The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  you can’t get more conspicuous!

  They still suspect me of those crimes:

  I wish I knew how many times

  they’ve parked across from 44

  and stared and stared at our door

  and stared and stared at that front step

  till they deduced the sun was up.

  While criminals just roam about,

  they wait in vain for Hans van Hout!

  They seem to think they have their man

  and yet the crimes go on and on;

  they took me in for questioning

  and then they let me go again.

  I’m not ashamed to say that My

  is glad to be my alibi—

  “Where did you go three months ago,

  the night that there was so much snow?”

  Who has that kind of memory?

  She told them, “He was home with me.”

  Beware of what you hear out there;

  my enemies are everywhere.

  Their daughters went to school with you

  and gossip like their parents do.

  They’ll seem so nice, it’s just pretend—

  they’ll play a game called “let’s be friends”

  to try to worm it out of you:

  they’ll say they know it isn’t true,

  it isn’t true what people say,

  but still they’ll say it every day,

  and they’ll closely watch your face

  in case you show some hint, some clue—

  and if you don’t, they’ll turn on you.

  When they do, you must be ready—

  no one else will vouch for Daddy.

  Who are these girls that disappear?

  It’s in the winter of the year

  that girls go missing everywhere.

  They’re not the ones from proper homes;

  they run away from home in droves—

  you don’t run from a place that’s safe

  to strike out for another life.

  They have one thing to bargain with,

  the ones that are so slim and lithe—

  they get more than they bargain for

  the second they step out the door.

  The evil man who lurks about

  is not Professor Hans van Hout.

  The safe place is the House Within;

  let’s both say those words again.

  The way they dress, they freeze to death:

  they don’t grow up, they don’t grow old,

  they catch their deaths out in the cold;

  their deaths catch them is what I mean—

  their epitaphs are “when last seen.”

  No one has taught them wrong from right;

  they stand beneath street lights at night,

  alone, half-dressed, on drugs, drinking—

  what on earth are parents thinking?

  All of it is self-expression—

  an odd way to express yourself,

  to dress so as to bait the wolf.

  Not until they’ve been undressed

  do girls these days feel self-expressed.

  Cops can’t admit they got it wrong;

  they must invent a bogeyman

  who steals their precious girls away—

  they have to make some stranger pay:

  “Some man was seen the other day—

  he’s not from here, it must be him.

  We can’t blame us, we can’t blame them,

  we’ll blame the high-and-mighty man,

  the foreign-sounding also-ran;

  it’s obvious where he went wrong—

  he simply cannot get along.”

  It seems your father, Hans van Hout,

  has been chosen as the scapegoat,

  a role that he was born to play,

  Professor Hout, from Bantry Bay,

  who drives about the streets at night

  and parks his car in vacant lots

  and other such suspicious spots

  and listens to the radio

  and thinks of things from long ago

  that his accusers do not know,

  the war, the fall of Amsterdam,

  the ones who fought, the ones who ran,

  the memories that forbid sleep,

  the secrets I have had to keep.

  It all starts in the House Within;

  that’s where the best and worst begin.

  You have to bring a girl up right

  (make sure her jeans are not too tight).

  Don’t let her stay out after ten.

  The House Within, the House Within—

  that’s where the tale begins again.

  I must go back to chapter one;

  I have to get it right this time:

  the lines must scan, the words must rhyme.

  Throw out the drafts, erase the past;

  I know this chance will be my last

  to re-right what they did to me,

  to rewrite what they wrote of me.

  I must create the world anew;

  it’s what the greatest writers do.

  There were no other families—

  I must invent the memories:

  in order to perfect the world

  I’ll have to raise four perfect girls.

  You let me down, my Rachel Lee,

  but I still have the other three.

  From The Arelliad

  MYRA (1985)

  He comes home late most every night—

  I go to bed, leave on the light

  above the door, but I don’t sleep:

  there is a watch I have to keep.

  He thinks that I’m protecting Him

  (unless he only thinks of Them

  and never thinks of me at all).

  What those who take Him for a fool

  take me to be is plain to see

  (to Him, perhaps, a mystery).

  The truth is I’m protecting me. It’s far too late for Myra van Hout to be a prison inmate’s loyal and faithful wife. Hans would never leave me for anyone except those four. I’ve taken my share of the blame for Him, and I’ve done my best for Them.

  They think that they have had it bad, but I grew up without a dad. I didn’t throw myself at every pair of pants or starve myself. I didn’t self-lobotomize with drugs and booze. I never tried to run away inside some book like someone half-demented, pretending that she wrote in a language she invented while idolizing long-dead Jews.

  The four of Them are women now, and still He has his way with Them. They won’t, or can’t, say no. It seems He needs all four of Them but has no need of me—we last kissed when I was forty.

