Martin Sloane

by Michael Redhill

  “I don’t think your sister would be happy to know I was here. I’d better just go.”

  “You’ll come back, though? And bring some fish and chips?”

  “Yes,” I said. I just wanted to get out. The oppressive thickness of the smoke, the hopelessness of the room. I wanted to run.

  “My sister is not so well in the head,” Mrs. Bryce said, groaning. “She thinks the king is Jewish. Can you imagine?”

  “Which king?”

  She frowned at me. “The king of Ireland, dear.”

  I took the smouldering remains of her cigarette out of her hand, which she watched with sad dismay, and then I stood away from her. I righted one of the boxes that lay flat on a table. It was a box with loose sand and hidden pictures. I couldn’t remember its name. I placed it in its correct position. The head of a mushroom peeked out. “I’d better go,” I said. “If you could just tell me where can I find Martin?”

  “My lord!” barked a voice behind me, and I spun around to see Lenore standing in an attitude of shaking terror. “Francy?” she cried out.

  “I’m here, Lennie. We have a visitor.”

  “What do you want?” said Mrs. Bryce’s sister. She held a wire brush tightly in her hands. “We’ve nothing for you here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  “I turned you out,” she said.

  “I know, and I’m sorry. I needed to talk to Mrs. Bryce.”

  “Francine?” the old woman cried again. I stepped aside so she could see her sister was okay.

  “She’s fine,” I said. “She’s had a cigarette, you see.” Lenore remained frozen to the spot, only her eyes moving, shooting back and forth between her sister and myself. “I’m going now, though.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Lenore. Mrs. Bryce raised her hand to her sister.

  “D’you know, Lennie, she’s bringing fish and chips!” she said happily.

  I started out toward the front door, and Mrs. Bryce’s sister stepped backwards and flattened herself against a wall to let me pass. “I turned you out,” she said quietly, in disbelief. I stopped in front of her.

  “You’ve no right deciding who your sister can and can’t see,” I said. “I came on important business. I have every right to see her.”

  “He tossed her away like she was garbage!” she said, her voice rasping, so her sister wouldn’t overhear. “I take care of her now! I do! He can’t send his messengers here.”

  “I’m not a messenger,” I said, but the old woman was frantically waving her hand in front of her face and shaking her head, as if to make a bad dream go away. “I’m leaving, all right?” I said, and I pushed away from her, my face burning, and went to the door. Lenore followed and I opened the door on the bright day outside and felt the flat of the old woman’s palm on my shoulder. “Don’t touch me!” I snapped, but then she was shoving me out of the house. I grabbed ahold of the railing to keep myself from falling down the stairs, and still she kept pushing with the force of her anger and fear.

  “Get out! Get out! Get out!” she kept shouting. I flailed an arm behind me, striking at her, the other gripped the railing tight.

  “I’m out, for god’s sake!” I shouted back at her, and then she was quickly back behind the threshold and the door was slammed shut. I heard her footsteps hurrying back down the hall, and I took the steps to the street, my legs wobbly.

  I stood in the shed with him, his back to me, his hands busy with something unseen.

  His things scattered about, still unpurposed.

  An old croquet ball, yellow and red, the paint around the middle chipped.

  A wax parchment envelope, smaller than a child’s palm, containing a deck of tea cards from the turn of the century, birds of Ireland: stonechat, mute swan, pied wagtail.

  A horn from a phonograph, patinaed in a golden floral motif.

  Two iron garter pins.

  One sleeve from a 78 RPM recording of “That Old Virginia.”

  The feeling, the certainty, that you cannot know anyone. Not if you love them.

