The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  The rationale of the police is that if a potential witness can pass over Marco for someone else, then the identification is likely to stick. The reason that Marco is such a popular choice is that he looks exactly the way people think a criminal should look. He has scraggly, receding hair, protruding eyes, no chin to speak of, and is always in need of a shave. His teeth are yellow, his nose hooked; he wears a dirty trenchcoat, baggy pants and sneakers. Marco Ferlinghetti is the middle-class idea of a child molester, pimp, pusher, and petty thief.

  Marco did indeed do time a few years ago for the innocuous crime of selling a marijuana cigarette to an undercover cop. While he was in prison (Marco was treated rather harshly, partly because of his looks and partly because the undercover cop was standing outside an elementary school when he made the buy), he decided to learn a trade. Behind the walls he learned to be a cannon (a professional pickpocket) and practices his trade with a solemn efficiency. His stall (an assistant who distracts the intended victim, usually by bumping into them) is his girlfriend, whom he calls Jackson, a bedraggled little hype in jeans, boots, and a halter that exposes most of her breasts. Jackson always looks as if she is about to ask someone for directions.

  The police know of Marco’s profession but live and let live as long as he keeps himself available for daily lineups.

  A few weeks ago, Marco, in all his grimy splendor, crabwalked into a Toronto-Dominion Bank on Granville Street, several blocks from Hastings and Main, and presented the teller with a note which was clearly printed but poorly spelled and punctuated. Marco, the proud holder of a B.Com. from the University of British Columbia, walked away with several thousand dollars.

  The police pulled in an assortment of known bank robbers; they also pulled in Marco Ferlinghetti.

  “That’s him!” said the robbed teller.

  “That’s him!” said the assistant bank manager.

  “That’s him!” said an elderly lady who had been in line behind Marco.

  The police politely thanked them for their trouble.

  A few days later Marco limped into the Main Street Police Station and approached the sergeant in charge of police lineups.

  “I’d like to take a little time off,” he said deferentially. “I think I picked a rotten pocket, if you know what I mean. Came into a large amount of bread, but the empty pocket belonged to the Mob. There are nasty rumors on the street.”

  “You go ahead, Marco,” said the police officer. The sergeant had a soft spot in his heart for petty criminals like Marco. He didn’t like the Mob either. “Just be sure you settle around here when you come back. You’re very valuable to us.”

  Marco and Jackson caught the next flight for Honolulu. But even in paradise, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, with a lei of waxen orchids around his neck, Marco Ferlinghetti looked like a criminal. His third day on Waikiki, Marco was picked up and displayed in a police lineup. Late at night, wallets, picked clean as fish skeletons, glow whitely in the alleys of Honolulu.

  Out of the Picture

  I have the privilege of doing most of my writing in a sunny, corner office overlooking the Pacific Ocean. On the long back wall of my office are a number of oil paintings, mostly by the famous Cree artist Allen Sapp. Sapp paints his memories of reservation life in rural Saskatchewan a half century ago. His paintings are realistic. Though I sometimes write of magical happenings, I have little tolerance for abstract art, something I believe I inherited from my Grandfather Drobney, though I never called him Grandfather in any language. He was simply Drobney, to one and all. A few days ago I rearranged the oils on my wall to make room for a new acquisition, though the painting was not new to me, for it hung in my home when I was a child.

  My family have always been secretive. The past was treated as something to be discarded, like out-of-style clothing, something once disposed of, never to be thought of again. Family history was seldom discussed. Baba Drobney told me she was the seventh daughter of a man who owned a small winery near Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. Other than that and the oil painting I know little about either side of my family. And I realize I have been equally uninformative. I have withheld from my daughters what little I know about my parents and grandparents.

  Drobney died before I was old enough to start school. I was an adult before I visited his grave and saw his tombstone—ARON DROBNEY 1847–1939—where I learned both his first name and the fact that he lived to be 92. I remember him sitting in a rocker in the kitchen of our drafty farm house, a bright afghan around his knees. He had a full head of iron-gray hair, a walrus mustache of the same color, and flashing black eyes.

