The Big Why

by Michael Winter

  You pulverize me, Kent. You love that word, and that is what you do to me.

  She gave me a mad look.

  You want everything and yet you know you can’t have everything. For to have it all excludes a deepening of anything. There is a limit in me.

  I have a powerful will and you have a powerful heart.

  We paused and there was a moment of tenderness. Kathleen released the agony in her skull. She exhaled. She was about to do something silly. A soft-shoe routine.

  So you think, she said, that it’s okay for my friends to sleep with you.

  No it’s not okay.

  That I shouldnt take it personally.

  There was something about Emily that was the hired help.

  How respectful.

  You know I find a lot of people attractive.

  I wish. I wish that at least you’d just find distant women attractive. It wouldnt be so bad if they werent in the same goddamn town.

  She swore. It took a lot out of her to swear. I wanted to say I was sorry. I wanted to beg. I loved Kathleen, I loved her integrity and her long arms. The ferocity of her hurt pained me. But also, her anger and her outrageous wishes made me say that I hated the predicament. I hate this, I said.

  What if I found Gerald Thayer attractive. Or if I fucked Rupert Bartlett.

  Gerald is your cousin. Then I said it: Could you please not swear?

  For that was what I hated. The jarring of goodness with a malevolent, ill-used force.

  I think that’s what I’ll do.

  She was white-hot with anger.

  Rupert is not going to sleep with you, I said. And Gerald’s your cousin. I did not know what I was arguing. I had lost my footing, and I did not know where she was or who she was. She had become unknowable. The thing is, we’re all unknowable, but usually we mask it. Now her unknowableness had surfaced.

  Kathleen: So youre saying your friends are more principled.

  Well, for one thing Gerald’s my best friend, and Rupert is not a sexual man. But in general, yes, I’m saying men are more principled.

  You have to be the most arrogant — that is such bullshit. I could have had something with Rupert.

  Well okay, sleep with Rupert, but I dont want to hear about it. And if I do hear about it, I won’t embarrass him.

  What had I been saying? What was the root of the fight?

  That is so civil, she said. Really. Youre such a swell guy, Kent. So where did you fuck her.

  Kathleen, that is an endless road that road.

  Oh it is endless, I know. So not only in our bed but over the kitchen table. I bet the children had to eat their breakfast on top. You fuck.

  Please dont swear.

  And in that little room and on the kitchen floor. Did you fuck her in all the unusual places where youve fucked me? Have you so little imagination?

  Kathleen.

  And in the bed that was her mother’s. That’s very good, Rockwell. You at least. Well, what did you do with the children. She was supposed to be with the children, so did you hire someone else to look after the children while you, or did they just listen in their rooms upstairs. Oh you ingrate, and I suppose the whole town knows.

  Kathleen, this is important. No one must know of this. If they knew, that would be it for here.

  You remind me of a man in a towel who is staring as his house burns down. I was having a bath — that’s what he says.

  She beat her arms against me. She punched me in the neck. She caught a knuckle in my eye. I held my hands up. I took the flurry. I let her flail against me, whip me until she was exhausted. Then she sat down in a chair and caught her breath. She made a concentrated effort to be unapproachable. We stared at parts of the room, as quiet as individuals. She said, It all comes down to what kind of honesty can you dredge up. And am I legitimizing what you did with Emily.

  She reminded herself that I didnt mislead her. That she had always known what I was like.

  I will not argue with you, I said, or defend my case.

  I handed her a glass of water and she drank it. I was standing there, saying nothing. She was waiting for me to say something. She got up and opened a window and it was chilly. I thought that this predicament, if we let time pass without talking about it, would sizzle away and be over with. It is never the case, though. Something is usually said later and it makes the thing harder to take. It makes it bigger because it is deliberated on. This time, though, it would be different. I was a new man. This time was to be the first moment of a new length of time. But there it sat, someplace above the back of her mouth, in her head. It was like an inert material, a grain of a new type of insulation. We both refused to speak — as the room got colder. This time, I thought, she will be able to get over it without saying anything more about it. She is too weary. I have made her weary.

