Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  The other chap, the Balliol man, was a perfect type of English-speaking Montrealer, perhaps a bond salesman or minor functionary in a brokerage house on Saint James Street. He was about fifty with a round domed head, red hair beginning to go slightly white at the neck and ears, pink porcine skin, very neatly barbered and combed. He wore an expensive white shirt with a fine blue stripe and there was some sort of ring around his tie. He had his hands folded fatly on the knob of a stick, round face with deep laugh-lines in the cheeks, and a pair of cheerfully darting little blue-bloodshot eyes. Where could the pair have run into each other?

  “I’ve forgotten my French years ago,” said the priest carelessly. “I was down in New Brunswick for many years and I’d no use for it, the work I was doing. I’m Irish, you know.”

  “I’m an old Blue.”

  “That’s right,” said the priest, “John’s the boy. Oh, he’s a sharp lad is John. He’ll let them all get off, do you see, to Manitoba for the summer, and bang, BANG!” All the bus jumped. “He’ll call an election on them and then they’ll run.” Something caught his eye and he turned to gaze out the window. The bus was moving slowly past the cemetery of Notre Dame des Neiges and the priest stared, half-sober, at the graves stretched up the mountainside in the sun.

  “I’m not in there,” he said involuntarily.

  “Indeed you’re not,” said his companion, “lot’s of life in you yet, eh, Father?”

  “Oh,” he said, “oh, I don’t think I’d know what to do with a girl if I fell over one.” He looked out at the cemetery for several moments. “It’s all a sham,” he said, half under his breath, “they’re in there for good.” He swung around and looked innocently at Fred. “Are you going fishing, lad?”

  “It’s a kite that I bought for my little girl,” said Fred, more cheerfully than he felt.

  “She’ll enjoy that, she will,” said the priest, “for it’s grand sport.”

  “Go fly a kite!” said the Oxford man hilariously. It amused him and he said it again. “Go fly a kite!” He and the priest began to chant together, “Hoo, hoo, whoops,” and they laughed and in a moment, clearly, would begin to sing.

  The bus turned lumberingly onto Queen Mary Road. Fred stood up confusedly and began to push his way to­wards the rear door. As he turned away, the priest grinned impudently at him, stammering a jolly goodbye. Fred was too embarrassed to answer but he smiled uncertainly and fled. He heard them take up their chant anew.

  “Hoo, there’s a one for you, hoo. Shaoil-na-baig. Whoops!” Their laughter died out as the bus rolled heavily away.

  He had heard about such men, naturally, and knew that they existed; but it was the first time in Fred’s life that he had ever seen a priest misbehave himself publicly. There are so many priests in the city, he thought, that the number of bum ones must be in proportion. The explanation satisfied him but the incident left a disagreeable impression in his mind.

  Safely home he took his shirt off and poured himself a Coke. Then he allowed Deedee, who was dancing around him with her terrible energy, to open the parcels.

  “Give your Mummy the pad and pencil, sweetie,” he directed. She crossed obediently to Naomi’s chair and handed her the cheap plastic case.

  “Let me see you make a note in it,” he said, “make a list of something, for God’s sake, so you’ll remember it’s yours. And the one on the desk is mine. Got that?” He spoke without rancour or much interest; it was a rather overworked joke between them.

  “What’s this?” said Deedee, holding up the kite and allowing the ball of string to roll down the hall. He resisted a compulsive wish to get up and re-wind the string.

  “It’s for you. Don’t you know what it is?”

  “It’s a red kite,” she said. She had wanted one for weeks but spoke now as if she weren’t interested. Then all at once she grew very excited and eager. “Can you put it together right now?” she begged.

  “I think we’ll wait till after supper, sweetheart,” he said, feeling mean. You raised their hopes and then dashed them; there was no real reason why they shouldn’t put it together now, except his fatigue. He looked pleadingly at Naomi.

  “Daddy’s tired, Deedee,” she said obligingly, “he’s had a long, hot afternoon.”

