Grade four was shaping up to be a golden year. The hated Mrs. Persson was thoroughly behind me, and I had a new friend. But then, Grouse Valley was the sort of place where things usually turned out properly, like a fairy tale. It felt reassuring to know that, and I hoped for Norman’s sake his parents would quickly figure it out.
Norman’s parents were my one worry that fall, since they were so different. No sooner had the Hortons moved into their new house than they took off on a ten-day camping trip, which made for more excitement in one month than most people cared for. That meant they missed the Pacific National Exhibition at the end of August, which the rest of us looked forward to all year. And of course, there was the fact that Norman’s mother still had a job when most mothers couldn’t wait to quit work when they got married.
Mr. Horton turned out to be like other fathers in driving off to work every day. But Mrs. Horton proved to be eccentric, striding past everyone’s windows early in the morning, heading downhill to the school with a canvas rucksack on her back. Not long before dinner, she’d stride home again and disappear inside, and on weekends no one saw her, since Norman said she did her marking and class prep.
This put Mrs. Horton outside neighbourhood life. Few people had two cars, so most of the mothers spent quite a bit of time in each other’s houses, meeting for coffee, maybe exercising together to Jack LaLanne on television, no one going very far afield without their husbands and not really needing to.
The milkman came every Monday and Thursday in his square yellow Dairyland truck, rattling cases of milk bottles. The egg man from the Fraser Valley pulled up Tuesday in his station wagon, and on Wednesday, the fruit and vegetable truck lumbered up the hill, the man and lady from China selling produce out the back that smelled of good earth. My father let the egg man and the fruit and vegetable people park in our driveway, meaning that Bunny got to chat when the neighbours came by.
But since Mrs. Horton worked, she was never there for the egg man or the fruit and vegetable people, much less for a chat. She didn’t even go to the supermarket. Instead, Mr. Horton did the shopping on Friday after school, when it was open late. Bunny shopped on Thursday, but for three weeks running, one of her friends saw Mr. Horton at the local SuperValu, pushing his cart up and down the aisle as if it was natural for a man to shop for groceries after work.
When Bunny told my father, he had to pause to think things through.
“That boy’s going to be teased,” he said finally.
“Children are mean,” Bunny agreed, which interested me. “His mother ought to pave the way. She ought to know that. Otherwise, I don’t see how she can claim to be a teacher.”
“Because she teaches grade five?” I asked.
This proved to be a mistake, my parents having forgotten that I was lying on the floor behind my father’s recliner.
“Who’s supposed to be in bed?” Bunny asked, and I had to scramble.
Yet what she’d said stayed with me: paving the way. My mother made it sound as if Norman was a car, and you paved a road ahead of him, allowing him to drive his Normanness forward. Paving the way meant making the suburb fit Norman instead of making Norman fit in. Yet it seemed to me that Norman would be better off if he did things the way other kids did, at least as far as his polio let him. I never did myself, but Norman was new and he didn’t have as much leeway. Lying there, I decided on a fall project: to help Norman belong.
As a first step, I brought up Norman’s allowance on the way to school the next morning. I’d already learned that Norman got a dollar once a month instead of a quarter every Friday like the rest of us. Everyone had quiet time on Saturday mornings when we didn’t bother our parents, getting our own cereal and watching cartoons. Afterward, they paid our allowance and the younger kids went down to the shopping village while the older ones went to the Park Royal mall.
“Don’t your parents make you have quiet time on Saturday?” I asked, as we walked down Moore Road.
“I get lots of quiet time,” Norman said. “They’ve always got their marking.”
“But you watch cartoons?”
A shrug. Of course.
“And you like to come to the village on Saturday.”
This was a statement rather than a question, since we’d already established that he did.
“So why don’t you get your allowance beforehand like everybody else?”
“I get a dollar, and I divide it into a quarter a week, so I get a quarter a week same as you do. It teaches me willpower.”
“But you didn’t have any left last week, and it’s only halfway through September.”