  I got on a bus back out on the main drag, the early-afternoon sun lighting up the trees, the leaves as singular as mirrors. Turning colour but still drawing down heat and light, the desire to live attending. I wanted nothing more than to get back to the hotel and get into bed, but of course the bus turned and headed off toward St. Stephen’s Green, which omen I accepted as being part of my comeuppance. The park came into view and I gave in, pushed the stop button and stepped down into the bright square of streets there, the taxis zipping by on all sides, and I crossed to the green. I walked into the park, where the sounds of traffic fell away almost immediately, and I took a seat at the edge of a wide circling path, and gradually, above my throbbing head, the sun moved. (Did I sleep? Did I stare off into the trees?) I watched children feeding the swans on the far side of the pond. In fairytales such regal birds, but in life, feral. They snapped at the children’s hands, at each other, and gulped the food down as if they’d die in moments without it. I remembered hating domesticated wild animals when I’d gone as a child to the petting zoo in Rochester with Dale still in my mother’s arms. The sloe-eyed baby lambs, nearly dead from gorging on ice cream and bread, the disgusting llamas and the threadbare donkeys sway-backed and depressed, purulent sores on their knees. All of them covered in the urine-soaked woodchips, caked in cotton candy and bits of red candy apple. Dale had been attacked by an enraged swan when he tried to feed a duck some popcorn, and it had beaten my father with immense wings when he tried to free him. I shuddered, recalling the filth.

  My thoughts turned to how I would explain this outing to Molly. On the way to Mrs. Bryce’s it had occurred to me that the morning might provide the very thing I had come to Ireland for, but now it was clear I was only at the beginning of a winding path, and that I would have to take Molly on it with me if I wished to continue. Stopping altogether did seem a much more sensible thing to do. I went to see Martin’s wife, I’d say, it didn’t turn out that well. I’m going home now. A man who was sitting at the end of the bench folded his paper hurriedly and began walking away. “Was I saying that out loud?” I called after him. “I’ll be quiet, you can come back.” He went off down the path.

  A nut vendor rode past and I bought a bag each of chestnuts, peanuts, and candied almonds from him. I tucked the two hot bags under my shirt to warm my middle, and I chewed the almonds. The park was emptying out. Unaccountably, my heart got heavy for Toronto. It was no longer the cold city I’d once been warned off of. I’d gone there to wait for my life, and although Martin never returned there, my life gradually did. The city became my home, by default. But here, for all I knew, there were murderers lurking in the trees with poets; astronomers crossing the park for their hotel assignations; lost children no one would ever look for. Was there a search for me taking place? How would I be described? Young? Plain? I hoped they would note my full-bodied sandy brown hair, my long graceful neck. Woman with kissable neck goes missing. Otherwise, no distinguishing characteristics, except for this black hand that reached out for me from the past.

  From the bench, I watched swans cutting Vs through the calm water and I felt those wings on the back of my head, the lift and heave of a body settling. To be carried off. To be anywhere but here. The atmosphere in Mrs. Bryce’s house had been too much like the house I’d lived in after my mother’s death, where my father’s grief floated in the corridors like the smoke from a dead blaze. For almost three years after she died, our father kept the curtains in the house drawn so that the rooms were always yellow with strained light and dust hung in the air. Apart from Basil Thompson, the piano tuner (who came once every six months by prior arrangement, even though no one played), there were no visitors to the house. My father ate alone, read alone in his study, went alone to church. When he spoke to us, it was to run down the list of things we had to do to survive. Had we eaten, had we washed. Did we go to school. Answering in the affirmative released us from these disc
ussions, and he would slouch off afterwards to one of the parts of the house we never went into.

  He still slept in the marriage bed, and there were still the thick yellowing doilies folded over the back of the couch that had been there for my entire life, although after 1975, I don’t think they were ever washed again. My father’s Chrysler was the only really obvious victim of time. It sat behind the house on deflated bald tires for years after my mother’s death, both windows on the driver’s side smashed, and the magenta paint faded to maroon from seasons of sunlight and rain. One spring, we found a kestrel nest tucked up under the chassis. We’d seen the mother flying under the car, back and forth. She thought the car was a fallen tree, I told Dale.