  “But I want to see it,” said Deedee, fiddling with the flimsy red film and nearly puncturing it.

  Fred was sorry he’d drunk a Coke; it bloated him and upset his stomach and had no true cooling effect.

  “We’ll have something to eat,” he said cajolingly, “and then Mummy can put it together for you.” He turned to his wife. “You don’t mind, do you? I’d only spoil the thing.” Threading a needle or hanging a picture made the normal slight tremor of his hands accentuate itself almost embarrassingly.

  “Of course not,” she said, smiling wryly. They had long ago worked out their areas of uselessness.

  “There’s a picture on it, and directions.”

  “Yes. Well, we’ll get it together somehow. Flying it … that’s something else again.” She got up, holding the notepad, and went into the kitchen to put the supper on.

  It was a good hot-weather supper, tossed greens with the correct proportions of vinegar and oil, croissants and butter, and cold sliced ham. As he ate, his spirits began to percolate a bit, and he gave Naomi a graphic sketch of the incident on the bus. “It depressed me,” he told her. This came as no surprise to her; almost anything unusual, which he couldn’t do anything to alter or relieve, depressed Fred nowadays. “He must have been sixty. Oh, quite sixty, I should think, and you could tell that everything had come to pieces for him.”

  “It’s a standard story,” she said, “and aren’t you sentimentalizing it?”

  “In what way?”

  “The ‘spoiled priest’ business, the empty man, the man without a calling. They all write about that. Graham Greene made his whole career out of that.”

  “That isn’t what the phrase means,” said Fred laboriously. “It doesn’t refer to a man who actually is a priest, though without a vocation.”

  “No?” She lifted an eyebrow; she was better educated than he.

  “No, it doesn’t. It means somebody who never became a priest at all. The point is that you had a vocation but ignored it. That’s what a spoiled priest is. It’s an Irish phrase, and usually refers to somebody who is a failure and who drinks too much.” He laughed shortly. “I don’t qualify, on the second count.”

  “You’re not a failure.”

  “No, I’m too young. Give me time!” There was no reason for him to talk like this; he was a very productive salesman.

  “You certainly never wanted to be a priest,” she said positively, looking down at her breasts and laughing, thinking of some secret. “I’ll bet you never considered it, not with your habits.” She meant his bedroom habits, which were ardent, and in which she ardently acquiesced. She was an adept and enthusiastic partner, her greatest gift as a wife.

  “Let’s put that kite together,” said Deedee, getting up from her little table, with such adult decision that her parents chuckled. “Come on,” she said, going to the sofa and bouncing up and down.

  Naomi put a tear in the fabric right away, on account of the ambiguity of the directions. There should have been two holes in the kite, through which a lugging-string passed; but the holes hadn’t been provided and when she put them there with the point of an icepick they immediately began to grow.

  “Scotch tape,” she said, like a surgeon asking for sutures.

  “There’s a picture on the front,” said Fred, secretly cross but ostensibly helpful.

  “I see it,” she said.

  “Mummy put holes in the kite,” said Deedee with alarm. “Is she going to break it?”

  “No,” said Fred. The directions were certainly ambiguous.

  Naomi tied the struts at right-angles, using so much string that Fre
d was sure the kite would be too heavy. Then she strung the fabric on the notched ends of the struts and the thing began to take shape.

  “It doesn’t look quite right,” she said, puzzled and irritated.

  “The surface has to be curved so there’s a difference of air pressure.” He remembered this, rather unfairly, from high-school physics classes.

  She bent the cross-piece and tied it in a bowed arc, and the red film pulled taut. “There now,” she said.

  “You’ve forgotten the lugging-string on the front,” said Fred critically, “that’s what you made the holes for, remember?”

  “Why is Daddy mad?” said Deedee.

  “I’M NOT MAD!”

  “It had begun to shower, great pear-shaped drops of rain falling with a plop on the sidewalk.

  “That’s as close as I can come,” said Naomi, staring at Fred, “we aren’t going to try it tonight, are we?”

  “We promised her,” he said, “and it’s only a light rain.”

