by Gail Bowen
Compared to the Sawchuks’, Roma Boychuk’s place, 82 Joicey Street, was a model of restraint. The house was white with red trim. On each side of the walk to the front door was a half an oil barrel painted white. The raw edges of the barrels had been smoothed into scallops, and the barrels were filled with bright red geraniums.
I had told Roma I would be there by ten. It was five past when I knocked on the door, and she was waiting for me. When I called I had told her I was working on a book about Andy’s life; she had been interested and pleased.
Less than two weeks before, her only child had died and I expected full mourning, but she was dressed for company. She was a stocky little woman but not fat, and she dressed with the care of a woman who has, all her life, been proud of her looks. Her black skirt was cut carefully to slim the line of her hips, and she had a brooch of china pansies at the neck of her lacy white blouse. Her hair was mauve-rinsed, and she had braided it and twisted it into two knots, one at the nape of her neck and one just above it. She had secured the knots with flowered combs that looked vaguely Japanese. Her cheek, when she placed it in front of my lips for a kiss, was smooth and unlined. “Vaseline every night,” Andy told me once when he saw me buying some expensive night cream. “That’s what my mother uses, and she has skin like a baby. Of course, she goes to bed looking like a channel swimmer, but she hasn’t slept with anyone in forty years, so …” And he’d shrugged and laughed.
Roma didn’t smell like a channel swimmer; she smelled pleasantly of something masculine and familiar.
“You smell good,” I said.
“Old Spice,” she said, “the only thing that covers the onions. I make shishliki this morning. I give you some to take when you go.” She gestured me into the front room – a place of heavy drapes, heavy furniture covered in plastic slipcovers, and pale, dispirited light. “You’ll have coffee,” she said, then, brushing aside my offer to help, she left me alone in that gloomy room.
Through the door I could see the kitchen – a room flooded with sunlight and potted plants and good smells. If I had been a friend, I would have sat at the kitchen table and sipped coffee from a thick mug and talked to Roma as she sliced cabbage for soup or twisted dough into circles for poppy-seed bread. But I was company and I sat on the stiff plastic, which kept Roma’s living room suite as free of spot or blemish as it had been the day the men from Kozan’s loaded it onto the truck and delivered it to Joicey Street. When my eyes grew used to the light, I saw that the room was full of pictures. Half were of the Blessed Virgin and half were of Andy.
Most of the pictures of Andy as an adult I had seen before. They had been in campaign literature or newspaper articles and then we replaced them and forgot them. But Roma hadn’t forgotten. She had clipped these pictures of her son and framed them and hung them on her wall next to pictures of the Annunciation or the Sacred Heart. There were pictures of Andy as a child – dozens of them. I walked to the wall by the window to look at these more closely. There was Andy at school, a succession of ever larger Andys sitting, hands folded in front of him, in a series of dim grey classrooms with the pictures of the Pope and the King and Queen and then the new Queen behind him. There was Andy with his friends, grinning, face bleached almost into nothingness by the sun as he stood with his baseball team; Andy sitting in a canoe, waving at the person who stood behind the camera on the shore of some forgotten northern lake.
There were none of Eve and Andy. None of Eve and Andy and their children.
“You like? I get more.” Roma’s voice behind me, startlingly loud and strong. She set the tray she was carrying on a wooden tea wagon, disappeared and was back almost immediately with a box of photo albums. The one on top had a cover of palest powder-blue satin. In the centre was an oval indentation with a picture of a tired-looking Jesus surrounded by little children. Across the top of the album in raised Gothic letters was the legend “My Baptism.”
“I get our little lunch while you look at Andrue’s pictures for your book,” said Roma as she placed the box on the floor beside me. Then, magician-like, she fluttered a lace tablecloth out of nowhere, covered the coffee table and began arranging cups and plates. As I went through the pictures, Roma moved from kitchen to living room, bringing first a pot of coffee and cream and sugar, then a plastic lazy Susan piled high with breads, poppy-seed and zucchini and carrot, then a tray with butter and cheese and dishes of pickles and jams and jellies. And finally another plastic lazy Susan, this one heavy with cookies and squares.
