Reg Ryan Sr had left to my father the editorship of what Uncle Reginald once described as the world’s worst newspaper, The Daily Chronicle. It was a morning paper, ‘a mourning paper’, Uncle Reginald said, a paper in mourning for its own past greatness.
At one time a major paper in the city, back when newspapers were expected, even required to be biased, it had fallen on hard times. The problem with The Daily Chronicle was that while other papers in the city had changed with the times, toning down or disguising their biases, it had stayed the same, continuing to denounce those who, as its editorials often put it, were of the ‘wrong’ politics or the ‘wrong’ religion.
Even the layout of the paper had stayed the same. Every morning, The Daily Chronicle appeared with an ad for Reg Ryan’s funeral home in the top left corner of the page, and a short quote from the bible in the top right corner. The quote was called ‘The Word of God’, and had been appearing in the top right corner since the first day the paper had been published. That’s how ‘The Word of God’ had become the nickname for The Daily Chronicle, even among people who liked the paper. ‘Is The Word of God out yet?’ people would say at newsstands. ‘I wonder what’s keeping The Word of God today. It’s usually out by now.’ People would read stories aloud from the paper, concluding by saying, ‘This is The Word of God.’
Always sensational, The Daily Chronicle, by the time my father took over, had been a strange combination of scandal sheet and church bulletin. The only thing that distinguished it from other tabloids, apart from the church news, was the complete absence of sex scandal stories, stories which neither Sister Louise nor the other members of the editorial board, Father Seymour and Father Francis, would tolerate. Side by side with stories about how construction of a new church was proceeding were stories about UFO sightings, aliens from other planets, celebrities returning from the dead. Aunt Phil, who spent much of her spare time reading about such things herself, saw nothing wrong with this – ‘sugaring the pill’, she called it. How strange it must have been for my father, who had studied metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, to edit the Chronicle. He had often joked that what the paper lacked in philosophy, it more than made up for in metaphysics.
Every morning, when I got up for breakfast, there was a copy of that day’s Daily Chronicle on the dining-room table, left there by Aunt Phil who, before going to work, had gone through it page by page, assessing the job the new editor – the third since my father’s death – was doing. I always looked at the editorial page, the ‘sermon’ as it was known throughout the city. I had delivered my first sermon when I was six years old. That’s what my father called it, ‘delivering the sermon’. Depending on whose turn it was to write it, I would stop by the rectory, or the convent, or the orphanage on my way home from school to pick up that day’s editorial, then take it to my father at the newsroom. ‘Here he is,’ my father always said, ‘Draper Doyle, delivering the sermon.’
Sister Louise, Father Francis and Father Seymour, ‘the board’, as my father called them, wrote the editorials, which appeared in the paper unsigned, so that most people were under the impression that my father wrote them, an impression which we were all sworn to do nothing to correct. Usually, an editorial was an endorsement of the church’s position on some matter, on birth control perhaps, or abortion, or the celibacy of priests. ‘There’s no harm in people thinking that Donald writes them,’ Sister Louise said. ‘We’re only putting into plain language what Donald would say in that sophisticated way of his.’
This was the accepted notion, that while my father’s views were doubtless entirely proper, entirely in line with those of the board, he might express them in such a way as to make them incomprehensible to what Sister Louise called ‘the average reader of the Chronicle’. This, Sister Louise said, far from being a criticism of him, was to his credit – it was only because the board lacked his ability with language, only because of what she called their ‘plodding minds’, that they were able to make themselves understood by the common person. It was better that my father apply his talents to the running, rather than to the writing, of the paper, she said, especially since he was the only one of them who knew how to run it.
