Devotion

by Howard Norman

  “I’m apologizing to you, Mr. Field. Before they take me to jail.”

  “You like the idea of being dragged off in handcuffs, don’t you?” William sighed. “What’s playing at the drive-in these days?”

  Toby’s entire countenance shifted with this change in subject; he straightened right up. “We’ve got a movie called Straight Time,” he said. “It was playing in Halifax some months ago, then it ended up on the drive-in circuit. Since the Starlight’s the only drive-in in Nova Scotia, we got it.”

  “What’s it about?” William said.

  “Basically, it’s about a guy who can’t stop robbing jewelry stores. He can’t seem to help himself. Or, it’s more like he helps himself to things he shouldn’t, I guess.”

  “Daring daylight robberies?”

  “Both night and day, I think. I can’t tell you the whole plot, Mr. Field, beginning to end, because I’m occupied at the concession. I miss a lot of the movie.”

  “Is that where you got your big idea, Toby, from this movie? The big idea to break into my house?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Difficult to feel inspired from your own resources these days? Your most exciting ideas coming from the movies?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Field,” Toby said, looking off at the wall.

  “I want to see this movie,” William said. “If you take me to see it—tonight—now—get me in free of charge, I’ll pretend this botched little robbery of yours never took place. Except you’ll have to pay for the window you broke.”

  “You’ve got a deal, Mr. Field.”

  “Oh, don’t I love a solemn pact,” William said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. He looked at the bedside clock. “It’s eight twenty-five. We have to factor in the drive to Truro. What time’s the movie start?”

  “There’s coming attractions and such,” Toby said. “The movie’s supposed to start at nine, but it’s usually late. I don’t run the projector, though.”

  “I take it you weren’t on concession duty tonight.”

  “Look, Mr. Field. I’m in over my head with some debts, you know? I wasn’t thinking clearly. I was going to grab what I could, try to pawn it down in Halifax.”

  “Didn’t you hear my opera? Didn’t you figure me to be home?”

  “I thought the record might drown out hearing me. I was only going to take a few items. I didn’t even know what. I didn’t think it through, Mr. Field. I was just driving by.”

  “Lame,” David said.

  “Would you prefer he’d thought about it ahead of time, David?” William said. “Premeditated robbery of the house of someone’s known him since he was born?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” David said.

  “Give me five minutes to get ready,” William said. “I need to get out of this goddamned house, Toby, so I guess I should thank you for the opportunity.”

  David and Toby went out onto the porch. There was a vast quilt of moonlight-diffused clouds, no stars. “Use ‘Tobias,’ all right?” Toby said.

  “What?”

  “In your report to the Tecoskys. Naomi said every month you send a report to Izzy and Stefania. Saying how everything is. Saying how the swans are doing. What the tree surgeon did, things like that. So I’m asking, when you tell them about my breaking in, refer to me as Tobias, not Toby. They know me as Tobias.”

  “You fucking idiot.”

  “I don’t care if you tell Izzy and Stefania. I’m just asking you to use Tobias.”

  William appeared on the porch. He wore threadbare brown corduroy trousers, a blue work shirt, bedroom slippers. “Since I’ll stay in the car, I’ve got slippers on,” he said. “Let’s go, Toby. I’ll sit in back. You’re my chauffeur. That car has ashtrays in back, doesn’t it?”

  “Including on the pull-down armrest in the middle.”

  “I’m not allowed to smoke. It’ll feel good just sitting there in the company of all those ashtrays, though.”

  “I’ve got French cigarettes I bought in London,” Toby said.

  “Don’t show them to me.”

  They walked to the Buick. David called from the porch, “Toby, I don’t have to write the Tecoskys—I can telephone them directly. They have telephones over there.”

  William stopped and beckoned David over. When David stood a few steps away, William said, “The crisis is over. We’re going to the moving pictures. The swans are on your watch. I noticed they’re still on the pond.” William slowly crouched into the back seat and shut the door. Toby got in behind the wheel, revved the engine, let the idle even out, mist swirling in the headlight beams. He gunned it in reverse all the way to the road.