  40

  I walked down to the naked man. I was an asshole. I knew that part of my assholeness came from the fact that I was unrepentant. I just wanted to go away and sit with it. I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. I’d had this fight with Kathleen and the children were going nuts and I had to be on my own. I sat there and lit the hurricane lamp. I leaned back against the cairn of rocks and listened to it hiss. It made the night darker — light does that. The dark also makes things louder. Behind me the house all intense, the four tiny bright windows of a family. I had made that. I had willed it and I was strangling the juice out of it. I stretched out my knees, my knees ached. I could feel the heat coming out of the land. The wind swung around. It was warm off the land and then cold off the water. It just swung right around. My light fluttered. I had to shade it, so I leaned up against the naked man. All the lights of the town now. As if there were a dial and it was being turned up just a notch a minute. Waves now. The tide is down and the bare black rock. The crest of a white wave over the rock, creamy and fizzing. Little boats up on the slipway. This was the littoral zone, where so much of the work of the world happens. A few small boats were coming in. You could hear the oarlocks groaning. An oil lamp lit in the bow. Idling in. A painter thrown to the stagehead. The oars drawn up, clunking on the gunwales. Something happening in the dark. Now standing. Now the flash of the sides of fish being pitchforked up. Having to connect shreds of sound and light to a story. Fresh, stiff fish. Pushed around by feet. Into a barrel. Slow, the work is slow and long and constant. A storeroom lit now and they’ll work in there until three in the morning. I stand and I take up my lantern. I swing it in their direction. I swing it as if it’s a toast to their work. I want them to know that I am acknowledging them. I take the path back up to the tight and tiny lights of my will being done.

  41

  I wore the scarf that was my wife’s. I wore it the way I’ve seen women wear scarves. You double it, wrap it around your neck, then thrust the two ends through the loop and tighten. I was soaking my feet in a tub of hot water and scraping my soles with a German knife. Kathleen had put the children to bed. I formed a sludge of grey along the edge of the blade. Dunk and scrape. I had a sore nose too, and I was pushing eczema cream into my nostrils. It was all I had. And I noticed how deep and cavernous is the nostril cavity.

  They want us to leave.

  Kathleen listened. She knew this.

  Me: What do you think.

  I think it’s hilarious. They want you to leave for being a spy. When all you are is unfaithful.

  I was listening to Schumann’s “Traumerei” over and over. It was making me say sentences that ended with and yet. I will love you until the cows come home, Kathleen, and yet. I am alive with the spirit of grace and generosity, and yet. I will commit and be driven and centred and empty myself and never lie, and yet.

  This conviction as I soaked my feet in a tub of slurry.

  Happiness, she said. It is a difficult, complicated place to attain.

  Me: It is easier to be unhappy.

&nbs
p; And so we shy away from the complication that might foster happiness.

  You do. You become simple in the depth of your tenacity to endure, and so become sad.

  Kathleen looked at me in the tub. You look like you just got out of bed, she said. You look more like yourself now. I mean, when you were younger.

  Right now, I said, youre more like me than yourself.

  Because I’m looking at you with a cold eye.

  Yes, it’s something across the eyes. It’s not bad. I’ve got the same look. You look like youre thinking: Oh, this is where I’m at and this is new and I’m resolved to where I’m at.

  Kathleen: Everything seems more me than I am.

  Regret is hoping backwards.

  Kathleen: There is a difference between the fact of the matter and the truth of the matter.

  An ironic distance, I said.

  Kathleen: A sense of humour is important in any serious thing you do. If you can joke about something youre involved in, then it’s working.

  Me: Are you saying it’s working?

  She smiled at me.

  We should leave, then.

  I’m not interested in fighting them, Rockwell. Not after this.

  You mean after Emily.

  She nodded.

  Then we’ll leave.

