11 11Of all the sessions of oralysis I had with Uncle Reginald, the ones I liked best, the ones that came closest to being worth the fifty cents I had to pay for them, were the ones he collectively called ‘The Mid-season Review’. For several weeks in a row we talked about hockey, about how the Habs were doing, what their chances looked like for a third straight Stanley Cup. The biggest obstacle, Uncle Reginald said, would likely be, not our nemesis, the Leafs, than whom there had never been an NHL team more aged, more decrepit, or less talented, but the Chicago Black Hawks, led by the Golden Jet, the awesome Bobby Hull, in whose massive shadow the entire league was playing. The Black Hawks were in first place, an incredible fifteen points ahead of Montreal, who were barely keeping pace with the Leafs and the lowly Rangers. Montreal, Uncle Reginald said, would have to find a way to stop Hull, who once again, was well on his way to scoring fifty goals.
The favourite phrase of the colour commentators that year was, ‘You can’t stop what you can’t see.’ They used it whenever Bobby Hull wound up for a slapshot. That’s all people talked about, the speed of Bobby Hull’s shot. How fast was it? people wondered. During oralysis, Uncle Reginald solemnly informed me that Bobby Hull’s slapshot was faster than the speed of light. Hull’s shot, said Uncle Reginald, was so fast that it went backwards in time, so that Hull was literally rewriting the record books, scoring goals, not only in the present but in the past, changing the outcome of games played thirty, forty, fifty years ago. This is how Uncle Reginald imagined Montreal’s colour commentators, Dick Irvin Jr and Danny Gallivan, talking about Hull’s shot:
‘We’ve just gotten word, Danny,’ Dick said, ‘that Hull’s last slapshot, the one that disappeared at the blueline in the second period, turned up in the Stanley Cup Final of 1965, April 17 to be exact, a game which the Habs won 3–2, but which has now been tied up 3–3 by Hull’s blistering slapshot and is going into overtime. Habs fans will recall that the Habs won that series in seven games, which means that, if the Hawks should win in overtime, the Cup for 1965 will go to them.’
‘I bet I can guess where Hull’s slapshot is going,’ said Danny Gallivan.
‘You betcha,’ said Dick. ‘Right back to 1965. I hope the Gumper is ready.’
‘I pity Gump Worsley,’ said Danny. ‘Those slapshots from the future must be almost impossible to stop.’
‘Definitely,’ said Dick. ‘I mean, how do you cut down the angles on a shot that won’t even be taken for another two years?’
‘If anyone can do it, the Gumper can,’ said Danny.
I loved the notion of Gump Worsley, who was so indignant when his defencemen allowed so much as one shot from the present, having to stop shots from the future, the Gumper standing in his net, watching the play at the other end of the ice, when suddenly from out of nowhere a puck appears at the blueline, a small black blur from the future, Bobby Hull’s time-travelling, 1967 slapshot, which, unless it is stopped by the Gumper, will win the Cup for 1965. I tried to imagine the expression on the Gumper’s face as pucks from both the present and the future came flying at him. After being scored on, he would likely take the puck and, with his goalie stick, bat it baseball-fashion into the stands. Then he would turn and, with his monkey face beet red and his big ears sticking out, demand an explanation from his defenceman. Bobby Hull’s time-travelling slapshot. What chance would the Habs have against it?
Through the coldest month of winter, with the fire-escape steps treacherous with snow and ice, Uncle Reginald still forbade me to use the lift. Not that I minded. Each afternoon, as I made my way up four flights of steps, sometimes in the darkness, I wished there was nothing else to think about but hockey, no reason to go to Uncle Reginald but to hear him talk about the Habs. After each session of oralysis, however, the same old problems were always waiting for me. There was, for instance, the ever-deepening problem of Father Seymour and my supposed membership in the Number.
It wasn’t until February that Father Seymour had me spar with one of his Number. Or should I say that it wasn’t until February that he had one of his Number hit me in the face, for there was no sparring. Father Seymour paired me with Young Leonard, an unlikely opponent for a beginner it seemed to me, though I didn’t say so. Young Leonard’s first punch hit me squarely on the nose. Eyes watering so badly that I couldn’t see, I backed away from him, trying – it must have looked quite ridiculous – to wipe my eyes with my boxing gloves. No-one took much notice of me until Father Seymour came running from the other side of the gym. He put his arm around me, then put his face up close to mine, moving about this way and that as if I was trying to hide behind the gloves.