  After the Depression ended, and with the advent of World War II, prosperity slowly returned to Canada, and it was my vivacious Aunt Lichta who got custody of the family portrait. Lichta was my mother’s sister and lived with us until I was seven years old, as did the rest of my mother’s family, along with the portrait, an oil, painted by an artist who Aunt Lichta named as one of the Canadian Group of Seven, which meant nothing to me at the time.

  The artist did not ordinarily do portraits, Aunt Lichta said, but Drobney, my grandfather, when he wanted something could be very persuasive, and over one thousand pre-Depression dollars was a great deal of money for a struggling artist in the 1920s. In those halcyon days before my grandfather became like everyone else in North America, more or less insolvent.

  Aunt Lichta’s second marriage was to a man who became a federal member of parliament for Alberta, and who, when his career was over, was appointed to the senate. The Canadian senate has no political power and is a dumping ground for political hacks, faithful fund raisers, and defeated incumbents. But the pay was excellent, the duties non-existent. Aunt Lichta and her husband lived out their lives in Ottawa where she became famous as a hostess.

  I remember, in the late sixties, seeing a photo in Maclean’s magazine, taken at some diplomatic function, where the Senator, sleek and gray as a Rolls Royce, was flanked by his wife, Lucille.

  Aunt Lichta was in her sixties then, a tall, striking woman with hair the pure white of hoarfrost. In spite of always having an extravagant European accent, she somehow must have thought Lucille a more Canadian name than Lichta. Foreignness has not always been a virtue in Canada, though a recent Prime Minister’s wife delighted in acknowledging her Yugoslavian ancestry.

  Once, when I was quite young, I remember my Baba Drobney being very angry with my grandfather. He had gone to a neighboring farm owned by a Czech named Weisocovitch, and they had gotten into the dandelion wine. Drobney, as everyone called my grandfather, could be heard singing loudly in his own language, as he crossed the meadows toward our home. Drobney was unsteady and mumbling when he entered the kitchen.

  “Go to bed, you old fool,” Baba barked at him in English. Everyone except me and my father spoke several European dialects, Slovenian, Serbo-Croatian, German, Romany. Though I never noticed, Aunt Lichta told me years later, at Baba’s insistence only English was spoken when either I or my father was present.

  Drobney stared at us bleary-eyed.

  Baba Drobney rearranged me on her ample lap.

  “In his family was Gypsies,” she said, the foreboding dripping down her chin. Then, after a pause to let the gravity of that situation sink in, “Worse, was Rumanians.” She paused again to let me reflect on how bad that must be. “In Sarajevo we had a cat. He named it Nistru,” she went on. “‘For that river used to run by my door as a boy,’ he said. Nistru is a Rumanian river,” said Baba Drobney ominously.

  Apparently Yugoslavians and Rumanians did not hold each other in high regard. “If I’d only known,” said Baba Drobney, shaking her head. She and Drobney spent sixty-two years together, and as far as I know, were extremely happy.

  The portrait: by the time I was old enough to comprehend, one person was already gone from it. My first memories of the painting are of it hanging on the bulging calcimined wallpaper in the dark inner hallway of our farm house. The house I grew up in was made of logs, the cracks chinked with white plast
er by my father, who was a plasterer by trade. The upstairs was unfinished, and the wind whistled eerily through the gaps between the unpainted boards at each end of the attic. A colony of bats lived in that attic, oozing out at dusk on summer evenings to hurtle about the farmyard like black clots in the feathered twilight. Baba Drobney, who when her coiled braids were combed out, had waist-length yellowish-white hair, refused to set foot beyond the screen door after sunset in summer, and strongly warned my mother and my aunts not to venture outside for fear of getting a bat in their hair.

  “A bat in the hair prophesies an early death,” Baba said darkly.

  In the portrait, Drobney had one arm across his chest as if he were clutching something unseen, the other hand, fingers spread, was poised above his right leg, a colorful vest was visible beneath his dark suit.

