Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “I’d like to bring Father and Mother to Boston. We have a much larger place, and the staff to take proper care — though I know Lillian is taking care. Of course I do. She’s wonderful. But you have a baby, and this place is —”

  He took note of my withering look.

  “Why did you wait so long before telling me your firm went down? You know I still have contacts in this city. Or you could come to Boston. Not every business has been flattened, you know.”

  “The work will pick up,” I said grimly.

  He reached into the vest of his expensive suit. “At least let me leave you some money for expenses, for doctors and medicine. I know this must be draining and I’m certainly in a position to —”

  “Your money is no good here,” I said coldly.

  “Don’t be ridiculous! We’re family.”

  What can you say to someone who has prospered in hard times by marrying well and charming his way through a world sick with troubles?

  “I am the oldest now,” I said stiffly. “I’ve handled far worse than this. Now put your pocketbook away before I rip it up.”

  The hand went back in the vest. The pocketbook was replaced by a silver cigarette case.

  “Try one of mine.”

  I almost sent the case flying but looked away instead. The clatter of children increased. A young boy scooped up the ball expertly and hurled it back towards the flat rock that was serving as home plate.

  “Just for a moment I saw Will,” Rufus said. “Throwing to Thomas. God, they were good together. I idolized you guys.”

  I finished my skimpy fag and took one of his fine, store-bought brand after all.

  “That summer of the war was the very worst. Till now, I’d say,” Rufus murmured. “First you were captured, and we were told you were dead, you know. Mother fell apart. You should have seen Father concocting schemes to get you out. He was going to study German and pose as a wealthy industrialist. He almost went crazy with it. I think he loved you the best. He saved everything you drew. Maybe you didn’t realize —”

  “Stop talking about him as if he were dead!”

  “He was hard set against Alex joining. But with you captured and still alive there was no way to stop him.”

  The same boy had the ball again. He chased down the skinny girl, the one with the powerful swing.

  “I knew I wasn’t old enough to serve. I couldn’t be a hero like you and the others. But I swore I would never let this family down. And I haven’t. Ramsay, look at me! I’m in a position to help.”

  I flicked his cigarette away. Thomas and Will were swallowed in the soup of battle. Alex fell from dysentery behind the lines. I was a bloody fannigan. There wasn’t a lot of heroism any way you sliced it.

  Rufus shifted his weight. “Father tells me there’s this commission for war reparations for the prisoners. You must sign up for that. There will be money for what you went through. You deserve it, Ramsay. You need it.”

  Now even the old man is grasping at straws, I thought. Government money! As if there could be any hope in that.Without comment I stood up and left Rufus on the stoop to finish his smoke.

  Father was in a bad way, tossing with the pain. Vanessa had taken over trying to do something for the gang of us on the coal stove. She was surprisingly dextrous in the kitchen — in such a pitiful kitchen — considering the most she probably did at home was give orders to her staff. Lillian stayed in the back room, feeding the baby, and Mother was wiping the old man’s brow with a dampened cloth. He jerked his head suddenly and eyed me in a fit of clarity.

  “Come here, boy!” he said in his old way, as if he had just set foot at home again after months of being off.

  I stepped to his side.

  “Leave us, Mother,” he gasped. She did not move until Father tore the cloth from her hand and hurled it at the far wall. “I need to talk to my boy!”

  She got up then, muttering in Spanish, and went to help Vanessa with the food.

  “Mother and I are going to stay with Rufus in Boston,” he said bluntly. “That’s the end of the discussion, all right?”

  My eyes fixed on the small holes in the wall close to the bed that we’d packed with newspaper to keep out the draft.

  “What about your work?”

  I mumbled something about the different leads I’d been trying, what I’d heard from some of the other commercial artists I used to work with in the better days. “It’s bound to pick up.”

  “I mean your real work. You’ve got all this time, but I don’t see any space here for you to paint.”

  “I can’t work here, of course.”