She handed me a dessert plate and a bright paper napkin that said, “No matter where I serve my guests they seem to like my kitchen best,” poured our coffee and began her narrative on the albums in the box. She told me about the pictures in “My Baptism” and “My First Communion,” then she handed me four fat scrapbooks, each of which was labelled, “My Life in the Church.”
“These,” she said, “perfect for that book you do on Andrue. Just copy them out.”
The scrapbooks were filled with the work Andy had done at school, drawings and poems and essays on subjects like chastity and obedience and piety. Many essays on chastity.
“Here,” Roma was saying. “Here is the picture for the book – on the front. Andrue with the bishop. This is Andrue’s confirmation picture from Saint Athanasius. That bishop dead now, but a good man, very kind and patient with the children.”
The bishop did not look kind and patient. He had the bulbous nose and the paunch of a serious drinker. But then pictures often lie.
“You take it,” she said. “I have copies. Use it in your book to show Andrue brought up in the church. That baby-murder stuff … abortion.” She made a spitting sound of derision. “He must have picked it up from that one he married.” Again the spitting sound of dismissal. “You write the truth in your book. Andrue did not believe in that stuff. No.” And she shoved the confirmation picture in my purse and went to the kitchen for more coffee.
The rest of the morning passed pleasantly enough. Roma wanted to talk about Andy, and I wanted to listen. When I left, she kissed me and gave me an ice cream pail of lamb shishliki for Mieka.
As I started to walk down Joicey Street, the enemy Sawchuk came running after me.
“So how is she?” He stood, blinking in the sunlight, a barrel-chested man with iron-grey hair and a voice that had ordered a hundred thousand packages of smokes. “What do you make of it?”
“It’s a very sad thing,” I said.
His eyes were bright with spite. “I suppose she’s been carrying on like crazy now that the big shot’s been killed off.” He laughed a wheezing, sucking kind of laugh that touched a nerve in me.
“Mr. Sawchuk, I hope you’re never unlucky enough to lose a child – especially your only child.”
His face came alive with malice, and I knew immediately that I’d walked into Sawchuk’s trap. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief before he answered me.
“Is that what she told you? That the big shot was her one and only? Next time, ask her about the girl – the one she threw out.”
Suddenly the fun seemed to go out of the situation for him. He sounded distracted, as if his focus had shifted somewhere deep inside himself. “Probably dead now, too, or worse. Such a beauty. The old man, the father, he doted on that girl. Every year he made her a skating rink out back. Hours he’d spend, standing in the cold, holding the hose so the ice would always be smooth for her. She would skate and skate. My wife used to stand by the kitchen window and just watch her. She said it was better than the ice show. She’s gone, too, now – my wife.” The spite had puffed Sawchuk up. Now he looked depleted – small and old.
“Mr. Sawchuk,” I said. But I’d lost him. He was somewhere in the past, standing at the kitchen window with his wife, watching the neighbour girl skate.
“Mr. Sawchuk,” I said again.
He looked at me, and suddenly his eyes were as blue and untroubled as the September sky. “Elena,” he said. “That was the Boychuk girl’s name.” He turned, and with
out another word, he walked away – to his fabulous yard and his empty house.
As I stood waiting for the bus, I was confused and off balance. I had known everything about Andy. And yet I hadn’t. A sister. Andy had a sister. But he couldn’t have known. He would have mentioned it. He couldn’t have known.
But how could he not know?
And behind me, sweet with the singsong of the street chant a little girl’s voice.
I am a pretty little Dutch girl
As pretty as pretty can be,
And all the boys on Joicey Street
Are so in love with me.
My boy friend’s name is Tony.
He lives in Paris, France.
And all the boys on Joicey Street
Watch me and Tony dance.
