Gerry and Vivian are waiting at the airport for two-thirds of her kids to come home. By some miracle of on-line booking, Tanya, the youngest, and Duane, the eldest, and his family are both arriving on the same plane from Toronto. Tanya is coming in from Alberta, and Duane and his family can get to Newfoundland from where they live, near Ottawa, quicker by flying to Toronto and meeting her there. They’re all travelling on one of the one or two-syllable airlines that seem to pop up like mushrooms on the arrival screens these days, Zip or Zap or Bingo. It amazes Gerry that, if he shops around, he can get to places on the mainland as cheaply, or even more cheaply, than he could thirty years ago. In some cases he thinks he’s even flying on the same planes. Bingo, or whatever line it was he last used to get to Ottawa, flew the old familiar Boeing 737’s like the ones Eastern Provincial flew in the old days. They had tall, pretty young flight attendants who sang summer-camp-style songs to their passengers. Unlike thirty years ago, though, they charged for everything. Cheezies cost a dollar. Dubious-looking sandwiches cost five bucks or more. Gerry wondered if they had antique value. Maybe they had been discovered, stashed in the old planes. Bottled water had to be paid for and people did. Gerry remembers free double Scotches and being blissfully buzzed by Halifax.
Gerry and Vivian wait by the arrival gate. She’s craning and stretching in her leather coat to look for Duane and Gretchen and their kids, Joshua and Natalie. Gerry looks at her beside him, hair short and recently gone redder, big hoop earrings and a good scarf tied around the strap of her bag. The snow is still holding off and she’s wearing low, black walking shoes, jeans and a sweater.
“We look good for breathless grandparents,” he says. He’s being conciliatory. They’d argued over when to leave for the airport. They often argue about when to leave for things. Gerry likes to go early and hang out. Vivian favours a last-minute dash. When they go somewhere together, they both manage to feel rushed and pressured.
“There they are,” Vivian says, neutrally. A truce has been arrived at. “Wave. You’re taller. They’ll see you.”
Gerry waves and watches the family come down the steps.
Vivian had Duane when she was eighteen, so now he doesn’t look all that much younger than the reception committee. He’s a short, square man, with his mother’s snub nose. After Vivian’s divorce from his father and before Gerry came along, Duane had fixed things around the house and kept his mother’s beat-up car running. She’d been clerking in a store then, studying for her real estate licence, and money had been tight. Duane put himself through technical school by joining the militia, where he worked on radios with the communications squadron. Early on, Gerry always thought of him as “Master Corporal Duane,” the rank he achieved before he landed a job in Kanata, just outside of Ottawa, and moved out. That was shortly after Gerry and Vivian got married. He laughed in a guarded way at Gerry’s stories about his unsuccessful year in the navy. He laughed in the right places, but seemed wary of the fact that Gerry had been an officer and that he had failed some courses and emerged again as a civilian. Duane hadn’t the luxury of trying things on. That said, he didn’t socialize with his militia buddies and dropped out entirely when the job in Kanata came along. Gerry grew up in Ottawa and gave Duane some names of people to look up. Duane called on Gerry’s elderly mother a couple of times, but other than that, did little to get in touch with anybody Gerry knew. Instead he got in touch with Jesus.
Gerry doesn’t remember Ottawa as a born-again kind of town but he supposes it’s changed. He knows, for example, that a building which won a Massey Medal for Architecture when it was a brand-new Chinese restaurant in the ’60s is a “community temple” now. He saw its scruffy hand-painted sign when he went to Ottawa to visit his mother in her retirement home. He supposes that it’s probably no stranger for it to be a church than it was for a Chinese restaurant to go out and hire an architect and win a design medal back when he was in high school. He knows it won the award because he and his buddies, Doc and Mort, were hanging out in the art gallery on the night of the presentations. They were dressed up in sports jackets and skinny ties, trying to look older and cool and not spend any money. They tagged along behind a crowd of people in evening clothes to get free sandwiches and coffee and look at photos of the winning buildings. It occurs to Gerry that Ottawa was a very small town when he lived there. People would put on evening clothes for coffee and sandwiches.
