White Mythology

by WD Clarke

  The fat kids went to Parochial school. We were Catholics, too, but it cost a lot of money, so we didn’t. We went to Duxbury High and got our Religious Ed. in different Catholic ladies’ basements. We sat in circles a lot, boys and girls together, and had to hold hands when we prayed, which I didn’t mind but which Gerald hated, even though he was two years older. He was shy around girls.

  We saw lots of filmstrips too. The one that scared me the most was the one about Abraham, whose wife was old and couldn’t have kids. Then God gave them one, which was good in a way, but then God told Abraham to sacrifice the kid, which made no sense at all, and turned out to be a bluff anyways, but it was scary nonetheless. I mean, yeah, sure, there’s the obvious name thing with the son, but Abraham, who’d seemed so good and righteous and caring, was all of a sudden ready to slit the kid’s throat like he was a sheep or calf or some other dumb animal.

  Some God, some dad, I said to Mrs. Holiday, our teacher. Her daughter, Elizabeth, was the first girl Gerald ever had a crush on. Elizabeth wore Fair Isle sweaters, bore a striking resemblance to that girl with the ‘naturally curly hair’ in the Peanuts cartoon, and, even though she herself wasn’t blond, dated a blond soccer player who sold Microdots at school. She sailed for the Yacht Club and had no time for Gerald, and I told him so. He stared at me like he didn’t know what I was talking about. He looked at me like he was going to say ‘Elizabeth who?’ or ‘Shut up, dickwad’. But he didn’t. He just stared.

  God was testing Abraham, Mrs. Holiday said. It was a test, to see if Abraham was faithful. People back then did those kinds of things, Isaac, Gerald chimed in, in an ambiguously matter-of-fact voice that made me wonder if he was trying to assuage my concerns or embarrass me. They were barbaric, he said, not civilized like us. We’ve progressed.

  I was called Isaac in honour of dad’s brother, and also my great-uncle. Dad had been Jewish before he met my mom, but not the real religious kind. He’d been a communist back in Montreal, too, something which I didn’t understand at all, but which I knew had to be bad. You mean he’s Russian? I asked after making discreet inquires amongst my friends, all of whom were as clueless as I. Gerald looked like he knew, but Gerald wouldn’t answer.

  I asked my dad about the Abraham thing, which I knew he’d like, because he was sure religious nowadays, going to church weekdays sometimes too, though he wasn’t showy or talky about it at all, which both Gerald and I respected. Dad was serious and quiet, when he wasn’t in one of his moods, and liked to talk to us about books and things. Gerald read way more than I did, but I still loved to hear my dad talk.

  It’s a little complicated, my dad said about my Abraham question. But it comes down to trust. God needed to know if Abraham trusted him completely, more than anything or anyone else.

  That wasn’t really a satisfactory answer, so I asked another question. Dad, are you a communist?

  What do you mean by communist?

  I don’t know, I said. But it’s a bad thing, right?

  That would depend upon what you meant by the word, he said, pausing to look at me look at him, as if I thought he was playing with me. I was, but he wasn’t.

  I believe, he said, choosing his words the way we’d choose candy at the store, with a deadly, earnest deliberation, I believe that God is Love. We belong to Him. Everything we have belongs to Him, and He gives us this world because he wants us to be happy. But we, being human, think that we’re the ones responsible for everything we have or don’t have, and that we don’t have to share with anyone if we don’t want to. And the way we humans have set up the world is so that some have lots of things and others have very little, or even nothing.

  That’s not right, I said.

  No, it’s not, he said.

  But, are you a communist? I said

  What’s a communist? he said.

  Dad! I don’t know! I said. That’s why I’m asking! Look it up, son, he said. Look it up.

  That was dad on a good day. He had quite a few like that. But there were other, not-so-good days, too. I don’t think he liked working for Mr. Jones.

  —Why not? Amē asks.

  She knows why not. Gerald had gone over much of the same territory with her, but she wants to hear it all again, one last time, from me.

  I oblige, and speak as calmly and deliberately as I can, pretending, so I can tell the story as honestly as possible, that we have only recently made acquaintance.