  My father no longer worked at the restaurant, but let his manager, Tom Darling, take over the business while he occasionally looked at the books. One night Mr. Darling came over and begged Dad to sell him the business before it went under. My father agreed, and afterwards he still did the books for the restaurant, but apart from that all activity stopped. He became a full-time mourner, and only the sound of his adding machine ratcheting grimly down the hall in his office gave proof of his existence. Sometimes he served me and Dale supper, then stood back leaning against the kitchen counter and smoking. When our plates were empty, he’d lurch forward and give seconds. Silent but for the clank and splat of food being served and eaten, these were the loneliest times of my childhood. All three of us in one room, and not a word spoken.

  If we got sick, an aunt would mysteriously appear, down from Syracuse, and stay the week, mechanically going through the nighttime actions our mother had once done with tenderness. Temperatures taken, the bittersweet chewable children’s aspirin given in a paper cup. Ginger ale going flat in a glass on the back of the toilet in case we got up and were thirsty.

  Seasons went like this, punctuated by Basil Thompson’s visits. The first time he came, I’d watched him anxiously from the corner of the room, knowing that he’d been hired and was there by permission, but still frightened he would upset whatever balance there was in the house. He struck the wires with his tuning fork and tightened or loosened the strings, reaching down to the front of the piano to test the keys. The sheets of muscle in his old back moved under his shirt and a bloom of sweat filled the dried stain that had soaked his shirt at his last appointment. When he was finished, he took a pencil out of his pocket and leaned into the piano’s works, under the lid. Then he became still, and pulled his head out, told me to come over. I went and stood on the bench and looked into the darker space of the piano’s guts where he was holding one of the felt hammers out from the strings. There was something written on it: “BT 12/6/39.” He moved his hand along the keyboard and pushed down one of the keys, and a deep, honeyed note sounded in the wood below us. He held out the hammer that connected to that key and wrote “BT 01/10/77” there. His handwriting was shakier, the line thicker. He played the higher note, and the two sounds twisted around us. That’s my whole life, he said.

  When my father died, many years later, Dale and I went up to Ovid and buried him beside my mother. The casket weighed almost nothing at all.

  He faded out, said Dale. We let the groundsmen lower him into the earth. He waited a long time to be with her again.

  I hope she’ll be where he’s expecting her, I said. Later that week, we got rid of what was left in the house. My father had long before closed the lid of the piano’s keyboard and locked it. It was still locked when we buried him, and we sold it like that, without the key.

  A young girl was standing in front of me, her hands behind her back. She teetered a little on her heels, watching me. “Why are you crying?”

  I shook my head. “I’m not.”

  “Are you sad because you’re old?”

  “I’m not old,” I said pushing my palms across my eyes. “I may be to you, but I’m not old.”

  “But you’re sad.” She regarded me with a little girl’s untrained frankness and then sat down beside me. “Because if you cry and you’re not sad you’re either very happy or you’re crazy.”

  “I don’t think I’m crazy, and I know I’m not happy, so you must be right.”

  “Will I sit with you for a while?”

  “I don’t know, will you?”

  She looked out into the trees, apparently thinking, then swung her stick-like legs and turned her little porcelain face to me. “Yes.”

  “You’re here pretty late, aren’t you?”

  “This is a safe park.” She was eight, maybe nine, with a mass of badly cut short blonde hair on her head, so thin it stuck up at her crown.

  “Does your mother know where you are?”

  “It’s all right. I’m going back soon.” She was looking up at me with eyes that seemed black in the dim lamplight of the park. I hadn’t noticed the lights coming on — it had somehow become dusk. I felt cocooned with the girl. Her hands lay folded in her lap, and she gazed out at the shadows of the trees, and beyond them, the moonlit pond that stretched down the north half of the park. Fat swans waddled past us on the grass.

  “They shouldn’t eat so much,” she said. “They get too heavy to fly.”

  “I think their wings grow along with them.”

  She thought about that, and looked down at her feet. “My father says they fly away in winter. They go somewhere nice.”

  “Maybe they go to France.”

  “Maybe.” I looked over at her, and she was sitting quietly now, her hands covering her knees. The dress was a little soiled around the hem. She looked up at me, eyes bright with a thought. “The lovely thing is they come back, isn’t that true? The very same ones. My father told me they remember how to come home because they follow the stars.”