This was how they all talked about him, as a kind of behind-the-scenes genius, on the one hand an adept in the mysterious process of putting out a paper, on the other the family intellectual who had been sent to Oxford to study scholastic philosophy, acquire the arguments, the proofs of Catholicism, and who now could trot them out, to the discomfiture of non-believers, at a moment’s notice. It was commonly believed that not even Father Francis or Father Seymour had his command of metaphysics. He knew that this was how they thought about him. He once said they were all waiting for some sidewalk confrontation, during which he would be called upon to quote at length from Thomas Aquinas. The routing of some Protestant in public, in broad daylight, that was what they wanted.
But he had never said as much to them. Sister Louise had disarmed him by making token deferrals to his authority whenever church matters were being discussed. ‘Donald will correct me if I’m wrong,’ she’d say, then go on to voice her opinion, while my father sat there, as if in tacit agreement with every word she said.
He had rarely spoken at family gatherings. His often distant, preoccupied manner had been put down to what Sister Louise called ‘the fineness of his mind’. They spoke as if between arcane technical matters on the one hand and metaphysics on the other, most of what went on in my father’s mind was incomprehensible to anyone but him. It was for this reason that they were not especially troubled by his breakdown, which had happened when I was five. In fact, they had seemed almost reassured by it, as if it confirmed, beyond all doubt, their assessment of him. It was the kind of thing that people with minds like my father’s were known to do, even expected to do, it seemed.
‘The mind that man has,’ Sister Louise said, shaking her head, as if it was inevitable that, from sheer proximity to that divine spark, his body would burn out from time to time.
That it was his body and not his mind that was the problem was obvious, Sister Louise said, from the high spirits he was showing in the hospital. It was a case of sheer physical exhaustion, that’s all it was. The wonder, her tone implied, was that it had taken this long to happen. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just the first of many breakdowns,’ Sister Louise said, making ‘breakdown’ sound like some sort of benign growth which, every so often, would be removed. Everyone had nodded, as if this observation somehow clinched the matter. He was five weeks in the hospital, then came home without fanfare of any kind – my father, Sister Louise said, was not the kind of man who liked you to make a fuss over him. He went straight back to work, and soon it was as though that five-week interval had never happened.
I was not surprised that, despite his young age, my father had died of a heart attack. One of the reasons we had been able to keep The Daily Chronicle afloat was that our father had been willing to work impossibly long hours for next to no salary, running the newsroom more or less by himself and even overseeing the running of the other departments – paste-up, circulation, even advertising. He worked from three in the afternoon to three in the morning, six twelve-hour shifts a week, his only day off being Saturday, because there was no Sunday edition of the Chronicle.
Mind you, a seventy-two hour work week was not unusual among the Ryans. The rest of the family put in just as many hours in the other corners of the empire. ‘It’s hard work that got us where we are,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘And it’s hard work that will keep us there.’
The strange thing was that my father had first taken to working impossibly long hours after his breakdown. He had gone from seeing less of his family than most people would have thought proper to hardly seeing them at all. For the last few years of his life, he had all but lived at the newspaper, leaving the house before noon, coming home at four or five in the morning to have breakfast with our mother, then going to bed just as Mary and I were getting up to go to school. Whole days went by without us seeing him. We always ate breakfast in hushed silence for fear of waking him; most of the time, when we came home to lunch, he had already gone back to work.
Every day, my mother said, the same scene of panic was repeated. Every day, my father was convinced of the absolute impossibility of getting the paper out by six o’clock the next morning, but somehow, every morning without fail, The Daily Chronicle appeared. Each morning’s issue was a miracle, Aunt Phil said, another routine miracle from Donald Ryan.
During the last few months of his life, we had seen him so infrequently, he had seemed more like a boarder than a husband or a father. ‘The boarder’, in fact, was what our mother had taken to calling him. It was hard to believe, she said, that two people who lived in the same house could see so little of each other. And Mary and I saw him even less than she did. You could count on the fingers of one hand, she said, the number of hours in a week that we were all at home and all awake at the same time. She had begun joking with Mary and me about how the three of us might not be the only ones living in the house, that she was beginning to suspect that someone else, ‘possibly a man’, was living with us. She had seen evidence, she said, that a man might be hiding from us, sneaking out to use the toaster while we were sleeping, running water late at night, leaving doors and windows open. Yes, she was almost certain that some fourth person was in the house, leading a kind of shadow existence, a life parallel to ours but somehow never intersecting with it.