  He continued to stare at me. “Have you been approaching galleries? You could use more of Rufus’s drive in this respect.”

  He started coughing then, and I reached for a blanket for him.

  “It’s not money that runs the world, it’s people,” he sputtered. “People who have money. And you’ve got to show your face to them. They have to respect you, respect what you’ve done. If you keep hiding in here no one will know and you won’t make a cent and you’ll go on being bitter. There, that’s my lecture.” His hand gripped my wrist. He closed his eyes and went rigid for a spell.

  “Write to the English relatives,” he said finally. “Perhaps they know some of the right people who can push your work forward. Be a big man in London, and Montreal will come begging to you.”

  He grimaced then and once more clutched my arm with fingers as cold as icebox meat.

  “I know, you’ll never be Rufus,” he said. “I guess that’s what I like about you.” He looked around the gloomy space for a moment and then said, calmly and with precision, “Damnation. Would you send in the women, son?” I looked at him with concern. “Unless you want to wipe me yourself?” he added, and turned away in disgust.

  In the late afternoon, in our hour in the yard, I sit in a small measure of sunshine sneaking its way past the guard tower and the kitchen hut and stealing through barbed wire. I am trying not to think about food, or about the agony of waiting for parcels that always seem delayed or tampered with or outright stolen by the Germans. I try to make it enough to sit in a small spot of warmth, to use no energy, to close my eyes and will myself elsewhere.

  But the hunger squeezes upon my brain, and my hands can’t stay still. I have one sheet of paper for a letter and too many people to write to, one stub of a pencil that will soon be too small to fit in my own shaking hand. And so to stop it, to take my mind away for a while, I quickly sketch a dark-haired girl with hard questions in her eyes and a fine, lovely face and a mouth just slightly open, getting ready either to offer argument or to plunge into a kiss.

  A desperate sketch with something of the woman captured, I suppose. Something of the way she is in my mind.

  Witherspoon finds me out and sits beside me. He closes his eyes in the sunshine. He has come back from Strafe nervous and trembling in the limbs. Like all of us now his face is gaunt, his eyes ringed dark, and his skin reeks of something sour — of a body slowly eating itself to nothing.

  “She’s beautiful,” he says, his back against the barracks wall. “Looks like my Beatrice before she gave me the heave.”

  “You probably don’t want to see her, then.”

  “I’ll trade you tobacco for her,” he says in a voice like a snaggle-toothed saw. I can’t tell if he wants to gaze at her adoringly or rip her face to shreds.

  “I have tobacco,” I say.

  “I got some extra socks in my last home package.”

  “I don’t want socks.”

  He keeps looking at the picture.

  “Make her nude, I’ll give you three pieces of biscuit.”

  “Five.”

  “Done!”

  I tell him to bring me another sheet of paper. “And I need something smooth — a board for backing.” I’ve been drawing against the flat of my knee, and the lines are faint in places.

  Witherspoon comes back in minutes with a fresh sheet
of paper and an almost smooth piece of board pried from inside the barracks wall. I quickly sketch a form I’ve seen in one of the French postcards circulating among the lads: a woman with a leg up on a chair, bending over to pull up her stockings. I give her long, curly hair falling over one shoulder and have her look up with a bit of womanly blush on her cheek, as if distracted by someone who has just come into the room.

  Witherspoon snatches the paper from me as soon as I finish. Then he pulls my pieces of biscuit from his pocket. I put four of them in my own pocket and nibble on one, letting it dissolve slowly. My tongue is so swollen and painful from the bad food I can’t hurry the procedure. And my spot of sun has moved on — the cold is quickly returning to my limbs, to my core.

  I suck on another biscuit.

  Collins comes by later with a chunk of chocolate he has somehow managed to keep from devouring.

  “I need another pencil,” I say. “This one’s shot. And bring your own paper.” While he’s gone I imagine myself deeply sniffing the chocolate before swallowing it. Despite the biscuit my hunger is, if anything, worse than before.