  “Will we all go?”

  “I wish you’d take her,” he said, “because my stomach feels upset. I should never drink Coca-Cola.”

  “It always bothers you. You should know that by now.”

  “I’m not running out on you,” he said anxiously, “and if you can’t make it work, I’ll take her up tomorrow afternoon.”

  “I know,” she said, “come on, Deedee, we’re going to take the kite up the hill.” They left the house and crossed the street. Fred watched them through the window as they started up the steep path hand in hand. He felt left out, and slightly nauseated.

  They were back in half an hour, their spirits not at all dampened, which surprised him.

  “No go, eh?”

  “Much too wet, and not enough breeze. The rain knocks it flat.”

  “O.K.!” he exclaimed with fervour. “I’ll try tomorrow.”

  “We’ll try again tomorrow,” said Deedee with equal determination — her parents mustn’t forget their obligations.

  Sunday afternoon the weather was nearly perfect, hot, clear, a firm steady breeze but not too much of it, and a cloudless sky. At two o’clock Fred took his daughter by the hand and they started up the mountain together, taking the path through the woods that led up to the University parking lots.

  “We won’t come down until we make it fly,” Fred swore, “that’s a promise.”

  “Good,” she said, hanging on to his hand and letting him drag her up the steep path, “there are lots of bugs in here, aren’t there?”

  “Yes,” he said briefly — he was being liberally bitten.

  When they came to the end of the path, they saw that the campus was deserted and still, and there was all kinds of running room. Fred gave Deedee careful instructions about where to sit, and what to do if a car should come along, and then he paid out a little string and began to run across the parking lot towards the main building of the University. He felt a tug at the string and throwing a glance over his shoulder he saw the kite bobbing in the air, about twenty feet off the ground. He let out more string, trying to keep it filled with air, but he couldn’t run quite fast enough, and in a moment it fell back to the ground.

  “Nearly had it!” he shouted to Deedee, whom he’d left fifty yards behind.

  “Daddy, Daddy, come back,” she hollered apprehensively. Rolling up the string as he went, he retraced his steps and prepared to try again. It was important to catch a gust of wind and run into it. On the second try the kite went higher than before but as he ran past the entrance to the University he felt the air pressure lapse and saw the kite waver and fall. He walked slowly back, realizing that the bulk of the main building was cutting off the air currents.

  “We’ll go up higher,” he told her, and she seized his hand and climbed obediently up the road beside him, around behind the main building, past ash barrels and trash heaps; they climbed a flight of wooden steps, crossed a parking lot next to L’Ecole Polytechnique and a slanting field further up, and at last came to a pebbly dirt road that ran along the top ridge of the mountain beside the cemetery. Fred remembered the priest as he looked across the fence and along the broad stretch of cemetery land rolling away down the slope of the mountain to the west. They were about six hundred feet above the river, he judged. He’d never been up this far before.

  “My sturdy little brown legs are tired,” Deedee remarked, and he burst out laughing.

  “Where did you hear that,” he said, “who has sturdy little brown legs?”

  She screwed her face up in a grin. “The gingerbread man,” she said, beginning to sing, “I can run away from you, I can, ’cause I’m the little gingerbread man.”

  The air was dry and clear and without a trace of humidity and the sunshine was dazzling. On either side of the dirt road grew great clumps of wild flowers, yellow and blue, buttercups, daisies and goldenrod, and cornflowers and clover. Deedee dis­appeared into the flowers — picking bouquets was her favourite game. He could see the shrubs and grasses heave and sway as she moved around. The scent of clover and of dry sweet grass was very keen here, and from the east, over the curved top of the mountain, the wind blew in a steady uneddying stream. Five or six miles off to the southwest he spied the wide intensely grey-white stripe of the river. He heard Deedee cry: “Daddy, Daddy, come and look.” He pushed through the coarse grasses and found her.

  “Berries,” she cried rapturously, “look at all the berries! Can I eat them?” She had found a wild raspberry bush, a thing he hadn’t seen since he was six years old. He’d never expected to find one growing in the middle of Montreal.