At any rate, Duane started going to church and met Gretchen and got married. Gretchen sounds German but isn’t. She comes from Trail, B.C., and her parents just liked the sound of the name. She always strikes Gerry as a bit like Duane in drag, not fat but slightly thickened, with thick, shoulder-length hair. She makes her own clothes and wears a lot of denim. Tonight she’s wearing winter boots with thick light-coloured sponge soles. They have a ’70s, bargain-basement look to them. Gerry suspects Duane and Gretchen don’t waste much money on shoe leather. She and Duane and the kids don’t actually live in Kanata. They’ve bought a place somewhere in the country beyond Richmond, and Duane commutes. They have a horse and are thinking about getting some sheep. Gretchen looks after the horse and a big vegetable garden.
The kids are quiet and big-eyed, half hiding behind their parents. Gerry wonders what they’ve overheard about Vivian and him. Are they the grandparents from hell?
Joshua is ten, delicate featured. Natalie is eight and carved more like her parents, round cheeks, a Cabbage-Patch-Kids look to her. Vivian wades in with hugs. Gerry grins but hangs back a little.
“How are you doing, guys?” he asks.
He wishes he could do an Exorcist head rotation for them and then wink to show that demonic possession isn’t really so bad. He shakes hands with Duane and kisses Gretchen on the cheek. She smells of oatmeal and airplane. Gerry wonders if economy airlines can possibly serve porridge, or did she bring her own?
Tanya is making her way down the stairs now. She is the child Gerry had the most to do with. Duane and Melanie, her older sister, moved out fairly early on in his and Vivian’s life together. Tanya, now twenty-five, was only eight or so when Gerry appeared on the scene.
“You raised her,” Vivian will say. Gerry wonders how true that is, but she arguably is raised. A couple of years ago she went to work in a hotel in Banff. Later she stayed for a while with Vivian’s sister in Calgary and got interested in a wildlife technology course that was being offered there. She took it and now she’s back in Banff counting elk. When she calls or e-mails she says how much better she likes it than the business courses she started at the university at home.
“Hey kid,” Gerry gives her a hug. Tanya’s lean and blonde. She has become the type of woman Gerry associates with patting a whippet, fine bones just under the surface. She’s wearing a Michelin Man down ski-jacket and jeans and her old air cadet boots. She’d e-mailed to have the boots found and shipped out.
In case I decide to have a formal wedding, she wrote, followed by: Joke, ha ha!
She hardly feels there when Gerry hugs her in her marshmallow coat.
“Still wrestling elk there, Hulk?”
“Oh yeah. Bears too, except they’re all asleep now.”
Gerry tries to picture Tanya doing anything with a bear and gives up. When they lived in a townhouse in an outlying suburb he used to have to walk in front of her to the bus stop on windy snowy days. He broke trail in the snow and cut the wind that held her back in the long pink parka Vivian had bought her that year.
Gerry had been puzzled about being a late-blooming surrogate parent to Tanya. He never knew how much he was supposed to give or expect. Before her teens they had mostly been pals, co-conspirators. He had told her to call him Gerry, reasoning that she already had a father, whether or not he was still around. He sometimes wonders now if he should have left well-enough alone and let her decide what she wanted to call him.
How he and Tanya got along was often an irritant between him and Vivian. He tried to be what he hoped was reasonable, supportive, civil. Vivian was louder, more bloody-minded. She acknowledged no need to be consistent.
“Go! Get! Get upstairs before I smack you!” Vivian could shout. She also invoked unspecified threats. “You’re in trouble now, maid! Just you wait!”
Gerry felt he couldn’t threaten because he didn’t know what he could realistically carry out. He was pretty sure smacking other people’s kids wasn’t an option.
“You leave all the discipline up to me,” Vivian would complain. “Support me a little, can’t you?”
However, she’d threaten dire punishments when Gerry got home if he wasn’t there when things went wrong.
