by Kim Aubrey
At the funeral, I’d felt as though I was spying through the window of my grandparents’ bedroom as they lay in their queen-size bed, Esty peeling the blanket from Gus’s pyjama-clad body while she snuggled close, her fingers wandering down his white buttons.
“Did you know the man in your dream?” I asked.
“He was just some man. I don’t know where he came from.”
“Are you sure there was nothing familiar about him?”
Esty shook her head.
“Karyl,” Len said in his don’t-go-there voice, placing a hand on my shoulder.
“Len.” I mimicked his tone, pushed his hand away.
Len and I had laboured through the fall, dealing with an outbreak of flu and pre-Christmas neuroses. Our office handled people’s physical and emotional ailments, Len as homeopath, me as social worker. But the same clients who couldn’t get enough of his little white pills and hearty advice eyed me with suspicion when I encouraged them to talk about their troubles, or recommended books for them to read.
“The man in your dream wasn’t Dad, was he?” my mother asked Esty.
“Of course not. I could never hurt your father, not even in a dream.”
“Maybe you were trying to shut him up.” My mother sliced another piece of pie for herself. “You always said he talked too much.”
Esty had been secretary and receptionist for Gus’s small-town medical practice. He’d collected stories about everyone in town, sharing them with her, but she’d never let him repeat them to others. If patients had thought their secrets unsafe, they’d have visited the doctor in the next town, or the young man who’d moved into the old florist’s shop.
“Mom’s right,” I said to Esty. “Whenever Grandpa started to tell me a story, even stories about his childhood, you’d always ask me to help with some chore.”
“Like hanging laundry,” my mother said.
“Or filling Grandpa’s birdfeeders.”
“I don’t remember that.” Esty smoothed her paper napkin with both hands and folded it in two.
“Do you remember the story of the schoolteacher with the dreadful secret?” I asked. “I never did find out what happened to her.”
Esty shrugged.
My mother scraped the filling out of her pastry, which lay wan and limp on her plate.
When I was small, Gus used to lift me off the floor and twirl me around while Esty yelled, “Watch out for the furniture!” He’d make a quarter disappear, then reemerge behind my ear or under my chin. Rolling her eyes, Esty would say, “I’d like to see you make my shingles disappear. Some doctor.”
My mother stuck her fork into the empty crust, poked a series of holes across its surface. “I could always rely on Dad to take my side, to let me go out and enjoy myself,” she said to Esty. “You seemed to think that life was just about work and school.”
“We were brought up to work hard.”
“More tea?” Len filled my mug before I had a chance to say yes.
When he topped up my mother’s tea, she leaned her cheek against his hand.
By the time I was ten or eleven, I squirmed away from Gus whenever he tried to pick me up or pull a quarter from my ear. Since my father no longer showed me such attentions, I chose to think myself too old, to regard hugs and playfulness as insults to my autonomy. Rejecting their inadequate consolation, I’d ignore Gus the way Esty did, while she and I logged hand after hand of Gin Rummy, or dashed outside with a handful of carrots to feed the neighbour’s horses.
Back then, my parents often went out to dinner parties, or had people over to play bridge or dance on our scuffed living room floor. Even when the party took place in our own home, I was sometimes sent to sleep at Esty and Gus’s. But during my early teens, the parties had ended, and my mother had ordered moss-green wall-to-wall carpeting to be laid down over the living room parquet. Later I learned that my father had been sleeping with one of the women in their group of friends.
“Does anyone want to go for a walk?” Len asked.
“It’s too cold.” I pressed the warm mug to my cheek.
“We could play cards,” my mother said.
“My father used to play the piano after dinner.” Esty sighed. “Those were good times.”
“I thought you hated those old days,” I said. “Your mother working herself to death, your father unable to hold a job. It doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“Oh, but my sisters and I made our own fun, naming the chickens, making dolls out of rags and corn cobs, singing around the piano. When my father was in a good mood, he sang the most comical songs.”
I tried to catch my mother’s eye, to confirm what I remembered her saying about Esty’s father—that he used to beat them. But she rose from her chair without looking at me and disappeared into the kitchen.
“What happened when your father was in a bad mood?” I asked.
“Oh, he used to storm and shout and go off for the day, sometimes longer.”
“Where did he work?” asked Len.
“He worked on the railroad or cutting timber, but mostly he was between jobs. He couldn’t get along with his bosses. There was always a fight. He wasn’t a bad man, just unhappy.”
Esty seemed to have forgotten her old feelings about her childhood, whatever had led her, for most of her life, to avoid mentioning those days, and to stop Gus from talking about them too. Now the past was wiped clean, allowed into the ether of her fresh consciousness, as if she’d gotten religion. Maybe her mind really wasn’t as sharp and tough as it used to be.
My mother returned from the kitchen with a bottle of peach schnapps and some glasses.
“Now that was a good idea,” Len said, taking a glass.
“I thought we could use a little something.”
“Tell us more about your dream, Grandma.” Convinced that the man in Esty’s dream had been her father, I wanted her to see it too.
“There’s nothing more to tell. All I remember is beating at this strange man until he fell over as if he’d been struck by lightning. Struck down dead. And he never fought back, didn’t even try to get away.”
