Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  One case held nothing but wedding bands. I tried to get a good look at them without attracting the attention of a salesman, but of course, this proved impossible.

  “Can I help you, sir?” The tall, lean man in a suit that looked nearly as costly as the ones Gleason wore bore a remarkable resemblance to David Niven.

  “I’m looking for a particular style of band,” I improvised.

  The salesman made a sweeping gesture at the wares before us. “We have a large selection, as you see, sir,” he said. “Would you care to look at one of these?”

  As if thinking about what I’d like to be shown, I studied the rings in the case. Everything looked so new, not only because the rings were unworn, but also because of the style. Even the plainest band looked more modern than the rings Gleason and I were investigating.

  “Do you ever do custom-made rings?” I asked.

  I thought the man stiffened a little at the question, as though he was offended by the implication that the selection he offered might not be wide enough to suit my needs. Or perhaps it was my imagination. “We can arrange for you to speak to one of our jewelers directly, sir,” he said, then added, “if you are sincere in your interest.”

  I took the hint. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks for your help. I’ll keep looking.”

  A dead loss. I tried the jewelry departments at Eaton’s, Simpson’s and Hudson’s Bay, but I saw nothing that gave me the least hint as to how a person would go about getting a ring made like the rings on the body at the morgue—or why.

  Toward the end of the afternoon, I realized that it would soon be Saturday night. Arletta was not allowed to date, and she always spent Saturday night with her giggling girlfriends. As for Michele, he usually spent Saturday night in the company of long-haired women as intense as himself. What they did together I didn’t ask. But it usually involved long conversations and the consumption of strong coffee and cheap red wine.

  As for me, I sometimes had a date with one of the female students, though never with the elusive red-haired law student who was the only woman on campus—in the world, actually—I really wanted to date. On this night I had no date, and when I found myself walking toward Lombard Street, I toyed with the dumb idea of checking to see whether the clerk might work on Saturday and might be unmarried and might be free and might agree to go out with me.

  I decided that was too many mights by the time I got to the corner of Lombard and Church. Instead of continuing on to the morgue, I made a sharp left and walked up the east side of Church, where, in the shadow of St. Mike’s cathedral, the pawnbrokers’ shops were lined up.

  Musical instruments; typewriters; toy soldiers dusty but valiantly arranged in mock battles; books; trophies; insignia of forgotten schools and battalions, choruses and teams; hats; bats; binoculars; record players; objects made of iron, plastic, wood and lead, but most of all silver, gold and gems—jewelry. The teeming windows of the pawnshops on Church Street were cemeteries marked by the stones of lost hope, mistaken love, dashed expectations and, I was sure, narrow escapes.

  The salesmen in these shops, I soon learned, were not as suave as David Niven, or nearly as curious as the Italian jeweler. They’d already heard every tale of woe. Their gruff manner as much as said, “Buy, sell or get out.” It wasn’t until the fourth or fifth shop that I found someone I wasn’t afraid to approach with the type of question I’d asked at Durston’s. “Do you ever see custom-made rings?”

  “In this place what you don’t see don’t exist,” the pawn-broker told me, leaning across a counter piled with black velvet trays of rings, one tray atop another. Against the velvet, the jewels sparkled in the low light of the shop, but once again I noticed how easy it was even for my untrained eye to tell the difference between these previously owned items and the brand-new gems in Durston’s. “Are you buying or selling?”

  “Neither,” I ventured. “I’m just trying to find out where a person could get a certain kind of ring.” I slipped the drawing out of my pocket.

  “Let’s have a look,” the man said. I handed him the paper, a little embarrassed by my amateurish effort at drawing.

  The pawnbroker didn’t seem to mind my lack of artistic skill. He studied the picture so intently that I half expected him to subject it to scrutiny through the lens of the jeweler’s loupe he wore on a frayed cord around his neck.

  “You know,” he said after a long pause, “a pawnbroker gets to see things that other people never see—same as a cop, I guess.” He glanced up at me and for a moment I wondered if he thought I was a police officer. The thought flattered me. “But,” he went on, “you get used to not asking too many questions, in case you find out something you don’t want to know. You get a ring from a nice, good-looking lady and you learn the guy run off with some other dame on the morning of the wedding, that sort of thing.”