“You blow me up into some kind of monster,” he complained. Then Tanya and a friend got picked up for stealing lipsticks at K-Mart and Vivian thought he over-reacted.
“There’s nothing worse than a sneak,” he’d grated. “It’s not like you needed the stuff. You’ve got pocket money, you could have bought it. One of these days you’re going to be living with other people at university or somewhere. Are you going to steal from them?”
Tanya said nothing. She just looked down, hot and red. She wasn’t much of an arguer-back, not with Gerry anyway.
“Kids steal,” Vivian had said, shoes off, relaxing with a beer in front of the late news after the cops had left and Tanya had been sent to bed. “She’s just acting out.”
Gerry wondered if he was just a property-worshipping, middle-class wimp. Was his homily on sneaks hypocrisy and a wimpy cop-out? Maybe he should have congratulated Tanya on taking on the system, becoming a lip-gloss commando, a make-up martyr.
Gerry supposes the ripples of the incident are still expanding off into outer space somewhere, gone to reverberate in some elk pasture in Alberta. He thinks of the times he’s been startled when he opens his mouth only to hear a ventriloquist’s rendition of his genuine, born-in-1898, Victorian father. Maybe some wayward elk or back-sliding bear is in for the lecture of its life when Tanya starts channelling him from some buried memory.
Gerry takes charge at the baggage carousels, positioning people where they can spot their bags easily and give warning so the rest of the tribe can snatch them from the circling current of Samsonite, duffel bags and Canadian Tire tool boxes with locks and rope and duct tape. It’s a small family myth that Gerry is a practical traveller, familiar with airports and all their mysteries. They load a cart and head out past the triage of cab companies and rent-a-car reps sorting the incoming passengers.
Outside the pinball-machine brightness of the terminal, it’s gone drizzly. The tall lights in the parking lot are haloed in drifting sodium-yellow haze. Duane and Gerry pack suitcases into the boot of Gerry’s mud-and-salt-stained Honda wagon and crowd five into the back seat, kids on laps.
“It’s only a minute to home.”
“Can you breathe back there?”
“Yeah, we’re fine, we’re good...”
The third of Vivian’s kids is waiting for them at home. Melanie is the middle child. She lives across town with her husband Darren, who isn’t with her tonight. He runs Darren’s Donair and Pizza and he’s working. Gerry privately calls him “My Other Brother Darren,” a reference to Brother Darrel on the Bob Newhart TV show.
Melanie has brought her daughter Diana with her tonight. Diana’s eight and has been told she can stay up to greet her cousins. She’s dozed off on Vivian’s basement couch in front of the cartoon channel and Melanie has made corned beef, tuna, and peanut butter sandwiches and put on a pot of coffee.
Melanie is a slim, tallish woman with a bit of last year’s purple-red to her hair. She moved out, not long after Duane, and spent half a dozen years waiting tables and partying. In the course of the partying she met Darren, who was in the process of setting up Darren’s D&P, as the family called it. Vivian contended that Melanie married Darren because he was such a hapless goof, a stray.
“He’s just like Jack,” Vivian would complain.
Jack was her ex, who had gone bust running a gas bar in Grand Falls and taken it out on her and the kids until she loaded them on the bus and came to town. Darren is often in debt, behind on his payroll or broke because he likes to play the video gambling machines.
“The government doesn’t need to worry about him being behind in his sales tax,” Vivian pronounces on Darren from time to time. “They’re getting it back triple in those damn machines.”
“You’ve got to pay your stupidity tax,” Gerry says.
“You should talk to him,” Vivian says. “He’d listen to you.”
“What makes you think that?” Gerry says. “The man’s thirty-five years old. He’s a grown-up, supposedly. How much advice did you take from your mother when you were thirty-five, or eighteen, for that matter?”
“Melanie should pack up Diana and move out,” Vivian will say, shifting to her other tack in the ongoing Darren debate.
Darren, for his part, rails against the government.
“They shouldn’t have those old machines,” he complains. “They ought to be illegal.”