“I’ve had that dream myself,” my mother said. “But I know who the man was.”
We all knew who the man was—my father, Derek, who had remarried years ago and died of cancer early this spring.
I allowed Len to grip my fingers under the table. He’d wanted to spend the holidays in the Dominican Republic where we could have lingered in bed over champagne and sliced pineapple, catching up on our lovemaking.
Yesterday, driving here from our home in Toronto, we’d found ourselves on the wrong road and stopped for coffee at the next exit. Dusk had begun to set in, the sky spitting snowflakes.
“I don’t like the look of this weather.” Len had tugged on my scarf. “Let’s get our coffee to go.”
“Can’t we just sit here for ten minutes?”
“We have at least an hour ahead of us, and I don’t want to drive it in a snowstorm.”
“There’s not going to be a snowstorm,” I said, choosing a booth beside the window, trying to ignore the rhythmic tapping of Len’s fingers against the Formica tabletop, trying to pretend that I was enjoying my bitter coffee and cold apple pie.
He stirred two sugars into his mug. “Isn’t it interesting how you’re doing your best to put off arriving at your mother’s house? Especially since the whole trip was your idea.”
“Stop it, Len.”
“All I’m saying is we should have gone south for a real holiday.”
“Mom says Esty’s not well. It might be her last Christmas.”
“I thought you didn’t believe your mother’s doom and gloom.”
“What if it’s true?” I’d pressed the hot mug to my face. “I never got to see my father before he died, didn’t even know he was sick.”
“It’s natural for you to feel angry.” Len lowered his eyebrows, assuming the compassionate tone he used with his patients.
“I’m not angry. I’m grieving.”
Without Len, I would never have completed my Social Work degree. Disabled by depression, deserted by the boyfriend I’d followed to Canada, I’d been ready to quit school when a friend had recommended a homeopath, who’d turned out to be Len. He’d lent me a light visor and prescribed a regimen of herbs and vitamins, but it had been his attention and care that had pulled me through.
My mother poured herself more of the awful peach schnapps.
“It sounds like you’re still angry at Karyl’s father,” Len said.
“It doesn’t keep me up nights.”
“Do we have to talk about this?” I pulled my fingers away from Len’s grip.
“Talking is good,” he said.
“I hate talking. No wonder I’m such a lousy therapist.”
“You have to stop saying that.” His warning tone again.
In the morning, we’d picked up Esty, who’d been waiting in the kitchen with her overnight bag. The neighbouring meadow where we used to feed the horses had been sold long ago, and now bore a brick bungalow with a red door, but Gus’s birdfeeders still hung from the apple tree in the backyard, and inside, the place still smelled of pot roast and soap. When I was a child, I used to burst through the door after a few weeks’ absence, delighted to find the same brown leather couch, the same board games in the cupboard, the same violets growing in their painted pots, and Esty and Gus in their usual places, bent over a puzzle at the kitchen table. But this morning, all the familiar objects and smells had made me squeeze my face tight to stop the tears that threatened to undo me.
“It’s too bad you don’t enjoy your work, Karyl,” Esty said.
“That’s rich coming from you,” my mother said. “You never thought that work was something to enjoy.”
“Oh, I liked my work well enough, but most aren’t so lucky. Remember how much Derek hated his law practice? I bet that was what made him go off the rails.”
“You always said it was my fault. That he got bored with me.” My mother looked down at her empty glass.
“He was a restless one,” Esty said. “Trying to ‘find himself.’ Trying to forget himself more likely.”
Ever since my father left us, I’d been trying to forget him, forget how remote he’d become when he was still at home, forget the way he used to tuck me into bed when I was small, answering the stream of questions I invented to make him linger by my side. Forget the way I used to help him in the garden, digging holes for the tomato and cucumber seedlings. He’d shown me how to tamp down the soil around them, how to stake the plants when they grew bigger, how to pinch off the new growth between the established branches and the stalk. He was always giving me some vegetable nickname.
“Look, Peapod,” he’d say, pointing to the fine green seedlings that had appeared beside a row of onions. “You planted those last week. Remember?”
“Are those the carrots?” I’d ask, squatting beside him.
“Yes. And when they get a little bigger, you’re in charge of thinning them. All you have to do is pull some out to make them less crowded. I’ll let you know when it’s time.”
“Okay.” I’d jump up and wrap my arms around his neck.
Squinting into the distance, he’d rise slowly, making my legs leave the ground.
“Don’t drop me,” I’d cry, seeking safety in the belief that he never would.
Len wanted me to remember these and other, harder things—how my father’s gardening phase hadn’t lasted two summers, how I’d felt excluded from his later hobbies and sudden passions, like learning to fly an airplane or photographing blurry horizons. I used to skip rope in the basement for what seemed like hours, waiting for him to emerge from the darkroom he’d built. Sometimes I’d give up and go outside into the fierce sunlight, playing hopscotch on the paving stones that cut across his abandoned garden.
I gave Len a somber, apologetic smile.
He grinned back, ever hopeful. “How about that walk?”
“We already had a walk today. Remember?”
