Alec

by William di Canzio

  “What? No, Alec—it’s not ugly. It’s just … you.”

  “Now, that’s why I love you! You understand. It’s like a scar or a wound, I think, love is; hurts to acquire, but once you’ve got it, it’s who you are. I wouldn’t trade this scar for the perfect skin I owned when I was a boy, when I knew Van, before I knew you.”

  Maurice drew him closer to his chair; he slid Alec’s drawers down to the floor, wrapped his arms around his waist, kissed his belly, closed his eyes, and rested his head there: “Alec…”

  * * *

  That night, as Van made his way to the big bed in the front bedroom of the farmhouse, Mabel Blunt could not help but notice her husband’s prick—even concealed, as it was, by his nightshirt. She noticed for a couple of reasons. Since he had returned from the war she had seen him in no such state. And this particular erection was also noteworthy for its size and stamina, unprecedented, she believed, in all their marriage. When Van was under the covers beside her (with his back to her), she said, “You seem quite stirred up today.”

  “Hm?”

  “Since our visit from Alec Scudder and Mr. Hall.”

  “What’s that? Oh no, it’s just the second plantin’ got me worried. Gettin’ the seed in on time and tryin’ to get these lugs I’ve hired to shake a leg.”

  “Let’s count ourselves fortunate we’ve found any help at all.”

  “Yeah, yer right, of course. Still, it’s all a bit maddening. Goin’ on these four years since the fields been properly tilled, and for what? The whims of our so-called Great Ones.” He punched his pillow and resettled his head.

  Mabel knew Van’s secret—some of it. Her sister-in-law Rowena had gossiped to her about having spied Van once with the Scudder boy in the barn before the wedding. Row-ena found it funny, as she found most things, and Mabel, though troubled, laughed it off with her. But then she started to notice how Van eyed comely lads and ignored striking girls. Practical as she was, she made peace with herself about the matter: better that Van should play with lads than squander their money on some other woman, or—God forbid!—a second family. Her husband was preposterously good-looking; she guessed people wondered how Mabel White, bony and sparrow-chested, could have fetched such a prize. Maybe it was her boyish figure that had appealed to Van. More likely her dowry, including that small but prizewinning herd.

  She chose therefore to content herself with the comfort and warmth of his strength in her bed every night, with their house and the farm and the family they were creating, with his kindness. At last she answered him: “Oh, I don’t know, I guessed that perhaps their visit reminded you of the war.”

  “Ah…”

  Under the sheets, she embraced him best she could from behind; it was a stretch for her, so broad was his torso. “Van?”

  “Hmm?” He caught her hand in his own and held it close against him.

  “It’s time, don’t you think, Phyllis had a sister or brother?” He turned over to face her. She continued, “This farm is far too big to weigh its future on the shoulders of one little child.”

  He caressed her and took her in his arms; he raised the hem of her nightgown, feeling between her legs, squeezing, not tightly, then releasing, and again and again till she moaned, kissing her till she softened, dampened. Her breath deepened, her whole body relaxed and charged at once. Her mind pictured her husband’s strong hands at last month’s birthing of the lambs, helping to draw them from the ewes and then prodding the newborns, coaxing them to come alive, to open their eyes and bleat and stand on their legs to nurse from their mothers. Van and the shepherds as midwives—such tenderness …

  Then she felt her husband fill her to her guts, it seemed, to her very heart. She pressed her face into his neck. What did she hear? Was he sobbing? Yes. Why?

  She started counting the months in her mind. Come next winter, she was certain, there would be a baby.

  34

  Since returning from the war, Maurice had been careful to write or, if possible, to phone Mrs. Hall regularly whenever he was away from home. On the recent trip to France, he’d wired her about the success of his mission to locate the missing soldier; he then wrote that he would be making his way back to London at a tourist’s pace and followed up with postcards from Venice and Zurich. In none of these communications did he name the soldier, much less mention that they were traveling together. When he’d reached England, he phoned her. “So you’ve been all right, Mother? And Auntie?”