Mostly Melanie appears to let it all roll off her. She spends as much time as she can with Diana, ignores Darren when he’s morose, and sweeps around in a patter of sneakers. To Gerry, Melanie sometimes seems to be playing in some internal madcap ’50s comedy like I Love Lucy. She’s unnaturally bright and breezy and does the smallest things with Diana with a decisive toss of her head. Melanie has an expressive head. She nods when making points and shakes when saying something isn’t so or didn’t happen. The toss is a physical exclamation point.
“Right...” Melanie will announce, shaking her autumn-dyed hair aside. “We are going to the store for ice cream!”
Gerry sometimes wonders if all the head movements aren’t an effort to look over her shoulder at what might be gaining.
When they arrive home, Melanie has turned the outside Christmas lights on. Gerry doesn’t care for Christmas lights but Vivian says it’s not Christmas without them. A couple of Christmases, the light debate has ended in tears and slammed doors. He got them up early this year, un-asked, as part of his personal campaign to make Christmas as painless as possible with everybody home. The eaves drip electric icicles and a big lit wreath makes a ring of fairy lights.
“A dartboard to throw reindeer at,” Gerry said when he put it up.
The tree is lit-up in the living room. Vivian had it up by the fifteenth of the month.
“It’s the best tree we’ve had yet,” she says.
“Every tree is the best we’ve had yet,” Gerry jokes. “It’s inevitable, fore-ordained, an endless succession of trees that become perfect the minute we get them in the door.” He knows he sounds shallowly avuncular when he talks like this. He finds the jovial-old-cynic role distasteful, but he can’t think of another one.
Duane and Gretchen’s kids are tired and grumpy from the flight and Diana is out-of-it from being awakened to see them. They all tend to hang on their mothers and whine in vague, distant voices while the grown-ups sit at the kitchen table.
Duane asks a blessing on the sandwiches, “...for this food, thank you, Lord Jesus. Amen.”
Vivian looks mildly perplexed. She was an Anglican as a kid, a low-enough Anglican that sandwiches didn’t rate a grace. She’s pretty much a nothing now.
Gerry has been eating officially unhallowed sandwiches for years and feels that being hungry is grace enough. If he was being all Taoist and Lao Tzu-ish about it, he’d say that eating and being eaten are as much a part of “The Way” as the automatic perfection of Christmas trees. Gretchen, however, seems relieved that the snack is divinely sanctioned.
“No promiscuous, unsanctified sannies for our Gretch,” Gerry says to Vivian at the sink.
Gretchen avoids the ham sandwiches. “I’m on the Scripture Diet,” she says.
Gerry can’t remember tuna or peanut butter in the bible but apparently they pass muster for Gretchen.
Everyone is hungrier or less hungry than they thought they’d be, so the sandwiches and a plate of Christmas cake work out approximately right and get eaten up. The kids are put to bed and the grown-ups sort out bags and rooms and couches and follow them.
Outside, the drizzle slides diagonally through the naked tree branches and rings the street lights. Along the street the Christmas lights throw out the cheesy welcome of long-ago summer hot dog stands and disco lighting. About two in the morning, when Gerry gets up to go to the toilet, the house is silent and the occasional sound of tires from the parkway at the end of the street is like a distant whir of grouse wings far away in a leafless forest. You’re not quite sure you heard them.
A little bit of family goes a long way with Gerry. By the next afternoon he’s hiding in the basement, pretending to have to write. Vivian sniffs, but he smoothes things over by cooking a big, late breakfast and fussing over them as they plan to go to the mall and go visiting. Gerry hints at writing that must be done and presents that have to be wrapped. He’s practically dancing from foot to foot by the time he gets them all out the door. He isn’t totally lying. There’s always something he ought to be writing.
Sitting at his computer with a cup of coffee, Gerry thinks that he’s always found excuses to put distance between himself and the people close to him. Trying to write something was often the excuse. Today he’s holed up in the cellar. Thirty years ago he’d hang out in bars and collect what he hoped were legends. He’d tell them to Patricia. He wonders now just when she got bored with dressed-up bar gossip and when she stopped caring how long he spent away gathering it. Still, he had to play the literary druid and go off to the word-woods by himself to gather the herbs for the potions, even if he only grabbed a few weeds and took a nap under a tree.