  It’s no big deal what they’ve been through. Others have come through it none the worse. I suppose I cleared the way for Him: He wrote for Them, He read to Them—my Husband was my gift to Them, as were my girls my gift to Him. The five of them have special love, but I have none at all—though, in my way, I still have Him.

  If He was caught, they’d let me go. I’d be the wife who lived in blissful ignorance, so blinded was she by her love for Him and Them. Or else I’d be regarded as stupid and gullible, or even callous, the woman who knew but looked the other way.

  You’d be surprised what women do

  to make the fairy tale seem true,

  the perfect spouse, the wedding dance,

  the perfect house, the picket fence,

  the perfect kids in Perfect School,

  the backyard with the perfect pool—

  and what was she? A
perfect fool.

  Years ago, I thought of nothing but the worst. How would it look if people knew? Where would we go? How would we get by? “The hero of the underground.” He had to spread all that around. For all I know, it might be true, but saying it made Him look like such a craven fool, as much in need of a pat on the head as some attention-seeking child. He said things first, then thought them through.

  What He does when He goes out is something I don’t think about. I know what He’s guilty of, but He’s not guilty of everything. I think I know the man I love better than others do. I’m not some twit who wouldn’t see a monster right in front of me. They’re barking up the same wrong tree that others barked up long ago. Hans van Hout, the bald professor, is not the man they’re looking for—it’s just that He can’t help saying and doing things that make Him look suspicious. He’s not their man, no, He is mine. They need someone to blame it on, someone to frame for it. They can’t just come out and admit that, although young girls in St. John’s go missing more and more, they don’t know why. To cover their incompetence, they’ll try to force Him to confess to something that He didn’t do, and I doubt that He could stand up to the kind of methods they would use. It’s not a crime to drive at night. He always has because of his insomnia. But they hope that His inconsequence can cover their incompetence. We have to get out of here.

  It may not be too late to start again

  back there in the Land Within,

  back there in the Land of Hout,

  back there where we started out,

  back where The Ballad first began

  and Hans was still a strong young man

  and I was young and beautiful

  and everything seemed possible.

  It’s not too late to turn back time—

  the lines still scan, the words still rhyme.

  RACHEL

  I suspected that Fritz and the others were worried about our plan to go home through Amsterdam, where, at the sight of Anne Frank’s house, I might fall apart and tell Wade everything. I was surprised that Gloria hadn’t tried to convince me to take a different route back to Canada. I confronted her about it on the phone. “So the whole gang’s coming,” I said. “Are you and Carmen and Bethany as worried as Fritz must be about what I might do in Amsterdam?”

  “It’s Fritz we want to keep an eye on, not you. When he said he and Carmen were going with you, I convinced Max that, given how fragile you are, we should go too, and there was no question about leaving Bethany on her own, so…But, your first visit to Anne Frank’s house, coming so soon after—I don’t think some sisterly support would hurt, do you?”

  “I suppose not,” I said, and left it at that.

  Sisterly support. I didn’t doubt that the prospect of Wade and I being watched over by no one but Fritz and Carmen made Gloria and Bethany uneasy, but I was a problem for them because I was not only in love, but in love with honest, earnest, idealistic, truth-seeking Wade. They saw Wade as the foremost of my many weaknesses. And so, I must admit, did I.

  I called a professor at Leiden University whom I had frequently corresponded with about Anne Frank when I was doing my honours paper, a woman who didn’t know about my breakdowns and thought I was still working on it. I asked her if she might know of anywhere we could stay in Amsterdam for a few days. The woman told me that my timing was perfect. She visited Amsterdam so often to do research and give lectures and papers that she had rented a small flat there, and she would not be using it for a while. She said we could stay there at no cost and told me to think of it as one scholar doing a favour for another. She seemed so sweet, I felt bad for having tricked her into lending us her flat, which was on Prinsengracht, just a few bridges away from Anne Frank’s house, and one canal and a few bridges away from the house in which Dad had grown up.

  * * *

  —

  At the airport, I hoped I didn’t look as nervous as I felt. I worried that the authorities would find it suspicious that all of us were leaving South Africa just weeks after the murder of the van Houts. It might seem, even to the apathetic police, that we were on the run. What if the man Fritz had hired had given himself away by spending too much money, or boasted of his exploits to a friend while he was drunk?

  I imagined all of us being taken into custody, if not now, then at Schiphol in Amsterdam, or Wade and I being detained in Halifax, where we had to touch down before the final leg of our journey home.

  At the check-in counter, we sisters were recognized by name by a ticket agent who, as she was handing Bethany her boarding pass, burst into tears. All the ticket agents, young women like us, gathered around. Soon, they were crying over the tragic deaths of our parents, which set Bethany off, which prompted Carmen and I to begin to cry as well.

  “I’m so sorry,” the ticket agents kept saying, almost in unison.