“That sometimes happens,” Norman said, and I could see how it could, although I felt on the edge of something else.
Then it broke through.
“But some months have five weeks!” The injustice struck me hard. “So we get a quarter each week and you only get a dollar! That’s not fair!”
Norman sucked on this, getting my point and slowly going sad. We walked on like that for a while, with me kicking my shoes on the road. Bunny polished them every night but the patent leather was already cracking, so that she was starting to see them as a bad call, too.
“I can’t,” Norman said finally.
“You can’t what?”
“Ask my mum and dad.”
“All right,” I said, calculating that I couldn’t talk to Mrs. Horton at school, but I could wait at Norman’s until she got home. I might have been the only one in the neighbourhood to speak with Mrs. Horton, since I often went to Norman’s house and we’d formed an acquaintance.
“Here you are again, Tink,” she’d say, hanging up her knapsack on a hook beside the front door.
The idea of turning this into an actual conversation made Norman nervous. But I refused to budge, insisting on going home with him, building a fort out of sofa cushions in the Hortons’ rec room and staying inside it stubbornly until the front door opened and closed.
When I ran upstairs, trying to explain properly, Mrs. Horton took off her knapsack and put it on its hook. She listened as I spoke, but kept walking into the kitchen to get dinner underway. Mrs. Horton was a calm person. She was the usual size for mothers, but she wore her light brown hair braided and coiled around her head like a grandmother. There was also something powdery about her hair and complexion, and when she’d come in, she’d kicked off her shoes and put sandals on top of her socks, not slippers. I knew her name was Marian, having heard Mr. Horton call her Maid Marian. It looked as if they were having fried chicken for dinner.
“That’s a good point, Tink,” she said, once I’d argued my case. “But you know, Norman can very easily do long division, dividing up his dollar to find out how many cents he has to spend each day. Can’t you, Norman?” she asked. “In months with thirty days, he can divide his dollar by thirty to get one daily figure—can’t you?—and in months with thirty-one, he can divide by thirty-one. And February is a bonus month, isn’t it? With only twenty-eight days. Then you multiply each daily number by seven to get his allowance each week. I wonder if it makes much of a difference. What about you, Tink?”
The arithmetic boggled my mind. Nancy Workman was a genius at arithmetic even though she wet her pants. But I wasn’t, and most people weren’t. Mrs. Horton was being a teacher, which wasn’t fair when school was out.
“We’re only grade four,” I said, my voice wavering a little. “Not grade five.”
Mrs. Horton considered this for a while, and to my surprise, she nodded. I thought she was going to say she’d ask Mr. Horton, but instead she told Norman, “It looks like you’ve got yourself a raise.”
Norman’s shoulders drooped in relief, although I felt disregarded.
“I got it,” I said. “I’m the president of Norman’s union local. Which is made up of him.”
Mrs. Horton didn’t seem to know how to take this.
“My Uncle Punk is president of his union local.”
“Which union?”
“The woodworkers?”
“The one who’s on the radio all the time?” When I nodded, she asked, “Isn’t his name Donald Barnham?”
“He’s my mother’s brother,” I said. They’d started calling him Punk because he went to work as a lumberjack when he was just a punk kid, and I wasn’t surprised that Mrs. Horton had heard of him. My uncle was famous, although the newspapers didn’t like him, much less Jack Webster on his radio talk show.
“Everybody’s heard of Uncle Punk,” I said, savouring my second victory.
It proved to be more than that. When we went down to the village the next Saturday, Norman had an extra quarter, which his mother had thrown in so he could treat me to fries and a milkshake at the Riverine Restaurant. Union dues, she said. We were too young to presume to a booth at the Riverine, which was a diner. Instead, we sat at the counter on the red leatherette stools and decided to save a quarter by sharing an order. The Riverine gave you so many fries they fell off the plate, and the shakes came in an icy metal container that filled a soda glass one and a half times, and they were big glasses. We were both in the mood for vanilla, so it worked.
