sheets! What if …? Such worries tug him from the edge of total abandon. His ear is half-cocked for the key in the door, his lips ready with excuses for the mess in the kitchen, for the presence of Paul, his mind rehearsed with all the great reasons he must go to Los Angeles. But he is much too besotted not to fall into every little adventure that Paul, so clearly more experienced than he, suggests. They have been trailing lust all over the house. It is day three of this. That Dorian wouldn’t bring Paul home was never a question. After their little debauchery along the highway, steering car and Paul and knapsack into the city, to the house on Dromore, took on the force of inevitability. Car parked, front door shut, up the stairs they piled with hands and mouth all over each other.

  Dorian pushes around the silver ring on the fourth finger of his right hand with his thumb. He does it unconsciously; it’s a habit, but it’s soothing. He and Paul are sitting shoulder to shoulder, glistening skin to glistening skin, smoking a joint, gorging on ice cream, talking about the high school play Dorian wrote with his English teacher, Death in Life, about music, about travel.