  “That’s probably true.”

  She looked deeply satisfied to have her father’s knowledge seconded. “It probably is,” she said.

  “Have you had dinner?” I asked her.

  “About five hours ago.”

  “I mean supper.”

  “Oh. Well, there’s a party tonight, later. Mrs. Beaton is making fried fish.”

  “Are you hungry?”

  She buried her chin in her chest and shook her head.

  I passed her a few still-warm chestnuts. She sheepishly took them, and started cracking the shells in her teeth. I watched her eat with a strange pulse of love running through me. I wanted to touch her hair, which glowed in the light of the lamps. As if sensing this, she reached a hand out to me, palm up, and I gratefully took it. It was small, cool and damp, and she wrapped her fingers around the top of my hand. A sense of peace enveloped me, like a drug seeping down. We sat like that for what felt like many minutes, not speaking. Then my hand was empty. She was standing in front of me.

  “Gotta go,” she said.

  “Wait.” Against the pond, her slight child’s body had turned dark. I stood and reached forward and took both her hands in mine. She resisted, but I pulled her toward me, and when she emerged again into the light, she was a little boy. I drew him against my stomach, and I held him there.

  “I have to go,” he said.

  “Tell me why.” I pushed him back until I could see his face again and he stepped away. “I don’t understand.”

  “You think I didn’t love you,” he said.

  “It doesn’t matter what you felt anymore. I want to know about the rest of it.”

  “The rest is gone,” he said, and he shrugged. “I have to go now.”

  “Go where.”

  “Where I live. Iona Road.”

  “I know that,” I said bitterly and waved him away. “Go,” I said, and he moved off down a path between trees.

  VI.

  DIARY, 1963. 10" X 6" X 4" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FABRIC, CARDBOARD, FIBREGLASS. ART GALLERY OF ONTARIO. A BLUE CURTAIN, PULLED BACK BY MEANS OF TWO DOWELS PROTRUDING FROM THE TOP OF THE CONSTRUCTION, REVEALS A LIFE-SIZE HAND HOLDING DOWN THE TOP OF A MINIATURE CIGAR BOX WITH ITS INDEX FINGER. ENLARGED NEWSPAPER AD DISPLAYING DEPARTURE T
IMES OF S.S. ST. LOUIS ON EXTERIOR BACK OF BOX, WITH MIRROR-IMAGE SIGNATURE.

  WILLIAM HAD A CRICKET IN HIS HAND, BUT HE WAS refusing to show it to anyone. They were all standing on Iona Road; Devon was there too, and a boy named Clark they were trying out. This was outside the Beatons’ (number 74), and Martin knew to ignore William when he was like this, but Devon and Clark were red in the face from shouting at him. Down the road, outside number 16, Mr. Warren — the mouse-faced lawyer — opened his front gate and pulled it to. He got into his car. It started quietly; it was a car they said in the ads was the quietest car on the road (Chrysler advertised their Saloon cars the same way — smooth motoring, quiet motoring). Mr. Warren began driving toward Drumcondra Hill and when he came to the little roundabout at Iona Road and Iona Park, they saw his head dip down. Later, the police said Mr. Warren had dropped a piece of toast. The car slid into the roundabout, very slow, and at that moment the cricket jumped in William’s hand and he dropped it. It whirred like a sycamore key and landed in the grass as a car belonging to a Mr. Craigie (number 43, Lindsay Street) struck Mr. Warren’s car on the driver’s side. All four of the boys saw Mr. Warren’s body jump across the other seat, and his head popped out the window on the other side just before the car rolled over, trapping him by the neck. It was very still as the car lay there on its side in the grass circle, the only sound being Mr. Warren’s feet kicking against the passenger door. He thumped five or six times, then stopped. The crash had sounded to the boys like someone stepping on a paper cup.

  William and Devon and Clark rushed to the circle as Mr. Craigie stepped from his car and righted his glasses on his nose. Martin watched the four of them push the car back on its thin wheels, but he didn’t look at what was going on in the grass circle.