  “Yes, Morrie. Of course, it’s rather lonely without you. The house seems a bit empty, two old women rattling around…”

  Maurice sighed. How often had he heard that complaint? He tried changing the subject. “Oh, I’m sure that Ada and the baby must be keeping you busy.”

  “Ada was very patient with me during those horrible months you were missing, so very kind—I may have worn out my welcome.”

  “No, surely…”

  “One senses these things. But then, I do have two daughters. What of my elder girl?”

  Maurice recognized the bitter tone. “Ah, still no visit?”

  “How could I have wronged Kitty, that she should treat me so coldly?”

  “I’m sure it’s her work keeping her busy, as she says…”

  “And that place where she lives! If you could only have seen it…” Her voice was shaky.

  “Mama?”

  “I’m sorry…”

  He did not like to get caught between his sisters and their mother, but now he felt an obligation as the only son to try to make things right for her: “Listen. I’ve a couple of friends who live near Sheffield. I was planning to visit them—to follow up on some business I’d started before the war. I was thinking I’d go later, but I could go sooner instead and…”

  “And call on her? Would you, please?”

  “Yes, I shall. Give me a few days. I’ll wire you.”

  “Oh thank you. But Morrie—?”

  “I’m here.”

  “On the Continent, you were careful where you dined?”

  “What’s that—?”

  “I don’t trust those foreign sauces. You never know what’s in them—too many ingredients—”

  * * *

  Mrs. Hall’s elder daughter had made good on her intention to volunteer as a nurse after the outbreak of the war. In public, the mother approved the noble gesture, of course. (Could she do otherwise?) But in private, she shook her head: she’d raised her girls delicately, not to confront God-knows-what horrors in hospital wards. Besides, Kitty did not have the constitution for such work. She’d nearly died of scarlet fever as a child; she must therefore be exceptionally prone to infection. Mrs. Hall blamed herself for her daughter’s rashness. When was it—in 1912, 1913?—she’d allowed the girls to take that course offered by the Red Cross on how to apply bandages in an emergency. If she’d only stood more firmly against it. But they wheedled and pleaded about “all the other mothers” till she gave in—on the condition that she accompany them. To be sure, it seemed harmless then. They even cajoled dear Clive Durham into letting them practice on him and wrapped him like a mummy. Those were happier times, when Maurice and the young squire were friends. Who could have known what was coming? But even now, with the peace, Kitty continued her medical work, despite her mother’s reminders that her twenty-fifth birthday was approaching, and she might give some thought to her personal life, particularly marriage. “At your age, I was expecting my second baby. Who, by the way, dear, was you.”

  “It’s selfish of you, Mama, demanding that I visit when there’s so much need all around us. Remember, your own son once relied on the care of his nurses.”

  With Maurice, Kitty tugged the right maternal heartstring. Mrs. Hall considered perhaps it was selfish of her to expect her daughter to come to London. Therefore she went to Sheffield, where Nurse Hall was living and rotating her service among three military hospitals.

  She went uninvited, unannounced, and prompted by an intuition that something was amiss. She made her way
through the town’s dirt, the miasma of soot, the squalling children, the want and envy of those who hated the sight of such a well-dressed lady as herself. She was particularly pained by the eyes of those young veterans (often maimed) who stood about idle or begging. Of what did they wish to accuse her?

  At last she reached a building on an unpaved street and asked a neighbor for Miss Hall.

  “The nurse?”

  “Yes, Nurse Hall.”

  The neighbor climbed the stairs and returned: “No answer at the door.”

  “I’d like to wait in her room, then. I’m her mother. I’ve traveled from London to visit.”

  “I haven’t a key.”

  “Oh.” She looked up at the frayed curtains in the window that she imagined was Kitty’s. She offered the neighbor a coin. “Would you please say I called?”

