The Mystery of Right and Wrong

by Wayne Johnston

  He got up abruptly and left. I never stopped wondering when he would come to my room again, but he never did.

  From The Arelliad

  MRS. WILANSKY (1985)

  Now comes the quickening of time

  that happens when I start to rhyme.

  It’s like a spell of vertigo;

  I know what’s next, or should by now—

  just when I think it never will,

  the spinning stops, the world stands still.

  There she is, the green-eyed Anne—she beckons me to follow her. The foghorn sounds, warning of sunken wrecks, unmindful ships. She stops and turns to look at me. “I’d rather not go there alone,” she says. “Will you go with me?” Somehow I know she means her home, the house where she grew up. I’d rather not go there, and almost say so, until I realize that this is the first time she has spoken without accusing me. “I’ll go with you,” I say.

  We’re side by side and holding hands, standing on a city street in front of a bungalow I take to be her house. We go inside, where she leads me to a small dining room—and there they are, her parents, having dinner at a table set for three. “They always set a place for me,” she says. “I guess it’s kind of corny, but I think it’s nice.”

  Mrs. Wilansky looks up from her plate and says, as if she is thinking out loud: “I’m glad I don’t know who he is, his face, his name. I’d think about him even more than I do now. Sometimes I dream that she’s out there on the cape, alive but lost. There’s not much light left in the sky and no one knows she’s missing. No one is looking for her. In the dream, she’s lost because I let her down somehow. I feel such guilt. You see, it must be someone’s fault, or else each of us could die because we missed a bus. In the absence of the killer, the mother is the murderer, the negligent creator who let her stray too far from me.

  “I stay awake to ward off dreams, but even so, he sits beside my bed at night on a chair, his back to me like a prisoner I’m interrogating. He listens while I ask him where he went after he left her there, and how he got her in the car in the first place. She was smart; she would have run. She must have known and trusted him. The ever-silent, unseen Man. What sort of divine plan required her to die like that? To Whom was it necessary that she should die instead of me? What appetite is satisfied by the murder of a child? I pose these questions to his back, this Man who sits there in the dark but never speaks or moves.

  “When she got in, where did they go? He wouldn’t have parked beside that road—he must have taken her to some other place. I fancy it would give me peace to know exactly where she died. It might have happened miles from Cape Spear, where the wrecks of long-abandoned cars lie everywhere among the trees. Why leave her, then, where all could see, my little girl, my Anne Marie? Where are her books; where are her clothes? What could that Man have done with those? I’d like to have them. I hope he didn’t keep them. I can’t stand to think that he still has them hidden in his house or somewhere else, that he looks at them or takes them out from time to time…

  “I lie awake for hours while the night goes by in quarter chimes. Usually, I fall asleep just after dawn and wake to find nothing but an empty chair beside the bed.

  “Who was the someone that she knew and trusted? Had we had him in our house or had we been to visit his? A family friend?

  “We don’t go out anymore, and it’s been ages since anyone stopped by. There’s no man that I don’t suspect. We gave up our dry cleaning business. I couldn’t stand the thought that he might have been a customer. Anne worked on weekends at the store—he might have got to know her there. I’d see a man coming in and think of her inside his car. Every man whose clothes I cleaned might be the man who murdered Anne. I might have cleaned the very clothes he wore that night in Maddox Cove. Would anyone be so cold, so shameless as to chat with someone whose child he killed? In my worst dreams, such things make sense—the sons and husbands of the world conspiring against my girl.

  “I stay at home because, out there, her killer might be anyone. The man who politely holds the door for me, the man in front of me in the checkout line at the grocery store. In a cinema, he might be in the audience, in the same row as me, this man who never has to hide. I don’t know him but he knows me. My picture has been in the paper. I’ve been on TV, the mother whose resemblance to Anne is unmistakable.

  “He preferred winter, the police said, the early dark, no one about, the bitter cold. He cruised around for girls in cars that wouldn’t start or that broke down on side roads. Girls in danger of freezing to death must have been so relieved when they saw his lights. Some were found and some were not. The searchers stop when winter comes and then a rosary of storms keeps them going until spring.”

  The house spins around and, when it stops, I am sitting on the chair beside her bed—I am her prisoner now.

  It’s hard to eulogize the young,

  list all the things they might have done,

  the things they wanted to become.

  These are the things they liked to do,

  the countries they’d have travelled to.

  You plan to read, if time allows,

  what others say about them now

  but never thought to say before.

  “Do you remember what she wore

  the last time you laid eyes on her?”