  “Drobney once owned a thousand taxis in Ontario. Your mother grew up in a stone mansion before everything went poof,” Baba confided in me, as she patched the knee of my overalls. “We had servants before everything went poof.”

  Drobney stared at the artist as if it were offering him an insultingly low price for something. Beside him on an ice-blue love seat sat Baba, looking more benign than in real life, smiling secretly, perhaps pleased by the expensive, peach-colored gown she wore. To the right of them, my tiny mother sat on a red-velvet chair with insect legs. She was very beautiful in a pale blue dress, her cheeks rouged, her blond hair coiled in a French braid. Though an adult, her feet did not even come close to touching the floor. Behind her stood my curly haired Irish father who was destined to die young.

  Behind the love seat, my tall, beautiful Aunt Lichta, smiling as if the portrait had been her idea. Next to Lichta was a younger sister, Rose, looking slightly scared. On the left stood my uncles Waldemar and Jaroslaw, and Jaroslaw’s wife Katarinka. Uncle Wald looked exactly like Drobney, only younger.

  Everyone knew about the empty space in the portrait, except me. And because everyone knew, the space was mentioned occasionally, sometimes seriously, sometimes in a joking manner. I came to understand, without ever being officially told, that in the original painting someone named Percy had been beside Aunt Lichta.

  When Drobney said “Percy,” there were many cees between the r and the y.

  The women were more tolerant, wondering sometimes, when Drobney wasn’t present, where Percy might be now. My uncles punched each other on the shoulders and snickered when Percy’s name was mentioned.

  I came to realize that Percy had been Aunt Lichta’s husband, someone she met in Ontario, when the family was still prosperous. Before everything had gone poof, and they had, with my father’s help, purchased one-way train fare to Alberta. Percy was what was called a remittance man, someone who had brought some kind of embarrassment to his wealthy family in England, so was banished to the colonies with an allotment which allowed him to live well but not regally.

  After Percy had, as Drobney sometimes said, let his bristles grow, a reference to Percy being a pig, and after he and Aunt Lichta were divorced, Drobney took the painting back to the original artist and insisted that Percy be obliterated from it.

  “He is no longer part of the family,” Drobney raged. “I can no longer look at his snout without wanting to burn the portrait. The others I love,” shouted Drobney in his extravagant European way. “Him, I want OUT!”

  So Percy had been painted into oblivion.

  When I was a little older, just before Aunt Lichta left the farm to live in Edmonton, where she met her second husband, I begged her to tell me what Percy looked like.

  “I can do better than that,” said Aunt Lichta, “though you must promise never to mention this to Drobney.” Going to her closet, which smelled of dried rose petals, she produced a small photo. Percy was younger than I imagined; dressed in a variety of tweeds, he had straight blond hair slicked back off a high forehead, a long, thin nose with a pale mustache beneath it, thin lips and a receding chin. My mother had let slip once that Percy wore a monocle, but it was nowhere to be seen in the photo.

  “He did,” said Aunt Lichta, smiling sadly as she answered my question, “but it wasn’t an evil monocle like the Germans wear. I believe even Percy’s mustache was tweed,” she added, and laughed prettily.

  One evening when we were seated around our large oilcloth-covered kitchen table, eating supper by the light of two coal-oil lamps, someone mentioned the portrait. Drobney congratulated himself for having Percy painted out of the picture.

  “I suppose if I died you’d have me painted out,” said Baba, not entirely joking.

  “Of course I would,” shouted Drobney. “Everything should be as it is,” and he stared around the table hoping, I’m sure, that someone would contradict him. Aunt Rose scurried to the stove to fetch more turnips.

  “Then everyone in the picture should be wearing overalls, like we are now. And why aren’t I in the picture?” I asked.

  Everyone in the room wore bulky sweaters and bib overalls, a far cry from the finery of the portrait. I didn’t realize until years later just how poor we were. That winter we lived on turnips from the root cellar and eggs preserved in stone crocks of alum. What must my father have thought when he suddenly became responsible for seven members of my mother’s family, when the stony and worthless quarter-section of land he farmed produced barely enough for our own livelihood? If one of the chickens looked as though it was definitely going to expire of natural causes, it was killed and we enjoyed chicken soup, liberally laced with turnips for a meal or two.