  On the train back, Mrs. Hall was upset: she could not dismiss the feeling that Kitty had in fact been there in her room when she called. She was unsure if she was more concerned for her daughter’s well-being or infuriated by this slap in the face.

  35

  On Empire Day in the spring of 1919, children all over the kingdom had been singing:

  And did those feet in ancient time

  Walk upon England’s mountains green?

  Alec couldn’t get the tune out his head, nor the words, nor the music of their treble voices all mixed up with the military bands, parades of open motorcars, carriages, and officers on horseback. Men in uniform—Canadians, Anzacs, Indians—still marching, why? What next? “Bolshevik Terror!” The dailies were screeching that the BEF would go off to fight the Reds next. “Oh for Christ’s sake,” he thought, “just send the weary lads home.”

  And was the holy Lamb of God,

  On England’s pleasant pastures seen!

  And did the Countenance Divine,

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here,

  Among these dark Satanic Mills?

  Before the war, at the Working Men’s College, Harrison Grant had decoded Blake’s mystical verses for his students. Once upon a time, he told them, according to legend, during the Hidden Years of his unrecorded life, the young Jesus had sailed to England with Joseph of Arimathea. Yes, the holy Lamb of God in the company of the man whom the legend called a tin merchant and who, in due time, according to the St. John gospel, would receive his young charge’s divine body from the cross. He would bury Jesus in the tomb he’d had carved for himself.

  Alec wondered if Professor Grant had volunteered for battle. He seemed the sort that would have made the valiant gesture, even in his fifties, so devoted to his students that he would wish to fight with them and for them. Had he survived the war? Or had he died, along with all his knowledge and passion…?

  George’s prediction, made back when they enlisted, turned out right: the parcel of forestland they’d found before the war was bought up while they were in battle, its great trees felled for Satanic Mills. They were now standing in front of the weapons factory built there, put up as fast and cheaply as possible and meant to be temporary, but proving to be permanent, along with its warehouses and service roads. Scores of additional acres had been cleared for a much different purpose: for summer cottages, each featuring a picturesque little turret.

  The children had sung:

  Bring me my Bow of burning gold:

  Bring me my Arrows of desire:

  Bring me my Spear—O clouds unfold!

  Bring me my Chariot of fire!

  Now there was no other forestland for sale—neither nearby nor anywhere, it seemed, in all of England. Where to go now?

  Maurice sighed and said, “Seen enough?”

  36

  Ted and George had welcomed their young friends back to stay at Millthorpe. There, they decided that Maurice should seek out his sister in Sheffield on his own. Alec would meanwhile return to Osmington. He’d given Van the go-ahead on buying the Scudder cottage, and Van invited him to visit to see if there were things he wanted.

  The cloudless sky brightened the sight of Alec’s empty home. The agent had offered him the key, but he’d found his own in a pocket of his old army pack. He’d had it with him, forgotten it, all through the war.

  He hesitated before opening the door. Why the dread? He was tempted to walk away and tell Van to sell what he could and toss the rest. His parents owned nothing valuable: unloading their things would likely cost more than the lot was worth. But what of the pictures, mementos? He conceded a family obligation and turned the key in the lock.

  Inside it was hazy with dust, motes scattering in the air when he closed the door. All else was stillness. In the kitchen, he saw breakfast dishes by the sink. Had Aderyn left them to wash on that morning more than two years ago when she’d planned to come home after seeing Fred off from Southampton?

  He heard the faintest of sounds, something rusty yet musical. What was it? His grandmother’s spinet. He must have stirred the air enough to make its wires vibrate. He stood at the yellowed keyboard and pressed a key. Instead of a note, it yielded a little thud, the hammer within likely broken. He ran his finger along an octave.

  He took down some pictures from a wall in the parlor, tintypes of forebears, bridal couples. These he would send to his brother, along with Fred and Jane’s own wedding photo, colored by hand. There was also a wedding picture of Ma and Da, posed in a studio against a background of a painted garden scene with a real balustrade. That he would keep for himself.