  Dad had been a poet, or a writer of some kind anyhow, when he was a student. It had been his dream, I heard him say a couple of times to my mother, that his avocation might one day become his vocation, and when he was young it had felt tangible, palpable. But now it came to him only from time to time, in the occasional nocturnal dream, gossamer shadows flickering on the film screen of the imagination for an hour or two every now and then before the lights came on. And the lights always do come on, and life comes first, real life, and with it the three of us to feed, to care for and worry over.

  Life came first for all of us. Gerald got over his crush on Elizabeth Holiday, but then started following around this girl who was at our bus stop. She was small, really skinny, and her hair was like Rapunzel’s, but redredred. She was certainly pretty, but she always looked like she wanted to be somewhere else, like riding horses maybe, and she never talked to any of us. I don’t think she knew that Gerald existed, and I told him so. He started timing his walks to the bus stop, so they would coincide with hers.

  The Religious Ed. filmstrips at this time had to do with martyrs. Many saints, it seemed, had been called upon to give up their lives for what they believed in. The latest filmstrip was on John F. Kennedy. He was from Boston, like the bands The Cars and Aerosmith (and, of course, Boston), and so we all paid attention to this. President Kennedy had done many brave deeds in World War II, in his boat pt109. President Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline had made America into a new Camelot. But more importantly, President Kennedy had sacrificed his life for the Church, and for America. For freedom. Your freedom. My freedom. Freedom from war, freedom from communism. Mrs. Buttons, the parent-teacher for this unit, played Elton John’s ‘Your Song’ afterwards, and talked about where she’d been when the great man was shot and this got us all crying, even the most reserved of the boys, even Gerald. Then Mrs. Buttons gave us all copies of the lyrics. We would be performing it, she informed us, with the Children’s folk choir at Thanksgiving.

  The year was 1976, and we had a very dry September and October. It didn’t even rain once. The leaves fell early, all at the same time, and we made forts out of them. Then Gerald and his friend Victor got a parcel in the mail. Cherry Bombs! Smoke Bombs! Bottle Rockets! It astounded us that the post office would deliver such things, straight to our house, since they were illegal in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Anyhow, we could now make real use out of our forts, and so we promptly, efficiently, chose sides.

  I’d never liked Victor. We were middle class, and he was working class, but I don’t think that was the only reason. There was also the fact that he was even more nerdy, even more of a naïf than we were, but there had to be more to it than that. It was probably jealousy.

  Jealousy. No, I’d never liked Victor, but I’d always worshipped my brother, had always followed him around. He was two years older, but I went wherever he went, did whatever he did. Watched the same shows, listened to the same music, played the same games. I turned out to be better at sports than him, but he never seemed to mind. When we fought, it was usually on the same Side, against our classmates, or our neighbours, or whomever.

  For the draft-picks Gerald, who had invented the Game, made himself General. He knew, of course, that I was the best shot, the fastest runner, had the best arm. But he chose Victor first, and Gipper Welch, the other General, predictably chose his own best friend (8th grade ‘most likely to succeed’) Brian Buttons. When Gerald chose one of the Kennedy twins next, Gipper shot him an ‘are you retarded?’ look, gestured in my direction like he was going to choose me, but then
to ok the other twin—in order, it seemed, to make a point.

  —And what point was that? she asks.

  —To force the issue. Of why Gerald was not choosing me. Gipper was going to twist Gerald’s arm; he was going to make Gerald choose me.

  —Did he?

  He did. He pretty well had to. But in the fourth round. Just before ‘ludicrous’, but just after ‘painfully obvious to all concerned’. So here we had two rather obvious clues that something was up with my brother. I pretended that I didn’t notice, but it would have been disingenuous of me to say that I didn’t feel hurt: we had always done everything together, and now, here was Gerald, becoming … someone else. Why?

  Here’s why. Or, here’s how I felt about it at the time, because now, I’m not so sure. But in 1976, I thought it was, well, very clear, and on the surface. Sure, part of it had to do with dad, with those episodes he always had, every so often. He’d always had them, but they were starting to really piss Gerald off. But part of it also had to do with me.

  As for dad’s part: Mom had been away for 36 hours, and the place was a mess, he said, shouted actually, while we stood in front of his barber’s chair, in the basement, where he sat.