This was only a slight exaggeration. At the end, aside from a few hours here and there, his life had only coincided with ours from noon on Saturday when he got up, to early afternoon on Sunday when he began another week of work. It occurred to me, sitting in Aunt Phil’s dining room, eating my breakfast while Reg Ryan Sr looked down from the wall, that it was the ghost of a ghost that I had been seeing lately, the ghost of the ghost my father had been while he was still alive. These were literally his old haunts that he was returning to, for his existence now was hardly less solitary, less disembodied than it had been before his death. I remembered how my mother had looked in the weeks after he was buried. She had seemed more puzzled than anything else, as if his premature death was just the latest inscrutable thing that he had done. For her, his death might have been no more than a completion of, a perfection of, the absence that had been his life.
Some mornings, I had woken up to the sound of Aunt Phil downstairs in our kitchen. She would come over from next door, barge in unannounced to talk to my father, to give him what amounted to his morning pep talk, despite the fact that his day was just ending. The ink was not dry on that morning’s paper, and she was already hounding him about tomorrow’s. She always told him that the family was counting on him to keep the paper going, ‘to keep it alive’, as she put it.
The phrase conjures up for me now a vision of my father running around in the machine room in which the wire-service machines spewed out copy, day and night, copy that, because we could not afford reporters, comprised about 99 per cent of the paper. I could see my father loading the teletypes, the life-support systems of The Daily Chronicle, frantic about them breaking down or running out of paper when he was not there to reload them – my father, endlessly maintaining those machines, the ceaseless noise of which drowned out all other sounds.
One day, when I had gone to the newsroom to deliver the sermon, I was told that my father was in the machine room. I went to the door of the room and was about to knock when, looking through the window, I saw him, bending over one of the teletype machines. At first, I thought he was reading the printout, but then I saw that the movement of his head was too exaggerated. In addition to moving from left to right, following with a kind of mock fascination each line of type across the page, his head was going rapidly up and down, as if he was mimicking the striking of the keys, or else pretending that he was making them move, that he was typing at this impossible speed by sheer telepathy. He stood there mocking that machine, until he happened to look up to catch me staring at him.
I smiled, thinking I had caught him in some harmless game that he was fond of playing. Without straightening up, still with his hands on either side of the teletype, he stared at me for what seemed like a very long time, then said something. I couldn’t hear him, any more than I could hear the machines, for the room, because it bordered the newsroom, was soundproof. When I shook my head to indicate I hadn’t heard, he spoke again, his lips moving soundlessly. Again I shook my head, and again he spoke, his face now expressing irritation with what he seemed to think was my stubborn refusal to hear what he was saying. I pointed to indicate that I was coming in, at which his expression switched to rage, and he began shouting, shouting soundlessly at me, still bent over that machine, still looking at me sideways. I began to wonder if he had somehow failed to recognize me. I stood there a little longer, staring at the soundless tantrum he was throwing, then turned and, dropping the sermon on the desk, ran from the newsroom. He never afterwards said one word about it.
I could think of only two things our family had done together on anything like a regular basis – one was watch the hockey game on Saturday night, and the other was go to early mass on Sunday morning. It had been Aunt Phil’s practice to, as Uncle Reginald put it, ‘convene’ a meeting of the Divine Ryans at her house whenever the Habs were playing the Leafs on TV. There had been no meetings since my father’s death last March, not even during the playoffs in the spring when the Habs had won their second straight Stanley Cup. When, at dinner one night, Aunt Phil announced that the whole family was getting together for the Habs’ first televised game of the season this coming Saturday, I screamed, ‘Hurray,’ causing Mary and my mother to roll their eyes.
