Despite the fact that Uncle Reginald was not involved in the actual running of Reg Ryan’s, the popular notion was that, as had been true of his father Reg Ryan Sr in the Forties and Fifties, he was the real brains behind it. ‘The power behind the crone’, he called himself, the crone being Aunt Phil, who really ran things. The Divine Ryans did everything they could to keep alive this notion of Uncle Reginald as owner and proprietor – when it came to death, Aunt Phil said, people preferred to think that a man was in charge.
The truth was that Uncle Reginald was more of a symbol, more of a figurehead than anything else, ‘like Colonel Sanders’, he said, though it was not a comparison that pleased Aunt Phil. His only official duty, for which he received, not the percentage of profits he was always asking for, but what he called a ‘piddling’ salary, was to dress up in his black top-hat and waistcoat and drive the hearse, not only in funerals, but to make what were called ‘collections’ – that is, to go to homes or to hospitals, to collect what Aunt Phil called ‘the customer’ and bring them back to Reg Ryan’s. Uncle Reginald did not do the actual collecting, but waited behind the wheel of the hearse, his hat removed, while it was done. He also ran whatever errands needed running, staying at home and waiting for one of the Weird Sisters-in-law to call him. He described himself as a combination of chauffeur and gopher, a ‘gauffeur’ you might say.
To Aunt Phil, Sister Louise and Father Seymour, Uncle Reginald was the embodiment of all that was wrong with Reg Ryan’s. They were forever harking back to the old days, when horses were still used to draw the casket and Reg Ryan Sr was still driving them. Were funerals better or worse now that horses were no longer used to pull the casket? This question, ‘the horse/hearse controversy’, as Uncle Reginald called it, had been raging in the family for the past twenty years. At least the horses had known the way to the graveyard, Sister Louise was fond of pointing out, adding that that was more than you could say for Uncle Reginald. This was in reference to the fact that once, on the way to one of the more remote graveyards in the city, Uncle Reginald had taken a wrong turn. He had not been aware of it until one of the mourners, who had circled around to intercept him, flagged him down, and then, just to be sure, rode with him the rest of the way.
It had happened only that once, but Sister Louise would not let him forget it. ‘I shudder to think,’ she said, ‘where one of our funerals might end up some day.’
While Uncle Reginald admitted that a horse had a better sense of direction than either a hearse or, in that one case, the person driving it, he personally found a hearse a lot easier to ‘operate’. It had been one of his greatest fears, he said, during those few years that he had driven the horses, that he would lose control of them, and the funeral would go tearing like some runaway stagecoach through the streets. Well, said Sister Louise, the chance of his losing control of the hearse was just as great, if not greater, given that he had no driver’s licence, in fact refused to get one. Uncle Reginald pointed out that, since the only car he drove was the hearse, it was extremely unlikely that he would ever be asked to show his licence. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sister Louise. ‘You should have one.’ ‘Well let me put it this way,’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘Were I to try to get one now, the whole world would find out that, for the past twenty years, I didn’t have one.’ That it was out of the question for him to get his licence at this point, Sister Louise begrudgingly admitted, but she said his not having one was a ‘shameful impropriety’ that he would one day have to answer for.
Some years back, when, like ours, their house had been sold for the greater good – that is, tossed into the great black maw of The Daily Chronicle which, only a short time later, was hungry for more – Aunt Delia and Uncle Reginald had moved in with Aunt Phil. Uncle Reginald had opposed the move, but Aunt Phil had threatened to have him evicted, ‘brother or no brother’, as she put it. They did not actually live with Aunt Phil, but had a large, self-contained apartment on the upper floor, to which you could climb, from the outside by way of the fire-escape, and from the inside by way of a kind of warehouse lift which they had had installed. Uncle Reginald, who now lived in the apartment by himself, loved using the lift, often descending unannounced to visit us. ‘To stir up trouble,’ Aunt Phil said.
The first sign that he was on his way would be a whirring sound from above, then the squeaking of the cables as the lift came down through what was once a stairwell at the end of the hall. The devil ex machina Uncle Reginald called the lift, further exasperating Aunt Phil by refusing to explain to anyone what this meant. Uncle Reginald usually went out by way of the fire-escape and, to avoid climbing the stairs, came in by way of the lift. However, when he was heading out to a funeral, Aunt Phil had him use the lift, pointing out that it would not do for Reg Ryan to be seen in full costume ‘clomping’ down four flights of stairs.