  He called her Mom too, never by her name, at least in front of us. But this was not disconcerting to us at the time, because, to Gerald and me, she was Mom, not Margaret Mary. Her family called her that, while friends called her Marjie. Letters that came to the house addressed her as Mrs. Harold Tibbs.

  Mom was still away, and would stay away for another 36 hours too, which was not something that Gerald and I were looking forward to, for it meant listening to dad rant and rave, quite steadily, until her return.

  He was not a drunk; he was always quite sober when he delivered his ‘lectures’, which was generally about once or twice a month, and which always took place in Mom’s absence. We never complained to her about them, and she never said anything to us, but I was sure, even then, that she knew about them, on some level.

  Yes, mom was far away, as he sat in his barber’s chair, cracked red leather atop scratched porcelain-on-steel. He’d gotten it from his father’s barber shop when we were little, after his father, Theobald, had died. What was the significance of that chair? What did it represent?—the emotional topography of a land that was foreign to us boys, because we never really knew our grandfather, a German-speaking Jew who had brought his own two sons from the Czech Sudetenland in the 1930s, and who had lived near and worked on Rue-St.-Viatur from the day he arrived in Montreal until the day he died. Grandfather somehow had a different surname (Hauer) from ours (Tibbs)—what was up with that?

  Dad sat in his barber’s chair, and we stood in front of him, listening, taking it in, just taking it: We knew that this was merely one of his Episodes, that he didn’t really mean it, but of course there was the distinct, nagging possibility that he did. He was kind, gentle and thoughtful at other times, why did this have to happen?

  You’d be forgiven for asking a different question: why did we even put up with it? Necessity, I guess, on a number of levels, but a part of that necessity was also love. In any event, people will put up with a hell of a lot when they feel they don’t have a choice.

  We had always put up with it, it seemed, ever since we could remember. But now Gerald—wait. You have to understand why Gerald….

  I can’t be-lieve you two! Dad said. I just can’t believe it! The house is a mess, the kitchen a dis-as-ter! I take you to play hockey, and this is the thanks I get? Is it? Is this the thanks?

  Well, no, in a word, but listen: the whole way back from hockey, the thirty-minute drive from the Pemboke rink, had turned into a compressed, well, all-too-familiar étude, but one which, if possible, resembled nothing so much as a neo-Wagnerian operetta, performed alla breve and with uncompromising dissonance by a well-rehearsed yet over-enthusiastic trio of Aryan Blackshirts: the recitatives were generally homophonic, the tonal centre always my father’s supple, yet daringly accidental, chromatic tenor. Our own grace notes careened back and forth from a doloroso, muttered basso-profundo to whispered, whimpering falsetto. The libretto was reliably melodramatic, replete with staggering alliteration, mixed metaphor and bathetic juxtaposition, while the score was always fortissimo, predictably accelerando, and, as we neared the Duxbury town limits, mounted to what should have been a climactic, cathartic agitato. But then a sudden, ad libitum rest led to an interlude performed on the car radio (680 wrko Boston) by the rock band Queen, while Gerald and I opened our second helpings of Mountain Dew and sipped from the now-warm cans in silence, the considerable levels of caffeine having made us, as Gerald (who was fond of port-manteau words) would put it, ‘twired’. The second act would commence when we got home, staged in our concrete-floored and therefore acoustically live basement.

  It wasn’t (my father began again, once more from the top) it wasn’t that we had lost our game against Hull. It wasn’t even that the score was 8-0. No. It was that, as a team, we had shown ourselves to be self-centred idlers as well. Our passing, to the extent that there was any, he said, was simply deplorable (the actual word, one of his stock favourites, a word that sings like a dentist’s drill in my head to this day, was ‘appalling’). Our appalling wingers, excepting, of course, Gerald (who had other issues of his own, with which we were all quite familiar and to which he would be returning in due course), our wingers backchecked with the frequency and orientation of Halley’s comet, hanging out whenever possible near centre ice with their backs to the action, but with their heads turned around with an absurd impatience, waiting with unshakeable faith for the defence to complete, on their own, an unlikely breakout from our end. And whenever the puck did manage to randomly bounce into Hull’s end, into one of the corners, our wingers had the stick-to-itiveness of Teflon. Moreover, our defensemen for their part were unfailingly polite, Lady Byng nominees all, deferentially removing themselves from in front of the net so that they could look on—admiringly—as Hull’s forwards could practice their slapshots in the slot. Etc.