CHAPTER
11
Mieka’s spaghetti sauce was lighter than mine, but full of fresh basil and very good. Her boyfriend, Greg, joined us for dinner, and he was deferential to Howard, courtly with me and adoring of Mieka. It was a fine party but, as pleasant and courteous and civilized as we all were, it was apparent that Mieka and Greg wanted to be alone. There was a hum of sexual tension in the air as soon as supper was over, and it wasn’t coming from our end of the table. When I announced that Howard and I should leave as soon as we did the dishes, Greg was up in a snap, putting the dishes in the sink with one hand and helping me on with my coat with the other.
Howard and I were on Circle Drive and out of the city when I realized I hadn’t said any of the tender and wise things I’d planned for nineteen years. I snuffled a bit when we pulled onto the highway, and Howard looked sharply at me.
“Are you okay, Jo?”
“Fine. It’s just everything happened so fast, and I think I’ve been done out of my big scene. Howard … I’m going to miss her so much. I can’t imagine going back to that house without her.” I could feel my throat closing and the tears gathering in my eyes. I seemed to be doing that a lot lately. The skyline of the city faded behind us; ahead the highway was a ribbon in the darkness. Howard turned on the radio, and we listened to a half-hour program on the problem of gridlock in downtown Toronto.
When the lights from the town of Davidson loomed on the horizon, I caught my breath. Andy and I had gone to a bonspiel there last winter. It was the first time I had ever curled, and I loved it. Andy, in an awful, too-big curling sweater, had volunteered to skip our rink. Standing at the end of the ice, shouting encouragement, he had grinned ruefully when my rocks sailed past him into the wall or, inexplicably, stopped halfway down the ice. A good friend.
And someone had killed him. But who? His wife? Poison is a woman’s weapon, the mystery novels say. And there was the poem by Blake with its hint of inner corruption. (Eve turning in the door of Disciples the day after the murder and saying, “None of you knew the first thing about Andy Boychuk.”) Most damning, those letters A and E intertwined like the bride’s and groom’s initials on a wedding invitation.
We passed a gas station. Howard’s profile was thrown into sharp relief, and I thought of his terrible story about Eve Lorscott and her tortured family. I was reeling. There had been, as one of my sons had once said tearfully, “just too much day.” I didn’t want to think any more.
The sky was black and starless between towns. There wasn’t even a farmyard in sight. Howard turned off the radio, and the miles slipped by in silence. Finally, he turned and looked at me.
“Are you up to some news, Jo?”
“No, but don’t let that hold you back.”
He laughed and reached for my hand. “You really are a nice woman. Anyway, no use beating around the bush. I’m going away for a while. When I was in Toronto last week, that old law-school buddy I mentioned asked me to teach a session in criminal law at Osgoode Hall. It’s not a real appointment, just a couple of classes to help out a friend. They hired some hot-shot whiz-kid from Montreal, but at the last minute he got a chance at a TV contract interpreting the law as a background man, whatever the hell that is. Anyway, this came up and I took it.”
“But that’s wonderful. It’ll be a good change for you.”
“Yeah, I need to get out of Regina. A big part of it is because Andy’s gone. Without him in the picture, the possibilities just don’t excite me, but there’s more …”
“I thought there must be,” I said. “Is it Marty?” Two years before, Howard’s wife, Marty, had left him and moved to Toronto. He never spoke of it, at least to me, but I’d heard rumours – the kinds of things that always seem to float in the wake of someone else’s misfortune.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s Marty. She’s the good Catholic, but I’m the one with the guilt.”
“Do you still love her?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if love has anything to do with it. But somehow it doesn’t seem right to me to pack up thirty years of marriage and say, ‘Well, thanks so much, I’ve got other plans.’ ”
“How does Marty feel?”
“She says she has a job she likes. She says she has friends. She says politicians make lousy husbands. She says it won’t work unless I change. She says a lot of stuff, but it all boils down to the same thing – she thinks it’s over.”
“And you don’t?”
“I don’t know. I think I’m too old to change, but that business about politics is just crap. You and Ian had a good marriage.”