Gerry has been working on a piece about his early legend gathering for his writing group. He dusts off his characters, George and Paula, and wanders in thirty-year-old east-end fog.
Fragment: Bars
In those days, George remembers, St John’s still had neighbourhood bars; in fact, their apartment was on top of one, a third-floor aerie reached by an anonymous door from the hall next to the pool table.
The bar was the sort where middle-aged locals dropped in for a drink at noon hour or a couple of beers after supper. George hung out there in the daytime if he was working nights. He and Paula would drop down in the evenings sometimes, or they just bought a couple of beers and took them upstairs with them. It meant paying bar prices for beer you could buy at the beer store a block away for half the price, but there was something about having a bar and bartender in your basement.
Frankie, the bartender, opened every day at ten-thirty in the morning and shut at midnight. He and his wife Veronica were the whole operation, except for Veronica’s ancient Uncle Tommy who swept and mopped up. He’d be given a beer when he was finished and then Veronica would drive him home to his boarding house somewhere in Rabbittown. She’d leave Frankie in charge until two o’clock. Then she’d take over until five when he returned. From five until closing, Frankie would be behind the bar, with Veronica coming back later in the evening if things got busy.
Frankie was a townie, but with Syrian immigrant parents, a round little man like a comic grand vizier or court astrologer in some Hope and Crosby road-to-the-harem movie. He’d have looked at home in a fez. The younger neighbourhood layabouts, who thought fifty-five cents was too much for a beer, said Frankie was a Jew, but in fact, “Frankie” was short for Francis Xavier, and he was a pillar of the Basilica and a Knight of Columbus. Frankie gloried in a dinner jacket, cocked hat, cape and sword on high occasions.
His older customers liked Frankie and disapproved of the neighbourhood youngsters taking liberties, but they couldn’t resist pulling his leg about being tight with a dollar either.
“The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the billfold...,” said the barbered insurance agent. He’d been praised for his recitations as a boy and he still sang John MacCormack Irish songs in the bar rather than make calls in the afternoon.
Others told the story of Frankie and Nicky Dolan. Nicholas Dolan lived across the street from Frankie’s bar. He was a thin, vague man with what he believed to be the Irish manners of another age.
“You don’t say,” he’d encourage the person he was talking to, leaning back expectantly and peering through the smoke of a carefully cared for briar pipe. “Did you ever hear the like?”
He became vaguer and more polite as the evenings wore on and he sipped India beer until he disappeared into a sort of warm black hole of civility and floated back across the road to his numerous family and grim-looking wife.
One day, so the story went, Frankie was driving up Military Road when he spied Nick Dolan and pulled over. He bought big black American cars he could barely see over the dashboards of, and he was proud of the way he kept them.
“Can I give you a run, Mr. Dolan?” Frankie asked.
“That would be very kind of you, Francis, very kind indeed,” Nicky said. “I’m just going up the Basilica, you know.”
Frankie would finish the story himself. “And that’s just where I took him, dropped him right off at the door. Then the old shagger goes in and takes the pledge and stops coming in for a beer or a swally. If I’d have known, he could have walked, the old bugger. Very kind of you, Francis, me arse!”
Since Paula and George had arrived in town they had been trying out the local beers and picking their favourites. In Ontario, when they were first going out, she had drunk Fifty and he had drunk Red Cap. He still occasionally sang the Red Cap hymn from the commercials that had been on TV when he was in university.
Cans or draft or bottles,
It’s our favourite brew.
We drink Carling Red Cap.
We are drinkers true...
Now they were trying to make up their minds over India and Dominion.
The writing group gave Gerry an easy ride on that chapter. They like local colour and nostalgia.
Vivian read the piece after he brought it home.
“They liked it,” she said. “You must be happy.”