We’d navigated the twisting suburban streets, our heads bowed to the wind, walking silently, our arms a swinging bridge between us, until he’d said, “I’m worried about you.”
“Well, don’t worry.” I’d stuffed my hands into my pockets. “I’ll be fine. I’m not one of your patients.”
Len believed that unreleased emotions festered inside of us, spawning disease, that our bodies were fluid, and if we kept our emotions moving, we could transform ourselves, creating whatever reality we desired. Only, most of our clients either couldn’t do this, or didn’t want to. Perhaps they sensed my own lack of faith in Len’s theories.
“I thought we were going to play cards,” Esty said.
“We are,” said my mother.
Len, who hated card games, yawned and rose from his chair. “Since no one wants to walk, I guess I’ll go see what’s on TV.”
“Maybe Grandma will tell us one of Grandpa’s old stories,” I said, feeling a sudden panic at the thought of Len going, reaching out a hand to stop him. I wanted to be able to count on him to never leave me, even though I sometimes felt the urge to leave him, to pack up and go somewhere I’d never been, eyeing the distant horizon.
“What about the schoolteacher with the dreadful secret?” I asked Esty.
“That was so long ago,” she said.
“It sounds like a good one,” Len encouraged her.
“Let me see if I can remember. I want to get the story right, like he would have told it.”
“It won’t be the same,” my mother said.
“I’d like to hear it anyway.” Len was standing behind me, working his fingers into my knotted shoulder muscles.
“That feels good,” I said, wishing I could always respond this way to his touch.
“The schoolteacher’s name was May Starling,” Esty said. “I remember her name because she had a face like a bird’s—delicate features, but her nose stood out like a beak. She wore her blonde hair in a bun and was pretty in a tall, gangly way. She came into the waiting room very standoffish, hardly spoke to me, just sat primly on her seat until Gus was ready to see her. I don’t think she knew we were married. Some people didn’t. New people mostly. Later I asked Gus about her, and this is what he told me:
“She sat on the other side of his desk and stared at him for what must have been close on a minute, then said, ‘You look like a trustworthy man.’
He said, ‘I try to be.’
She leaned in closer. ‘I’m in perfect health, but I need to talk to someone.’
‘People often come here to talk about their problems,’ Gus said.
‘I have a dreadful secret,’ she confessed. ‘And it’s wearing me down not to be able to tell anyone.’
‘You can tell me,’ he offered, laying his hand flat on the desk so that she could touch it if she wanted, if that would help her to get the story out.
She placed her hand close to his, but not touching, and said, ‘Last fall, when I was new to the school, I came in one morning to find a grown man sitting in one of the small chairs. He wasn’t one of the other teachers so I thought he must be a father come to talk about his child, but he wasn’t that either. He said he worked on the train, and he’d taken my ticket when I was moving here. He said I looked as if I’d been crying, which I probably had been, as I was sad to be leaving home and nervous about my new job. He’d stayed in the same car as long as he could, watching me, deciding he wanted to marry me. Later, at the station, he asked who I was and where I was staying. As he told me this, his dark eyes seemed to burn through mine, and his long fingers gripped the back of the chair. He stood up to grab hold of me and kiss me. I kissed him back. I could have stood there all day kis
sing him, but I knew my students would soon be arriving, and I couldn’t allow myself to be found in such a position. So I broke away and said, I can’t marry you, even though I thought I might like to if I had some time to get to know him. But he cursed me and pushed over the chair. I was afraid he might hurt me, but he sloped off out the door. The children came in. And the day carried on in the usual manner.
‘I never saw him again. I wanted to, but I didn’t know where to find him. When I asked at the train station, they said he’d quit his job. Then a few weeks ago, I saw his ghost in my classroom. It was early morning before the children arrived, the same time he’d come before. I turned around from the blackboard, where I’d been writing a poem for the class, and saw him sitting in the same chair. But when I ran to him, he vanished.
‘And you see, I’m confused. I don’t know if it was a real ghost or just my longing for him. I don’t know if he died for love of me like in some old song, or if I’m just imagining this whole thing. And I don’t know what’s wrong with me. How could I have such feelings about a man I hardly know, a man so irrational, maybe even insane?’
“Gus tried to pat her hand where she’d left it on the desk, only now it was a fist, the knuckles white and trembling. He told her she needed to forget about this man whether he was a ghost or alive. She needed to get out with other young people, to go dancing, play cards or tennis. He prescribed a sedative to help her sleep. She thanked him, pressing his hand with her cold thin fingers, and left.
“Gus told me all this shaking his head, not knowing what to make of it. I told him, ‘She’s a fine one to be teaching our children. There’s something not right about her.’ A year later, when the doctor from the next town came for a visit, we discovered that this May Starling had told him her dreadful secret too. So Gus called the new doctor in town, and sure enough, she’d been to see him as well. She’d been running around collecting prescriptions. ‘An addict,’ I said. ‘Or maybe she just likes the sympathy,’ said Gus. The new doctor was convinced that she really believed her story, that she’d imagined the whole incident out of loneliness. But when she walked out of Gus’s office that day, there was defiance in her smile and a flicker of something that said she’d gotten what she wanted.”