We always gathered at the lift to watch him appear. It was quite an impressive sight, Uncle Reginald descending slowly into view, dressed all in black, his spats appearing first, then his trousers, then his waistcoat and his top-hat which was so high that, upon stepping from the lift, he had to duck his head. To me, Uncle Reginald’s height was a kind of physical manifestation of his oddness. Where such height had come from in a family that, as he put it, was ‘notoriously short’, no-one seemed to know. He described himself as ‘a shade over six feet tall’, or sometimes as ‘a shade, over six feet tall’, pausing just long enough after ‘shade’ to make people wonder if the second meaning was intentional.
There was something regal about the way he held himself, a kind of mournful grace in the way he moved. He called himself ‘the most dapper Grim Reaper this side of the Atlantic’. Sometimes we applauded, though this was often cut short by Aunt Phil, who would give him the once-over, making sure that nothing was amiss. It was all he could do to stand for this inspection, frowning straight ahead, as Aunt Phil, like some drill sergeant, walked around him, now and then picking bits of lint from his uniform. When she was through, he would straighten up and adjust his top-hat to the proper angle. ‘Another ferry to the mainland,’ he’d say. Then Aunt Phil would take his arm and escort him to the hearse, which was parked in the backyard where no-one in the neighbourhood could see it. When she had more or less installed him in the hearse and he was headed up the street towards Reg Ryan’s, she would wait at the end of the driveway, keeping an eye out until the procession, led by Uncle Reginald, left the funeral home.
Because in the mornings our mother and Aunt Phil were at Reg Ryan’s, it was left to Uncle Reginald to get us ready for school, which he managed to do without even coming down from his apartment. He got us out of bed by sending the empty lift up and down until we woke up and screamed for him to stop. Then, while we were getting washed and dressed, he cooked our breakfast, sending it down on the lift, dumbwaiter style. He never showed himself, never said a word, even if we complained about how something was prepared. Every morning, he made sure to forget at least one thing. ‘You forgot the milk,’ I’d shout. Minutes later, down, all by itself on the lift, would come a glass of milk. Sometimes, the entire cargo of the lift was one lump of sugar, descending ceremoniously in the middle of a plate.
We couldn’t get such things from the downstairs kitchen because it was locked, Aunt Phil not trusting even twelve-year-old Mary to work the stove properly. For the same reason, we ate breakfast in the dining room, Mary and I, just the two of us at that huge table. Every morning, we stood at the bottom of the lift, waiting for our breakfast to appear like manna from above, then carried our trays to the dining room, where, subdued by the room and by the prospect of another day at school, we ate in silence. Before leaving, we put our trays on the lift and watched them rise slowly out of sight.
Aunt Phil’s, or rather, Reg Ryan Sr’s dining room, was hung with the kind of portraits you could otherwise only see in low-budget horror films, a gallery of grandfathers looking down at you as you ate, staring at you, Uncle Reginald said, as if they hoped their very expressions would make you choke on your food. Uncle Reginald called them ‘our four fathers’ and swore that their portraits were intended to stir the family into action, to shame us into preserving what they had handed down to us, and for which they had obviously suffered much. Grandpa Stern, Grandpa Cross, Grandpa Grim and Grandpa Disapproving, he called them. They were, in fact, his great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his father, representing, he said, 100 years in the newspaper publishing and undertaking businesses, 100 years of digging up dirt of one kind or another.
Grandpa Stern had been the first New World undertaker in the family, the art of undertaking having been practised by the Old World side of the family since the early 1700s. At least according to Aunt Phil. Uncle Reginald swore that the Old World Ryans had only been gravediggers. Still, he told me, I came from a long line of undertakers, and might end up one myself if I wasn’t careful. It might be in my blood after all, he said, telling me that the first indication of being a born undertaker would be an urge to rearrange the features of people who were sleeping. If I should ever find myself creeping out of bed to turn up the corners of Mary’s mouth into a smile, he said, I should let him know at once. I told him that newspapers might be more my line. He grimaced. ‘Worse again,’ he said. ‘You’re better off undertaking. It’s less morbid.’