‘Draper Doyle,’ he said, as if he was embarrassed for me, ‘Draper Doyle, you’re not crying, are you?’
‘No,’ I said, genuinely surprised at the very suggestion. I dropped my gloves and, through eyes still badly watering, looked at him. As if to say that I was the very picture of crying, he smiled and, still with his arm around me, told me that I could go home if I wanted to. By this time, the whole gym had gone silent and all the boys were watching.
‘I’m not crying,’ I shouted at him, now so self-conscious that my eyes began to water even more freely than before.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘all right, you’re not crying,’ then magnanimously turned his back, as if I obviously was crying and his only concern was to spare me further humiliation.
The truth was that I felt like going home, but I knew that if I left now, I would have to ask him to unlace my boxing gloves, there being no-one else in the gym whose hands were free. The thought of standing there, in the middle of the gym, eyes streaming tears, holding out my arms while he unlaced my gloves and all the other boys watched, was less appealing than going back to sparring with Young Leonard, which I decided to do, only to find that Young Leonard, no doubt at some signal from Father Seymour, had paired off with one of the other boys. I was relieved to see that some of the younger boys were doing laps around the gym. When they came round to where I was standing, I fell in with them and somehow managed to keep running until practice was over.
Father Seymour never again paired me with Young Leonard. In fact, it was only on rare occasions that he had me spar with anyone, and only then with boys who were much smaller than I was, boys so small that to hit them or be hit by them would have been humiliating, so I avoided both, keeping them at arm’s length or throwing my arms around them in a kind of hug. Father Seymour focused his attention on the older boys, never actually coaching me or any of my pint-sized opponents on how to box. I presumed that, as with the choir and tap-dancing practice, he had given up on me, deeming me to be a waste of time that would be better spent coaching boys who had at least a chance of winning at the tournament in March.
The strappings continued, though I had yet to be his victim. Often when he finished strapping one of the boys, he would smile at me, though what he was trying to tell me by doing so I had no idea. Was it that I was exempt from strapping because I was his nephew, or was the notion that I was exempt supposed to be a kind of private joke between us? It was clear that he believed that we had an understanding of some kind, but I could not decide what it was.
How relieved I was each day when he blew his whistle to end the practice. While Father Seymour and the other boys went back to the orphanage, I walked home alone. I was glad to leave that place at five o’clock, not to have to go to the orphanage like the other boys, not to have to eat, night after night, in the great hall, with the pictures of all those orphans who had gone on to become Christian Brothers looking down at me.
Outside, it was always very cold. In the light from the streetlamps along Fleming Street, I could see my breath, trailing out behind me in great plumes of frost. None of the people watching from the houses along the street knew that Young Leonard had hit me in the face, or that my eyes had watered so much that Father Seymour had been able to pretend that I was crying, or that he now had me fighting boys from a faction of the Number known as ‘the pygmies’. To them, I was just someone heading home on a cold night, someone who, hunched as I was into my duffle coat with my hands in my pockets, made them glad to be indoors where it was warm.
For some reason, this thought always made me feel warmer. I would take the long way home, starting from the other end of Fleming Street, going past The Daily Chronicle, as well as the outdoor rink, so I could see how the ice was doing and, somewhat morbidly perhaps, relive my defeat at Mary’s hands.
Each time I passed the Chronicle, I thought of the photograph on Aunt Phil’s mantelpiece. On the mantelpiece in Aunt Phil’s living room, framed, hinged together, looking like an open book, there stood two photographs of my father. In the left photograph, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Chronicle wearing his newspaper bag, the strap of which ran like a sash across his chest. In the right photograph, taken fifteen years later during his first day as editor of the Chronicle, he was standing in exactly the same place, this time wearing his editor’s cap which my mother had bought for him and which, except to pose for that photograph, he had never worn.
The two photographs seemed to tell a story, to bracket the formative years of the kind of self-made man that each of my grandfathers had been. In the missing middle, there might have been the classic climb to success – from paper boy to mail boy to printer’s helper to proof-reader to reporter to desk editor to editor, all in fifteen years. In both photographs, my father was smiling, the boy and the man smiling at each other, it seemed, except that in the second photograph, he was smiling as if he knew the joke, as if he could already see himself on the mantelpiece, paired with his younger self, the paper boy.