  Swans in the House

  WHEN THE BUICK’S lights disappeared, David went into the main house to assess the damage. As he passed the kitchen the telephone rang, always a startling thing in an empty house. David stood there through five rings. He felt like the thief. The answering machine recorded Maggie’s voice: “Hey, Pop, it’s me. Where are you? I’m in my apartment. I had a day. Things at work are fine, but I went to the doctor this morning. Guess what? My official due date is November nine. I finally couldn’t stand it and had them tell me, so I’m telling you—you’ve got a granddaughter on her way. And no, don’t you tell David, please. When I want to tell him, I will myself. Call me, okay? I want to know you got this news. It’s not even nine o’clock but I’m going to bed. Me, the night owl. Love you. Bye-bye.”

  David thought, Never mind the due date—no one told me Maggie was pregnant to begin with! He went to the guesthouse, circled November 9 on the calendar, sat drinking coffee, thinking back to the night he and Maggie had last slept together, February 10.

  Though it seemed impossible, the fact was, between the accident in London and February 10 of this year, he and Maggie had not met each other’s eyes, let alone had any sort of conversation. Nor since February 10, for that matter. From his kitchen window, David occasionally glimpsed her driving up to or away from the estate, or strolling with William to the pond and back. Now and then he’d impulsively telephoned Maggie’s office, and her assistant, Carol Emery, would say, “They’re in France,” or “They’re in New York,” or even “They’re in town,” but he had the distinct feeling she’d been instructed to keep such information to a minimum.

  Early on the morning of February 10, Maggie drove to the estate, stayed late, and while driving back to Halifax she stopped at the all-night diner for a cup of coffee. There was blowing sleet. Maggie had the windshield wipers going. In the parking lot, before turning off the ignition, she saw David through the diner window. He was paying his bill at the cash register. She sat there, heat cranked up, watching her husband complete his transaction. Neither the car’s nor the diner’s window qualified as amorous, that was for certain. You can’t help where your mind goes, however; Maggie felt the pitch and seethe, the opposing forces of love and hate, though there was a unifying element: she still felt David to be the love of her life. (At the same time, she thought, He has not come to Halifax to say that very thing about me, has he?) This surprised and saddened her, and then she experienced a surge of disappointment in herself for feeling it. That is, her emotions ran the gamut.

  David stepped from the diner, his breath ghosting out—Put on your gloves, she thought. He noticed her car and stopped abruptly, watching Maggie appear and disappear behind the streaking sleet as the wipers arced back and forth. The parking lot had patches of black ice. He walked, slipping once, catching his balance, to her car. Maggie didn’t roll down the window. They looked at each other a moment, then David walked to his truck and climbed in. He fully expected Maggie to continue on to Halifax, but in the rearview mirror saw that she was following him to the estate.

  Once inside the guesthouse, Maggie took off her coat and said, “David, I really don’t want to talk. I can’t bear it.” She stood next to the bathtub and dried her hair from the sleet. Viewing this from the kitchen, David felt so grateful for her presence—the painful familiarity in the
way she bent slightly, let her hair fall, rubbed it with the towel in furious eddies—that it unhinged him a little. He sat down at the table, his coat still on.

  Finally he followed her into the bedroom.

  She left at 1:30 in the morning. “I’m driving straight back to Halifax,” she said. “I’m going now, David.” On the return drive she stopped and got that cup of coffee. As she sat sipping it in a booth, her heart felt scored by anger and blame. Nonetheless, she came up with a pairing of words to help her get purchase on the fact of having just slept with her estranged husband: “necessary and confusing” (once she learned she was pregnant, she revised this to “necessary and nostalgic”). She felt a slight cold coming on.

