1 1Our house must be sold to help keep The Daily Chronicle afloat. What better place for Aunt Phil to make this announcement than in the graveyard, among relatives who, by the way she looked at their headstones, might all have died to keep the Chronicle afloat? To hear her talk, giving up the house was the least that we could do.
‘Their only regret,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘is that they have but one house to give for the Chronicle.’
We had moved in with Aunt Phil three months ago, supposedly so that the house that we were renting from her, at what Uncle Reginald called ‘the family rate’, could be repaired. The repairs were taking place, all right, but we would not be moving back, not ever. Aunt Phil said that we could stay with her as long as we liked. All of her children had moved out, so there was plenty of room, she said. The rest of us said nothing, and no wonder. When someone tells you that your house is being sold to help preserve the life work of your great-grandfather, at whose grave you just happen to be kneeling, there isn’t much you can say. Except maybe ‘We who are about to lose our home salute you’, which was what Uncle Reginald had said ten years ago upon being told that his house must be sold.
Lots of things had been sold to keep the Chronicle afloat. We had once owned a marbleworks and a pair of flower shops, but these had been sold. Other houses had been sold. Uncle Reginald swore that Reg Ryan Sr had bought up all the houses on Fleming Street just so that in re-selling them he could pick and choose his neighbours. Fleming Street was what Reg Ryan had made it, Uncle Reginald said, a little empire, all of which had been left to Aunt Phil, and most of which was now gone. Uncle Reginald had taken his disinheritance better than anyone expected. After the reading of Reg Ryan’s will, he had turned to Father Seymour and said: ‘Well, at least he let me keep his name.’
All that was left of the empire, except for Aunt Phil’s house, was its four corners: the Chronicle and the funeral home, which we owned, and the orphanage and the convent, which we might as well have owned, given how long someone named Ryan had been running them. The Daily Chronicle, Reg Ryan’s (as the funeral home was called), St Martin’s orphanage, and St Mary’s convent. The only money-maker in the lot was the funeral home, prompting Uncle Reginald to remark that, from now on, the family motto should be, ‘We make our living from the dead’.
Because there were so many priests and nuns in the family, we were known throughout the city as the Divine Ryans. We had always been a church family, and had married into other church families, so that it sometimes seemed that all the priests and nuns in the world were related to us. Our last family reunion, Uncle Reginald said, was known to the rest of the world as Vatican 11.
Aunt Phil’s news was that much harder to take because our old house was next door to hers. I could see it from my bedroom window. In fact, because the curtains were down, I could see right into the rooms, all of which were empty. One night, I stood there for a long time, looking at our house, wondering who would move into it. Almost directly across from my new bedroom window was my old one, where I had often stood, looking out at Aunt Phil’s backyard, hoping to catch a glimpse of Aunt Phil escorting Uncle Reginald to the hearse.
I looked away from the window. On the wall of my room was a picture of me which Uncle Reginald had had blown up. The original had appeared in The Daily Chronicle about a year ago when I had been chosen minor hockey player of the week, an honour I would not have had bestowed upon me if, on the one hand, my father had not been editor-in-chief of the Chronicle, and, on the other, if he had ever seen me play. In the picture, I was dressed in full goalie gear, face mask included. I looked like some sort of insect, magnified ten thousand times, preening for the microscope. At my skates, on the ice just in front of me, lay my nemesis, the puck. The word ‘puck’, my father had once told me, originally meant ‘demon’. For a time it had even been used interchangeably with ‘hobgoblin’. I made a mental note of thanks to that anonymous inventor of hockey who had had the good sense to opt for ‘puck’.
I looked back to the window again, and was surprised to see that in the house across the way the kitchen light was on. The kitchen looked – there is no other way of putting it – as if someone was about to enter it. For a few minutes, there was no sign of anyone, but then came a faint flickering of shadow as if, in a room just off the kitchen, someone was moving about. The flickering stopped for a few minutes, then began again, more distinct this time, as if whoever was making it was coming closer. Finally, from out of the darkness of the house, he appeared, looking as if he had just come home from work. My father stood at the kitchen sink and looked out the window, at me, it seemed, though he gave no sign that he had seen me. I closed my eyes, then opened them to find that a man unmistakably my father was still staring at me, a look of forlorn perplexity about him as if he could not understand why we had left him behind when we moved. Then he took from his coat pocket what looked like a hockey puck, which he began to toss from hand to hand, his head going back and forth as he followed the flight of the puck through the air. Then he held the puck to his ear, shaking it now and then, as you might do with a watch to see if it was ticking. Backing away from the window, I turned and ran downstairs.