There had been twenty priests at my father’s funeral, Uncle Reginald told me. I doubted that the death of a fellow priest would have drawn so many. The sight of so many priests around the casket had caused more than one person to recall how, at one time, my father had planned to be a priest himself. After his graduation from high school, he had surprised everyone with his announcement. He had shown no inclination whatsoever in that direction while growing up. It had been presumed that ‘bookish’ as he was, he would take over the Chronicle one day, become what Sister Louise called ‘the family’s man of letters’. My father had wanted to enter the priesthood, but his father, irony of all ironies, had prevented him from doing so.
At this point, Father Francis and Father Seymour were already in the seminary, and Uncle Reginald, ten years married, had no children. It had looked like what Uncle Reginald called ‘the Ryan Line’ would end unless my father accepted marriage as his vocation. Reg Ryan Sr used his considerable influence among the city’s priesthood to make sure that none of them even considered my father for the seminary. There was apparently some bitterness between father and son for a time, but this had passed when Reg Ryan Sr agreed to the compromise of sending my father to Oxford to pursue a layman’s course in Latin and scholastic philosophy. The implication of the story seemed to be that these scholarly interests were the real reason my father had wanted to join the priesthood, and that marriage was therefore no great sacrifice for him to make.
It would be going too far, but only just too far, to say that my parents’ marriage had been arranged. It was more, Uncle Reginald once told me, like they were ‘recommended’ to each other. I was hardly more likely to think of them as a couple than I was to think of Uncle Reginald and Aunt Delia as one. Aunt Delia, whom I could not remember, had died six years ago. I could not imagine Uncle Reginald ever having been married, his strange life joined to someone else’s. But neither could I imagine my father’s life ever having been joined to someone else’s.
I remembered that there had been a curious awkwardness between my parents, especially on my father’s part, right up to the time he died. Eight years into marriage, and his family was still coaching him on how to act towards his wife and still explaining him to her, making jokes about habits of his that she would have to get used to as if they still knew him far better than she did. They might have been just married or might have just announced their engagement for the way that the family carried on. At Christmas or on birthdays a public kiss had always been required. ‘Give her a kiss, Donald,’ Sister Louise would say teasingly, as if, like schoolyard sweethearts, they were too embarrassed to admit their affection for one another. Everyone would watch and applaud as my father kissed my mother, my mother trying to disguise the fact that she had to incline her head for him to reach her, my father standing awkwardly on tiptoe, his hands on her shoulders.
It was more than the standard busybody inlaws treatment, for it was carried to such extremes that even my father complained from time to time, though only to my mother, who would tell him to speak to them about it, at which point he would drop the matter. There seemed to be a feeling that the inlaws could not, in fact must not, leave Donald to his marriage, that there was no telling what would happen if they were not there to keep him from making mistakes, or when he made them, to explain them to his wife. One or another of them was always on the phone to her, coming to see her while he was at the newsroom, making allowances for him, encouraging her to share their view of him as a hopeless eccentric whom no one person could possibly take care of, much less understand.
He was a kind of hobby that all members of the family shared. Her marriage had won her a free, lifetime membership in the Donald club, the mystified-by-Donald club, the what-on-earth-will-Donald-do-next club, the save-Donald-from-himself club, whose members were cheerfully dedicated, not only to taking care of Donald, but to trading stories about him, ‘Donald stories’, as Sister Louise called them. Of course, my mother had more Donald stories than anyone else, at least more new ones, so it was usually she that told them and the others who listened. Aunt Phil, Father Seymour, Father Francis, Sister Louise, all listened to the supposedly just-for-fun Donald stories with such grave expressions on their faces that our mother finally realized that she was their way of keeping tabs on him and stopped telling Donald stories altogether.
Every day after boxing practice while I was going past The Daily Chronicle, I thought of my father taking this same route home at four in the morning, walking by himself down Fleming Street. Sometimes at four or five o’clock in the morning, after a sixteen-hour shift at the Chronicle, instead of going home he would go down to the rink and, to the disbelief of the people who lived nearby and who, even with their windows closed, could hear him, he would go skating for half an hour. More than one of the neighbours, perhaps after failing to get satisfaction from him about the matter, had complained to our mother. Why, they wanted to know, was a grown man out skating by himself at four in the morning while others tried to sleep?