Afterward, Norman used his saved quarter to buy two extra comics in the drugstore, where they were displayed on a revolving metal rack that squeaked when you turned it. We could share those, too. The comics were twelve cents apiece, leaving Norman enough to buy himself a penny candy in the fruit and vegetable store across the street, which stocked gum and chocolate bars on shelves below the counter and kept penny candy in jars on top.
Having bought just one Superman, I had enough money left to buy a package of red licorice. Norman took a long time to decide on a gummy bear. Afterward, we picked up our bikes from outside the drugstore, taking a tour past the hardware store, where they sold marbles, then past the library, where Norman already had a card. Further on were the doctors’ and dentists’ offices, where we stopped at the stop sign.
“My mum says I’m going to keep seeing my old doctor in the Marine Building over town,” Norman said. “But he’s okay.”
“Unh-uh. Unh-uh. Unh-uh,” I replied, and we both said it as we turned right and rode past the Anglican Church, which wasn’t the one we went to, and said it even louder as we circled back through the village. People turned to look at us, including the jeweller who stared out the window with an eyeglass in one eye that made it look enormous. It looked exactly the way the dentist’s eyes looked through his glasses before he bent down to hurt your mouth, the thought of which made me pedal faster, like Dorothy trying to escape the tornado that carried her to Oz.
Two weeks later, the Hortons came to dinner, which ended up making my plan for Norman feel crucial. Bunny had invited the Hortons as soon as they’d arrived. But first, they had to settle, then they went camping, then school started, and it was almost the end of September before they found a date. I heard Bunny tell my father she felt insulted. At least she would have, if they hadn’t turned down invitations from everyone else.
There was a knock on the door the next Saturday evening and there they were: Mr. and Mrs. Horton, Norman and his sister Rosa. They were late, but Mrs. Horton made up for it by holding out flowers, having picked a bouquet of sweet peas from Mrs. Milewski’s garden. It was their garden now, but I still thought of it as belonging to Mrs. Milewski, who had planted the sweet peas before selling her house. Getting them was a bit of a coup. Mrs. Milewski had never given them to anyone, although I’d been known to sneak into her backyard and pick some, at least until she caught me.
“How lovely!” my mother cried, using her company voice. “Mary Alice, go get the small cut-glass vase.”
“So you have a real name,” Mr. Horton said, fixing me with his teacher’s eyes. I’d seen him around Norman’s house, and he’d looked at me just as piercingly once or twice but had never spoken to me before.
“What’s yours?” I asked.
“Mary Alice!” my mother cried.
“Jack,” he said. “But you can call me Mr. Horton.”
That was strange, since of course I had to call him Mr. Horton. I still thought it was a valid question, and looked at him again as I went for the vase. Seeing Mr. Horton beside my father made me realize that he was tall, although not as tall as my father. He was also darker than my father with black curly hair, and I thought he looked more like a principal than a teacher.
“I’ll take a beer,” he said, before anyone had asked.
“Please and thank you,” Rosa said lazily, as I came back into the kitchen with the vase. Rosa was like Norman in being a slow-moving person. She moved like syrup, and after seeing her for the first time, my mother had said Rosa was a little too, without going on. Maybe she meant a little too grown up, since Rosa was already busty at not-quite-fifteen.
Mrs. Horton was busty, too, although she was otherwise slender, and she wanted a beer as well. Afterward, she stood watching my mother jam the flowers into the vase, not taking over the way some mothers did, Bunny being the first to admit she wasn’t artistic. I wondered if Mrs. Horton was the observant type, as Miss Atkinson called Norman. He must take after someone, and he wasn’t like his father, who had already left the kitchen with his beer.
Feeling curious, I followed Mr. Horton into the living room, where I found him frowning out the picture windows as if he were planning to grade the view.
“Flitting around, Tinkerbell?” he asked. Like all teachers, he had eyes in the back of his head.
“It’s Tink.”
“And you don’t know where it comes from?” he asked, turning to face me.
“My sister,” I said. “And the movie. And the book, Peter Pan.”