  That night, after I was put to bed, there was a heated discussion, parts of which drifted to me where I lay bundled in a down comforter, in what had once been a pantry attached to the kitchen. The discussion was about whether, when there was money, if there would ever again be money, should I be painted into the portrait.

  “Jerry and Kitty,” Baba Drobney said, referring to my aunt and uncle, “will have children. Wald and Rose will marry. What if Mariska has ten brothers and sisters for Jamie? Children, no. Future in-laws, maybe,” she declared with some finality. There was argument, especially from Aunt Kitty for her future offspring. But Baba stood fast, won her point, and the subject of my being painted in, when and if prosperity returned, was never broached again.

  I tried to learn why Baba and Drobney had chosen to immigrate to Canada.

  “Drobney thought it was a good idea,” my mother said.

  “I heard the streets of Canadian cities were paved with gold. Ha!” Drobney barked, when I got up the courage to ask him.

  Once, when Baba was rocking me to sleep, at a time when I was almost too big to fit on her lap anymore, she hinted that Drobney had been in some kind of difficulty with the Yugoslavian government, and that large sums of money were involved. I share a birthday with Josip Broz, code name Tito, the man destined to rule the conglomeration that became Yugoslavia. Apparently Baba was hell-bent on my being named Josip Broz O’Day.

  “If your grandmother had been here when you were born you’d probably be Marshal Tito O’Day,” my father said several times over the years, “but she was in Toronto then, and she’s not as persuasive by mail as she is in person.”

  The Drobneys were not poor when they came to Canada. They settled in Toronto in a large stone house close to the University of Toronto. The house still stands, long ago converted into a warren to house students. Not many years ago, on a visit to Toronto, I drove my wife past the property. “That’s where my grandparents lived when they first came to Canada. It’s where my mother was living when my father came to patch the plaster in the upstairs bathroom.”

  Drobney, who had been a horse trader in the old country, became a used car dealer in Toronto, one of the first. Then he discovered the taxi business. It is said that at one time fifty percent of the taxis in Toronto bore a white line down each side with Drobney Taxi in fat white letters on each door. Drobney’s mistake was that he believed in his new homeland. In Dubrovnik he had kept his wealth in a money belt, under the floorboards beneath his and
Baba’s bed. In Canada, he decided to trust his wealth to a bank. When the Depression came, not only did people stop riding in taxis but the bank failed. Drobney lost everything.

  My father and mother, Baba and I, were the last to leave the farm. Lichta was the first. She got a job in Edmonton as governess to the children of a wealthy lawyer. She married the lawyer’s younger brother, the aspiring politician.

  After the war, Uncle Waldemar went back to Yugoslavia and after a few years stopped writing. I suspect Uncle Wald was gay. I always meant to ask Lichta about that. Jerry and Kitty moved to Winnipeg, where he became a bus driver. Timid Aunt Rose married a timid Alberta farmer named Stefanichan.

  And one fall, while we were still on the farm, Drobney announced that he was going to die, and sixty days later he did. In his final days he lay in bed, his hands raised in front of him, braiding imaginary rope for the horses he had long ago led through the streets of Dubrovnik.

  On golden Indian Summer days Baba helped Drobney to a rocker on the sunny south side of the house, where fist-sized marigolds glowed along a path bordered with whitewashed stones.

  Drobney sat in the sun, his right hand poised as it was in the portrait. He mumbled the word, “Nistru, Nistru.”

  Whether he was referring to the river or the long dead cat I never knew.

  After her second marriage, Aunt Lichta wrote asking if she could have the portrait. It was Baba’s decision. No one offered any objection, so she agreed.

  Baba wrapped the portrait in a blanket, tied it with binder twine and drove by horse and cart eight miles to the highway where she put it on board the east-bound Western Trailways bus. That was the last time I saw the portrait for over forty years.