  “Wild raspberries,” he said wonderingly, “sure you can pick them, dear; but be careful of the prickles.” They were all shades and degrees of ripeness from black to vermilion.

  “Ouch,” said Deedee, pricking her fingers as she pulled off the berries. She put a handful in her mouth and looked wry.

  “Are they bitter?”

  “Juicy,” she mumbled with her mouth full. A trickle of dark juice ran down her chin.

  “Eat some more,” he said, “while I try the kite again.” She bent absorbedly to the task of hunting them out, and he walked down the road for some distance and then turned to run up towards her. This time he gave the kite plenty of string before he began to move; he ran as hard as he could, panting and handing the string out over his shoulders, burning his fingers as it slid through them. All at once he felt the line pull and pulse as if there were a living thing on the other end, and he turned on his heel and watched while the kite danced into the upper air-currents above the treetops and began to soar up and up. He gave it more line, and in an instant it pulled high up away from him across the fence, two hundred feet and more above him up over the cemetery where it steadied and hung, bright red in the sunshine. He thought flashingly of the priest saying “It’s all a sham,” and he knew all at once that the priest was wrong. Deedee came running down to him, laughing with excitement and pleasure and singing joyfully about the gingerbread man, and he knelt in the dusty roadway and put his arms around her, placing her hands on the line between his. They gazed, squinting in the sun, at the flying red thing, and he turned away and saw in the shadow of her cheek and on her lips and chin the dark rich red of the pulp and juice of the crushed raspberries.

  Where the Myth Touches Us

  People still listen to their radios, evading the corpse-like glare of the man who breaks down the fat globules. Joe Jacobson has a radio shaped like the fat point of a late Gothic arch, with a fretwork face in front of a faded red curtain, which shields the speaker cone, and below three knobs of which the third — the one on the right — does nothing, although a tiny decalcomania under it says TONE. The other knobs are for volume and tuning but the condenser is shot in the volume control. Sometimes the old set won’t speak above a chaste murmur for days and then, all at once, it booms out with an enormous tinny rattle of the speaker and a
great crackling noise. Joe swats it with an open palm, hardly looking up from his typewriter or book, and it subsides.

  He doesn’t want a new radio; this one was in the family for thirty years. When he was still a baby his father burst excitedly into his bedroom late one night, past nine-thirty, with a pair of earphones in his hand and a long black cord trailing behind.

  “Babele,” said his father, “it’s a miracle, listen!” And he clamped the headset on Joe’s ears, startling the child. There was music in the earphones.

  “CKOC Hamilton,” crooned his father, “like it was in the next room! Amazing!” Hamilton was forty-six miles away.

  The next day the “Atwater Kent” appeared in the living room and Joe’s mother brought him up next to it, sewing her way through eight daytime serials every afternoon. After his parents were dead, he asked his brothers for the radio as his share of the inheritance, wanting nothing else — somebody has to die before you inherit — placing it on his bureau, over the drawer where he keeps his family pictures.

  The plywood veneer is peeling at the back of the set and parts of it have flaked off, exposing the cheap pine frame. Every week or so he takes a butter knife and spreads wood glue into the crack, pressing the veneer down, and for a while it holds. Then in the evening, while he writes, he’ll hear a pinging sound and know that it’s sprung up again. He means to go along, gluing it together as long as he can.

  Toby Frankel came to his room that time and made fun of the radio; she couldn’t be blamed, knowing nothing about it.

  “Joey, on what you make! An associate professor!”

  He looked at her blankly and gave the peeling wood a squeeze with the palm of his hand. He will marry Toby anyway, he thinks, when the book comes out. A first-novelist ought to be a bach­elor, but on a second-novelist it looks queer unless he writes about North Africa. Once, visiting her in the Group Dynamics Lab, he offered comically to “take you away from all this” but she didn’t get the joke, pushing him away when he patted her. She looked up fearfully at the one-way window, unsure, unsure.