I knew I had to stare him down, the way I would a kid like him. I remembered my father’s word sardonic. Mr. Horton scared me, and I refused to let him know it, holding my ground until he turned amused, his grey eyes sparking.
“Tink it is,” he said.
“Are you teasing her, Jack?” Mrs. Horton asked, coming in with her beer. My mother had a highball, my father his ginger ale. Norman and Rosa each had Cokes, and I hoped I hadn’t missed the boat on the Coke front.
“Mr. Horton likes teasing people, Tink,” his wife said. “He doesn’t mean anything by it.”
“Yes, he does.”
“Mary Alice!”
“Yes, he does,” Rosa echoed. “Ignore him.”
Mr. Horton smiled broadly. So Rosa was his pride and joy, just like I was my father’s and Debbie was my mother’s. Not that they were ever as obvious about it as Mr. Horton.
“I got a new Batman,” I told Norman. “We can go read it in the rec room.” Raising my voice slightly: “After I get my Coke.”
Hearing no objection, I turned politely to Rosa. “You can come if you want.”
“You’ve got a cat!” she cried, spotting Wilma by the fireplace.
“No,” her father said.
“Rosa wants a cat, but Jack can’t stand them,” Mrs. Horton said.
“It’s okay. I’ll get one now we’re out of that cruddy apartment.”
This was new information, and I lingered while Rosa crouched down beside Wilma, who was a tortoiseshell. My father called her long-suffering. I had no idea why.
“She has kittens twice a year, so you can have one the next litter,” I said, conscious of scoring a point on Mr. Horton, then taking off to get my Coke.
Norman was naturally polite. A born gentleman, my father called him. But as we sat down at the dinner table, it turned out that his parents and sister didn’t have any company manners, which involved asking people how they were and being concerned about the answer. People always said they were fine, couldn’t be better, but then you had to ask were they sure. The Hortons didn’t ask anything, although it’s true that Mrs. Horton showed herself to be as bookish as my father. While my mother served the starter, Mrs. Horton mentioned how much she’d enjoyed a novel she’d just finished reading.
“The Carpetbaggers,” my mother agreed, putting out fruit salad in sundae-type dishes, which was the latest fashion. Mrs. Horton looked so uncomfortable that you could tell she hadn’t read it.
“Catch-22,” she said.
My mother didn’t seem to have heard of that one, although my father nodded.
“That’s how it felt,” he said. “Overseas.”
I knew the name of one of the battles where my father had fought during the Second World War. Ortona. He’d got a medal there, the biggest of his medals. One time, after he’d stayed in his workshop for almost a week, my mother had taken them out of a crumpled old brown paper old envelope to show me. Ortona had been fought exactly fifteen years before.
“Although I can’t say I’ve ever heard things spoken about in quite that way,” my father said. “And wonder if they ought to be.”
“How do you think they ought to be spoken about?” Mr. Horton asked.
“As little as possible,” my father said, and there was an awkward pause.
“My latest was Franny and Zooey,” Rosa said. “Which I l-o-v-e-d.”
My mother sat down uncomfortably. Once you’d established that everyone was fine, the polite subjects for conversation at dinner were the weather, TV, and the outrageous prices charged by shopkeepers. Books weren’t discussed any more than politics and religion, although at least the Hortons hadn’t got into those.
It was also true that children didn’t have opinions, even teenagers like Rosa, who were expected to either wolf down double helpings (boys) or push their food around on their plates (girls) then excuse themselves from the table to widespread mutual relief. My mother didn’t like Rosa smoothing things over, especially since you could see that Bunny hadn’t heard of Franny and Zooey either, although it turned out my father had read that one as well.
“The Carpetbaggers,” my mother repeated, her feathers ruffling. “Was a real page turner.”
It wasn’t that my mother didn’t read. She drove me to the library on days she had the car and sometimes took out a book for herself. But Bunny only really had time for one big book a year, and this year it had been The Carpetbaggers, which was a Hollywood novel that all of her friends adored.
“What about you, Tink?” Mr. Horton asked, emphasizing my name. “Did you read The Carpetbaggers?”