  “You collaborated to save yourself, just as he did. You saw your chance. He taught you well. You gave her to him. ‘If you touch me again, I’ll tell them what you did to Anne.’ You’d never had the proof before, just his ‘confessions,’ but now you had the perfect trap. Anne, the innocent bystander, was caught between the two of you. She would never have guessed that such families existed. But then…

  “You didn’t know your name sometimes. You lay in bed, the diarist of 44, self-imprisoned in your room, writing, hinting at the truth in such a way as to hold the interest of your non-existent audience. You were a thirteen-year-old girl who had had ten years of Him. How much of ‘you’ was still alive after all that he had done? How treacherous and conniving could you have been when you could barely frame a thought? If you had spoken up, or threatened to, would he have stopped? Or would you be among the dead, and helpless to prevent all the things that he went on to do?

  “In the heaven of what might have been, anything can be forgiven: a single act of treachery, a century of butchery.”

  So this is what I must live with. In spite of what was done to me, what little was still left of me, could I have chosen to be brave? Could I have chosen anything but what I chose because of him? Anne’s crimes, it seems, were two. She was a girl, and she was a Jew.

  I spent the night in my warm bed;

  I heard the screeching of the wind

  protesting that a girl was dead.

  The wind came gusting through the walls,

  a million slantwise waterfalls;

  an avalanche destroyed my soul

  because I let her go with him.

  I drew the elements within,

  I tried to scream above the wind,

  the torrent and the roaring flame,

  but I was trapped inside my room,

  which turned the colour of my mind

  because I left your girl behind.

  There is a roll not often called;

  its names are not engraved on walls

  or on the war memorials.

  I promise I will not forget

  the ones who cannot answer it.

  They are the missing and the dead,

  the women and the girls who said,

  “We vanished then, we’ll come back when

  the wind blows from the west again.”

  The wind is rising from the west.

  They come from the unwritten past,

  each one alone, each one at last:

 
the murdered and the missing girls,

  the stolen women of the world.

  Each holds a candle in her hand

  and each one holds another’s hand;

  they hold this vigil for each other—

  mothers, wives, sisters, daughters.

  They march for no cause but their own;

  this regiment that died alone

  is numberless and has no name,

  no anthem, flag or uniform.

  The lights are on above the doors,

  as they will be throughout the years,

  for days and nights that never end:

  the rest of us must make amends.

  All hope is lost, yet hope endures

  if someone waits for their return:

  they live as long as candles burn—

  not long unless they pass them on,

  from wick to wick, from flame to flame—

  a different kind of light brigade;

  the flames burn out, the names remain.

  The roll begins and ends with one

  as long as we remember them.

  There is a roll not often called

  (some names are never called at all).

  I promise I will not forget

  one girl who cannot answer it.

  I know a name that few recall;

  I wish that I could tell it all.

  Her story must begin somewhere:

  It was the winter of the year

  that girls went missing everywhere.

  WADE

  We flew from Amsterdam to St. John’s, connecting through Halifax. It was mid-afternoon when we arrived, weary from the flight, though we had slept through most of it. As the plane made its approach to the airport over Cape Spear and Signal Hill, I cast back to our departure from Schiphol, where we’d bade goodbye to Rachel’s sisters just outside security.

  “This is goodbye,” Gloria said. “We’ve never been much of a foursome, but it breaks my heart to have to say that I doubt the four of us will ever be together again. I have a going-away present for you, Rachel.”

  “We’ll meet again,” Rachel said, but her tone was so perfunctory that a surge of sadness for her filled my throat.

  Gloria drew three white envelopes out of her purse, each of them inscribed with one of her sisters’ names. “I was going to give one of these to Carmen and Bethany when we got back to Cape Town, but it seems like the right thing to hand them out all at once. One wedding band and one engagement ring for each of you. I don’t want you to ever wear them. They are mementoes of my three ex-husbands, and they are worth quite a lot of money. I didn’t look for, or accept, a penny from any of those men when I left them. I preferred to start over without any baggage. Starting over is my specialty. But I didn’t want to give them their rings back or sell them. I haven’t been able to decide what to do with them until now.”

  She stood directly in front of Carmen and handed an envelope to her, then did the same with Bethany and Rachel. “I love you all,” she said. “You might not believe it, but I do.”

  “What a weird present,” Carmen said as she stared at the envelope in her hands.

  Gloria smiled fondly at her, her eyes welling up with tears. “Carmen, we used to hold hands when we walked home from school in Rondebosch. I bet you don’t remember that.”

  Carmen shook her head and looked again at the envelope, as if it might help her remember.

  “Bethany,” Gloria said, “maybe those rings will come in handy when the baby’s born.” Bethany smiled at her.