  “Do you think there’s a story behind rings like these?” I asked him, trying to hide the desperate nature of my growing curiosity.

  Again he studied my drawing and the cryptic quote at the bottom of it.

  “Sure there’s a story,” he said, “and you don’t gotta be a genius to figure it out. If this drawing is right, these rings were made of two old rings, one silver, one gold, but the inscription is new. See, you got it going across the place where the gold and silver are joined. Is that how it was on the real rings?”

  “Exactly,” I answered.

  “One thing you always gotta remember about jewelry is that people get it in happy times and get rid of it in sad times. When did you get these rings?”

  “I, uh . . . My friend got them,” I sputtered. “But yes, you could definitely say they were gotten rid of in bad times.”

  Again he gave me a look, but I glanced away and he continued his analysis. “A ring’s a circle because it’s supposed to be eternal, but of course it never is. Sometimes people fool around with that eternity angle. They like to make rings that are circles of precious stones so much the same that you can’t tell one from another. That means you can’t tell where the circle starts and where it ends. Like I said. Eternity.”

  I was certainly conversant with the notion of eternity, having had hell mentioned to me on a daily basis for twenty-three years.

  “So these rings that my friend has are meant to signify something eternal?” I asked.

  The pawnbroker shook his head. He was a short, bald man, about forty, I thought. I wondered how long he’d been incarcerated here, speaking of eternity among the discards of other people’s lives.

  “Nah,” he answered. “Here you got the opposite. You got two symbols of eternity cut in half, interrupted. These rings were made by somebody who wanted to wreck something that was meant to last forever. If the person who cut the rings was the same person who put them back together, then you got somebody—or two people—who wanted to wreck an old union to make a new one.”

  I looked at him in puzzlement. “What does that mean?” I asked.

  He studied me in a way I didn’t like, as if he were judging whether I was old enough or wise enough to understand what he was about to say.

  “I’ve seen things like this a few times before,” he began, glancing at the drawing, the trays of rings on the counter, the dusty shelves of the shop, but not at me. “I’d say a person who makes something like this wants to kiss the past goodbye.”

  I didn’t quite understand the pawnbroker’s meaning and knew better than to press. It was clear he’d told me all he was going to tell me. I was sure of that when he shoved the drawing back at me and said, “I’m busy right now, kid. Bring me one of them rings and I’ll give you a hundred dollars. Bring me the two that match and I’ll give you five hundred.”

  Chapter 8

  Condominiums are being built in Toronto today with minaret-like balconies that face east to allow Muslims to kneel facing Mecca. In Nathan Phillips Square in front of City Hall, Muslims remove their shoes to pray. Hindus and Buddhists, Druids and Wiccans, Anglicans and Baptists regularly take to the stree
ts for religious observances, sometimes in the dead of winter. Many people think the Italian Good Friday street procession is what started mass outdoor public worship in Toronto, and I am inclined to agree. Our family, friends and neighbors always went to modest Mount Carmel for Good Friday, and then maybe in a few weeks, we’d go again. But on an ordinary Sunday like the one in the spring of 1965, we ignored the politics of Italian churchgoing, refusing to settle on a parish to which we owed our loyalty. Instead, we decided to attend St. Michael’s cathedral, where Catholics of all persuasions met in noncombative devotion.

  By “we,” I mean my mother, Arletta and I. Michele had declared himself to be against organized religion some years before. As for my father, a double latte and a chance to go over the soccer scores with his compaesani at the Cafe Diplomatico on the corner of Clinton and College were all the church he needed.

