“Am I interrupting something?” Sextus said from the doorway.
Duncan looked up sharply. “Come back later.”
Sextus backed off.
“No,” Effie said. “You have to tell me now. Later won’t matter. Consider it a moral compromise for a higher cause.”
Duncan smiled. “Right. Moral compromise. My specialty.”
“I didn’t mean that,” she said.
“Secrets are funny,” he said. “They demand fidelity regardless of their worth. Even an unworthy secret is a test of character. That’s why I’ve never messed with your secrets.” He drank.
She studied his face, meeting his searching eyes. “I don’t need a priest just now,” she said. “I need a brother. More than that, I need a friend.”
He stood. “He’s looking for somebody. He’s kind of desperate.”
“Who could he be looking for that would make him that desperate?” she asked.
Duncan sat again. “I’m surprised he didn’t tell you. I don’t know why he wouldn’t. He cares a lot about you, you know. Maybe he wanted to protect you.”
“From what?” she said.
“You didn’t know that he has a granddaughter?”
“A what?”
“A granddaughter.”
“Not that Tammy?”
“No, not Tammy. I understand you met the girl’s mother last summer. She lives in Port Hawkesbury.”
Effie nodded.
“Anyway, his daughter grew up in Isle Madame. And years ago she—I think her name is Sylvia—had a daughter that she never told JC about, until recently. I don’t know why he didn’t let you in on it.”
“And she’s in Toronto?”
“We think. She was last seen in Halifax. She had a black boyfriend, which the mother found … alarming. The mother did some checking, learned some unsavoury details about the guy, who’s more than ten years older than the kid. Anyway, she heard that this boyfriend was a pimp, running girls from Halifax in Toronto. It isn’t an implausible story.”
“Black boyfriends don’t have to be pimps,” Effie said tartly.
“You think I don’t know that?” he said. “In any case, JC asked me to help find her, to make some inquiries around the shelter. I didn’t know he’d launched his own investigation … until I saw him talking to Tammy one night a few months ago. But that’s the story.”
“You’re right,” she said sorrowfully. “I don’t know why he didn’t tell me.”
“He’s always been a complicated guy.”
“And guys never change.”
“I don’t know about that,” said Duncan. “Now why don’t you come downstairs with me, mingle a bit. It’s a big day for your daughter.”
“I think I’ll go home,” she said.
15
After Cassie’s wedding there was a week of silence. Finally she called him, got the answering machine, apologized. She didn’t try to qualify or evade. She’d been wrong. She had given it a lot of thought. Her grotesque suspicion had been unforgivable. But by offering an apology, she might at least recover a small measure of her self-respect.
The waves of self-reproach had been cleansing, in a way. Taken as a whole, her lives with men, for all the grief, had immunized her to a very real extent. Finally she understood that self-reproach was just another opportunity for self-improvement. It was, really, diagnostic. And after a long night of anger, loneliness, sorrow, self-pity, fear of growing old alone and, finally, the flood of tears, she felt a transformation. Failure was, she realized, a form of therapy.
Sextus called on April twentieth. She hadn’t heard from him in ten days. He seemed subdued.
“Just wondering how you are,” he said.
“I’m okay,” she said. “And you?”
“I’m good. Look, I’m sorry if I seemed to be hitting on you at the wedding. But you know me.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I don’t think I’ll be sticking around,” he said. “Think I’ll head back. Maybe you can check their place now and then while they’re away, honeymooning or whatever. I find it creepy, being here with all their stuff. Every time I open a drawer, I’m afraid of what I’ll find.” His laugh was humourless.
She felt an impulse to offer comfort, but she resisted it.
“I’ll be down probably in July,” she volunteered. “John’s baby must be due about then.”
“That’s what I hear,” he said. “I don’t suppose you got around to reading the great memoir yet.”
“Not yet,” she said. Again she resisted offering the reassurance that might comfort. A white lie would have been appropriate: “I’ve only started” or “I’ll give you my reaction when I’ve had time to read a bit more.” Her new protocol: words reserved for comprehension, stripped of sentimental purpose.
“So we’ll probably see you down there,” he said.
“Ma bhios mi beo,” she said.
“Whatever that means.”
“Your dad would say that anytime he was referring to some possible future happening. ‘If I’m alive.’ ”
He laughed. “That was the old man being the optimist.”
“Bye for now,” she said.
“Bye.”
She’d hardly put the phone down when it rang again. He had an afterthought, perhaps.
“Yes?” she said.
But there was only silence.
Three days after she had left the apology on JC’s answering machine, he called back and asked if they could get together. Maybe for a drink or dinner.
“Would that be wise?” she wondered.
Wise or not, he said, there was a lot to be explained. By both. “I was surprised to hear you apologize,” he said. “I wasn’t sure why.”
“I jumped to some dire conclusions. I was wrong.”
“Well,” he said, “not necessarily. Not in the circumstances.”
“What circumstances?”