“Ian and I had a good marriage because we both lived Ian’s life.” I was surprised at the anger in my voice, and I was surprised at what I’d said. Until that moment I don’t think I’d acknowledged how much everything had been for Ian.
“So that’s the way it was.” Howard’s voice was gentle. “You know, Jo, it never seemed like that from the outside.”
“It didn’t start out that way.”
“How did it start out? All the years I knew you and Ian, I guess I always just thought of you as a unit – the Kilbourns. Maybe Marty’s right about me. I am obtuse.”
“No more than the rest of us when it comes to understanding what goes on inside other people’s marriages. And Ian and I were a unit, so you were right there. It’s just that we didn’t – I didn’t – plan to be part of a unit. Did you ever read D.H. Lawrence?”
“A thousand years ago.”
“Well, Ian and I were going to be those fiery twin stars Lawrence talks about, separate and dazzling. And then …”
“Ian got into politics,” Howard finished for me.
“And I got pregnant. Scratch one star. We were twenty-eight that first election. Mieka was born on E-day, remember?”
Howard laughed. “Sure. I always tell Mieka she showed great wisdom in waiting for the New Jerusalem to be established before she was born.”
“It didn’t seem like the New Jerusalem to me. Suddenly I was a mother, and I was married to a twenty-eight-year-old who was attorney general of the province and who didn’t have a clue about how to run the A-G’S office.”
“Jo, none of us had a clue about anything. All those kids we ran – we figured the young guys could lose their cherries on that first campaign and the next time out, well, maybe we’d get close, and then, well …” He reached over and patted my knee awkwardly. “Do you remember the results coming in that night? Did they bring you a TV into the delivery room?”
“Howard!” I groaned.
“Yeah, I guess not. Anyway, when I watched the results that night I just about dirtied my drawers. My God! First of all to win, and then to win and have nothing but kids to form a government.” His voice grew serious. “Ian was always so good, Jo. I can count on one hand the number of times he screwed up when he was a-g. And he was smart enough to keep the constituency stuff humming. Except –” he looked at me quickly “– that was because you were there, wasn’t it? I’m sorry, Jo. I should’ve known that.”
“Howard, it was too long ago to feel guilt about, and I’m too old to enjoy making you feel guilty. It just happened. The political stuff came my way by default. I liked it. I was good at
it, and it was something I could do while I was having kids. Another thing – it really mattered. It was important work. But Howard, Marty knew that, too. She really did. No matter what she says now. We’re all revisionists when it comes to our own lives.”
“Tell me, Jo.” Howard’s words were so quiet, I could barely hear him above the hum of the engine and the swish of the miles passing by. “Tell me how Marty was in the old days.”
“Let’s see. I guess the first time I saw her was a couple of weeks after the election. It was my first outing after Mieka was born, so of course I brought her along. Do you remember? Somebody had the bright idea that we should go out into the rural areas to show off the new team. A bunch of us went to hell and gone out into the country …”
“McCallister Valley,” he said. “Remembrance Day. I remember. The year it rained right up until Christmas Eve. Damnedest thing I ever saw. Of course, the opposition made a big thing of it. Charlie Pratt was still leader then and he made one hell of a speech in the House. All about God’s anger manifesting itself because the people had turned their backs on the one true party, and about how Charlie and his gang would have to build an ark to save the province – metaphorically, of course. The old bastard …” He was laughing.
“Anyway,” I said, “you and Marty had been to some formal thing in the city, and she hadn’t changed.”
“And” – Howard’s face softened at the memory – “just before we got to McCallister Valley, our car got stuck in the gumbo, and Marty took off her shoes and stockings, jammed a shoe in each coat pocket and walked barefoot through the mud.”
“Ian and I were waiting in the hall,” I said, picking up the story, “and someone yelled, ‘Here’s the premier.’ I’d never met you, and my heart stopped. The premier and his wife! They threw open the doors to the Elks’ Hall, and there you were and there was Marty with the skirt of her evening gown hiked up to her thighs. She was solid mud from the kneecaps down, but she had such a great smile.”