My mother had swatted my hand when I’d reached for it. But you couldn’t say so in front of company; even I knew that.
“I like Anne of Green Gables,” I said.
“You like Anne,” Mrs. Horton said, smiling agreeably. “So do I.”
“And A Wrinkle in Time. I got it out of the library last week, and I’ve already read it twice. And my Aunt Magda gave me Little Women, and that was absorbing.” Aunt Magda was married to my father’s younger brother, Uncle Ray, and she was absorbed by many things.
“So you like Jo Marsh, too.” Mrs. Horton was still smiling.
“She’s okay. Except that all the girls in that book keep running after boys. After Laurie. You’d think they’d have more brains.”
“Ha!” Mr. Horton laughed, which was startling. He pushed his fruit salad aside and leaned on the table to fix his eyes on mine, ready to quiz me, I could tell.
I tried to avoid him, concentrating on my salad, having lucked into four pieces of pineapple. It occurred to me that getting teachers for parents must be tiring. Maybe that was part of the reason Norman moved so slowly. Polio wasn’t all of it.
“In the nineteenth century . . .” Mr. Horton began.
“History lesson,” Rosa said.
“Historically, Tink,” he went on, almost ignoring his daughter, but not quite, “young ladies of the middle and upper classes weren’t allowed to hold jobs. Their economic positions were determined by whomever they were able to marry. So getting themselves a rich husband was fundamental to their comfort. Marriage was their job. In writing a novel about young women, Louisa May Alcott was writing a how-to guide for getting the job you wanted, which in Jo’s case, wasn’t what people expected. Giving advice. An agony aunt. The nineteenth-century Ann Landers.”
My mother looked bewildered, my father amused, although his eyes were sharp, too. He took Mr. Horton’s measure in full, which was one of his sayings.
Farther down the table, I thought about what Mr. Horton had said.
“I get that,” I replied.
Mr. Horton looked me over. “I actually think you do.” Turning to his son, he asked over-politely, “What about you, Norman?”
Norman was eating his way through his fruit salad. He liked all kinds of fruit but especially cantaloupe, so he’d lucked out, too.
“I haven’t read it,” he said.
“No. Because you only read comic books.”
“I plan to start reading science fiction.”
“Oh. You plan.”
Mr. Horton sounded like my brother Bob needling our father.
“My brother is sardonic, too,” I said, making Mr. Horton swivel toward me.
“Mary Alice has a vocabulary,” Bunny said, sounding pleased with me, which wasn’t usual when we had company.
“Mrs. Horton knows Uncle Punk,” I said, trying to smooth things over.
“No. I’m sorry. Who?” Mrs. Horton asked. Then she corrected herself. “You told me Donald Barnham is your uncle. Yes, I’ve heard him on the radio.”
“Airing his many opinions,” Mr. Horton said. He didn’t seem to like Uncle Punk’s opinions, which struck me as a rude thing to say. I looked at Norman, who was taking his time with his fruit salad. Beside him, Rosa had an expression on her face I didn’t understand, almost as if she felt superior to her parents.
It was the strangest evening I’d ever spent, although Norman and I enjoyed our meal. After the fruit salad, Bunny served a fine roast pork and scalloped potatoes with cheese.
“Daddy?” I asked afterward. I hardly ever called him that, but I was sitting on his lap keeping Bunny company while she did the dishes. I couldn’t think how to ask him what I wanted to know. I didn’t even know what I wanted to know.
“The Hortons are intellectuals, Tink,” my father said. “They’re readers. Thinkers. Fish out of water, at least around here. They’re not bad people. They’re just different.”
I didn’t think they were bad. I didn’t think Mrs. Horton was bad, anyhow. She paid union dues. But it took Uncle Punk to ask my real question two weeks later, which I recognized as soon as he asked it.
“What are they doing here?”
This was on a Sunday, when he and Auntie Nita had come over to watch the B.C. Lions football game, my brother Bob in tow.
