9 9Because of all the holiday confusion, the next Confession Wednesday was not until three weeks after the concert. In the days before, I tried to think of a way of getting out of it. I could feign sickness, but I would have to seem very sick to convince Aunt Phil to let me miss confession, especially since it was three weeks since we had gone. Mary, who had been genuinely ill, had once asked to be allowed to miss confession and Aunt Phil had assured her that however sick her body might be, her soul was much worse. It seemed there was no end to metaphors when it came to sin. The soul was black. The soul was sick. The soul had too much hair. My normally bald soul would have grown a brushcut’s worth of sin in three weeks, so what chance did I have of missing confession? And even if I did miss it, that would only delay the inevitable.
‘Bless me, Father, I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession.’ I repeated those words over and over in my mind, and when Wednesday came, I went to meet my fate, which turned out to be every bit as bad as I thought it would. After reciting some vague infractions of the junior ten commandments, I fell silent.
‘Anything else?’ said Father Seymour. I said nothing.
‘Anything else?’ he said, somewhat more forcefully than usual, and in the kind of familiar tone he had warned me against using. For a long time, there was silence. The penitent on the other side of Father Seymour, as if to signal his impatience, began to cough. I could faintly hear the shuffle of footsteps from outside, the world, despite my dilemma, going on as usual. I could dimly see Father Seymour, his hand resting on his chin in that reflective pose he always used. I suddenly felt dizzy and fell forward, banging my head against the screen.
‘Anything else?’ said Father Seymour, who seemed startled. I closed my eyes, remembering my mother’s remark that I had ‘spoiled’ the concert.
‘I spoiled the Christmas concert,’ I said.
Without asking for an explanation, he gave me penance.
The visitations continued, as did the Momary nightmares. My father appeared about once a week in the yard next door, dressed for winter as if even ghosts could feel the cold. Once I saw him in the middle of the afternoon, a rare daytime appearance. He stood there in the backyard, holding a puck up to the sunlight like some jeweller appraising a stone, staring at it with one eye closed as if he was trying to see through it, trying to see what it was made of. Later, when I was sleeping, Momary, that strange spectacle of nakedness, pursued me through dreams in which I too was naked. Her object was to get a look at my Methuselah, which I could keep hidden from her only by running as fast as I could, thereby showing her my backside, at the sight of which, in a voice all too like my mother’s, she shouted, ‘Look Mary, look, it’s Draper Doyle’s bum.’ She was trying to fool me into thinking that to let her see my bum was more humiliating than to let her see my Methuselah, but I wasn’t falling for it. I knew it was my Methuselah she was after, and no matter how gleefully she pointed at my bum, I didn’t turn around.
I took to sleeping on my back so that when the pee started, when my alarm cock went off, I wouldn’t stain the sheet. I was spending all my weekly allowance, as well as drawing from my once-substantial savings, to keep myself in underwear. I wondered if I should ask Uncle Reginald to forgo my oralysis fee, at least for a few weeks, then thought better of it, for he was certain to worm an explanation out of me.
I had visions of becoming like one of those boys we saw in the public health films at school. ‘Drug addicts will do anything for money,’ the narrator said, ‘anything to feed their daily habit.’ Mine was a weekly habit, one pair of drawers per week on average. My habit. My weekly fix. ‘The addict begins each day with the knowledge that he must somehow get enough money by nightfall to buy a pair of underwear.’
I knew that if I got to the point of spoiling one pair of drawers per day, I was finished. It had gotten so that I could not look at my mother or Mary without thinking of Momary, and therefore of all the underwear I had to buy, as much for their sake as for mine. When I saw Mary, all I could think of was that tuft of hair between her legs, that little goatee which in the dream was always there when I looked over my shoulder – above it was her belly button, her belly like some cyclops with one eye in the middle, coming after me.