  He braced himself to go into his parents’ bedroom. (Maurice had warned him the visit would be hard, and so it was proving.) In that bed between the windows, his mother told him, he’d been born. He’d been an easy birth, as births go, she said, easier than Fred, and … She did not complete the thought and her eyes turned sad. Was she remembering the twins, stillborn? Or maybe Susan’s fevered cradle beside the bed? How it must have pained her when her granddaughter took ill, remembering her own baby’s ordeal. His knees suddenly went weak with sorrow and he sank down on the floor at the foot of the bed. He cried out loud, “Oh, Ma…”

  He took hold of the footboard to pull himself up. In the patchwork quilt, he thought he recognized some squares from old curtains and such. Then it struck him that he’d been conceived in that bed as well as born in it, and Fred and the others too. The room seemed a shrine to his parents’ life together, their most ordinary life.

  His mother’s clothes were already gone—sent on to Buenos Aires by a neighbor at her request. He was glad of that. Only his father’s things remained to be looked through. He turned away from the bed to cross to the dresser. He was surprised to see his own face on the wall, a photo of him in uniform taken shortly after enlisting, hung where his parents could see it when they were lying in bed. The picture was not yet five years old, but how much younger the face appeared than the one he could see in the film-streaked mirror.

  He opened a drawer—Da’s shirts and long johns and a thick-knitted cardigan. He knew his father’s clothes: in the closet would be two coats and four pairs of trousers, overalls, a mackintosh, a topcoat, but not his Sunday black suit—he’d been buried in it. None of the clothes would fit Alec; and Fred, whom they might fit, wouldn’t want them. He opened a small top drawer. There, with his father’s collars, was his watch, also his cuff links, a wedding gift from his bride. Aderyn must have held them back from the coffin to pass on to their sons. Beneath these valuables, he found an envelope, unsealed and unaddressed, holding a letter. He opened it and read:

  My own dearest son,

  We just returned from the train to see you off. I sat with your mother for a time with no word spoke betwixt us but at last she sed she woud lay down & has done so upon our bed where I hear her talking to your picture.

  Thryce the Lord has taken you from us. First three yeers ago when you were to cross the sea with Fred. But then you upeered befor us the very next day! You will never know how my heart did leep when I saw you. Then to leeve us again for this curst war
. That was twyce. But again you came back to us hurt but alyve. Now to set off again back to that place of death. I have no words for such back & forth joy and sorrow. Pray God bring you home to us onct for all.

  I shall not post this to you now, lest the sensers tare it up or you shoud be sad for our sake, but when the war ends & you are returned to us forever then I shall read it to you with lafter & care nothing for how foolish I upeere to hold you & kiss you, man that you are, as my own sweete boy.

  —Da

  30 Aug 1916

  * * *

  Walking toward the address in Sheffield, Maurice encountered veterans (as his mother had done), but instead of hastening to pass them by (as she had), he stopped to greet them, a pair of men, one lame, the other missing his left hand. He asked where they’d served and with what outfit. When they ascertained that Maurice too had seen battle (at first they’d taken him for a lily-white staffer), their attitude changed from resentment to a gruff kind of brotherhood, and then to respect when they learned he’d fought at Gallipoli. He urged them please to accept some money and enjoy a couple of rounds on him, assuring them that he’d join them for a pint himself but for urgent family business. As he reached for his wallet, he heard a woman behind him also greet the men. He turned to face his sister, who was even more surprised than he.

  * * *

  Alec sat on the bed and read the letter again. He closed his eyes and pictured his father writing … Where would he have sat? At that little table in Alec’s old room? Yes! Where his schoolboy son had worked equations and drawn triangles and identified parts of speech. He pictured his father, hunched, his rough large hand guiding a pen in the delicate task of forming words on paper, giving shape to a passion beyond words, that of his fatherhood. Alec kissed the letter. He said aloud, to no one, “I want to be buried with this.”