  “My wife’s name is Helen,” Collins says when he hands over the rough sheet of paper and the pencil, its point newly carved at that. “She wears her hair up. None of this bobbing nonsense. And her cheeks are —”

  I haven’t seen him this animated, this full of fun since before he was thrown in solitary and beaten to mash. So maybe Witherspoon will pull out of it as well, I think.

  “Her cheeks are, you know, womanly.”

  I’ve already started to sketch. Several others have gathered round — Wilkens and Jackson and Cuddihey — seeing what I’m up to.

  “Does she have large eyes? Is she sort of a Lillian Gish?”

  “Yes! Yes, Lillian Gish would be all right. With a decent set of knockers.”

  I give her a pert nose and dark, dramatic lips and long eyelashes, and the breasts that he is looking for. Collins too becomes impatient to own the sketch as soon as I’m finished.

  “Does it look anything like her?”

  “Not really,” he says with a big laugh. And the others too, all of us, stupid with hunger, laugh like little boys. “I love her anyway,” Collins says. “She’s my girlfriend now. I’ll call her Marietta!”

  I savour the incomprehensible luxury of the chocolate, close my eyes and think of my Margaret — of Margaret, rather, who isn’t mine except in the deluded few cubic inches between my ears.

  “We are a bunch of sorry buggers,” Collins says as the last of the chocolate seeps down my throat.

  “If anyone has bully beef,” I say, “I will do a nude in any position that’s anatomically imaginable.”

  Nine

  At first I thought the place was closed, it was so poorly lit, and the door stuck badly. It wasn’t W. Scott & Sons or even the fine art gallery at Eaton’s, but a smaller outfit, more welcoming, I assumed. I pushed and pushed at the door and peered in past the displays of muddled English landscapes: quaint hedgerows and cobbled lanes and misty gardens with muted roses. The man at the back was reading a book and seemed at first glance annoyed to have anyone interrupt him.

  He squinted at me from a distance through heavy glasses, then half rose and made a pushing motion with his hands. So I gripped the handle and lowered my shoulder and stumbled into the shop like a barbarian bursting through the gates.

  “It always sticks, that door, in the hot weather,” the proprietor said. He was even shorter than me but with a large head and a perfectly rounded pot belly. I followed his eyes as they took in the bound stack of stretched canvasses under my arm. His face hardened under the realization that I was not a prospective customer.

  His gallery looked as if it hadn’t had one of those in a good long while.

  My fingers shook as I untied the strings. He was kind enough, anyway, to have a quick look. I’d included a bit of everything: some landscapes which I thought might be of interest, a few of the Margaret nudes, a portrait of Father as a young man perched atop a railroad trestle, even some of my grimmer work about the war.

  “You’ve nothing framed?” he said finally.

  “Not at this point.” There was no need to confess that I could not afford it.

  “Nobody is buying art these days,” he said wearily. “Except the very rich, and they are few, and they only buy good British art, you understand.” Despite myself I looked around at all the good British art cluttering his store.

  “Are any of these painters still alive?” I asked.

  It was much easier to do the knots up again and put away my work.

  “I run a commercial gallery,” he said. “Some of the Montreal artists I know, the local people, have joined together in various groups. They aren’t trying to make a living at it. That’s impossible, certainly in these times. But they teach, and sometimes they exhibit together. You ought to get in with a group like that. For the exposure and whatnot. I think I heard some of them are doing Christmas cards. A penny each. That sort of thing.” He looked at me then as if the next bit of advice was practically cutting his own throat. “I’ve heard of some artists selling on the sly from the lobbies of the bigger hotels. You’d have to frame your work, of course. But some people have money.”

  I had a hard time again with the blasted door, which was stuck now from the inside.

  “Much of your work is very good,” he said to me. “But you must understand — I get ten of you a day and I’m not running a charity.”

  At last the door opened, and I felt the concrete of the sidewalk through the hole in my shoe.