  When Maggie got to her apartment on Robie Street, she took a bath, sat in her robe listening to the BBC on her broadband radio, a gift from her father, for almost two hours, trying not to think. She dressed in a favorite pair of black slacks, a peach-colored blouse with a button-down black sweater and, for the first time since her honeymoon, the simple pearl necklace David had given her in his London flat, for what he called their “one-hundred-day anniversary.” It began to snow. Putting on her overcoat, gloves and galoshes, carrying a pair of shoes in an oversize handbag, she left for her Dalhousie office; there was paperwork to catch up on before a 9:15 appointment.

  If love has its own velocity, so does love in absentia. He put on a clean T-shirt. He should have taken a shot of whiskey and tried to sleep, or read Anatole France, or listened to Bach. What was that phrase Maggie’s mother used when Maggie was anxious about this or that? Be patient, life will provide. David wasn’t so sure. However, he opted for none of the tried-and-true routines of the past year. Instead, he committed himself to a sequence of actions, each one by itself so compulsive, reckless, he didn’t fear or probably detect their cumulative destructive effect. How could I do more harm than I’ve already done? he might have reasoned, if he reasoned at all. Whereas he should’ve just called it a night.

  First he walked to the pond and saw the swans gathered on the far bank. He approached, then dropped to his knees, crawled close, reached under the nearest swan’s backside and attempted to lever it into some sort of reaction—it swung around and bit his shoulder. A significant jolt of pain made him recoil, but he recovered quickly, crawled again toward the gather of now pissed-off swans, all still hunkered down. David let loose a kind of seal-barking: Arrk, arrk, arrk. One swan flared its wings, and in a hydraulic motion raised up and settled down, then waddled off a short ways. Almost immediately there ensued a domino effect: the swans lined up, went single file to the path, began down it toward the pen. However, when they got within feet of the pen David caught up; he began to shout and administer kicks, herding the swans toward the guesthouse. They bustled up onto the porch, crowding at the screen door, so that David had to struggle to get it open.

  The swans clambered in, and for some reason the lead swan was almost magnetically drawn to the open-topped plastic garbage pail in the cabinet under the kitchen sink, whose hinged door David had left open. It stretched forward, and in an instant attacked the garbage. The pail was so full that a filter of wet coffee grounds floated at the rim. The swan submerged its head, came up for air and, having nabbed the filter, scattered grounds with a wild shake of its head. A second, then third swan followed suit, tearing into the garbage, which held peach pits, grapefruit rinds, banana peels and apple cores, then abandoned it. Meanwhile, in the sitting room, half a dozen swans went haywire, possibly reacting to having seen their reflection in the oval, full-length mirror in its wood frame on the back of the half-closed bedroom door. Or maybe they’d responded to the Van Morrison record on the turntable, a voice without visible source.

  In something of a panic now, David chased the swans with a broom like a cartoon witch, shouting, “Get out! Get out!” Which sounded stupid even to him. Besides, when you invite guests in, you should show them a good time. In the sitting room, yet another swan knocked over a tall vase containing dried cattail rushes, which smashed against the cobble fireplace. It then got a leg caught in the cord connecting the phonograph to the wall socket; immediately the Van Morrison tune “Tupelo Honey” became a horrible scratch as the turntable was yanked to the floor. At which point the swan started biting the vinyl record. The phonograph’s arm was twisted upward, the swan stepped on the needle and lurched, snapping at its own foot as if bitten by a serpent.

  David hurried to the pantry, took up the .22 rifle, shoved in a few rounds, fired three shots into the sitting room over the heads of the swans wreaking havoc. One bullet webbed a crack in a window, another splintered the headrest of a rocking chair, a third neatly entered the wall near the fireplace. The swans sat down. David set the rifle on the kitchen table, said, “I’ve done some real damage here,” a statement that stood for so much. He picked up a peach from the bowl, took a bite of it, spit it out, the most familiar and pleasurable taste in the world to him somehow rancid, though it was a perfectly good peach. He glared at the swans. Half of them squatted there in the sitting room, the rest were in the kitchen. They were mute and some had actually begun preening. One swan sauntered over to the fireplace and sat on the empty grate like an iron nest. “You have ugly natures,” David said.