I managed to get some revenge on Mary when it came to my attention that she and a boy named Harold Noonan were having what Uncle Reginald called a ‘fling’. A fling was putting it far too strongly since they had yet to speak to one another. All that had really happened was that Harold had taken to following Mary home from school, staring at her from a distance as if he was trying desperately to remember who she was. As for Mary, what strange satisfaction she derived from having a boy to whom she had yet to speak follow her home from school every day, I had no idea. She was always looking back at him, apparently encouraging whatever weird delusion he had formed about her.
Harold Noonan wore shirts with ruffled sleeves, as well as the most bizarrely coloured pants, sometimes red, with purple bell bottoms, sometimes striped. And his hair – combed completely to one side, it was almost as long as Mary’s, so long in fact that, to see, he had to walk about with his head turned sideways, sometimes holding his hair in place with one hand while his other hand was in his pocket. He seemed to think that this was a perfectly reasonable way to walk about, a relaxed, self-possessed pose. Sometimes, it looked not as if he was turning his head to keep the hair out of his eyes, but as if that great bunch of hair was pulling his head sideways, so weighing him down that his whole body was thrown off balance, making him lopsided, causing him to walk with one arm much lower than the other, and even with a kind of limp.
There he went, Harold Noonan, looking like someone with a permanent cold in the neck. Aunt Phil, who also noticed Harold Noonan’s strange behaviour, called him ‘that long-haired Lothario from up the street’. He was a sight to say the least, that Harold Noonan. I wondered what he would think of Momary. I wondered if, having once seen her, he would still follow Mary home from school.
One day, as Harold Noonan was stalking Mary, I walked along, halfway between them, on the opposite side of the street.
‘Go home, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said.
‘Mary, Mary, bum so hairy, how do you make it grow?’ I shouted. Mary screamed and began to run – not after me, I was glad to see, but away from me, as fast as possible, her hands over her ears. All Harold Noonan did was feign disinterest.
This episode touched off a renewal of the sex versus age controversy in which Mary and I had been engaging for as long as I could remember. It all hinged on the fact that, while she was three years older than me, I was a boy. She never doubted that those three years would always seem as crucial as they did when we were children, that forty would be as much of an improvement on thirty-seven as nine was on six. Nor did I doubt it, though for a while I did think my age was catching up with hers. It was my father who pointed out that while the difference in our ages would always be three years, the proportionate difference was forever getting smaller. I was faced with the mystery of how, when I was one, she was four times older than me, but when I was two, only two and a half times older. Surely, if my age was an ever-increasing fraction of hers, I told him, it would catch hers some day. My father assured me that this was not even theoretically possible.
My only comfort was that while she would always be older, I would always be a boy. Faced with the fact that most grownups of either sex agreed that boys were, as the saying went, ‘better’ than girls, Mary conceded inferiority in sex while trying to convince me that age was more important. She pointed out that she had gone to school before I did, made her first confession and communion before I did, was allowed to stay up later, and so on. I answered that these were things that I would do one day. The mere fact that she had done them first meant nothing. There were, however, things that boys could do that girls could not do at all. I believed that anything that boys could do that girls could not was a blessing, and that anything that girls could do that boys could not was, at the very least, not worth doing and in all probability a curse.
It was, for instance, a blessing to be able to direct your stream of pee in such a way as to explode cigarette butts left floating in the toilet. The thought of the contortions into which Mary would have to twist herself to even come close to accomplishing this feat always sent me into fits of laughter. Then there were things that girls could not do as well as boys. Hockey, for instance. Girls, I informed Mary when I was five, could not play hockey.
Faced with my complete refusal to acknowledge the advantages of being older, Mary had tried to prove her superiority on my terms; that is, on the ice. Though otherwise she was one of those girls who are defiantly incompetent at sports, she was something of a tomboy when it came to hockey. The fact that her sole reason for practising the sport was to beat her brother at it made her unique among the players on Fleming Street, all of whom were boys.