‘You’re not normal, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said. ‘You’re a fanatic.’
‘What’s a fanatic?’ I said.
‘A fanatic,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘is a fan who is so crazy you have to keep him in the attic.’
‘It’s only a hockey game you know, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said.
‘The Habs have won more Cups than any other team,’ I said. ‘Thirteen.’
‘Why do you like statistics so much, Draper Doyle?’ Mary said. ‘They’re only numbers, you know.’ Mary had a habit of reducing things to their basic elements to prove their worthlessness. ‘Why do you like all that candy?’ she’d say. ‘Candy’s only sugar, you know.’ Anything that could thus be broken down was worthless, as far as she was concerned.
‘Hockey,’ she said, ‘all it is is people hitting a piece of rubber back and forth with sticks.’
‘Water,’ I said, ‘all it is is hydrogen and oxygen. Why drink it?’
‘Just tell me one thing, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said. ‘Do you hate the other teams?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘They’re human beings too, you know,’ she said.
‘No, they’re not,’ I said.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m not saying Montreal is not the best team. I know they are.’ The inevitable superiority of the Montreal Canadiens was something to which Mary was resigned, a concession she begrudgingly allowed me whenever we had these arguments, which was often. ‘I just want you to admit,’ she said, ‘that the Boston Bruins for instance are human beings too.’
‘They’re not,’ I said. ‘Canadiens are human beings. But Bruins are bears. Black Hawks are birds. Red Wings are birds. Leafs are plants.’
‘What about the Rangers, Draper Doyle?’ my mother said, looking triumphantly around the table. ‘Aren’t they human? Aren’t they?’ I had forgotten about those damned Rangers. What were Rangers anyway – forest rangers? Were they human beings? I supposed they were. The New York Rangers hadn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1947, but they were human beings, any way you looked at it. I thought about pointing out that Smokey the Bear was a Ranger, but decided against it.
‘Shot down, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said, ‘shot down.’ Getting up from the table, she stretched out her arms and made the noise of an airplane, then did a sudden nosedive to the floor. ‘Boom,’ she said, so loudly that Aunt Phil was startled. ‘Shot down,’ she said, sitting down again.
‘You never shot me down,’ I said. ‘Mom did.’
My defeat at the dinner table notwithstanding, I could hardly sit still for excitement when Saturday arrived. Another season had begun. All week, I had been able to think of nothing else. The Habs had won the Cup the last two years, and had won their first five road games of the season. They seemed unbeatable. Now they were coming home to the Forum. I brought out my many hockey souvenirs from the closet, including a puck which my father had given me when I was seven. It had previously occurred to me that some sort of connection might exist between this puck and the one my father had lately been appearing with, though I couldn’t imagine what that connection might be. On a piece of paper taped to one side of the puck, these words were written: ‘Deflected into the stands by Canadiens goalie Gerry MacNeil at 1:03 of overtime. Caught by Donald Ryan. Nineteen seconds later, Elmer Lach scored to win the Stanley Cup for Montreal. Montreal Forum, April 16, 1953.’ How I envied my father. I’d have given anything to be there when the Habs won the Cup.
Among my other hockey souvenirs, the most unlikely of the lot was a hardbound copy of the Aeneid which my father had given me for my birthday when I was five, an illustrated adaptation for children. The Cartoon Virgil, it was called. The full-page drawings were in the manner of the old Classics Illustrated comic books, full of lurid detail – I can still see the Frightful Forms, Death-dealing War, and Mad Discord with ‘snaky, bloodstained hair’. I knew The Cartoon Virgil by heart. Of all the adapted classics my father had had me read, I liked it best, particularly those parts which took place in the underworld. (There were also underworlds in The Cartoon Homer and The Cartoon Dante, but Virgil’s was my favourite.) My father had shown me how the black, laminated cloth cover of The Cartoon Virgil could itself be a kind of underworld. On Saturday nights, I always had to go to bed after the first period of the hockey game, so my father, using a pen that had run out of ink, would ‘write’ the score of the game on the cover of The Cartoon Virgil. At breakfast, after mass on Sunday mornings, I would put a sheet of paper over the book and shade it with a pencil until I found the score. ‘Here it comes,’ my father would say, ‘here it comes, emerging from the underworld.’
