by Gail Bowen
“Jo, are you there?” Howard’s nervousness was apparent.
“Yes,” I said. “But I still think you should have stopped Charlie from leaving town.”
“Christ, Jo. You’re not usually obtuse. His girlfriend’s been murdered, and everything my son says makes him sound guilty. When we were at the morgue, he kept apologizing to Ariel, saying it was his fault she was dead. I was watching the orderly’s face. He was about ten seconds away from calling the cops. All I could think of was getting Charlie someplace where nobody could hear him. When he said he wanted to see Marnie, I jumped at the chance.”
“How is he now?”
“When he’s with Marnie, he’s fine. We haven’t told her about Ariel, so when Charlie talks to her, it’s as if Ariel’s just waiting at home for him. Charlie talks about their house and that Rottweiler they have. It’s almost like he escapes when he talks to his mother. Marnie’s in a world where reality’s a little shaky, and that’s where he wants to be.”
“He may want to be there, Howard, but he can’t stay there. You have to bring him back.”
The silence between us was eloquent. “I know,” he said finally. “I’ll take care of it. Meanwhile, I need another favour.”
“What?”
“Talk to Marnie. Charlie’s friend Liam Hill called yesterday. He told her that story you’d passed along about that night at Little Flower when she shoved the cabbage rolls at me. Marnie loved it. I’ve been trying to think of some more political stories, but I can’t remember any that she’s in.”
“I guess that says something right there, doesn’t it?” I said tightly.
“Jo, if you want to tear a strip off me, you’ll have to wait for another day. At the moment, there’s not much left to tear. Have you got any stories with Marnie in them?”
“Sure,” I said. “Put her on.”
At first, the sound on the other end of the line was like a gargle. I shrunk from imagining the person from whom it came. When I’d visited her in the hospital in Toronto the weekend after her accident, Marnie had looked so much like the Marnie I had always known that I was certain she’d break free of all the tubes, rip off her ridiculous surgical turban, and we’d escape to the nearest bar and talk about our three favourite topics: kids, politics, and what we were going to do with the rest of our lives. But when I’d looked into her eyes, it was clear that the surgical headdress wasn’t a temporary accessory to be abandoned when real life returned. Like the wimple or the purdah, Marnie’s sterile turban was emblematic of the fact that the life of the woman behind it had changed forever.
I had sat by Marnie’s bedside, held her hand, and chatted. There was never any response. When Sunday came and I kissed Marnie’s forehead, left the pain and the stench of antiseptic behind me and boarded the bus that took me to the airport, I felt the lung-bursting exhilaration of a prisoner headed for freedom. It was not a memory I was proud of, but it was the truth, and that night as I heard Marnie’s voice on the other end of the line, guilt washed over me. I hadn’t called her and, except for a card on her birthday, I hadn’t written. Sins of omission. But I was being given a chance at redemption.
“Howard tells me you guys have been telling war stories,” I said. “I was just thinking of a couple myself. Remember that time you and I were campaigning down in Thunder Creek, and we went to that trailer on Highway 2?”
“Gloves.” Marnie’s slurred enunciation stretched the single word painfully, but her delight was obvious.
“Right,” I said. “That woman who answered the door naked as a jaybird except for her yellow rubber gloves. They came up to her elbows, but it was the only part of her that was covered, and there we were trying to find a safe place to look and you said…”
“Bad time.” Marnie’s voice had been music, but now her cadences were distorted like an old record played at the wrong speed.
“Right. You said, ‘We’ll come back. We’ve obviously come at a bad time.’ And she said, ‘What makes you think it’s a bad time?’ ”
Marnie made a sound – a laugh that morphed into a sob. “Voted.”
“Right,” I said. “She voted for us. She even said she’d take a lawn sign.”
For the next five minutes I told stories. Marnie punctuated the familiar anecdotes with gurgled words and laughter, and I tried to banish the memory of Howard’s terrible statement of fact. “When she laughs, she shits herself.”
Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. “It was great talking to you, Marnie,” I said. “I’ll call again.”
“Soon,” she said. She laughed her new growling laugh. “Good times,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “They were good times.”
When Howard came on the phone again, I was fighting tears.
“Howard, I am so sorry,” I said. “For everything.”
“Look, Jo, we’re up to our ass in Catholic guilt at this end. We don’t need any of that watered-down Protestant crap.”
“Okay,” I said. “What can I do?”
“Help me save Marnie’s son.”
“Howard…”
“I know, I know,” he said wearily. “Just do what you can.”
I hung up the phone and walked downstairs to the family room. Bebe Morrissey wasn’t the only scrapbook keeper in our city. It had been many years since I had clipped out articles and carefully pasted them on the soft cheap pages because I believed that what Howard and my husband and the rest of us were doing was so important we’d want to remember it forever.
I had to riffle through a lot of yellowing scrapbooks before I found what I was looking for. There was no shortage of photographs of Howard and Ian and the others giving speeches, wowing audiences, building the province. But that night my interest was not in the men.
Finally, I found a photograph of Marnie Dowhanuik and me that had been taken on a long-ago election night. Fresh-faced and exultant, we were handing around coffee and sandwiches at campaign headquarters. The caption under the photograph read, “They also serve…”
I ripped the page from the book, wrote “Screw them all!” on the bottom, put it in an envelope, and addressed it to Marnie at Good Shepherd. It was a start but it wasn’t enough. Marnie deserved more.
I picked up the phone and dialled Mieka’s number in Saskatoon. It was time to find out more about the man who had fathered Ariel’s child.
I could hear Madeleine crying in the background when Mieka picked up the phone.
“Troubles?” I asked.
“Temper. Maddy went to all the trouble of crawling over to the CD player, now Greg won’t let her push the buttons.”
“Tell him to distract her with his world-famous rendition of ‘Louie, Louie.’ ”
Mieka laughed and relayed the message. I could hear Greg singing, then silence from Madeleine.
“Good call, Mum,” my daughter said admiringly.
“It’s the singer, not the song,” I said.
“You sound a little down,” said my daughter. “Something wrong?”
“No, everything’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I keep thinking of Ariel. So many people loved her.”
“You’re thinking of Charlie.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m thinking about Charlie and, Mieka, I’m thinking about the other man in Ariel’s life. Did she ever give you a hint about who the father of her baby was?”
For a beat there was silence, then Mieka said, “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything, but I guess there’s no harm now. I don’t know the man’s name, but I do know that he was an academic.”
“At our university?”
“Yes. And Mum, that’s all I know. Ariel was very discreet. Now, I have to boogie. Greg’s run out of verses of ‘Louie Louie,’ and Madeleine looks like she’s ready to howl.”
As my daughter and I said our good nights, my nerves were taut. I was certain I knew the identity of the father of Ariel’s baby. The fact that the man was an academic wasn’t exactly a clincher, and Beb
e Morrissey’s description of Ariel’s companion on the day she left Charlie had rung no bells for me. But finding an African prince who was teaching at our prairie university wasn’t exactly like looking for a needle in a haystack. In fact, as Willie and I turned out the lights and trudged up to bed, I was sure that, by noon the next day, the father of Ariel’s baby and I would have talked face to face.
CHAPTER
8
Fraser Jackson had been a member of our Theatre department for five years. I had never thought of him as an African prince, but I had played with the thought that he might be the doppelganger of Yaphet Kotto, the actor who portrayed the Black Sicilian Lieutenant Al Giardello on “Homicide: Life on the Streets.” Both men were in their mid-forties, heavy-set and physically powerful, with strong features and smiles that came infrequently but were worth waiting for. Both spoke with the reverence for language that reflected classical training.