For years, we had played goal against each other, and Mary, to howls of derision from my friends, had often beaten me, though she did so with less and less frequency as time went on. In fact, she had been saying over the summer and fall that she did not want to play against me any more, denying that this decision had anything to do with her recent lack of success.
‘I’m too old for playing hockey,’ she said.
‘Too old?’ I said. ‘You’re only twelve. Half the Leafs are over forty.’
‘I think Mary means she’s too old for a girl,’ my mother said. Mary rolled her eyes.
‘Too old?’ I said. ‘Mary’s too old?’ I howled scornfully, knowing that after the Harold Noonan episode she was ripe for a challenge. ‘C’mon, Mary,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down to the rink. Me against you.’
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘Mary, Mary, bum so hairy,’ I said, looking at her as if to say that I would complete the sentence if she did not accept. She jumped out of her chair and stood over me, her hands on her hips.
‘All right, Draper Doyle,’ she said, thumping her forefinger against my chest. ‘All right. I’ll play you one last time. ONE LAST TIME. And I’m going to beat you, too.’
This was one game that I was determined not to lose. I had the notion that somehow, despite my father’s ghost, beating Mary would lay Momary to rest, not to mention keep my alarm cock from going off again. Just the thought of not having to buy any more underwear was inspiration enough. I had lost my spot on the hockey team, I had been shamed into taking my goalie picture down from the wall, all to Mary’s glee. It simply would not do for her to win.
We played the following Saturday on the rink at the end of Fleming Street. I enjoyed the usual advantages. While I had every conceivable piece of equipment, including goalie pads and goalie skates and a Habs sweater with Gump Worsley’s number on the back, Mary played goal wearing white figure skates, three overcoats, and copies of Life magazine for shin pads. ‘Mary the Goalie’, I called her. On her head, she wore a stocking cap from which her hair hung down, fanning out across her shoulders.
‘Got yer pads on, Mary?’ one of the boys said, to a chorus of snickers from the others.
‘You can see that she doesn’t have any pads on,’ I said, at which the older boys all but fell down laughing. Mary looked at me.
‘Shutup, Draper Doyle,’ she said. ‘Just please shut up.’
We stood at opposite ends of the rink, facing one another. There was Mary, goaded once again into playing goal against me, hoping to beat me the way that she hoped some team, any team, would beat the Habs, and wipe that smirk of invincibility off my face. My defeat was Mary’s holy grail, in quest of which she had set out every season for the past five years.
I went to my equipment bag and, throwing aside my trapper, took out the bullhorn which Uncle Reginald had given me for Christmas some years ago.
‘No way,’ Mary shouted. ‘No way, you’re not allowed to use the bullhorn.’ I held the bullhorn to my mouth and, in a kind of grimly official, we-have-the-house-surrounded tone of voice, said, ‘Yes I am.’
‘No you’re not,’ Mary said, but my squeakily magnified voice drowned out whatever else she had to say.
‘We’ll take a vote,’ I said, speaking through the bullhorn. ‘Who votes for the horn?’ They all raised their sticks except Mary, even the boys on her team. It was universally acknowledged that although to have the bullhorn was an advantage, it made the game more interesting for everyone.
From long practice I had mastered the art of doing a play-by-play commentary even as I was playing goal. ‘The voice and the goalie of Fleming Street’, I called myself. The strange thing was that while I described the play the way that Danny Gallivan would have described it, the bullhorn made me sound like Foster Hewitt. (Foster Hewitt’s voice sounded the way anyone’s voice would have sounded when magnified by a bullhorn.) I might have been some strange hybrid of the two announcers, possessing Danny’s style and Foster’s voice.
The game began well for us. In the first five minutes, we scored on Mary twice. The problem was that she was barely able to move in those overcoats; her arms out rigid from her sides, she had to move her whole body when all she really wanted to do was turn her head. Just to keep breathing in those coats, she had to stand fully, exaggeratedly erect, like someone wearing a neck brace. Judging by her height and by the angle at which she was forced to hold her head, I estimated that she lost complete sight of the puck, if not, as some of our team claimed, the moment it crossed centre ice, then certainly when it came to within about ten feet of her. It looked as if she was merely guessing where the puck was, listening for it, her whole body turning one way, then another, her team-mates screaming at her, giving her directions, do this, do that, while Mary tapped about with her goalie stick like someone blind, a look of the most heartrending distress on her face.