  I couldn’t concentrate on the prayers, which were beginning to be meaningless to me, or on the sermon, either. It was little more than a rant on the hot topic of the day: birth control. Arletta appeared to be listening raptly, but I wondered if her attention wasn’t an effort to clue into the mystery of what she was so earnestly being warned to avoid. The only benefit I derived from Mass that morning was that it seemed to take forever, which meant that I had time to think about what to discuss with Uncle Salvatore. I kept awake during the sermon by planning how to ask my uncle about Chief Coroner Rosen or Attorney General Garrey. Since childhood, I’d been warned never to ask Uncle Salvatore a direct question about his acquaintances. In my earlier days I’d assumed that to be mere politeness, but by the time I was in law school, I had a different view of the matter.

  KING GEORGES ROAD, Kings Garden, Kings Lynn Road, Kingsmill, Kingscourt. These were the streets I walked on and past to get to the Tudor-style, three-story mansion from which Uncle Salvatore reigned. “He lives in England now,” my father had once jokingly said of his brother, but in a way, it was true. Though many of the finest residences in the city were built by Italians, including the workmen who were my father’s equals and the contractors who were Uncle Salvatore’s, my uncle chose to live in an enclave of old English wealth. The house crowned a treed embankment overlooking the Humber River. Miles from the crowded grid of the city of Toronto, this curving road, called the Kingsway, graced the western suburb of Etobicoke.

  Carrying the cheese bun, so securely wrapped by my mother that it could have stayed fresh until freed by a safe-cracker, I negotiated the flagstone steps that led to Uncle Salvatore’s front door. Half his main floor was one vast room. Through the front windows, leaded glass set in gray, hand-hewn stone, I could see across the expanse and all the way to the set of windows at the rear of the house, beyond which was a blur of trees. In front of these rear windows now, a dark silhouette slowly paced. I adjusted my tie, swallowed, rang the bell.

  Uncle Salvatore’s wealth came from the import and export of Italian food. Crinkly cellophane packages of biscotti and pasta. Exotically shaped jars of peppers and artichoke hearts. Prosciutto ham and provolone cheeses, smoky, salty and smooth. Above all, it came from oil. Not the crude oil of rough places like Texas and Alberta, but the liquid gold of the sun-streaked olive grove.

  “You can’t tell what he does by looking at him,” my mother always said, for my uncle was a slim man who dressed far more conservatively than the non-Italian businessmen who were his colleagues, his neighbors and his friends. His wife called herself “Fay” and told other matrons that it was short for “Faith.” It wasn’t. Her real name was Fietta. She came by her blond, fair-skinned looks honestly, though. Her people were from Trieste, a part of Europe that had been both Austria and Italy. Aunt Fay had a “past” in the person of another living husband. That she was divorced may have been of interest to her Protestant neighbors on the Kingsway, but it wasn’t supposed to mean a thing to us, for as children we’d been instructed to act as if Aunt Fay, living in sin and causing Uncle Salvatore to live in sin, too, did not exist. However, as the years went by, we began to be punished for our rudeness toward her, which signified that time had somehow made her an acceptable part of our family. Unfair and illogical, I know, but not untypical of the Italians of those days.

  It being the chronically resentful Irish maid’s day off, Aunt Fay answered the door herself. I handed her the bag with the cheese bun, which she took between her finger and thumb like a gift of soiled laundry. “Your uncle Sammy is in the study, Angelo,” she said. “He’s waiting.”

  I glanced at my watch. I had phoned ahead to say when I expected to arrive. I was four minutes earlier than I said I’d be. Why was Uncle Salvatore “waiting”?

  He didn’t rise when I entered. Maybe he was tired from all that pacing. He sat in a high-backed leather chair beside a massive stone fireplace in which a low blaze flickered. His deep-set gray eyes followed me as I crossed the carpet and stopped twenty feet from where he sat.

  “Sit down, Angelo,” he said in a voice as cold as our winter weather. “Have some wine.”

  I moved closer and accepted a small crystal goblet of sweet muscatel. Afternoon light from the leaded windows behind Uncle Salvatore caught in the depths of the musky liquid and made it glow like an old topaz.

  “How’s school?”

  I took a sip of wine. I took my time. Uncle Salvatore, for all his industry, was never in a hurry. Important men aren’t. “Fine, sir. Thank you.”