And so it would. A kind of ghost of what he had written would appear. Montreal 5 – New York 3. After a while, there were so many scores invisibly engraved in the cover of the book that my father had to start writing in the date to help me tell them apart. Montreal 3 – Toronto 3, 02/12/65. A kind of memory slate is what the book became, for, in the process of trying to find the score of last night’s game, I would call up the scores of games played years ago, and we would stop at each one to see if we remembered it. Scattered haphazardly across the cover of The Cartoon Virgil in my father’s handwriting were the scores of every televised Habs game from 1963 to 1966 when, because I was then allowed to stay up late, my father had stopped writing them. From then on, I had written the scores on the cover myself, with the used-out pen my father had given me.
Now, to remind me to write the score and date of tonight’s game on the book, I laid the pen on the cover of The Cartoon Virgil and went downstairs just as Uncle Reginald was descending in the lift. We were both wearing Habs sweaters, his with number 9 and mine with number 4 on the back. ‘Good evening hockey fans from ghost to ghost,’ said Uncle Reginald. I grinned.
Aunt Phil, Sister Louise and Father Seymour were already in the living room when we got there. None of them had any real affection for hockey. As far as they were concerned, God had created hockey for the sole purpose of allowing Catholics to humiliate Protestants on nationwide TV. Most of Fleming Street was Catholic, but there were a few Protestant families. In fact, one of the city’s staunchest Protestants and monarchists lived near the end of the street, her house just visible from Aunt Phil’s. Millie Barter was in every way Aunt Phil’s opposite – a tiny, fragile woman who, according to Aunt Phil, considered work to be beneath not only her, but her entire family. The Barters were supposed to be distantly related to some obscure, umpteen-times-removed cousin of the Queen, prompting Aunt Phil to refer to Millie as Queen Millie and to her family as The Royal Family. The Barters had a fortune, said to be so old that even they could not remember how they came by it. The Barters, Aunt Phil said, had done nothing since coming to the New World but live off some Old World fortune. God only knew where their money came from, she said. They had lived on that side of the street for as long as the Ryans had lived on this side, and, in all that time, no Barter had ever been seen to do a day’s work. As far as Aunt Phil was concerned, all Millie Barter did was back such Protestant causes as the retention of the Union Jack and royal visits.
Despite the fact that the Ryans and the Barters had never spoken to each other, it had somehow become the custom that after each televised game between the Habs and the Leafs, the family whose team had won would phone the family whose team had lost, not to speak to them, of course, but only to let their phone ring three times – three rings, three gloating cheers. Just as the Americans and the Russians had the hotline, the Ryans and the Barters had what Uncle Reginald called ‘the knellephone’, their only cold war communication.
Aunt Phil stood at her bedroom window just before the game, peeking out through the curtains, watching the Barter children arrive at what she derisively called Buckingham Palace. ‘Here they come,’ she said, ‘the Royal Family.’ Aunt Phil followed the comings and goings of the Barters as closely as other people did the real royal family. She began to announce their arrivals like some palace doorman. ‘Prince Pimple-puss,’ she said scornfully, ‘accompanied by his wife, Princess Pasty-face, and Child William, the Earl of Dirty Diapers.’ Laughing, Uncle Reginald wondered if Millie Barter referred to Aunt Phil’s house as the Vatican, and watched it as closely as Aunt Phil watched hers. Perhaps she too had nicknames for all of us, he said.
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what about His Mouldiness, Reg Ryan? What about The Infallible Philomena?’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Aunt Phil shouted from her bedroom. ‘Don’t be putting ideas in the boy’s head.’