Gerry was actually sadder for writing the piece. What’s stayed with him from his and Pat’s first year is pub stories. He knows there were cozy nests of sleeping bags and her old fur coat because they had no blankets at first. Now, he can remember walks to bus stops under giant snowflakes. Still, what stuck were the pub stories.
When did she stop coming with me to gather them?
Sitting in his basement now, Gerry finds time running together. He remembers the cartoons that advertised Dominion which Patricia favoured. He seems to remember that they featured the Duke and Duchess of Duckworth and the forger who painted the frescoes in Government House while he served his time. He thinks there may have been Johnnie Burke and Father Duffy and his holy well. However, he can’t remember if the cartoons ran when they first got to St. John’s or later on.
“India, India, India Beer, India that’s the brew,” Gerry hums. “India Beer’s the best there is and it’s all because of you!”
A few days later, Gerry is hiding out in a coffee shop again. It’s early afternoon. He worked an early morning shift and he’s in no great rush to go home. A police car pulls up outside. It’s the silly/cute little Pacer the Constabulary use for community relations, a little 1930s-looking car that always makes Gerry feel it escaped from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Two cops, a man and a woman in the utilitarian new black battledress uniform, feed the parking meter and head off down the street.
Gerry remembers cops from thirty years ago, when he was cutting his teeth as a court reporter.
The Newfoundland Constabulary weren’t “Royal” yet when he came to town, but their black delivery-van paddy wagons had a big crown flanked with an ER on the side. You’re not supposed to call paddy wagons “paddy wagons” now, Gerry reflects. You’re probably supposed to call them Celtic conveyances or something, but they were paddy wagons then. The back of the wagon was separated from the seats by a nautical-looking barricade of painted grey boards with a bright orange life-saving ring buoy hung on it. Two little foot plates were welded at the back of the van and a set of handles onto the roof so that two officers could ride outside like footmen on a coach or the Keystone Kops, waiting to be hurled off on a sharp turn. When the shifts changed, Gerry would watch the paddy wagons roll sedately and grandly up the hill to Fort Townsend, the cop shop, with a couple of constables standing on the foot plates.
For police grandeur, though, you couldn’t beat Inspector Jimmy Hayes coming down the hill. Gerry isn’t sure now if he remembers him, or imagines the sheer glorious anachronism of him on a sunny morning. He wore the belted tunic the Constabulary inherited from the Irish Constabulary, with black buttons with silver highlights and a short cape swinging. Square on his head was a cap that was a hymn of braid and polish and, in his gloved hand, an ebony and silver swagger stick. His boots were a heel-tap oratorio of black.
At the opposite end of the police fashion spectrum was Inspector Alphonsus Collins who shared the police prosecuting duties with Hayes. When Gerry started covering magistrates’ court in the 1970s, the police still did most of the prosecuting.
If Jimmy Hayes came down the hill like an Orange Lodge triumph, Gerry had no idea how Phonse Collins got to work at the court house. He suspected he slept in the walled-off prosecutors’ cubicle at the side of the court room. He looked like a giant toad swelling out of the blue-black uniform with the military, outside patch pockets. Leaning back in a swivel chair, looking at the world over the mound of his gut, he patted cigarette ash into his tunic, and Gerry, although he’s rationally convinced it didn’t happen, could swear he remembers Collins using the dangling tunic pockets as an ashtray, even popping glowing butts into them as the magistrate emerged from the panelled door behind the bench.
At Frankie’s bar, Gerry got lessons in Constabulary ancient history from a marinated giant of a former cop. Lately he writes about him as “Patrick Driscoll.” According to legend at Frankie’s bar, Driscoll got into an epic punch-up with Phonse Collins when they were new constables in the late ’30s. Collins had got the worst of it. He’d landed in hospital and complained, so Driscoll had left the force. He’d gone to sea for a bit, joined the heavy artillery during the war, and afterwards become a traveller for one of the old Water Street business houses until he retired.
Gerry heard his favourite cop story from Pat Driscoll as they drank Beck’s beer in Frankie’s bar. He has tried to sketch the scene for his writing group.