  The knot of weeping women attracted the attention of everyone within sight, people staring, craning their necks. “Who is it?” “What’s happened?” “Is something wrong?”

  To my great relief, the ticket agents eventually returned to their stations and we made it through security without incident, in spite of the sullen scrutiny of the ever-present military men in military fatigues.

  For the first time, it occurred to me that my parents’ secrets were now safe. We were free to reinvent them; in death, Hans could be the man who risked his life to save the lives of girls like us, and Myra, his loving wife and the mother of their perfect girls. The family charade could be maintained in its entirety for relatives and friends forever. The only flaw in the whole thing was Wade. Gloria must have been cursing the fluke of her confession. I wondered if she was cursing Wade, the one person who might try to wreck it all. I still wondered if he could withstand the pressure of his conscience or the chastening presence of me in his life. For days, he had watched me as, worn out from writing in the diary, I lay sleepless in bed. At any point during those hours of darkness, without having to look me in the eye, he could have told me what had happened at the shopping mall and what Gloria had confessed to by the sea below her house. But, somehow, he hadn’t.

  WADE

  I wondered if the share of the money Gloria had given Fritz to arrange the murder was on his person or in his luggage. I couldn’t imagine him leaving it in his house out on the Cape Flats while he was in Amsterdam, because, the Cape Flats being what they were, he couldn’t even be reasonably sure that his house would still be standing when he got back. But Fritz seemed relaxed, gazing about in his black beret, sunglasses, tie-dyed shirt, bell-bottoms and sandals. He all but whistled as the security agents rummaged through his khaki shoulder bag, the one plastered all over with peace symbols and decals bearing images of clenched black fists. If some other security agents went through his checked baggage with as much zeal as these were going through his carry-on bag, they would surely find something incriminating—even trace amounts of drugs. If Fritz was detained or taken into custody, would Gloria be next, and if so, what might lie in store for Rachel and me?

  But we boarded the plane without incident. Max and Gloria sat in first class, dressed in their SAA uniforms, with Bethany, Rachel and I seated three abreast in coach, Fritz and Carmen several rows behind us.

  As we taxied down the runway, I remembered Rachel telling me how she had felt during the Soweto riots in ’76 when she waited for her plane to lift off from the airport in Johannesburg. It seemed entirely possible to me that our plane would be stopped and boarded by police come to arrest Gloria and Fritz, and to detain the rest of us for questioning or worse.

  After takeoff, I kept waiting for the pilot to say that we were returning to the airport, kept waiting for the plane to bank in a series of turns that would point us back the way we came. Even when I felt certain that South Africa no longer lay beneath us, it occurred to me that all of Africa and the Middle East lay between us and the relative safety of Holland—relative becaus
e there was nowhere in the world, now, that we could go and be absolutely certain that we were out of reach of the South African police, or Interpol or any other number of agencies, or the man Fritz had hired.

  “Hey,” Bethany said from her window seat, “Remember the Edinburgh Castle?”

  Rachel nodded and smiled.

  “I remember looking at all the other kids who got on board in Cape Town and wondering how many of them were leaving home for good like us,” Bethany said.

  “I bet that almost none of them were,” Rachel said. “I bet that most of them came back and grew up in South Africa. We must have looked out of place in first class, all six of us, I mean.”

  “Maybe that’s why Mom and Dad aren’t in any of the photographs from the boat.”

  “Maybe,” Rachel said. “Whenever I’ve left South Africa, it’s been with them. It seems strange, leaving without them. I wonder if I’ll ever come back.”

  “Of course you will,” Bethany said. “You’ll come back to visit us.”

  “I suppose,” Rachel said. “But don’t you plan to get out of there as soon as you get the chance?”

  “I can’t think that far ahead. I can’t imagine having choices.”

  Later, Bethany moved to the empty row behind us, stretched across the three seats and went to sleep. As I was wondering, yet again, what she and Rachel would think if they knew what Gloria had told me, Bethany rose up and stuck her face between our headrests. “Raitch,” she said, “I read The Diary of Anne Frank last night. I’d forgotten most of it, no offence. God. For almost two years, she slept in a tiny room with that dentist, Fritz Pfeffer. Don’t you think he sounds kind of creepy? Maybe it’s just because his first name was Fritz. No wonder she didn’t like him very much. And he ate far more than his share of the food. I bet he was dashing in a chubby, disgusting sort of way.” Bethany laughed but Rachel didn’t. “Sorry. I shouldn’t make jokes about the sacred book. Prinsengracht 263. One of the most famous addresses in the world. I can’t believe Otto Frank died only a few years ago. He lived a long life even though he lost his wife and his two daughters. No one thinks about Margot. The forgotten sister. He survived Auschwitz, somehow, and then he lived for another thirty-five years. He lost everything, but he never gave up. He must have been very tough.”