  Dearest Ramsay,

  I know it has been quite some time since I have written to you. Please know, that silent as my pen has fallen, you have never been far from my thoughts and prayers. Sometimes I wonder what this war has done, how it has ravaged our inner lives. There must be millions of us in homes and families around the world whose every moment, waking and sleeping, involves the extraordinary effort of mentally caring for someone thousands of miles away. We are all prisoners of hope and contemplation, clinging to thoughts, memories, fantasies of what is to come, the day when the world will be set right again.

  Will it ever be right again?

  I’m sorry, I should be more of a brick about these things and write to you in certain hope etc. etc. Your cheerful cousin Margaret ever stalwart. But it is hardly the way I feel. I have had such curtains of darkness draw around me, and my poor family tries to jolly me out of it. They say, “Dear Margaret, come now, get out of bed! Look at that clear sky!” And I roll over and look at the dismal, dreary, suffering clouds and know in my heart that I have the least to complain about of anyone. I think to myself, what hardships is Ramsay enduring at the moment? What of so many others? And why? Why?

  Enough of my blackness. If you can stand to write back I of course yearn to hear from you. For now, please excuse your pathetic cousin Margaret. I am looking for bootstraps with which to pull myself up, but all I seem to find is more heavy woollen clothing to weigh me down.

  Forgive me, Margaret

  Dear Margaret,

  In your darkness walk with me — we are in Hyde Park again. Do you remember that day? That blue sky is forever. We’ll walk and walk, and this time we’ll talk about the way the light bounces off my little board as I write this. It sneaks in through the broken window and scatters itself over all the greys and muted browns and yellows of our teeth, the hard black scrabbiness of our beards. We will talk about the sketches I am making for nearly all the men in camp, the little echoes of femininity that help us remember the lovelier world beyond the wire. And we will talk about how in this weird and upside-down place an artist like me is suddenly wealthy. For men will trade with me all manner of things — their chocolate, even, their cakes from home, tinned meats, books, long underwear — for a scrap of paper with certain lines.

  And since we are in our heads and not reality, for your part you won’t be an idiot about loving Boulton (and you will forgive me for saying it. In hell one
says what one feels like saying).

  Damn the consequences. And damn my jealousy. It is before all that. It is just a sunny day in late May and we are walking in Hyde Park and the war is somewhere else.

  Yours, Ramsay

  wandered by myself down St. Catherine Street, lugging my work like some necessary burden. The cold winds of early spring knifed through me and through all the other unemployed men with no particular place to go, their hats pulled down, defeat etched on their faces. I’d seen too many of them for too long and felt as if I were re-entering a dream in which the trap I thought I’d escaped was closing in again and again.

  On a back street a crowd of men lined up for free haircuts sponsored by a good works committee. Those who weren’t in the chair with a sheet around their necks stood against a brick wall, sullenly smoking. For a moment I thought of joining the line. Maybe if I’d had a fresh haircut the gallery fool would have agreed to take on some of my work.

  Then again, perhaps he’d have shown more pity if I’d looked as ragged as some of these sods.

  Around another corner men were playing pitch and toss in a vacant lot. The board with the target rings was hung on a wooden fence, and I watched as two lads took turns and ten or twelve others bet on the outcome.

  “Are you in for a dime?” someone asked me, and I shook my head. “I never bet,” I said, but I stayed to watch for a while until I began to cough. Ever since my father had left for Boston my lungs seemed to be tearing themselves to shreds.

  I ended up in a bar on St. Denis, one of the last to still give credit to regulars. I stood with my foot on the rail, not looking into the mirror. The whisky was bitter and slow, and the others in the place did not bother me.

  Sometime in the late afternoon I gathered my hat and made a show of checking through my pockets to see what could be offered against my debt. I left some coins on the counter behind me and turned to leave, but I fell into another fit of wretched coughing. When I straightened up again I saw someone I knew but couldn’t quite place. He’d changed utterly, whoever he was, but he knew my name, at least.