‘Mom,’ I shouted, ‘Mom, Dad is in our house. In the kitchen. He’s there, I saw him.’
‘Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,’ Aunt Phil said, blessing herself as she got up from her chair and ran to the dining room, from which the view of our old house was much the same as from my bedroom. My mother and Father Seymour also stood up, Father Seymour doing his best to look calmly amused, stretching out one arm towards my mother as if to assure her that they could both sit down.
‘I saw him,’ I said. ‘I did.’ Aunt Phil came back and gave me that look she always gave me when I misbehaved. She looked at me as if I had been put on earth for some dark purpose, my ignorance of which was my only blessing.
‘Lies,’ Aunt Phil said, as if, despite the haste with which she had run to the dining-room window, she had known all along that I was lying. ‘Nothing but lies.’
‘I saw him,’ I said. ‘The light was on and he was looking out the window. He had a puck—’
‘There’s not even a light on over there,’ Aunt Phil said.
I ran to the dining room and looked out the window, only to find that what she said was true. The house was dark, which meant that no-one would believe that I even thought that I had seen him, let alone that I really had. I ran back to my mother. ‘Mom, I saw him,’ I said. ‘I did.’ My mother put her arms around me, holding my head tightly to her stomach, as much to silence me as to comfort me, it seemed, for when I struggled to get free, she held me tighter. ‘I saw him,’ I said.
‘Shutup, Draper Doyle,’ said my sister Mary, who believed it was all an obvious, if tasteless bid for attention, a commodity which she seemed to think no nine-year-old could ever get enough of. I looked at Uncle Reginald, who winked at me, whether to assure me that he believed me or that he thought the joke was in poor taste was hard to say.
‘I won’t have this sort of behaviour in my house,’ Aunt Phil said, looking down at me. Here I was, holding my mother, whose waist felt as if Aunt Phil could close one hand around it, and here was Aunt Phil, standing over me, looking as if I could not have enclosed her with both arms. I imagined trying to do so, my face lost in Aunt Phil’s bosom as I struggled to get my arms around her, Aunt Phil standing to full height to make it more difficult for me, impassively resisting me as she might have some temptation of the flesh, standing erect, her expression one of righteous satisfaction, as if her great girth was the very measure of her virtue.
‘I don’t want Draper Doyle going to any more wakes,’ my mother said. ‘No more wakes, Aunt Phil.’
At first, Aunt Phil looked shocked. Then she pressed her lips tightly together and said, as if to no-one in particular, ‘You’d think it was my fault the child was seeing things.’
‘I’m sure that’s not what Linda meant,’ Father Seymour said, in a way that made it impossible to tell whose side he was on.
‘No,’ my mother said. ‘No, of course not. I just—’
‘If this is the thanks I get,’ Aunt Phil said, ‘for taking in my brother’s whole family—’
I was about to point out that she wouldn’t have had to take us in if she hadn’t taken our house from us in the first place, but Sister Louise intervened. ‘Linda was just upset,’ she said, looking at me as if she believed I had lost whatever children had in the way of sense. Sister Louise had been confined to a wheelchair since some early childhood accident. Her black boots, on the footrest of her chair, might have been skates from which the blades had been removed. ‘We’re all upset,’ she said. At this, there was much nodding of heads, as well as a kind of general retreat, everyone shifting about to indicate that the unpleasantness had passed.
‘Sit down here beside me, Draper Doyle,’ my mother said. I sat on the sofa between her and Mary. Soon, Aunt Phil, Father Seymour, and Sister Louise were presiding, like some Vatican-appointed committee, over the question of my visitation. Aunt Phil said it was preposterous to even think that a grown man would appear to his nine-year-old son instead of to his wife or to his sister. My mother, declining this invitation to join with her against me, said nothing.
Uncle Reginald told Aunt Phil that knowing more about visitations than other people didn’t make her any more likely to have one. ‘Of course not,’ Aunt Phil said, ‘but neither should fanciful nine-year-olds be taken seriously.’ Aunt Phil, who considered herself something of an expert, had often held forth on visitations. She was constantly expressing the fear that her own husband would visit her, appear at the foot of her bed in the middle of the night to deliver some awful message. Her dead husband’s name was never spoken, by her or by anyone else. People said He or Him if mention of him was unavoidable. You understood who they meant, because you could hear the capital H, their tone faintly mocking that of Aunt Phil, who said He or Him with such fearful reverence that people unsure of who she meant were known to bless themselves. Aunt Phil claimed that, although she had yet to be visited, her husband had often been present in the house, invisibly present, performing little acts of mischief. All household mysteries were attributed to Him. If she could not remember the name of someone she had known for years, it was His doing. Once, when she broke a teacup, she said, ‘That was Him did that,’ as if her dead husband had wrenched it from her hands.