“I realized afterwards, when I thought it through. You don’t know me very well. Blind trust is a lot to expect from someone who doesn’t really know you.”
“I wonder if it’s too late to correct that,” she said.
“Let’s see,” he said.
They had lunch and, on the Friday, dinner. And she went home with him and stayed the weekend. They mostly talked, but in the intervals the physical intensity obliterated doubt.
The girl he was looking for had always been a problem for her mother, her teachers, the entire community. She was barely sixteen, but she’d been missing for months. There had always been, it seemed, conflict with her mom, so when she’d asked to spend a weekend with some friends in Halifax last fall, her mother welcomed the prospect of her absence. She began to worry, though, when days passed with no contact from the girl.
Her name was Marguerite. She had told her mother that she would stay with some university students she knew from high school. She’d always been advanced in school, doubled up some grades, and as a consequence she ran with an older crowd of kids. Her mother speculated that it would have been a strain on her, always trying to keep up, that it explained why she was so resentful of anything that drew attention to her immaturity.
By mid-week Sylvia had contacted the Halifax police, who, in the manner of policemen everywhere, declined to take the matter seriously. She was probably a runaway. There were legions of them out there, teenagers on the lam from parents, boredom and authority. Eventually they surfaced somewhere—most of them, at least.
But they’d obviously gone looking. A week after her first call, they were able to inform her that the kid had been seen in the company of a black man whose name they hadn’t yet been able to obtain. They’d been spotted in a dense complex of downtown drinking establishments known to the young in Halifax as the Liquor Dome. The girl didn’t look unhappy, according to the bouncer who had recognized her photograph.
Further independent inquiries by her mother produced the worrying intelligence that a number of young black men were recruiting prostitute
s in Halifax and moving them to Toronto. Sylvia convinced herself that this had been her daughter’s fate and begged JC for help.
“When did she bring you into it?” Effie asked.
“In January sometime.”
“And you never thought of telling me?”
He shrugged. “I guess I wasn’t thinking straight.”
“But now …?”
“Let’s hope.”
JC had eventually discussed the problem with Duncan, who promised to make some inquiries: his homeless friends might have noticed someone new among the hookers on the street.
Effie interrupted, “I hope you aren’t angry at Duncan for telling me.”
“I should have told you myself. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
“She matters to you, doesn’t she?”
“She matters. I don’t know why.”
He had immediately started making casual inquiries in places frequented by men in search of sex that was quick, anonymous and cheap. He met Tammy. He’d heard a rumour that she had a black boyfriend who came from Halifax. She brushed him off, even attacked him once. It only made him more persistent. Eventually she agreed to help him. “I figured it was just to get rid of me,” he said. “But I gave her my business card, just in case.”
“When was that?” she asked. “The card.”
He shrugged. “I forget. A month or so ago. On Jarvis.”
“You’ve heard nothing more?”
“Nothing.”
She fought a wave of remorse. “I can’t imagine how you feel.”
“Feel? I’m impressed. You managed to find out more than I could without really trying. How did you pull that off?”
“I was spying on you,” she said. “I just didn’t know what to think. I know it was … I saw you with this Tammy once. I just happened to be driving along Jarvis, and there you were. Sometime later, I saw her again, and she was with another girl. By the time I stopped, she was gone, but—”
“Another girl?”
“She was a black girl. I told her I was Father Duncan’s sister, and that was when she mentioned her brother, Robert—Tammy’s boyfriend, I think. And St. Jamestown.”
He shook his head. “A needle in a haystack. Some hustler named Robert in St. Jamestown.”
“You’ve been there looking, though?”
He nodded. “Now I can’t find Tammy either. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter, does it? The world is full of Tammys and Roberts and Marguerites. Lost people, all of them. Just getting by. Trying not to think of where they’re heading. Every one of them a product of some other loss.”
She placed a hand on his. “At the end of the day, it does matter.” She smiled at him. “I never thought I’d hear either of us using that tired expression. ‘At the end of the day.’ Somebody I knew used it till I thought I’d lose my mind.”
“Your Conor.”
“How did you guess?”
“The Irish love it. ‘At the end of the day.’ It suits their outlook perfectly.” His accent was a perfect imitation of a Belfast lilt. “Whatever became of that fellow, anyway?”
“He died suddenly,” she said.
“You said once that you suspected he was a terrorist.”
“I said that?” She shrugged. “I suppose he was.”
“Was it …?”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like that. He owned some gyms. One day he was jogging on a treadmill, and that was when it happened.”
JC laughed. “Sorry. But that’s kind of weird.”
“It was at the time of all the hunger strikers, and he was all worked up over that.”
“I covered the hunger strikers,” he said.
“I suppose you did.”
“You realize that he was probably a gunrunner. The IRA had them planted all over the world, set up as legitimate businessmen. There was even a banker here in Toronto.”
“Conor was getting out of it. He promised me.”
“Men promise all sorts of things.” He was smiling.
“Conor always told the truth. He told me he’d only lied to me once. And that was about Sextus.”