The two men were alike in another, more profound, way. Both possessed the intensity of those whose tumultuous inner lives are kept in check only through rigorous self-discipline. More than one woman I knew had been intrigued by the possibility of discovering what lay behind the interior walls Fraser Jackson had erected around his essential self, but Ariel Warren had, seemingly, been drawn to him first for professional reasons.
One windy fall afternoon I’d run into her on the academic green. She was wearing a fluffy red turtleneck and bluejeans, and she’d taken off her sandals so she could walk barefoot through the leaves. Her long blond hair was corn-silk fine, and when she stopped to talk to me the wind lifted it into a nimbus that shimmered in the yellow autumn light.
“Look at this,” she said. In her hand was a small leaf whose centre vein bisected its surface into two distinct planes of colour: scarlet on one side, gold on the other. “Perfect symmetry,” Ariel said softly.
“Miracles all around us,” I said.
“Especially in September,” Ariel agreed. “Joanne, I just spent two hours watching Fraser Jackson with his Advanced Performance class. He’s letting me audit.”
“That’s a fair commitment of time on your part,” I said.
Ariel put her hand up in a halt gesture. “I know, I know. I should be churning out papers and ingratiating myself with my new colleagues, but this feels so right. Fraser is amazing, and so much of what he does is pure instinct. He has this innate sense of what’s going on inside a student, and he’s so gentle with them.”
“Sounds like a great teacher,” I said.
“He’s a pretty decent human being, too.” Ariel twirled the perfect leaf between her fingers. “Today, after everyone wandered off after class, he asked me if I wanted to work on a piece – just for fun. Of course, I pointed out that I was auditing and it wouldn’t be fair for me to add to his workload. He said, ‘Just let me hear your voice. There must be a poem you liked enough to remember.’ ”
“So what did you choose?”
A flush started on Ariel’s neck and spread upward to her face.
“Not something salacious,” I said.
“Worse,” she said. “The Hippocratic oath. Talk about bizarre, but when your mother is a doctor…”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “My father was a doctor. I remember looking it up, too.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t memorize it,” Ariel said. “And I’ll bet you never stood in front of the mirror watching yourself swear by Apollo and Aesculapius and Hygeia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses that you’d ‘prescribe regimen for the good of your patients according to your ability and judgement and never do harm to anyone.’ ”
“Most of my serious mirror time was devoted to trying to look like Sandra Dee.”
Ariel looked baffled.
“Sandra Dee was the Cameron Diaz of the fifties,” I said.
Ariel grinned. “Gotcha! Anyway, I think I was trying to be hip and ironic when I dredged up poor old Hippocrates today, but Fraser listened very seriously, and suddenly I was very serious, too. Then the strangest thing happened. When I got to the line ‘I will preserve the purity of my life and my art,’ I couldn’t speak. Fraser reached out and took my hand, and I finished. Then he asked me what I thought had happened. I was so embarrassed I told him the truth…”
“Which was?”
Ariel gave the perfect leaf a final twirl and handed it to me with an enigmatic smile. “That I need to find out what happened to that girl in the mirror who believed in the purity of life and art.”
She never spoke to me about Fraser Jackson again. I had never seen them together on campus. I hadn’t even associated them in my mind till I’d spoken to Mieka. Yet I was certain that he was the man to whom Ariel had turned when she sought a father for her child.
As I walked back from Political Science 101 class on Wednesday morning, I was wholly absorbed with the problem of how to get Fraser Jackson to open up to me. My arms were full of essays, and when I reached to open the door to the main office, they shifted, and the copy of Political Perspectives that had appeared so fortuitously minutes before my first meeting with Ariel’s class, slid to the floor. I bent to pick it up and knew I had my opening.
Rosalie was at her computer. She was wearing a sweater set the colour of violets, and she was beaming. “Guess what?” she said. “I cooked an entire meal for Robert, and he loved it.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “What did you make?”