  42

  What I heard at Billy Cole’s window. Patrick Fardy: Did you see our man out on the point night before last.

  Jim Hearn: Yes, with that bug light. Did you read it.

  Patrick: What was it, Morse.

  Hearn: It was Morse, boy, right up on the clay scrape.

  What was he saying.

  It was in German.

  You what. You think.

  Oh I knows it, he was right by the naked man.

  It makes sense, dont it. That map. The bomb shop. Got to be.

  Did you hear what he shouted out in Carbonear?

  So he was signalling a submarine.

  For sure he was.

  He’s a Kraut through and through that one.

  And paid. Who goes around flashing five-dollar bills.

  She tried, but even good, kind Kathleen found that her humour wavered and up pulsed anger. And as her anger grew her love dispersed in little ships. Her anger stole her love of me away. I could see her complexion drain of love.

  43

  When my father died my mother became a different person. It was a gradual thing. At first she was the mother still. And she did the things she’d always done. Perhaps it wasnt until I was a teenager that she began to do the things that she would not have done under his eye. She was freed up to be herself. She was not expecting this. We all, I think, imagine a decade after the death of a spouse. When we’re seventy. A spread of solo years, not too long a spread. When we will wing out in a new bloom. Just a junior partner to the rest of your life. There is childhood and being a new adult and then there is marriage — the grounded living — and then the separation at death and the permission to be wild in a breeze or a calm pool. So for a time my mother, in her thirties, maintained my father’s ways. We moved into her aunt’s house for financial reasons. It’s not that we didnt have money, we just didnt have enough to maintain a standard that my father would have assumed. We had to keep the appearance of a good living even when Father was dead.

  44

  Tom Dobie came home on leave to marry Emily Edwards. They found out he was only seventeen. He looked stronger and he had enjoyed the time away. He wore his uniform and they both had white roses pinned to their hearts. Emily in white gloves. A gorgeous day. The morning had been rainy, so Bartlett said, Let’s burn a shoe. He was happy about the wedding. You dont want to marry, he said again, too far.

  Tom Dobie, as he stood by his bride: Youre short.

  Emily: I’m not.

  Tom: I didnt realize you were so short.

  She: I’m in a dip is what. You stand in it.

  And so they moved over a foot. And Emily grew three inches. When the minister asked them to be faithful. They pronounced the word as fateful. They all did, bride, groom, and minister. I wondered if they thought that was their pledge, to be fateful.

  Tom’s mother was ill in bed. So they walked over to the house in Frogmarsh. They climbed the stairs, Emily and Tom, and sat on the corner of the bed so Rachel Dobie could see them. From a drawer in a night table, she passed them an English silver coin.

  Tom Dobie was in town five days. He heard about my troubles. He spoke to Emily’s father, Marten. And Marten drew up a petition. Tom: Marten Edwards composed it. We got all the Bartletts to sign it, as have the Pomeroys and Dr Gill. We said you was a spirited man who loves culture. That youre stubborn yes, but not a German spy. The idea of you involved in espionage. No, this is what Marten wrote: It is highly improbable that Kent, as a socialist, has any particular regard for the kaiser or the military aristocracy of Germany. I’m sorry for your troubles, Kent.

  Tom shook my hand like a gentleman. Formal.

  And then he was sent back to St John’s.

  45

  Fate is something you cannot avoid, destiny is something you choose. A wedding is public, a marriage private. This book, consider it my marriage to the world. All I have written before this, a wedding.

  At my wedding. I was nonchalant. Sauntering into the church, taking in the heads and shoulders. The men had rounded top hats. I walked down the aisle and up the green stairs. I walked up all the stairs, shook hands with the minister, doffed my hat, set it down, and stepped back to meet my bride. I was not supposed to take all the steps, but I wanted to take in the steps. I have never left a stair unstepped, and I have never been patient. I had broken the rules of the ceremony and that is me: bigger than ceremonies, wanting to recreate them in my image. I stood there, rolling on my feet, waiting. I looked back on the guests. They giggled at my easygoingness. There’s a nervous groom, Gerald Thayer said. There were men holding women’s purses and men, afterwards, giving children money. And then my bride arrives decked out in a fabric the colour of ecru. A reception in a canvas tent, in case of rain. It’s sunny, so it offers shade. I want more dancing. What I want is more of a good time, and I want a good time on my behalf, sponsored by me. I do not want a time paid out like some debt of sociability.