One day, as I was walking home, I heard it, the unmistakable sound of someone skating. Long before I reached the rink, I knew it was my father. I began to run and by the time I got there he was skating hard, head down. He was wearing his duffle coat, the hood of which was up, and his flannel slacks, which the wind was blowing against him, outlining his thin, somehow pathetic legs.
I watched from Fleming Street as, by himself, oblivious to all else, he skated around the darkened rink, bent over from the waist as if there was nothing in all the world but that stretch of ice in front of him. He seemed to be constantly picking up speed, not even slowing down to take the turns, but using them to gain momentum. His fur-lined hood gave him a kind of phantom look as he went around the rink so fast it seemed his skates were barely making contact with the ice. It was as if he was making progress towards some goal, working up to some speed, perhaps, that in his lifetime he had been unable to achieve.
I went closer to the boards, waiting for him to come down the wing again, squinting into the darkness to make him out, to make sure that it was him. At the far end of the rink, he made his turn, then shot out of it towards me, coming straight at me, emerging from the darkness with both arms swinging, his duffle coat squeaking in time to the sound his skates were making. For the barest fraction of a second, as he was going past me, he looked up, his eyes staring in what might have been wide-eyed amazement, as if it was me who had come back from the dead to watch him skate.
‘Dad!’ I screamed, as he turned to avoid crashing into the boards. Without so much as slowing down, he went back up the other wing, and disappeared in a flurry of arms and legs into the darkness, this time for good, for there was sudden silence. I jumped over the boards and, getting down on my hands and knees, began searching the ice for the marks my father’s skates had made. The rink must have been flooded just after dark, for there were no marks on the ice except his. I imagined throwing a huge sheet of paper over the ice, then shading it to find the patterns he had left behind. I could take it home to Uncle Reginald, roll it out for him in the backyard like some giant shroud, an image in negative of my father’s presence in the world. But it was an image visible to me alone, for I knew that, even if I were to bring people to the rink and show them the skate marks, I could not prove that it was my father who had made them.
I lay down on the ice on my back, spreading out my arms and legs. Looking up at that clear cold February sky, I remembered something my father had once told me, a variation on that old idea that what we call stars are really holes in the sky with the light of heaven shining through them. A star, my father said, was a hole made when a puck had been punched out of the night sky. All pucks came from the sky, he said. And the end of the world would come when there was no sky left.
I wasn’t sure I liked the idea that if not for hockey, the world would last forever, that with each puck that went flying into the stands or was otherwise lost, the world took one more step towards oblivion. On the other hand, for a few weeks at least, it had made playing goal more interesting. The thought that the puck might have been a little fragment of time itself gave added meaning to the notion of making a save. I would pretend that I was trying to stop the puck, not from going into the net, but from flying off into oblivion. I concocted elaborate fantasies in which the continued existence of planet earth depended on my skill as a goaltender. There I was, standing bravely with my back to oblivion, trying to keep time itself from getting past me, defending the world against those agents of time, those ever-advancing forwards. I had even had a nightmare in which a great deluge of pucks was falling from the sky – the ‘Apuckalypse’, my father called it when I told him about it.
I looked up now at all the stars, the puck holes through which the light of eternity was shining down. Then the way that I was lying on the ice, with my arms and legs spread out, reminding me of something else my father had said, not long before he died. He asked me if I had ever heard of the expression ‘fire on ice’. I told him I hadn’t. ‘Some people call hockey fire on ice,’ he said. We talked for a while about the aptness of this description. Then he put his hands on my shoulders. ‘But do you know what else it means?’ he said. I shook my head. He reminded me of the picture in the Cartoon Dante. It showed, at the bottom-most pit of Dante’s hell, at the very core of the Inferno where the fires of retribution should have been most intense, a solid block of ice. And within that block of ice, frozen for all eternity, caught forever in the act of committing mortal sin, lay Satan – a figure of perfect isolation, utter loneliness, his arms and legs spreadeagled, his eyes staring up through the ever-widening circles of hell to heaven, where the saved were looking down at him with scorn.
I had told Uncle Reginald about my father’s strange story. ‘The Fire On Ice Sermon’, he called it, assuring me that Satan’s name did not appear even once in the NHL’S official book of rules and regulations.
Why my father had told me the story, I had no idea. Lying there on the rink, spreadeagled on the ice like some tiny Satan, I began to shiver. Closing my eyes, I folded my arms for warmth. I heard the wind rushing through the trees along the street. Night, puck-black night, in all its immutable aspects, was coming down.