Then she came out and, as she always did before a Habs/Leafs game, put the phone on top of the television set.
‘We’ll ring that woman’s phone tonight, Draper Doyle,’ she said, ‘you just watch.’
‘Maybe she’ll ring ours, Aunt Phil,’ Mary said, exchanging a smile with my mother.
When Montreal were playing Toronto at the Forum, as they were tonight, it was not a hockey game, but a holy war, a crusade carried on nationwide TV, Rome’s Canadiens versus Canterbury’s Maple Leafs, ‘the Heathen Leafs against the Holy Habs’, as Uncle Reginald put it. Uncle Reginald said that the real coach of the Montreal Canadiens was the Pope, who was sending Toe Blake instructions from the Vatican, where he and his cardinals were watching the game on closed-circuit television.
As it turned out, the Pope and his cardinals had seen better days, because to everyone’s astonishment the Leafs took a 3–1 lead in the first period. Never mind the Leafs, Uncle Reginald said, assuring us that, between periods, the Pope and his cardinals would find a way of beating them. No-one, he said, no-one on the face of the earth knew more about hockey than Pope Paul VI. And no-one knew less about it than Aunt Phil, I felt like saying. All Aunt Phil knew or wanted to know about the Leafs was that they were Protestant. Throughout the first period, because she was never entirely sure when something helpful to the Habs’ cause was happening, she had me sit beside her and, in a low, confidential voice, asked me questions from time to time. When, near the end of the period, Montreal scored to make it 3–2 and the room erupted, she waited for the noise to die down, then said the score of the game as if she was keeping track for those who didn’t know hockey as well as she did. ‘Three-two Toronto,’ Aunt Phil said.
It was a strange sight indeed, a roomful of people who otherwise never watched a hockey game, including Sister Louise and Father Seymour in their habits, acting as if their lives depended on the outcome. ‘C’mon Montreal,’ Sister Louise said, leaning forward in her chair, rocking back and forth. Father Seymour, standing up with arms tightly folded, would advance towards the television each time the Habs went up the ice, backing away when they failed to score.
The trouble was, Father Seymour knew almost as little about hockey as Aunt Phil and Sister Louise. ‘Yes,’ he said, when the puck bounced off Henri Richard’s backside and somehow found its way into the net; ‘yes,’ nodding his head, as if he had seen the goal shaping up, as if it was a classic example of the skill for which the Montreal Canadiens were famous. ‘It was a fluke,’ I said scornfully, looking at Uncle Reginald who winked at me and shook his head slightly. It seemed to me that, as well as being a warning, the wink was also meant to tell me that he, too, was thinking of my father.
I remembered the way my father had acted the last few times we had gathered for a game. For someone who knew so much about hockey, he had been very subdued while watching it. He had sat there, in the corner armchair, staring at the television set, speaking only when someone spoke to him, smiling when the Habs scored, or rather when, by the cheer that went up, it was evident that the Habs had scored, for he hadn’t seemed to notice until then.
Halfway through the second period, with the Habs down 4–3 but coming back, Aunt Phil started in with her very annoying habit of calling the Leafs ‘the Leaves’.
‘It’s not the Leaves,’ I said. ‘It’s the Leafs.’
‘The plural of leaf is leaves, is it not?’ Aunt Phil said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but no-one calls them that. They’re called the Leafs.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why, they just are.’
‘Well that’s not good enough for me. I’ll call them the Leaves until someone shows me why I shouldn’t call them that.’
‘Didn’t I just show you?’ I said. I could just see her correcting this ‘mistake’ in the next edition of The Daily Chronicle, the Leafs turning up as the Leaves all over the sports page.
Then Father Seymour joined in, joking about Protestants giving their team a name that contained a mistake in spelling, thereby leaving millions of people with no choice but to make the same mistake, over and over. ‘Well, I won’t make it,’ Aunt Phil said.
