Hoping to encourage Uncle Reginald to devote further sessions to hockey, I took the puck my father had given me when I was seven to oralysis. As it turned out, Uncle Reginald had never seen the puck before. He read aloud from the piece of paper that was taped to one side of it: ‘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.’
Uncle Reginald stood up and, turning the puck over and over in his hands much as my father had done at the Christmas concert, he shook his head and smiled.
‘Well I’ll be,’ he said. ‘So Donny was at that game.’
‘You remember it,’ I said.
‘I do,’ he said, ‘I do, indeed. I listened to it on the radio.’ His voice was trembling.
‘Is something wrong, Uncle Reginald?’ I said.
‘You’ve never heard of your father’s missing year, have you?’ he said, handing the puck back to me. When I shook my head, he sat down.
‘Of course you haven’t,’ he said. ‘Even your mother hasn’t heard of it. It’s something of a family secret.’
He went on to tell me that after his graduation from Oxford, my father had failed to come home as planned. The whole family had gone to meet him at the airport, only to find that he was not on the plane. His father contacted Oxford, but they had no idea of his whereabouts. He then notified the police in London, who soon discovered that instead of taking the plane to St John’s, my father had taken one to Montreal. Reg Ryan Sr’s first thought was that his son had welshed on his side of their agreement and had gone to Montreal to join the priesthood. He contacted all the seminaries in Quebec, asking them if anyone by the name of Donald Ryan had applied for acceptance. When he was told that no-one by that name had, he sent them a photograph of my father who might, he said, have used another name. Even when he was told that no-one answering to the photograph had turned up at any of the seminaries, Reg Ryan Sr was convinced that it was only a matter of time. He waited three months before finally contacting the police in Montreal who, because my father had obviously gone there of his own accord, refused to conduct anything more than a short check of phone directories and rental listings. No-one by the name of Donald Ryan turned up, and that, as far as they were concerned, was the end of it.
At home, opinion was unanimous that disappearing was more like something Uncle Reginald would do. They all kept saying that the last person they would have thought capable of doing such a thing was Donald Ryan. The family used the word ‘missing’ to describe his situation, though ‘hiding’, as Uncle Reginald often pointed out, would have been more like it. They did not let on to anyone that he was ‘missing’. He was in Montreal, they told the many people who had heard that he was coming home from Oxford. He had stopped off in St John’s, but only for a few days, not long enough to see anyone but his own family. He was going to ‘work’ in Montreal for ‘a while’ and then come home.
Still, before long, there were rumours, which Reg Ryan Sr blamed on Uncle Reginald, who in fact was not to blame for them. Donald Ryan had run off, people said. Donald Ryan was hiding from his family. Donald Ryan was involved in some sort of business dealings in Montreal of which his family, if they found out about them, would not approve. At the height of the rumours, Reg Ryan Sr hired a private investigator, but after a month of searching, the man turned up nothing.
It was just over a year after he failed to show up at the airport, when his family had all but given up on him and were telling one another that they would never see him again, that they received a letter from him, a letter which made no mention whatsoever of the missing year, containing nothing but a terse request for airfare from Montreal to St John’s. A few days later he was home, back in his father’s house where, despite all the shouting that was done, not just by his parents but by his brothers and sisters as well, all of them demanding that he explain himself, he refused to say one word about his year in Montreal. Nor did he ever say anything about it. In fact, Uncle Reginald said, in surprisingly little time the family stopped mentioning the matter and my father slipped quite easily into the life which, for one whole year, had been waiting for him.
He had been in Montreal from May 1952 to May 1953. In other words, it was during his missing year that he had gone to the Forum and caught the puck I now held in my hands.
Uncle Reginald took from the shelves which lined his apartment one of his many hockey books, in which he said there was a photograph taken that same night at the Forum. He opened the book out on the floor and, getting down on our hands and knees, we looked at the photograph. At first we were very excited, for the photograph was of the part of the Forum where my father would most likely have been sitting. It was taken just after the goal was scored in overtime. It showed, not the Boston zone, where Elmer Lach was no doubt being mobbed by his team-mates, but the Montreal zone, where Gerry MacNeil, still standing all alone in the net, was in the process of throwing his goalie stick and glove up in the air. My father, to have caught a puck from MacNeil’s stick, must have been sitting somewhere in the area which formed the background to the photograph, either behind or to the right or the left of the Montreal net.
We tried to find him in that sea of upraised arms, going over the photograph inch by inch, Uncle Reginald even using his OED magnifying glass. However, most of the faces, caught in the act of celebrating victory, were either badly blurred or obscured by people waving hats and scarves. None of those few faces in the background which were clearly photographed belonged to him. Somewhere among the hats and overcoats, among the black and white of 1953, my father, if the inscription on the puck was true, was standing with the others, holding the puck which I now held in my hands. Nineteen and some seconds before the photograph was taken, at 1:03 of overtime, the puck had come flying from the ice towards him. I turned the puck over. On the other side, in block numerals cut from paper, it read 1:03. Moment 1:03 had come falling from the sky and he had caught it, saved it. But the rest of that year in Montreal was still missing, perhaps even gone forever.
Later that night, I stood at my bedroom window, watching the house across the way, wondering what my father had done with his missing year, why he had gone from Oxford to Montreal. I knew that he had attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Among those qualifications needed to become a Rhodes Scholar was proficiency in at least one sport. My father’s sport was hockey, which he had played with average ability in high school. Not that he was the classic scholar/ athlete by any means. There was the problem of his size for instance. The rumour the year that he applied was that there were unofficial height and weight requirements, it being the opinion of the selection committee that a Rhodes scholar should stand no less than five foot eight and weigh at least one hundred fifty pounds. My father, who fell considerably short of both these marks, wrote five-eight, one-hundred-fifty on his application form, and, according to Uncle Reginald, went to his interview in mortal fear of being weighed and measured. It turned out, however, that, while my father was not the sort of manly scholar they were said to be looking for, he won the scholarship anyway. Uncle Reginald always suspected that unknown to my father, Reg Ryan Sr had pulled some strings for him.