Now she looked pointedly at me. She informed me that people came back from the dead to deliver ‘messages’ or ‘warnings’ to the living, not just to look at them or, ‘of all things’ to throw pucks up in the air. ‘When They come back,’ she said, ‘They come back. There’s no maybe They did or maybe They didn’t.’ I was about to say that there was no maybe in my mind when, this time, Uncle Reginald spoke up. He said that if the dead came back to warn the living against having too much fun, it was extremely unlikely that Aunt Phil would ever be the subject of a lecture from beyond the grave. At this, Aunt Phil looked to Father Seymour and Sister Louise to come to her defence.
‘Draper Doyle has often heard you talk about visitations, Phil,’ Father Seymour said. ‘That’s probably where he got the idea.’ Again, there was much nodding of heads, as if to say that Father Seymour had put his finger on it, exactly on it. In the process, he placated Aunt Phil, restoring her to her place as foremost authority on visitations. Aunt Phil even seemed faintly pleased with me, smiling at me as if to say that I could not be completely lacking in sense if I had been so strongly affected by something she had said. Father Seymour’s words had put me in a new light, it seemed. I was neither liar nor usurper of authority, just a nine-year-old boy on whom, without even knowing it, she had had a profound influence.
‘I’m sure Draper Doyle wasn’t telling lies,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘It’s just that he misses his father, which is understandable.’ This, then, was the finding of the committee, that, while no visitation had taken place, my claiming that one had was understandable.
Later that night, when everyone was gone to bed, I stood at the window again, looking out at the house across the way. It appeared to be as dark and as empty as when I had last looked. I wondered if my father might still be there, in one of the rooms, hiding from us. It seemed like the kind of thing he would do.
I thought of my mother and Aunt Phil, standing side by side at his grave earlier that week. ‘His death was your punishment, my dear,’ Aunt Phil had said, though not by way of accusing my mother of anything in particular. She was just as apt to say that her own husband’s death had been her punishment. It was one of the inscrutable ironies of Aunt Phil’s God that he spared the person with whom he was displeased and took some blameless relative instead. To Aunt Phil, my mother was a kind of novice widow, her husband but five months dead. She wanted her to do what she had done, embrace widowhood as her vocation, her calling. For this was what Aunt Phil believed, that God had made them widows for a purpose, that a kind of dark sacrament had been extended to them.
‘I don’t want you taking him to any more wakes,’ my mother had said. In fact, I had not been to a wake since my father’s, about which, I was happy to find, I remembered nothing. Even the days leading up to my father’s death had been blanked out. My ‘missing week’ Uncle Reginald called it. My father, he said, was gone but not forgotten. My missing week, on the other hand, was forgotten, but not gone.
I wondered how many more times we would gather in the graveyard to hear bad news. There were two things I hated about my father’s headstone. First, there was my name. Whatever chance I had had of convincing people that my name was Draper, not Draper Doyle, was gone now that ‘Draper Doyle’ was on the headstone, for how could you change something that was literally carved in stone? Doyle was my second name, and it was because my father had, for some reason, been fond of calling me by both names that my mother had deemed it appropriate that the headstone read ‘sadly missed by Draper Doyle’. I complained, of course, pointing out that they didn’t call Mary ‘Mary Louise’ and wondering why my father had been fond of ‘Draper Doyle’. It wasn’t as if there were so many Drapers in the family that he had to use second names to tell us apart.
The other thing I hated about the headstone was that my father’s day of birth and day of death were the same. He had died on his birthday, the worst of all possible days on which to die, it seemed to me, though that was not how the others chose to see it. Uncle Reginald told me that in his eulogy, Father Seymour had said that you could think of my father’s life as a circle, a journey from birth to rebirth. ‘God gave Donald’s life a perfect shape,’ Father Seymour said.
I climbed into bed and looked again at the picture of me on the wall. In the darkness, I could barely read the caption which Uncle Reginald had written on the bottom border of the picture. ‘Draper Doyle: Goalie’, it said. It looked more impressive than it had when the light was on, more imposing. There I was, weirdly oversized in my equipment, looking out at the world through my face mask. The puck at my feet might have been a symbol of the fate of all pucks that came my way. That, at any rate, was how I chose to think of it as I fell asleep.