Imagine trying to play goal while looking straight up in the air, and you have some idea of how Mary played it. In a goal-mouth scramble, she was helpless. She took pucks in the ankles, sticks on the instep and knees, she slipped on the ice, falling down and struggling in those overcoats to get back up, often falling down again in the process.
As if Mary’s problems in the net were not enough, our having the bullhorn gave us a further advantage. I had a way of doing the play-by-play that demoralized the other team. When they had the puck or threw a check, or when Mary made a save, I gave either an understated description of it or none at all. ‘Mary the goalie makes the save,’ I said, or ignored the save she made entirely. But when we had the puck, I described the play the way that Danny Gallivan would: ‘And Foley comes out with it, ad libs his way to centre ice and Ohhhh! what a move he puts on Skiffington. He loses it, but Ohhhh! what an enormous body check by Foley.’
I used such adjectives as ‘scintillating’ and ‘larcenous’ to describe the saves I made, said that our often-dribbling shots were ‘cannonading’, inflated our stickhandling to ‘a bewildering blur of stick and puck’. It amazed me how much effect this sort of thing had on the game, inspiring our players, demoralizing theirs. Despite the fact that we were not playing better than their team, players on both sides were soon convinced that we were. I could see how clearly the other team wanted to hear themselves described as ‘magnanimous’ or ‘brilliant’, and how demoralizing it was for them to hear us described in such terms, even though they knew we didn’t deserve it. It was never long before the game began to take on the character of my description, the tone of my voice, our team skating furiously, the other team convinced that we were far better than them, that it was simply not possible for them to beat us.
I hadn’t felt so good in a long time. After a long absence, I was back in the net, once again wearing my equipment, and my team was winning. There I was, a goalie stick in one hand, and in the other, not the usual trapper, but a bullhorn which, as it turned out, was almost as good for catching pucks. I doubted that anyone had ever played goal this way before.
‘The Bruins look tired, Dick,’ I said, and, sure enough, the other team were soon leaning on their sticks. By this time, the score was 4–0.
‘Four nothing,’ I said through the bullhorn. ‘Mary the goalie looks shaky.’
‘You’re cheating,’ Mary said, pointing her goalie stick at me. It wasn’t enough, she said, that I had the best team, no, on top of that, I had to show favouritism while doing the play-by-play.
It must have been the sight of me catching the occasional puck in the bullhorn that gave her the idea. Just before the game got underway again, she huddled with her team-mates. Then, when the puck was dropped, she screamed, ‘Aim for the bullhorn.’ The players on the other team who were able to raise the puck abandoned trying to score and began shooting for the bullhorn instead, hoping to either stifle me in mid-voice or bean me with the puck. Soon, I realized that I would either have to stop using the horn or face shot after shot aimed at my head. That puck-shy, choking feeling that had kept me on the bench the year before came back worse than ever. Even though I was wearing a mask and a helmet and was fairly safe from flying pucks, I called time out to throw the bullhorn aside and retrieve my trapper. ‘Hurray,’ said the players on the other team.
‘Well, Dick,’ Mary said, ‘Draper Doyle is having an off day. He’s given up the bullhorn and the other team is coming back.’
‘No way,’ I said, though my voice, no longer magnified by the bullhorn, sounded so absurdly puny that everyone laughed.
The rest is almost too painful to relate. I no longer had the bullhorn, but I couldn’t help thinking that the other team was still aiming for it, aiming for my head. At each shot, I all but turned backwards in the net. In no time at all, the game was tied, and, from that point on, it was, as the boys on the other team put it, ‘all Mary the Goalie’. As unlikely as it seemed, she kept making saves, while my vaunted, puck-dodging reflexes kept missing them. The final, shameful, ignominious score was 9–4.