  Gerald had gotten knocked around a lot, and it was his own fault. He had three inches and fifteen pounds over dad (who was short, wiry, intense), but dad had never let anyone push him around the way Gerald did, not on the ice anyway. As for me, I was tougher, dad said, but definitely too much of a hothead, and I couldn’t argue there. I was quite big for my age, playing up a league, and I didn’t take any shit from anybody, especially not those goons from Hull, who were all a good three or four inches taller than most of our players.

  Late in the second period, already ahead 5-0, Hull had switched its focus from scoring to maiming, continually stepping over the line and getting awarded penalties so often that, it had seemed, they’d played the rest of the game short-handed. This, however, had gotten in the way of neither their hitting nor their scoring. Finally, with thirty seconds to go in the game, after I had dumped the puck into Hull’s end and Gerald had bravely chased it into the corner, a particularly unevolved monster in one of those hemispherical Stan Makita helmets had gone after him, charging at him from forty feet out and driving him into the board head-first. His helmet had taken the brunt of the impact, and had fallen to pieces on the ice.

  Gerald couldn’t get up. He was conscious, all right, but he lay still on the ice, staring at the rafters. I circled slowly ‘round and ‘round Hull’s net. The Neanderthal who’d hit Gerald just stood by the boards, near his team bench, unconcerned, awaiting his penalty the way he might wait for a hamburger at Wendy's. He rested his gloves on the butt-end of his stick, and his chin on his gloves, his head tilted to the side, and wearing a blank, yet somehow impatient expression. I circled, Gerald moved to his knees, paused, tried to stand up. My circles grew larger. Cro-Magnon man began joking with team-mates, orangutans all, who were now milling about him as Gerald stood, wobbled, fell back to the ice, got up on all fours, collapsed back down, as if under the weight of an invisible force field. One of my team-mates’ fathers, a doctor, came down from the stands and onto th
e ice. I stopped my circling, glided noiselessly over to Gorilla-boy, holding my stick like a baseball bat. He didn’t see me coming: I smashed at his ankle with everything I had, dropped my gloves and fell with him to the ice, ripped off his helmet and managed to knock several teeth out of his mouth before the refs could pry me away.

  That was the beginning of my role in our family melodrama, as far as I could tell. It was several days before Gerald called me peckerhead, if I remember properly, and the day before the thing with the forts….

  This will not do, dad continued, this will just not DO. I’d been suspended from the league for the rest of the season. Gerald did not seem to be injured, the doctor had said, which was good, but I’d been suspended, which was bad.

  The doctor had eventually managed to get Gerald to his feet and had escorted him off the ice, guiding him by the arm. I followed at a respectful distance, my team-mates patting me on the shoulder-pads and tapping their sticks on my shin-pads and butt, congratulating me in manly voices.

  In the dressing room the jocular mood (the kind guys get into after witnessing a good ‘scrap’) continued, because the coach was still on the ice arguing with the ref about my suspension, and none of the parents had arrived yet. Gerald seemed fine, if a little dazed. He joked too, with the others, perhaps a bit sheepishly, about the hit—I’m not sure if I’m reading back into this or not—but then one of them yelled out Que es mas macho?—which was a gag on Saturday Night Live at the time. Then the others all chanted back, in unison, I-saac!—meaning, of course, that I was more macho than that puffed-up tarsier from Hull, but Gerald took it differently. I noticed a strange mood come over him, but couldn’t say anything because just then the coach came in—and behind him, not advancing through the doorway, our father.

  He said nothing, but a nod of his head in the direction of the parking lot meant that he’d be waiting out in the car. Gerald and I quickly undid our skates, grabbed our bags, helmets, gloves and sticks, and hurried out to the parking lot. We were still wearing our sweat-saturated equipment, and it chafed our underarms, elbows, knees and inner thighs as we moved with reluctant speed towards our fate, towards the lecture that awaited us.