Grandpa Cross, his great-grandfather, had started The Daily Chronicle, then called The Daily Catholic Chronicle. His grandfather, Grandpa Grim, otherwise known as Patrick Ryan, had seen The Daily Chronicle through its heyday. Under his guidance, as well as that of his two brothers, the Chronicle ruined the careers of many a Protestant politician, prompting someone at the time to observe that, while one side of the Ryan family buried Catholics, the other buried Protestants. Grandpa Disapproving, his father, Reg Ryan Sr, who had seen fit to give Uncle Reginald his name, but not one cent of his money or one inch of his real estate, was pictured in his undertaker’s outfit, identical to the one Uncle Reginald wore, except, as Uncle Reginald never tired of pointing out, about six sizes smaller. Reg Ryan Sr looked faintly absurd in the outfit – of all the things people imagined death to be, said Uncle Reginald, five foot six and badly overweight were not among them. Reg Ryan Sr had not only run the funeral home, but had been the publisher and editor of the Chronicle, working himself to death by the age of fifty-two, his reward for which, said Uncle Reginald, was a free wake in his own funeral home and a free obituary in his own newspaper.
‘Worked himself to death,’ Aunt Phil said, more boastfully than otherwise.
One morning, while I was having breakfast in the dining room, I heard the lift descend and, thinking some special treat might be waiting for me, went to investigate. On the floor of the lift was a round silver tray, and on the tray an envelope marked ‘Draper Doyle’. I picked up the envelope and, looking inside, found a note which read, ‘Come see me after school. Use the fire-escape.’ That afternoon, I climbed the fire-escape stairs and knocked on Uncle Reginald’s door. He let me into his apartment which looked as if the very walls were made of books. Books were scatttered everywhere, on the window ledge, on the floor. Uncle Reginald had to clear a space on the sofa so I could sit down. He asked me if I had seen my father’s ghost lately. I told him my father had last appeared to me two nights ago, this time in what had been our backyard, where he had stood tossing a puck in the air and watching with apparent fascination as it fell to the ground. Over and over he had done it, thrown the puck so that it fluttered end over end, high in the air, then watched it fall to earth. By the time I ran downstairs and out the door, the backyard was empty. I had searched the grass in case he had left the puck behind, but hadn’t found it.
Uncle Reginald nodded, then had me sit in an armchair opposite his. He asked me if I had ever heard of psycho-oralysis. I made a face and shook my head. It was, he said, the opposite of psychoanalysis. He told me that the job of an analyst was to listen, while the job of an oralyst was to speak. The job of an analyst was to take his patient seriously. The job of an oralyst was to make him laugh. An analyst had his patient lie on a couch. An oralyst had him tell the truth, whether it was on a couch or somewhere else – only the oralyst was allowed to lie, which he could be counted on to do almost constantly. The analyst spoke of nothing but the patient’s problems. The oralyst went off on tangents entirely irrelevant to the patient’s problems, in fact did so as often as possible, thereby confusing the patient and having fun at his expense.
The analyst sat out of sight of the patient who did all the talking – the patient, in other words, was treated like an adult, his desire for privacy respected. He was heard but never seen. With the oralyst, the patient was seen but never heard – in other words, treated like a child, which was entirely appropriate, Uncle Reginald said, since I happened to be one. In psychoanalysis, there was something called ‘free association’. In psycho-oralysis, there was fee association, a technique by which every word spoken by the oralyst reminded the patient of how much money this was costing him.
‘Which brings me,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘to the question of my fee.’
‘Your fee?’ I said.
‘My fee,’ he said. ‘Oralysis will do you no good whatsoever unless you have to pay for it. How does one session a week, fifty cents per session sound?’
‘That’s half my allowance,’ I said. He shrugged.
I tried to get him to explain more clearly exactly what psycho-oralysis was, but he assured me that I now knew as much about it as he did.
‘Fifty cents,’ I said. ‘Will it do me any good?’
‘You should consider yourself lucky,’ he said. ‘Hamlet, who also saw his father’s ghost, did not have nearly so nice an uncle.’
We agreed that on Tuesday afternoons, the one afternoon a week I had free from practice for Father Seymour’s Number, I would come to see him, to be oralysed. He told me that, for our sessions, I should never use the lift. Using the outside entrance, climbing the fire-escape, would make things seem more official, he said, more like we were strangers, patient and oralyst. ‘But for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘don’t tell anyone you’re being oralysed by your uncle. If you do, I’ll be arrested.’ Though I asked him, he refused to explain what he meant by this.