‘Nine to four,’ Mary said, pointing her stick at me from the other end of the ice. ‘Nine to four.’
I looked at her, wondering if the colour of my face showed through my goalie mask. The tradition was for the winning goalie to make what was called ‘One Last Rush’ on the other goalie. ‘It’s time for One Last Rush,’ Mary said. ‘And this will really be One Last Rush, because I’m not playing any more after this.’ This made it that much worse. I could hardly believe it. I had lost the last game that we would ever play. Mary had beaten me for all time.
With the puck in front of her, she stood in goal at one end of the rink while the rest of the players, even those on her team, went to the other end, jamming the ice in front of me, facing Mary. ‘One Last Rush,’ Mary shouted, and began to make her way up the ice, all but tiptoeing on those absurd white skates, standing weirdly erect, the overcoats tilting her head at such an angle that she was in danger of falling over backwards, looking like some overstuffed, stick-wielding figure skater, not so much stickhandling the puck as pushing it in front of her, nudging it forward a few feet, then catching up to it and nudging it again. When she reached the halfway point, the rest of the players went out to meet her, skating in what was meant to be slow motion, doing in fact a kind of slow-motion parody of Mary, arms and legs flailing, faces all wearing those agonized expressions we saw in hockey photographs, pretending to try to take the puck from her, only to fail, only to go skating past her as if she had deked them out with some brilliant move.
After they had all been deked out, after they had all gone past her, and there was no-one between her and me (I was still standing by myself in the net), they turned around and, catching up with Mary and still moving in a kind of frenzied slow motion, began to grab various parts of her, her shoulders, her breasts, her waist, her arms, some even falling to the ice to wrap their gloves around her skates. None of it was done forcefully enough to pull her down. In fact, they acted as if she was dragging all ten of them along, as if such was her strength that all of them together could not stop her.
They hammed it up, contorting their faces, looking with exaggerated hopelessness at one another, as if she was some superstar whom they could not hope to keep from scoring. I will never forget the sight of those ten boys, almost all of whom were younger and smaller than my sister, their hands just happening to grab her breasts, her backside, her arms, with affected randomness, wrapping about her upper thighs, their faces, as if purely by accident, brushing hers or tangling in her hair. And then there was Mary herself, her expression half mock-heroic, half indignant, as she buckled beneath the weight of the ten peewees who were fastened to her.
Finally, when she had ‘dragged’ them the length of the ice, with ten of them draped all over her, à la Maurice Richard, she started making moves, trying to fake me out of the net. Just as the ten of them began to haul her to the ice in earnest, she deked to the left while I, in accordance with the rules of One Last Rush, made a slow-motion lunge to the right. As the puck went in and as in melodramatic slow motion the boys all fell to the ice, we made ‘the crowd went wild’ noises and Mary landed on her back, her arms upraised, a look that might have been a parody of bliss on her face. Unable to stop, she slid along the ice, knocking my skates out from under me and causing me to fall on top of her, so that my wire goalie mask came to within inches of her face; there we lay, goalie to goalie, two figures so rotund that only about an inch of us was touching, the point of my belly balancing on the point of hers, with a foot-thick wedge of padding between us.
I was so encumbered by my equipment that, when I tried to roll off, I succeeded only in flopping wildly about on top of her, a sight the other boys found so hilarious, they gathered round us in a circle. ‘Give it to her, Draper Doyle,’ they said, at which Mary screamed, ‘Draper Doyle, for God’s sake, get off me.’
With a manoeuvre she might have been practising for years, she bounced me off her with one thrust of her pelvis. Then she got up and, without a word to anyone, left the rink. Holding her goalie stick on her shoulder, she went clomping up Fleming Street, her white skates making sparks on the pavement. I suspected that few goalies had ever marched so impressively to their retirement.