What are they doing here? That was Uncle Punk’s overall question, at least about our neighbours. One time, we’d all been standing in the driveway out front, saying goodbye to him and Auntie. They took up a lot of room. Auntie was big, and Uncle Punk’s shoulders were as wide as a refrigerator, although his bulk was softened by a comic’s rubbery face.
Just as they were about to leave, Mrs. Manners ran out their front door in her tennis clothes, waving at us cheerfully as she ran down the steps. She got in her little red sports car, honked the horn and backed out of their driveway. It must have been summer. The top of her convertible was down, and Mrs. Manners looked like a movie star turning into the road and roaring around the blind corner.
“How come they live here?” Uncle Punk asked, watching the empty road.
My mother bristled, because why wouldn’t you want to live here?
“Most people live where they can afford to live,” my father answered peaceably.
“Not in the British Properties, or Shaughnessy, or Point Grey,” Uncle Punk persisted. “Even when they can’t afford it, people like that live there.”
Rich people lived there; even I knew that. Uncle Ray and Aunt Magda lived in the British Properties. I was perturbed that my parents didn’t seem to know the answer, although I could tell that my father had thought of the question and felt a little perturbed as well.
Now he answered Uncle Punk, “The Hortons were working up north when their lad got sick. I don’t think they intended to move down here, but the boy was admitted to Vancouver General. Marian Horton quit work to look after him for three, maybe four years. It sounds as if she schooled him at home. Her husband found a job at the high school, and when the boy was well enough, Marian took a job down the hill.”
Uncle Punk grunted. He was inclined to dislike the Hortons after Bunny’s story about dinner. Stuck-up, he’d decided. Full of themselves. Even though Bunny had told the dinner as a funny story. “I’ll take a beer.” When nobody had asked!
“You can shine a good light on it,” Uncle Punk said. “But I’ve got my questions.”
“You’ve always got questions,” I said. That was my way of defending Norman, and I was ready to argue the point. But Uncle Punk just broke into a smile.
“You got that right, pet,” he said.
I wasn’t a pet, but Bunny signalled me to let it go. We were in the rec room watching the game, although it was halftime and we had the sound off. Uncle Punk and Auntie Nita were on the chesterfield while Bunny sat on the arm. She had to get up and down, refilling bowls of potato chips and dip, especially the sour cream and chives dip, which was popular, mainly with me. My father was in his old recliner, which had migrated downstairs, while my brother Bob slouched in an armchair. Only Debbie and Ed were missing. They had tickets to the game.
My father was the one who wanted to keep the TV in the rec room rather than the living room. That meant we didn’t use the living room as much as most people, although my mother was happy since it saved the furniture. It was October by that time, so the rec room fire was lit and crackling. My father had built the fireplace surround with big round stones he’d hauled up from the creek and lined the room with knotty pine. He’d also built bookshelves into the wall facing the picture window. They were overflowing with books, newer books laid on top of long rows of older books. My father had more books than anybody, even the Hortons, which I knew from snooping.
Outside the rec room was a small covered patio where the coals in the portable barbecue were burning down nicely. As the game headed into the fourth quarter, my father would be in and out cooking hot dogs and hamburgers. Some people wouldn’t miss one flat second of the fourth quarter. But my father found it tense and preferred to be moving, especially if it was a close game and it looked as if the Lions might bunk it.
“They won’t be here for long,” Uncle Punk said. He’d left a pause long enough that it took me a second to remember that he was talking about the Hortons.
“Dog with a bone,” Bunny said.
“Get jobs in some fancy-schmancy private school.”
“Norman is Tink’s friend,” my father warned.
“He fills a gap,” Bunny said. “With the Doherty girl off to California.”
“He doesn’t fill a gap,” I said, indignant on Norman’s behalf.
“Private schools don’t pay as well.” That was my brother Bob, levering himself up in his armchair. Bob was a Parker, tall and rangy with a lawyer’s sharp eyes. He got lost in his thoughts and didn’t always listen, although he listened to Uncle Punk more than he did to our father, whom he resembled so closely. “Part of your pay is supposed to come from the prestige of working there.”