‘They score,’ screamed Danny Gallivan, and he didn’t mean the Habs. I felt like telling Aunt Phil that it was her fault. I knew that because I had taken her up on it, she would say ‘Leaves’ as often as possible throughout the evening and I knew that this would so irritate me that the Canadiens were bound to lose. I had a theory that any team’s fortune depended on the mood of their fans, the spirit in which they viewed the game. I further believed that, on any particular night, this mood, this spirit, was the same among all their fans throughout the country. At this very moment, all across the country, I believed, Habs fans were becoming irritated, and this did not bode well for their team. It was still possible to turn the mood around, however. All we had to do was concentrate, focus on the game, try to ignore everything else.
At the start of the third period, I set about doing exactly that. I lay down on the floor in front of the television set and had soon regained my concentration to the point where the Habs scored to make it 5–4 when Father Seymour sat down on the floor beside me. I knew what was coming. It was his make-contact-with-the-boy routine. I could imagine how Aunt Phil and Sister Louise were smiling at each other, no doubt charmed by the sight of Father Seymour doing what they thought he did best. ‘Hello Draper Doyle,’ he said, sitting cross-legged beside me. He picked up my Pepsi and took a sip from it, and as if by this, some sort of bond had been established between us, laid his arm lightly on my shoulder.
‘Do you know what the CH on Montreal’s uniform stands for, Draper Doyle?’ Father Seymour said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Canadiens/Habitants.’ Father Seymour said nothing, only looked around the room as if to see if anyone had heard us. Then he informed me that CH were the letters with which the words ‘church’ began and ended. I nodded and went back to watching the game. I tried to think of a way to hurry his routine to its inevitable conclusion before the Leafs scored again.
‘But you know,’ he said, ‘the word means nothing unless “u r” in it.’ I must have looked mystified, for he laughed. ‘Do you get it, Draper Doyle?’ he said, looking around the room. ‘U r in church. The word “church” means nothing unless u r in it.’
I rolled my eyes and, once again, rather nervously this time, Father Seymour looked around the room. I considered pointing out that UR stood for Uncle Reginald who hadn’t been inside a church in twenty years, but thought better of it. Then he got up and went back to standing between Aunt Phil and Uncle Reginald, his arms folded, eyes intently focused on the television set.
Once again, I set about concentrating on the game. By now, however, my mood was all wrong. There was no way the Canadiens would win with me feeling so anxious and irritated. ‘They score,’ screamed Danny Gallivan, and once again he didn’t mean the Habs. The Leafs had put one into the empty net to make it 6–4, which was how it ended. When the siren sounded to end the game, I saw that Father Seymour was looking at me as if he was about to say something. The Leafs had won, Uncle Reginald said, despite Richard’s fluky goal and despite the infallibility of our team’s coach. It was obvious that Mary and my mother were delighted to have witnessed one of Montreal’s rare defeats, though they didn’t dare show it openly, what with everyone else looking the way they normally did at wakes. Mary gave me one of her ‘inside I’m celebrating’ looks and my mother kept her head down to hide a smile that was pulling at the corners of her mouth.
‘Toronto 6 – Montreal 4,’ Mary said.
‘That’s nothing,’ said Father Seymour. ‘It’s only one game.’
‘But it was the first game,’ I shouted at him, on the verge of tears. ‘The first game!’ by which I meant not only the first of the season, but the first since my father had died, a fact which, though it had gone unmentioned, had obviously been on everyone’s mind.
‘Don’t you speak to me like that, young man,’ said Father Seymour, advancing towards me, then looking at my mother in a kind of ‘I really think that was uncalled for’ sort of way.
‘Draper Doyle didn’t mean anything by that, Father,’ my mother said, her voice strained with embarrassment. ‘He’s just tired, that’s all. Apologize to Father Seymour, Draper Doyle.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling my face flush as Father Seymour, rising on his toes, looked down at me. My apology seemed to settle things. ‘The Habs will win the next one, Draper Doyle,’ he said. I nodded and gave him the smile I knew everyone was waiting for.