How I began to look forward to plodding up those steps, a nine-year-old in need of therapy, my lunchbox in my hand, my schoolbag bouncing. There to be oralysed by Uncle Reginald, who, I now realize, was quite right in not wanting me to use that phrase in public.
They became the highlight of my week, those secret sessions with Uncle Reginald. Our first concerned tap-dancing. I lay on Uncle Reginald’s couch and listened while he held forth on the matter. He began by defining tap-dancing as ‘the art of making an irritating sound with one’s feet’. What, he asked me – rhetorically, for I was not allowed to speak – what was the point of spending half your life perfecting a skill that no-one else could stand to see performed? Everyone hated tap-dancing. Everyone hated those absurdly clicking shoes, not to mention the dancer, going about the stage with that eager-to-please expression on his face, swinging his arms, and making those barely perceptible movements with his feet. The sound must be exactly right, Father Seymour always said, for it was the sound that people paid attention to – it was in the sound that one’s mistakes were most obvious, most glaring. But there was something inherently wrong, Uncle Reginald said, with a dance that you did not so much watch as listen to.
Our second session concerned Sister Louise. What had fascinated all of them when they were children, Uncle Reginald said, was that in one millimetre of skin, Sister Louise had total feeling, and in the next none at all. When she walked her fingers down her body, she simply stopped feeling them at her waist. It was as though she was walking her fingers on a mirror when, suddenly, their reflection disappeared. One day, he said, they tried to pin down the exact point where the feeling stopped. They had her lie on the bed with her blouse pulled up and, while she stared at the ceiling, Aunt Phil and Uncle Reginald bent over her like surgeons. Aunt Phil, touching her belly with the blunt end of a knitting needle, found a spot, then had Uncle Reginald mark it with a pen. When there was a row of dots across her stomach, they turned her over and did the other side, dotting her back with the pen. In the end, Sister Louise was wearing a girdle of blue dots, which Uncle Reginald then joined together to form what he decided would be called ‘the paraline’, below which she felt nothing.
The paraline. I tried to imagine Sister Louise ever having been so young, so girlish as to go along with such a thing. The very thought of her having a belly, let alone letting someone write on it, seemed preposterous. The only parts of her body I had ever seen were her hands and her face. I had never seen her hair. I could easily have been convinced that she didn’t have any. Nor could I imagine any sort of body lying beneath the black folds of her habit. All I ever saw of her legs was her black boots on the footrest of the wheelchair. Those massive black boots – it might have been those boots that confined her to the chair, so solid, so heavy did they seem. She never wheeled herself about, there being always far more volunteers for this task than were necessary. Instead of asking for help, she would drop her prayer beads in her lap and make as if to put her hands on the wheels. She never failed to seem surprised when half the people present came running to stop her. She had a way of sitting in the chair that made you forget that she was paralysed and made you think that it was simply her preferred form of travel, or that it was a kind of regal eccentricity of hers, a kind of mobile throne.
The notion of the paraline stayed with me. I wondered if such a line might separate this world from the next. Death might be nothing more than a slight shift in the paraline. A slight shift back the other way, and someone I saw waked last week is coming up the steps. A slight shift was all it would take to get me, I suspected, given how close to the paraline I must be to be seeing my father’s ghost so often. I was barely onside, so to speak, like Beliveau in full flight, crouching for a pass at the blueline, his upper body well inside the line, while his skates were still outside.
One night, I dreamed that I was paralysed, confined to a wheelchair in which I was gliding on the ice at the Montreal Forum without so much as touching the wheels. Then I was standing, still gliding effortlessly, but on a pair of skates. I was still paralysed, for I could not feel my legs, though I could see them. I knew that it was only by looking at them that I could invest them with the power to hold me upright. I knew that if I looked away, I would fall.
Then fog began to rise from the Forum ice, slowly at first, swirling about my feet, obscuring my skates, then rising quickly to my knees, then to my thighs. Finally, there was a circle of sensation at my waist, as though I were being immersed in cold water; this circle of sensation climbed up my body as each successive inch of me first felt the fog, then stopped feeling it. It was as though, inch by inch, I was being erased. When it reached my neck, I tipped my head back and began to scream. I woke up and, for the first time since my father’s death, remembered the nightmare. It didn’t seem like progress of any kind, given that the dream now had the power of scaring me while I was still awake.