  I could feel the cold eyes on me. “I hear you met with Sheldrake Tuppin the other day.”

  It had been a very long time since I had been surprised by anything my uncle knew about me.

  “I hear that as soon as you turn in a proposal, things will get moving. So how’s that proposal coming along?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, and the burgundy leather groaned under my weight. “I work on it every day,” I answered. It was one of those lies that you realize are almost true the second after you utter the words.

  “And what exactly is this project?”

  This was a question I’d been preparing to answer since I’d learned I’d been summoned to report to my uncle. “It’s a matter of international law,” I began strongly. “A potential challenge to policies of the United States government as those policies affect Canadian nationals.”

  Uncle Salvatore seemed to watch my lips as I spoke. I knew he always feared making a mistake in the correct use of the English language, a fear I didn’t have myself, the only advantage I had over my uncle. I paused, but he said nothing. I took his silence as an invitation to continue. “I’m engaged in preliminary research to ascertain the rights of an individual whose citizenship is at present a matter of some controversy and—”

  “There’s no money in helping draft dodgers,” Uncle Salvatore cut in. “And no lawyer—or judge either—is going to be interested in a client like that. You better come up with something more important than a bum who wants to get out of his duty to his country. And besides, you’re a fool if you think a law student can take on the United States government.”

  Already that Sunday I had sat through a sermon I didn’t want to hear, eaten a heavy lunch in a state of total anxiety, crossed town under the depressing gray skies of a winter that would not end, frozen my limbs walking through the meandering streets of this fake kingdom and been polite to Aunt Fay. But only now did a dangerous anger rise in me. I was not some obedient boy. I was not just another slab of comestible to be bought and sold by my rich uncle.

  Not sure whether I was referring to the Billy Johnsons of this world or to myself, I vehemently declared, “The right of a man to control his own destiny is fundamental. A lawyer not dedicated to that principle is not the kind I want to be.”

  For the first time that day, Uncle Salvatore smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “You are going to control your own destiny.”

  Was he agreeing with me or threatening me? I didn’t know which was scarier. I dared not say another word. When several long moments of frightening silence had passed, he stood and went to the w
indow, staring out over the trees of the river valley behind the house. Soon they would burst out in the delicate green-lace foliage of full spring, but now they were nothing but bare twigs. As if the sight of them had given Uncle Salvatore back his voice, he turned to me and spoke.

  “The most important thing a man can do, Angelo, is to invest. When we came to this country, we had nothing except what we carried in our own hands. But we invested our youth and our time and our hard work and pretty soon we had money to invest, too.” His gaze met mine briefly, swung away to sweep across the huge room, then returned to mine. I blinked but did not look away. “The biggest thing a man can invest is his honor. When the war came, we were supposed to forget about Italy. We were supposed to fight for the English and the Americans. We did that, and even then, Italians were put in concentration camps here in Canada.”

  I fought the urge to shift in my seat again. I didn’t want to hear about the internment of Canadian Italians. I didn’t want to hear Uncle Salvatore say he’d invested in me. I wanted to go home.

  “But we got over that,” he said, moving away from the window, “and since the war, we’re in a position in this country where nobody’s ever going to lock us up again.”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  “All I’m saying, Angelo, is I don’t want you to forget what we’re doing here.” He leaned down and reached for the decanter beside his chair, walked over to where I sat and replenished the quarter inch of muscatel I’d drunk. I smelled the deep richness of the wine and also the astringent lime scent of Uncle Salvatore’s aftershave.

  “What exactly are we doing here, Uncle?” I asked. It was an impertinent question and I could see by the stiffening of his hand as he replaced the decanter that he had not expected further questioning from me. My mind raced. It occurred to me that my father had told me about my uncle’s wanting to see me the minute I’d stepped in the door after the meeting with Tuppin. How could Uncle Salvatore have known so quickly where I’d been? Was this meeting with my uncle today, this warning, about Tuppin and the minuscule bit of work I’d thus far done on the Billy Johnson matter, or was it about the visit to the morgue, the stolen evidence? Had somebody tipped Uncle Salvatore off?