“All his favourites.” As she recited the menu, she ticked the items off on her blunt-edged fingers: “Roast beef with suet pudding, fried potatoes, onion rings, broccoli in cheese sauce, rolls and butter, and gravy, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “And for dessert?”
“Chocolate eclairs,” she said. “But I cheated. I bought them frozen at Safeway.” A tiny frown crimped her forehead. “Am I wrong, or are you looking a little disapproving?”
“Not disapproving,” I said. “It’s just… Rosalie, how old is Robert?”
“Sixty-one,” she said.
“If you want him to see sixty-two, you might want to cut back a little on the cholesterol.”
She took my meaning. “A new cookbook?”
“Maybe just a more judicious selection from the old one.”
Rosalie whipped out the Rombauers from under her desk. “I’ll get right on it,” she said.
“Before you do, I have a question. Yesterday, when Ariel’s book turned up on our doorstep, you said there was no note.”
“That’s because there wasn’t one.”
“I know, but I forgot to ask you if the book was in any kind of wrapping.”
“It wasn’t wrapped up,” she said. “Just stuck in an inter-office envelope. But your name wasn’t on it, and there was no sender’s name. I checked.”
“Is the envelope still around?”
“I haven’t sent anything out.” She walked over to the shelf under our mailboxes and removed a stack of large brown envelopes. “I’ll go through these if you’ll tell me what to look for.”
I glanced at the envelope on top. “No need,” I said. “We hit the jackpot, first time out.” I pointed to the last address.
“The Theatre department,” she said. “I don’t get it.”
“I think we’ve found our secret Santa,” I said.
I dropped off my books, and headed off in search of Fraser Jackson. His office was in our campus’s shiniest new bauble, the University Centre, a building with a soaring glass entrance, floor tiles arranged to represent an abstracted aerial view of our province’s southern landscape, a painting of a huge woman, defiantly and confidently naked, an upscale food court, two theatres, a clutch of offices that tended to student affairs, and the departments of Music and Theatre.
When I stopped in front of Fraser Jackson’s door, a student passing by told me that Professor Jackson was in the Shu-Box, the nickname that had inevitably attached itself to the theatre donated by philanthropists Morris and Jacqui Schumiatcher.
It took a moment for my ey
es to adjust to the darkness of the theatre, but I felt my way to a chair at the back, settled in, and watched as a student massacred one of the loveliest passages in The Tempest. Jeff Neeley, the young man onstage, was the quarterback of our football team, and he recited Caliban’s speech at breakneck speed, as if he had to unload the words before he was sacked.
When Jeff finished, Fraser rose from his seat in the front row and walked over to him. Jeff’s body tightened, but Fraser’s voice was disarmingly soft.
“You’re finding it hard to connect to this.” It was a statement of fact, not a question. “You know that moment that comes when you first wake up and what you’re waking up to is a hundred times worse than what you’re leaving behind?”
Jeff knitted his brow, then the light bulb went on. “Yeah,” he said. “Like when I wake up the morning after we’ve lost a game. The worst was last year against the Huskies. All I could throw were interceptions. Then in the final play I got clocked and fractured my femur. They shot me full of Demerol. I was dreaming that I’d run into the end zone for a touchdown and we’d won; then I woke up.” He shook his head in wonder at a world that had such moments in it. “I would have given my left nut to have drifted off again.”
Fraser’s nod was empathetic. He was wearing Nikes, jogging shorts, and a sweatshirt. His body was hard-muscled and athletic; it was easy to believe he understood the power of Jeff’s dream. When he put his hand on Jeff’s shoulder and locked eyes with him, the fact that he’d made a connection was apparent. “I knew you had an instinct for what this scene’s about,” Fraser said. “Now use what you just told me, and let’s hear it again – from the top.”
Jeff squared his shoulders and began: “Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises…” By the time he got to “The clouds methought would open, and show riches/Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked/I cried to dream again,” he had me. He wasn’t Kenneth Branaugh, but he wasn’t bad.