  46

  Bob Bartlett came with the news. He told Constable Bishop he’d deliver it. It was a telegram from Prime Minister Morris. Youve been told to leave by the end of the month, he said. You have seventeen days.

  Well, thank you, I said. Youre not put out at being seen with me.

  I’m not ashamed to visit a prisoner, he said.

  The children began to cough. You realized that the coughing was regular. And then small fits of choking. As if they were being politely strangled. Their mouths were full of phlegm and we called the doctor. They had a fever but then the fever passed. Dr Gill couldnt see anything wrong. It was just a cold, he said. A cold. They got a little better and then they grew worse. I was not going to have any more dead children on my hands. I refused it. When they coughed their cheeks and temples bloomed in colour. First red, then blue. Is that green. Yes, Kathleen theyre green. Theyre not getting oxygen.

  Rocky vomited and little Kathleen’s face was puffy. They looked at us as if they did not know why they were being punished. Clara wheezing, and thankfully Barbara was spared of any symptoms. I called Dr Gill again. But by the time he arrived they seemed fine enough.

  We listened to the children cough, anticipating their coughs. Urging them to stop. It was as if they were coughing as much as they could on one breath. Just exhaling. Not inhaling. Every single molecule of air out of their lungs. And then this dreadful sound like something being sucked down a sink. Kathleen: It’s whooping cough. That’s what this is.

  We got another telegram then, the final word, from the governor: YOU MUST LEAVE. We must. No later than the end of the month
.

  I wrote a terse response. I was fit when it came to writing. I said that if they didnt mind, two of my children had the whooping cough and could they postpone our expulsion.

  We packed. I tallied a list of the expenses I’d put into the house. I was thinking damages.

  The U.S. consul, James Benedict, wired us that they’d offered a reprieve. But by now we had decided to go. Kathleen tried to book berths aboard the Florizel. She was told that the family needed a permit to leave the country, otherwise they would not allow us on board. I wrote to the immigration chief and had George Browiny, who seemed polite with a kind of remorse now, send it:

  May I render some humble assistance to the government in the performance of its present humanitarian work by begging you kindly to permit us to obey the government’s orders. The six Kent suspects are unanimous in their desire to depart.

  We bade adieu to the Bartletts, to the Pomeroys, and in St John’s to James Benedict and Judge Prowse. It was a rushed farewell. In Brigus I watched Marten Edwards walk out to us. There was something in his face, full of conviction and dignity. He was red in the face. I thought it might be that his daughter had spoken of what had happened. I had thought that, if anything, would have been the reason for our expulsion. Marten Edwards came up to us with stiff, angry hands. I am, he said, awful sorry. Youre the finest kind, Kent. My daughter loves you and your wife — he nodded seriously at Kathleen — and your children. She will miss the children and I will miss you both. Emily is not with me, for she is feeling poorly, he said. She’s missing Tom and now your departure.

  He shook our hands vigorously, Kathleen was touched. He gave the children each a five-cent piece and then abruptly left, as if he had a lot of work to do.

  Bob Bartlett said we’d miss his birthday. He was turning forty in two weeks. He accompanied us to St John’s, he played with the children. He saw us off in St John’s harbour. The siren blew. The hawsers slackened, and we were drawn aboard. We were off. It was only then, with the hard Atlantic wind punishing our faces, that I appreciated how Bob Bartlett and Marten Edwards had taken time to see us off. How Prowse had tried his best. But as the gap of seething water widened in our wake, I, sadly, had no hope or thought of ever seeing Newfoundland again.