  Gloria turned to Rachel. “Please, please remember me, baby sister, and please don’t judge me too severely.”

  “I love you,” Rachel said. “And I think you’re wrong. The four of us will meet again. Why wouldn’t we?”

  Gloria wiped tears away with the heels of both hands. “You may be the closest thing to a baby that I ever have, baby sister. I hope not, but who knows?”

  They huddled together in a hug, and I couldn’t help feeling like an intruder. I wasn’t one of the van Hout sisters. I wasn’t a woman. A terrible thing had happened to Rachel when I had yet to meet her. What happened to Rachel happened to no one but Rachel. What happened to Gloria and Bethany and Carmen happened to them, to each of them, alone. Their sisterhood conferred commonality upon them in everything but this. They were not sister victims or any other kind of foursome. Each of them was absolute, entire unto herself. The same crime committed countless times does not become a single crime. Each of the sisters had her own story, much of which was unknowable to the others. And to me.

  * * *

  —

  Word of the murders of the van Houts reached home before we did. The house was empty but for Mom when we got there. I told her everything I knew, except for the part that Gloria had played in her parents’ deaths. Mom could tell there was more to the story. My eyes gave me away. Hers gave her away. But it was Rachel she hugged first.

  Then we told her of our plans to move to the mainland, and she said she had long known that I wouldn’t stay in Newfoundland. “We’re spoiling your perfect record of keeping your children near, Jennie,” Rachel said.

  “Rachel,” Mom said, “you’ll get over the loss of your parents somehow. With Wade’s help and God’s, not that I’m making comparisons. The two of you will visit us just as often as you would have if none of it had ever happened, and we’ll visit you if we can. You’re going to the mainland, not to the moon. My son is in love with you, and he’s never been in love before. You’re in love with him, and you’ve never been in love before. So keep at it. You’ll never get it right. No one ever has. But there it is.”

  I knew that, after we were gone, after my father and sisters had come home and gone to bed, she would sit at the kitchen table, smoking cigarettes, nursing a glass of rye and ginger. And then she would go out on the front steps with her cigarettes, her ashtray and her glass, and look up at the stars until she couldn’t see them anymore.

  My brothers and I had often come home hours after midnight to find her there, waiting for whichever one of us was out so late she couldn’t sleep, waiting for Dad’s car or a taxicab or the police to pull into the driveway at the bottom of the hill.

  By the time we’d got inside, she’d be in bed, too fed up with us to say good night. But she would be the first one in the kitchen in the morning, making breakfast for the early risers, who would have been astonished if she wasn’t there, and she would still be there when we, who had come home late, finally got up, and she would make us breakfast too and never say a word about the night before.

  * * *

  —

  Until we left for Toronto, we stayed with my parents, sleeping in separate bedrooms that had been my older brothers’. We borrowed Dad’s car when we could and drove to St. John’s. We avoided Freshwater Road, Rachel saying she never wanted to set eyes on 44 again. We went to the university campus and had lunch at the picnic table where we’d spent so many summer nights. Spring had come early but there was not yet much heat in the sun, so we huddled together over a Thermos of coffee and some sandwiches my mother made.

  “In June, it will be two years since we met,” I said.

  “It seems a lot longer,” Rachel said as she surveyed the distant hills of Petty Harbour. “Let’s never get married. Let’s live in sin forever.”

  It was the most that ever passed between us by way of a proposal. I accepted.

  From The Arelliad

  DEAR WADE (1985)

  These lines of verse, The Ballad kind,

  are still those of an anguished mind—

  or so it seems, I can’t be sure;

  they read unlike they read before,

  and I don’t feel as I once did

  while writing The Arelliad.

  I write for me now
, and for Them:

  He taught me to—but I’m not Him.

  I hope you don’t regret the day

  you saw me and I looked away

  when we were in the library,

  or wish that I had not looked back

  the second night among the stacks,

  or that, when I broke up with you,

  I did just what you hoped I’d do—

  when you were starting to move on,

  I turned up in your life again.

  It isn’t often words I lack

  (sometimes they come by sneak attack)

  but I was stuck for words that night

  and needed time to get them right.

  Will you cast back in fifty years

  and wish I’d never climbed those stairs

  to the garret that September?

  Will you be sad when you remember

  and wonder how things would have been

  if I had not come back again?

  Will you resent me, Wade, come then,

  and think of things that might have been?

  —

  Sometimes my words are all I have—

  more often they have me, my love.

  There’s nothing that I wouldn’t give

  to give them up and simply live.

  I know that that will never be…

  you know and yet you still love me.

  But there are things you mustn’t know

  (what happens when the west wind blows),