Fragment: Cops
“We were picked for big, not smart, you see,” Driscoll said. He was big and dark and beetle-browed and always wore a suit and tie and a good dark overcoat in winter. “There was this big young fellow and he found a dead horse on Waldegrave Street. He couldn’t spell Waldegrave in his notebook so he carried the horse ’round the corner onto George Street.”
The bar at Frankie’s would kindle into cop and court stories.
“There was this old fella, see, who used to get himself thrown in the pen every fall to get through the winter...” The audience pours its beer from the small bottles into the short tooth-glass tumblers that Frankie uses for both beer and drinks. “... Anyway, he chucked a rock through a store window down on Water Street and then he got worried that might not be enough to get him put away for the whole winter.”
In the diagonal afternoon sun of Frankie’s, the dust motes and smoke danced in anticipation of how the story would come out.
“I knows what comes next. I knows what comes next!”
“Anyway, the police bring the rock into court as Crown exhibit ‘A’ and the old fella pleads not guilty and challenges their evidence. He says he may have thrown a rock but he didn’t throw that rock.”
The storyteller became both magistrate and accused, his voice dividing into an imperial boom for one and a corner-boy crackie yap for the other.
“How big was your rock, man? Was it as big as my fist?”
“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”
“Bigger than my two fists?”
“Bigger than that, Your Honour.”
“As big as my head?”
“About as big as that, Your Honour, but not quite so thick.”
“Guilty! You are sentenced to six months in His Majesty’s Penitentiary! Next case!”
Somebody else has a story about a street character: Tommy Toe.
“There was buddy used to hang around with Tommy, see, and they were up in court for something and the judge asked Tommy where he lived, and he told him, ‘no fixed address.’Then the judge asks buddy where he lived.”
The bar would hang on the imagined question. Lips wet themselves with beer.
“I lives right alongside of Tommy.”
The answer completed the lunch hour liturgy and the drinkers would drain glasses and straggle down the hill back to work.
Gerry thinks of Patrick Driscoll during this year’s Christmas shopping. He has to go to a warehouse outlet in the industrial park out by the overpass to look for some kind of range hood that Vivian thinks they need. She said it could be their present to themselves. Gerry thinks half a range hood is a crummy present, but more and more often now, they find each other hard to buy gifts for.
Back when the railway track still ran through the scrubby spruce, Driscoll had a cabin there and a mistress who was not much older than Gerry was back then. Mistresses were officially a rarity in the working-class east-end. If they existed at all, they were more likely called “the lady friend” or “the girlfriend,” but Gerry always thought of Driscoll’s lover as a mistress. She and Driscoll had that kind of old-fashioned tang to them. Gerry remembers going to Driscoll’s cabin to meet her. He has added the scene to the on-going remembrances of George and Paula.
Fragment: Mistress at the Overpass
Driscoll drove them to the cabin in a large black car that moved like a battleship through lesser traffic. After dropping Mrs. Driscoll off at her bowling league, they made their stately way across town, out of the narrow street canyons of the east and out to the Breughel-landscape scrub around the overpass. There, they drove down snowy ruts among the rabbit tracks and rail sidings.
The mistress, whose name was Yvonne, arrived in her own small car. She was the widow of a man who had died in a hunting accident. She said she could never understand why he hunted because he didn’t like moose meat very much although she did. Anyway, his buddy killed him, shooting blind, somewhere down around the Horse Chops.
The three of them drank Scotch through a late winter afternoon. Around Driscoll, Yvonne had the air of a guide at some historic monument. They had a full set of weights and a weight-lifting bench in the cabin. Driscoll lifted weights to keep fit and Yvonne had taken it up. They both took vitamin B from a huge plastic jar.
“Good for the liver,” Driscoll told George. “You can drink what you like if you eat right and take those.”
It was fully dark when George finally excused himself and left them alone. He had to give a cab very elaborate instructions for finding him in the overpass wilderness. Twice, corrections had to be telephoned to the taxi company and relayed by radio to the cab which had gone up the wrong dead-end lane.