JC was frowning. “What about Sextus?”
“Shortly before he died, he told me Sextus probably wasn’t as bad as he’d made him out to be. Conor didn’t like reporters much.”
“You’re kidding. He told you that?” He laughed abruptly. “You’re sure he died on a treadmill?”
“He died on a treadmill. It was a heart attack. I saw the death certificate.”
“I can’t imagine—”
“I hate it when you go away,” she interrupted.
“I hate to go away,” he said.
“I know you do.”
On May 19, Molly Blue phoned to let her know that she’d just seen the story on the AP wire: the stay of execution for Sam Williams had been vacated by a U.S. circuit court in New Orleans. Effie didn’t understand what she was being told. “Does this mean he’s been reprieved again?” she asked.
“No. The opposite,” Molly said. “It means he’ll be getting another execution date any day now, and we’d better get ready for it.”
“Does JC know?”
“I’d be surprised if he didn’t,” Molly said. “I expect he heard the news straight from the guy’s lawyer.”
Effie thanked her for the call.
JC called five minutes later. “There’ll probably be something in the papers about Sam tomorrow,” he said. “It’s my guess they’ll be setting a new execution date fairly soon.” He sounded weary.
“Have you heard from him?”
“I had a letter the other day. He actually told me in April, right afterwards, that he regarded the stay as a technicality—postponing the inevitable, I think he said.”
“What will you do?”
“Whatever he wants me to do.”
“Yes,” she said. “But can I ask one question?”
“Fire away.”
“Why?”
It was a long pause, but she knew that he was still there. Finally he said, “I want to see if dignity can survive impotence.”
“Dear man,” she said. “You, of all people, don’t have to worry about impotence—or dignity.”
“We all have to worry about impotence,” he said.
The campus was subdued in June. There were summer students, but they seemed older, more dedicated to their studies. Effie had always enjoyed the post-graduation serenity of the place, the anticlimactic lull that follows the spasmodic intensity of finals, marks and the infectious ecstasy of students in the moment of relief that they can pretend briefly to be a permanent condition of their lives. The place was almost deserted as she walked away toward home.
She would remember June of 1999 as a blur of drink and food and talk. At first it was his narrative: romances that became relationships and died from distance or disinterest; exotic travel in a bubble of American and media entitlement; awful conflicts sparsely told. He described the final burnout, and she listened carefully for evidence of Molly’s truthfulness.
Her own disclosures became more structured through his gentle questioning.
“Why don’t you just start at the beginning?” he began. “Your mum died. It was just you and Duncan and your father.”
“There’s just so much I don’t remember,” she said. “And a lot of the things I do remember seem like bad dreams. Don’t you have the same problem? Separating the real from the nightmares? You must.”
“No,” he said.
“Lucky you,” she said miserably. “But you, of all people, must know that it isn’t useful and it isn’t fair to speak of things as fact when you aren’t sure, when dreams and fantasies pollute your memory. Conor never trusted memory.”
“Why don’t you work back? Tell me how you got involved with this guy Conor.”
“He just materialized at the right time. I felt betrayed by Sextus. I was alone in a strange place. I had a little girl. I had no job, no prospects. He was kind.”
“Kindnes
s is an asset, but …”
“Kindness is better than nothing.”
“Okay. You needed kindness. What did he need from you?”
“I don’t know. He had his cause. He didn’t need a lot from me.”
“That sounds hellish. Maybe you were window dressing. Part of his disguise.”
She turned away. He caught her shoulder. She shook free. “Conor made me what I am.”
“You made you what you are.”
“Conor taught me that the most effective form of therapy is self-improvement. He nagged me into a master’s program, then a Ph.D. He left me well off, materially. Years after he was gone, the head of Celtic at the university called out of the blue and offered me a contract. He’d been a friend of Conor’s.”
“And how much did you tell this fellow, the mysterious Conor?”
She shrugged.
“And did you feel better after that?”
“Not really.”
He put an arm around her shoulder. “Whenever you feel up to it, maybe you can have a go at it again.”
She nodded.
“That knife,” Conor said. “Can you describe it now?” His voice was soft, his eyes intense.
“It was just a knife.”
“What did it look like?”
“It was long. It looked sharp.”
“And where did he keep it? When he’d bring it out, where would he take it from?”
“From in his pants, I think.”
“From his pants?”
“Or it was in his boot. Why does it matter?”
“How old were you when you first felt threatened?”
“I think I was about thirteen. I don’t remember exactly.”
“Can you describe the knife?”
“Sort of. Maybe like a hunting knife.”
“A huntin’ knife?”
“Something like that.”
“Can you tell me how he held the knife?”
“What do you mean, how he held it?”
“Did he hold it in a fist? Or maybe like this? Like you would a small knife?” He held up a hand, thumb and forefinger together.
“I don’t remember, really. He held it in front of him.”
“In front of him? Where in front of him?”
Why Men Lie Page 21