About what my father had done at Oxford aside from study scholastic philosophy, I knew next to nothing. He claimed to have played centre for a hockey team made up exclusively of Rhodes scholars. ‘The Rhodes Blades’ they were called. Most of them were Canadians, a few were Americans, and one, their captain, said to have been named Lord Rumsey and related to the Queen, was from Great Britain. The Rhodes Blades, my father said, disbanded undefeated in 1952. Against which teams had they compiled their undefeated record? According to my father, against the Olympic teams of certain little-known European countries who came to Oxford to challenge them. He said the closest they had come to losing was their victory in overtime against the Estonian Ice Hockey Federation, for whom ‘the legendary Kron Vladsky’ was playing goal.
Needless to say, I took the very existence of the Rhodes Blades with a grain of salt. Suspecting the whole thing to have been an elaborate joke, perhaps cooked up by the so-called Lord Rumsey for whom ice hockey must have been one of those New World oddities that cried out to be lampooned.
It seemed not unlikely that the Rhodes Blades had been together for only as long as it took to have their picture taken. There was a photograph of them, the only photograph from my father’s time at Oxford, in my album.
I took the album from the closet and found at the very front the photo of the Rhodes Blades, taken at Oxford in 1950. They were posing in a kind of turn-of-the-century, back-at-the-club manner, a group of gentleman hockey players, lounging about in armchairs in front of the fire, their sticks, emblems of their sport, scattered about, the Rhodes Blades suffering themselves to be photographed, allowing the world a rare glimpse into their private lives. The only thing wrong with this back-at-the-club photograph was that, though the Rhodes Blades were wearing blazers and slacks and sitting cross-legged in their armchairs, they were also, all of them, wearing skates. Even the man who was standing by the fireplace, holding a snifter of brandy in one hand and a pipe in the other, was absurdly elevated on a pair of skates. Lord Rumsey, cigar in hand, legs elegantly crossed, was quite nonchalantly wearing skates. My father, sitting across from him, was wearing skates which, for the way that he was looking at the camera, might have been club slippers. They were all affecting the kind of insolence normal to such photographs, but also smirking slightly, not so much, it seemed to me, to acknowledge the obvious joke as to suggest that there was some further, private joke involved, some joke behind the joke, some riddle that they were daring you to solve.
After leaving Oxford, after leaving the Rhodes Blades, my father had failed to rejoin the Divine Ryans, the team for which, in my mind, at least, he had played centre. The Divine Ryans. I imagined them on bubblegum cards. Aunt Phil on right wing. Uncle Reginald on left wing. Father Francis and Father Seymour on defence. Sister Louise between the pipes. Their pictures on one side, their lifetime stats on the other. Instead of goals and assists, masses and confessions. I could see it now. ‘Reg Ryan Jr has been in a terrible slump since 1952.’ These, on the other hand, might have been Aunt Phil’s stats for 1967: M 156, c 52, TP 208. ‘Philomena Ryan, known to her team-mates as Aunt Phil, has led the League in scoring for thirteen of the past twenty-five years.’ All they lacked was a centreman. All they lacked, as in 1952–53, was my father, without whom they would be playing shorthanded from now on.
I went back to the window. Across the way in the backyard, on a small, spotlit patch of ice, my father stood, looking as though he had skated out of the darkness just in time to have his picture taken. Dressed in a numberless Habs uniform, he was smiling as though to a nation that adored him, as though this very picture would soon be on bubblegum cards throughout the country. Easing forward on his skates, he crouched over as if to take a faceoff, his stick in front of him. Then, as if there had been some delay and he must make his approach again, he coasted in a circle, turning his back to me, then coming round, head down, easing forward, as if some invisible linesman was about to drop the puck. He kept on repeating this manoeuvre, over and over, coasting slowly in a circle, then coming back, head down, for the faceoff, then turning away. I opened the window and was about to call out to him when he looked up at me the way a player might look at a linesman who was taking too long to drop the puck. The puck he had given me, the one memento from his missing year, was still in my hand. I held it between thumb and forefinger, held it up so he could see it, and he nodded. Then he coasted in a circle and, as he came forward for the faceoff, I threw the puck, threw it underhand, as far and as high as I could.
I watched it go up end over end, spinning, revolving so rapidly that it no longer looked like a puck but more like a piece of black and white glass glittering beneath the streetlamp. It went so high that for a few moments it disappeared into the darkness overhead. And then it reappeared, fluttering down, end over end, minus the paper which seemed to have simply vanished. A plain black puck it was now, barely visible against the darkness, spinning, until at the last second it straightened out and landed on my side of the fence, leaving only the faintest, slot-shaped indentation in the snow.
When I looked up to see what my father had made of my hopelessly inadequate toss, there was no sign of him. Even the spotlit patch of ice was gone. I ran downstairs and, putting on my coat and boots, and taking a flashlight from the porch, went outdoors. I found the place in the snow, the slot through which the puck had disappeared, and reached down with my hand, groping all the way to the ground without success. I put the flashlight down and began digging in the snow with both hands, sifting through it. Among that soft whiteness, one hard, black puck should not have been difficult to find, and yet I couldn’t find it. It seemed to have gone, not only through the snow, but through the ground, to have been swallowed up, to have disappeared as completely as the piece of paper which had been attached to it.
I lay on my back in the snow, looking up as if the puck that had come falling from the sky was not my puck, as if the puck from my father’s missing year might still come down.