Garth saw two PR men holding up the Press Club bar: a compulsive kisser who indiscriminately smacked both men and women and an alcoholic named Eric who, at some point every night, toppled off his stool.
They were paying court to the dragons, three fifty-ish women who smoked incessantly and stared down newcomers. Every year, there was a move to bar the PR men and the dragons, to limit Press Club membership to working media, but every year, the motion died as quickly as a moth. Garth moved by the flacks, who were shouting nonsense. For years, Jean had wanted him to leave the paper and get a job in PR, which she believed was glamorous and well-paying, relenting only when Garth became the ME with a salary that bought her dream house.
Eric, the alcoholic, was shouting now. “‘It was a woman who drove me to drink. And you know, I never even thanked her.’ That’s W.C. Fields.”
“How about this one?” the kisser countered. “‘I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.’ Winston Churchill.”
“Ahhh, good old Winnie.” Eric saluted Churchill, and the dragons chuckled.
Garth worked his way past frozen flash points on the Press Club walls — clippings from the Halifax Explosion, D-Day — past a petition to free journalists in South America, his head spinning like he’d stepped off a midway ride. He’d had a great idea for Where Are They Now?, a drummer who’d played with Wilf Carter before Montana Slim thrilled the world with his trademark echo yodel. The drummer had been in Halifax for bypass surgery, but why bother now? As senior editor, he was still on the payroll, but he was a ghost really, with no duties or clout.
“Maaame.”
Garth ignored a man sitting at a piano, belting out show tunes not worthy of his attention.
Garth thought instead about Carter, whom he’d seen in 1950, the year the singer set an attendance record at the CNE. Boomer, that Upper Canadian bean-counter, that big-headed freak, wouldn’t appreciate the magnitude of the story. He wouldn’t know a legend if it bit him on the ass. He wouldn’t know that Carter, a native of Hilford, Nova Scotia, had written more than five hundred songs.
He hadn’t told Jean about the pay cut.
Garth tried to steady himself, to fight off the nausea that kept coming back. He stared down the length of the bar until his eyes settled on an older man with watery eyes. In his worn tweed jacket, the man looked like someone who’d been shipwrecked on the sea of self-destruction and crawled ashore, exhausted but saved. Protectively, as though she knew what he’d been though, a woman gripped his arm.
Hey diddle diddle. Christ, it was Frank Mobley, Garth realized, but the woman wasn’t his wife. Maybe he was divorced from — what was her name — Garth searched his brain. Nancy! That’s it, a nurse from New Brunswick. She’d probably had enough of Frank’s antics, Garth decided, amazed to see his old colleague after so many years. He recalled, with a nostalgic chuckle, the year that the Standard had sent Frank to Providence to cover the New England governors and Eastern premiers, a vacation, since nothing ever happened at those things. Frank rented a black Caddie, stuck a Nova Scotia flag in the hood, and told security he was the lieutenant-governor. All week long, he drove around drinking Coors and waving out the window.
Garth looked at Mobley again. He knew it was him. Normally, he would let them approach him, given his former position, but on this day he needed to touch base with a time he understood, a time when the rules may have been harsh and arbitrary, but they were rules they both understood.
Up close now, Garth took a deep breath and exhaled: “Hi, Frank. Garth MacKenzie.” Frank steadied himself and gave Garth a look that he could not place, a look that Frank must have acquired somewhere else.
After he left the paper, Frank had gone to the wire service as a lead writer, a gunslinger who handled election night returns. It was fast, pressure-packed work, like being a stock trader or a short-order cook. “Hatfield lost his seat,” someone would yell, and Frank would crank out four paragraphs that would fit perfectly onto a typeset page, seamless and filled with facts. With twenty-nine leads in one night, it wasn’t writing, it was a mental party trick, like memorizing objects on a plate, a trick that required concentration and the bladder of an elephant. Frank was a master.
Frank put down his Coke — Garth noticed that his hand had a tremor — and stepped forward. “Garth MacKenzie.” Garth extended a hand. “Sparky.”
He was thinking about wire guys who’d covered big stories, stories that had made their careers, and had no memory of the events, no anecdotes or telling asides. The stories had poured through them with such speed, such velocity, that nothing had time to attach itself to their brains. Mobley really was small, wasn’t he, Garth decided, waiting for his response. And he looks so damn old with that grey hair and his nose streaked with blood vessels. Frank’s cheekbones were rocky cliffs over washed-away flesh.
Frank took another step — he was too close now — their chests almost touching, the Coke exhaust burning Garth’s face. “Don’t you open your slimy mouth to me.” Mobley poked Garth’s chest, pushing him back. “You pathetic snitch, you Benedict Arnold.” Garth stumbled, dizzy and defenseless.
“This is the bastard who gave our names to management when we tried to start a union,” Mobley told the protective woman. “He got me fired.”
The woman looked at Garth with such repulsion that he blinked. Stunned, Garth did not remember what Mobley was accusing him of. What act of betrayal? All of his life, he’d been driven by fear, the fear of losing his job, the fear of disappointing Jean, the fear of growing old. That fear had eaten away at his moral fibre like dry rot and left it flawed. When the chance came to assuage that fear, he simply took it. That’s all.
After Garth had been given the news by Boomer, Carla cleared out his office. The following day, she helped move Katherine in. Unlike Garth, the new boss recognized Carla’s degree in office administration, her three accounting courses. With Katherine, Carla decided, there would be no overbearing wife, no demeaning errands. There were things that Mr. Boomer should be aware of, Carla explained to Katherine, pulling out a spreadsheet with numbers and dates. “I’ve kept good records.”
Katherine was on the phone now, engaged in a conversation that Carla could hear through the open door. “Yeah, I miss you too,” she heard the ME sigh.
Carla adjusted her mail tray in an effort to appear busy. There was no one on the phone, Carla knew. There never had been, had there? No Dmitry, no worldly suitor, no glamorous escape from the daily stress. Maybe you just had to define real differently, decided Carla, recalling the catechism lessons of her childhood, the incontrovertible teachings of dour nuns who never asked why but knew that everyone needed something to get them through life.
Katherine hung up the phone. There were moments in life that are burned in your memory, moments more vivid than time should allow. Katherine recalled being at the top of a hill on her bicycle. She was ten. In the distance was a cluster of runners with numbers on their chests, organized, but unconcerned with speed, loping, straggling away from a clearing with balloons. As the runners drew closer, Katherine noticed that some were wearing masks of Winston Churchill and Beethoven, some carried signs: RUN FOR MENTAL ILLNESS.
She saw one man trotting up the hill, pulling a child’s wagon. Shirt off, he looked exuberant, like someone who had avoided calamity or received unexpected news. Grinning, he seemed free of family obligations, a liberated man in shorts, smiling so hard that his face threatened to eject his dense glasses. A boy stumbled behind him, preternaturally subdued. Katherine recognized the boy as a classmate from her school, a boy she had never spoken to. And then in a moment that stayed with her, a moment that she replayed and analyzed and stored inside her brain, he waved. It was a wave that erased all distance: the wave of an old friend and a kindred spirit. It was as though he knew her and everything about her.