  He stood up, put his mouth to the spigot in the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet and drank with loud gulping. It was as if the well water was laced with adrenaline, because David began shouting, “I have got to get out of here! I have got to get out of here!” about thirty times in a row, in a repetitive tone like a skipping record.

  David now turned to the novels of Anatole France. He slid the stack from the counter, clutching the books against his chest. Securing them at the base with his belt buckle, at the top with his chin, he kicked open the screen door. Leaving the guesthouse to the swans, he carried the books down and dropped them near the pond. Then he flung each one in the manner of skipping stones. Water immediately saturated Patroologica (it was the book most in disrepair, frayed spine, pages taped, though probably it was the angle at which it hit the water that caused it to sink so quickly). The rest landed and floated, covers facing up or down, like illustrated lily pads. A few soon sank, others drifted, indicating a slight current or breeze.

  David choked back three or four sobs in quick succession, countering with a kind of hyena laugh, shouted over the pond, “So fucking hot out!” as if that was the cause of all this madness. Easiest to blame what could least be helped. He again slipped out of his shorts and T-shirt, both of which he balled up and tossed aside. Lying naked on the grass, he closed his eyes. Sounds drifted down from the guesthouse. “Oh, Jesus, I think they’ve got into the cupboard,” he said. “Daring nighttime robbery. Perpetrated by swans.”

  He dozed off in the sticky heat, but in half an hour woke to music from a car radio approaching down the drive. Toby Knox’s Buick stopped at the main house. Toby switched off the ignition. He and William were talking, but David couldn’t make out the words. And then William suddenly raised his voice: “Holy Mother, Jesus and Mary!” Searching frantically for thirty seconds or so, David found his shorts and shirt, put them on and walked up the slope. William and Toby were already heading to the guesthouse to investigate. They all met up on the porch.

  William looked through the open screen door. He turned and said, “Toby, it appears that the Tecoskys’ swans are inside a house.”

  “That’s not good, Mr. Field,” Toby said.

  “I can explain,” David said.

  “Did you invite them in for tea?” William asked. He stepped forward and clocked David a solid right to the jaw. David careened back onto his butt and sat there, too stunned to reach for his jaw or try to utter a word. The arc of the punch had thrown William off balance too, and Toby had to catch him. “Whoa, there, Mr. Field,” Toby said, helping William regain his footing.

  “I felt something crack, and it wasn’t in my hand, either,” William said. “David, you might want Toby here to drive you to the hospital for an x-ray.” />
  David shook his head no. His jaw throbbed; without touching it, he felt it swelling.

  “Okay, then, I’ve finally knocked my son-in-law’s lights out, like I’ve been promising for over a year. So it can’t come as a surprise to him. I’m going in and put some ice on my hand and go to bed. Toby, don’t fashion yourself after that lowlife played by Dustin Hoffman, eh? It’s your life, Tobias. But you break into my house again, I’ll shoot out the windows of your car with my shotgun and only half hope you’re not in the driver’s seat.”

  “I’ve figured that all out already, Mr. Field,” Toby said. “You ever want to go to the Starlight again, just ask me. I’ll personally drive you there.”

  “Don’t forget you owe for the window.”

  David wiped blood from the corner of his mouth. He made a sucking sound, felt pain travel up to his left ear. Oddly, his neck and shoulders hurt too, as if he’d been completely realigned. He slurred, “Hope you’re happy now, William. You broke my jaw, I think.” It had been like trying to talk after the dentist shot you up with Novocain, your mouth stuffed with cotton and clamps, except the pain was still there.

  “I’ll expect the swans to be out of this house promptly,” William said. “You can get them out, broken jaw or no. Rise to the occasion, David. I’ll probably be docking your paycheck to cover getting the rug cleaned. I noticed a broken vase, too, and that was just from a quick glance. First thing in the morning I’ll call Stefania and Izzy over in Scotland and tell them there’s been a change of guard, that I’m back as caretaker of their estate. I bet they might let you stay on as my hired hand, though. In fact, I’ll make that recommendation, gentleman that I am. A man needs employment.”