17

‘Guess who was nice enough to lend us the money to move away?’ my mother said, wiping tears from her eyes.

‘Not Aunt Phil?’ Mary said.

‘Yes,’ my mother said, shrugging with mystification but smiling at the same time, ‘Aunt Phil.’

‘Aunt Phil?’ Mary said again, looking at me with astonishment, an expression I was soon mimicking, shaking my head as if I was every bit as amazed as she was, but all the while wondering what Aunt Phil had had to mortgage to get rid of me.

The only thing Aunt Phil asked from my mother was that she grant my father a kind of posthumous divorce by resuming her maiden name. Henceforth, my mother told us, our last name would be Delaney. It seemed that our divinity had lapsed. I suspected that not long after we were gone, it would be as though Donald Ryan had never married. Or that, at least, would have been the case if not for Uncle Reginald who, when I invited him to come with us, declined. ‘I’m not letting them off that easy,’ he said.

We had to wait until the end of the school year before we left. Given what our stay with Aunt Phil had been like, that last month didn’t seem so bad. Aunt Phil and I tacitly agreed to avoid each other, to acknowledge one another’s existence only when we had to.

I decided not to take The Cartoon Virgil with me. One night, as the carpenters who were still working on our old house were getting ready to leave, I went over and, when no-one was looking, pushed the book through one of the holes they had knocked in the plaster. It landed with a thud, and the next day the hole was blocked up with plaster once again. It may have been found by this time, or it may still be there, rotting like some skeleton between the walls.

But the puck, the one memento from my father’s missing year, I still have. Looking out my bedroom window a few days before we left, I happened to see it embedded in a patch of mud. The pieces of paper whch had been attached to it were gone, but the words my father had written were still there, faintly engraved in the puck so that I could shade them in when I wanted.

What Aunt Phil told Father Seymour, Father Francis and Sister Louise to reconcile them to the fact that we were leaving, we never did find out. But in no time, the official family position was that it was a good idea. In fact, by the way they acted, it might have been their idea, one that, hard though it might be for us to accept, was in everyone’s best interest.

The day that we left, they all came to Aunt Phil’s to see us off, all hugged and kissed us as if the events of the past year had never happened. ‘Goodbye my dear,’ Father Seymour said as he kissed my mother on the cheek.

The plan had been for us to take a taxi to the airport, but Uncle Reginald wouldn’t hear of it. He would, he said, take us to the airport in style, which is to say in his hearse. Aunt Phil protested against using the hearse in this manner – what if someone saw him driving it while out of uniform, she said. There was no chance of that, said Uncle Reginald, because he planned to wear his uniform. He had us wait while he took the lift upstairs. Ten minutes later, he came back down in coat and tails, his top-hat in his hands. ‘Ladies and gentleman,’ he said, ‘your hearse is waiting.’

I had always figured that we would leave Fleming Street in a hearse, though I hadn’t expected us all to go together, not to mention while we were still alive. Rather than climb into the casket compartment, which Aunt Phil wanted us to do so that no-one on Fleming Street would see us, we all piled into the front seat with Uncle Reginald. More than one person on the route to the airport witnessed the unlikely sight of a woman and her two children, crammed like hitchhikers into the front seat of Reg Ryan’s hearse, all laughing except for Uncle Reginald, whose mournful expression was even more pronounced than usual.

Why was it easier, Uncle Reginald wondered, to say goodbye to the dead than to the living? ‘You’ll see us again,’ my mother said. Uncle Reginald shook his head. ‘So far,’ he said, ‘my record of not seeing my passengers again is perfect. I wouldn’t want to spoil it.’ I told him I wished my record of not seeing his passengers again was perfect and he laughed. My father had not appeared to me, even in dreams, since the night the Leafs had won the Cup, so I knew the pucks were still in place and my father was still downstairs where he belonged.

At the airport, we got some strange stares when Uncle Reginald, looking grimly official in his waistcoat and top-hat, got out of the hearse, threw open the rear doors, and, pausing for effect, began to solemnly unload our luggage. There followed what may still be the only instance of people smothering the driver of a hearse with hugs and kisses.

Finally he stepped back, removed his hat, and giving us his best, most mournfully respectful bow, turned around, got in the hearse and drove away.

As the plane took off, as the city fell away and Mary and my mother crowded the window, searching the ground below for Fleming Street, I closed my eyes and replayed a scene from the day before. Walking down Fleming Street just after dark, I had spotted Mary and Harold Noonan, pressed against each other, Harold Noonan with his arms around Mary from behind so that it looked as if he had finally, literally, caught up with her, as if, while they were walking along with the usual fifty yards of street between them, he had increased his speed just enough to surprise her from behind, to catch her. They were hardly recognizable without that fifty yards between them.

It didn’t seem, in any way, to be a passionate embrace. Mary’s arms were at her sides and she was quite expressionless. The only sign that she was even aware of Harold’s arms around her was that her eyes were closed. She might have been hoping that when she opened them, Harold would be gone. Harold on the other hand, though he was standing about as awkwardly as Mary, had his eyes open. He was staring wide-eyed down the street, as if he had bumped into Mary by accident and was wondering how, without acknowledging her existence, he could ask her to step aside. Still, he was holding her and she was letting him, there was no denying that. That long-haired, long-limbed Lothario from down the street, who appeared to be wearing a bunch of grapes on one side of his head, so long and lopsided was his hair, had my sister in his arms.

When their image disappeared, another one replaced it. I saw Tom the Dobermann, his ears absurdly taped above his head, sitting in the middle of Fleming Street. As I ran towards him, he began to run away, loping down the middle of the street, looking back at me now and then, keeping constant that distance between us. Tom, you dopey dog, I said. I may even have said it out loud. Tom, you cartoon hellhound, wait for me.