Driving across the overpass, Gerry looks down and scans what’s left of the woods by the old railway right-of-way, trying to find a sign of the cabin or even the track that led to it.
He remembers that Patricia disapproved of the visit when he told her about it.
“The man’s married for God’s sake! Think of his wife!” She stopped short of saying something to Mrs. Driscoll. That would be too much tampering in Gerry’s supposed literary laboratory, a spoiling of his experiment. However, afterwards, she seemed to examine Gerry for symptoms of having affairs. Perhaps it was contagious. He realizes now that she was right. In a few years they both caught it, but he just caught affair sniffles from time to time. She got a terminal case and married somebody else. At the time, though, he just made a mental note that if adultery upset her, best not to tell her.
Words to live by, he thinks.
There’s no sign of Driscoll’s cabin now, or at least Gerry can’t find it. Neither can he get the range hood, or at least not by Christmas. The people at the warehouse know the one he means but it’s out of stock and they’re not even sure it’s made anymore. They say the people at the main store should have been able to tell him that.
A few years ago, Gerry read in the paper that his Patrick Driscoll had died. He hadn’t seen him in twenty-five years or more but he went to the funeral home. It was a soft spring night, one of the first warm ones of the year, and Gerry went up in the gathering dusk. He wore a blazer and a button-down shirt and tie with khakis and boat shoes. Once upon a time it would have been called irreverent but no one seems to change to go to funeral homes anymore.
Gerry’s “Yvonne” was the widow. The original wife had died years ago and she and Driscoll married. The children seemed to have accepted her, although some of them were her age. They stood around her protectively. Gerry knew some of the kids from the first marriage. There was one daughter who acts, and another, Siobhan, who took up public relations for some government department years ago. When he met her, Gerry had never seen “Siobhan” written as a name before and referred to her privately as Shaboom. Once he told her that at some office party and she thought it was cute. Now she greeted Gerry at the door. He introduced himself but found he didn’t need to.
“You’re still on the radio?”
“Until a grown-up job comes along, I guess. I’m still trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Who says you have to grow up?” she asked. “He never did. Not so you’d notice anyhow.”
She inclined her head to the long casket where the slightly yellow face reposed, propped up a bit in the satin ruffles. Except that his eyes were closed, Driscoll looked like he was trying to see the TV without too much effort while lying on the couch. Gerry looked at the yellow face and wondered if the vitamin B kept working. In his head floated a line from his drinking days: I know my liver redeemeth.
Siobhan told him she was living in Toronto now, working at a public relations firm. She had to be close to sixty but she looked fit and tanned. Her fingernails were painted a smooth cocoa brown.
Gerry had to be introduced to Yvonne.
“We met at Pat’s cabin,” he told her when Siobhan took him over. They could have been sisters, one of whom had had a harder life. Yvonne seemed to have blended into the role of an old man’s wife.
“Oh my, the cabin...” she said. “That’s been torn down for years.”
It wasn’t a very sad wake. Driscoll was old and had been sick the last few years. Gerry was re-introduced to the other kids, all of them his age at least. There were two sons with Florida golfers’ tans. They seemed somehow impressed that Gerry could have drunk with their father and still be alive to tell the tale.
“Here’s a man who used to go down to Frankie’s place with Dad.”
“I remember him boasting about you the year you won some big golf tournament, a junior club championship?”
“God! That must have been what, ’73, ’74?”
Later, Gerry drove home with the window down for the first time that year. You could tell it was really spring. The dotted lines and arrows on the streets bloomed bright white in the headlights, repainted and vivid after fading to nothing in the winter’s salt. Visibility of street markings is becoming what Gerry has now learned to call “an issue” with him. On wet nights in late winter and early spring, he sometimes wonders what lane he’s driving in. Recalling the brightness of the lines that night, Gerry reflects that now they’re starting to fade again under this year’s December salt.
“Tempus certainly does fugit,” he says aloud.