The prevailing opinion was that the game was a minor setback, the kind of defeat that would make victory that much sweeter when it came. Of course, there was still one thing left to do. We had to wait for the knellephone to ring, for Millie Barter to break the cold-war silence for as long as it took the phone to ring three times. It had been ten minutes since the game ended, and the phone on top of the television set had yet to ring.
‘She’s making us wait,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘She always does.’
We sat there for another ten minutes, in silence now that the TV had been turned off. We sat there, looking at that mournfully black phone until it rang at last, the first ring causing all of us to jump, then the second ring, then finally the third which trailed off into a kind of shrill silence.
‘Ask not for whom the phone rings,’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘It rings for us.’
Because I had always gone to bed right after the game and the next morning had gone to mass before breakfast, the hockey game and the mass, separated only by an interval of dreamless, timeless sleep, had seemed to run together. The Sunday after the Habs lost their home opener was no different. Weary from having stayed up late, I only half heard what the priest was saying, and the fact that the priest was Father Seymour, whose voice I had also heard throughout the game the night before, further added to my confusion. As I stood there in the pew, still half asleep, the dreams I had been too tired to have the night before began, snatches of Father Seymour’s mass mixing with the play-by-play of both Danny Gallivan and Foster Hewitt, so that a kind of hockey liturgy went running through my mind, a strange game in which there were swirling litanies of saints and hockey players, and the Habs and the Leafs were being asked to pray for one another, a game in which St Peter was ‘ad libbing his way to centre ice’ and Toe Blake was saying, ‘Upon this Rocket, I will build my Church.’
I saw the referee and two opposing centremen line up for the face-off. But instead of dropping the puck, the referee broke it in half, held the pieces above his head for a moment, then gave one piece to each player. ‘Do this in memory of me,’ he said. Then, at the sound of the angelus bells, I thought our phone was ringing, ringing three times for someone or something that was lost. I turned and, looking out through the halo of one of the saints in the stained-glass window beside the pew, I saw my father, walking slowly up Fleming Street, his hands in his pockets, as if he was headed to work, headed to The Daily Chronicle perhaps, despite the fact that it was Sunday morning.
Through the yellow-tinted glass of the halo of St Anthony I saw him stop suddenly and turn towards the church, then raise one arm as if to wave to me. Then I saw that there was a puck in his hand. He held it to one side of his head, between thumb and forefinger. He might have been a hockey player, posing with the puck he had used to reach some milestone in his career. But he kept glancing back and forth from me to the puck, a look of quizzical distress on his face.
I decided to wave to him, to tell him to come inside with the rest of us. I removed my hand from the pew in front of me, the hand which, as it turned out, was all that was keeping me up, for I had been asleep on my feet and now woke to find that I had fallen forward against the pews, and then to the floor. I sprawled out on the kneeler, my legs on either side of it, wrapping my arms around it and resting my head against the soft cushion. I would quite certainly have gone to sleep had my mother not reached down and, without so much as taking her eyes off her prayer book, grabbed hold of my blazer collar and pulled me to my feet.
Mary, in a vain attempt to hide this spectacle from the people in the pew behind us, not to mention Aunt Phil who was standing beside her, began taking off her coat, shielding me with it. ‘Draper Doyle,’ she whispered, a threat through clenched teeth; then had me stand between her and the pew, pressing me against it, so that while I might still fall asleep, it was quite impossible for me to fall down.
I looked again through the halo to find that, now, Fleming Street was empty. It might have been some old photograph that I was looking at, some yellowed picture of Fleming Street that had appeared in The Daily Chronicle a hundred years ago. With the soft and surprisingly pleasant warmth of Mary’s body pressed against me, I once again began to dream.