“From what they said,” our father told him, “they’re planning on staying where they are.”
“I didn’t get the impression you’d become confidential,” Bob replied.
“No, and I don’t think we will.”
“So you don’t have any particular insight into their intentions.”
My brother sounded as if he had our father in the witness box. That’s how my father sometimes put it, although pointing this out didn’t make Bob any happier.
“I’ve met them once, counsellor,” he replied. Bob looked ready to snap at him when Bunny shook her head.
It was well known in our family that my brother had a grievance against our father for having signed up, enlisting in the army as soon as Canada declared war on Nazi Germany. There wasn’t conscription, Bob would say. No one had made him sign up. A married man with two children. No one expected him to sign up. But there he was, first in line.
Bob was usually quiet, but sometimes he arrived even quieter, as gloomy as an overcast sky. This was a sign that at some point he’d go after my father, which Bunny would always tell me later wasn’t my father’s fault. It had probably started earlier in the day when a professor was too hard on Bob. After university, it might be a judge, a client, a girl. Bob couldn’t seem to take life easily. Bunny wished he would, although if she tried to forestall things by telling him so, Bob was guaranteed to go off. It frightened me, hearing my brother’s voice go thin and needling as wire.
A married man, he would say. Two children. No conscription. They weren’t going to grab him off the street. But he’d been gone for six years, starting when Bob was five years old.
“Six years!”
The worst times were when Bob goaded my father into answering back in that same whipping voice. Our father, I mean to say. He’d get out of his chair and stand what Bunny called ramrod straight, which frightened me even more.
“And would you be happier if Hitler had won?”
I didn’t understand why Bob cherished such a grievance, especially since he’d got Uncle Punk while our father was away. Uncle Punk and Auntie Nita had a family of seven and Bob was the same age as their middle son, Darren. He’d been over there all the time during the war and had been close to our uncle ever since. Debbie had gone there too, Bunny having worked as an executive secretary during the war, although Debbie always got left out of Bob’s story. He had to leave her out. Debbie had lost her father for six years, too, and she was a happy-tempered person.
“I suppose Norman is a family name,” Auntie Nita said, out of nowhere. I figured she wanted to change the subject before Bob went off, Auntie being a peacemaker, as warm as a bath.
“He’s going to be a doctor,” I began.
“Good for him!” she said. Auntie would have said that about anything up to, “Norman’s going to be a teenage murderer.” In which case, she probably would have answered, “Well, he probably has his reasons.”
“I guess having had polio means he wants to cure it,” Bunny said.
“They have cured it,” Bob said, still ready to take offense. “Or at least they’ve got a vaccine.”
“So if he’s cured—which he isn’t, by the way, not with that leg brace. If he’s cured, he must look up to the doctors for doing it.”
Bunny didn’t take Bob lying down, although he accepted more from her than he did from our father.
“He was named after a famous doctor. That’s why,” I said, still trying to answer Auntie’s question. “A famous Canadian doctor. I guess he was one of the missionaries Mr. Culver talks about in church. He helped the poor people in China. Norman wants to be like him.”
For some reason, this made my family go silent.
“Bingo,” Uncle Punk said quietly.
“Looks like it,” Bob agreed.
“Let’s not jump to any conclusions,” my father said.
“Oh, come on,” Bob told him. “They’re hardly going to name their kid after Norman Bethune if they’re not communists.”
“Communists?” Bunny asked faintly.
“Dr. Norman Bethune, the famous communist,” Bob said. “Put it together and what do you get?”
“I repeat: What are they doing here?” Uncle Punk asked. “Who sent ’em?”
“Auntie just asked me a question,” I said.
“And you done good by answering, sweetheart,” Uncle Punk replied.
Did. I thought you were supposed to say, You did good by answering. Did well. But I wasn’t sure, and I didn’t think I’d done any good at all. Not with my father turning into a ramrod in front of the window.
“I’m not going to have this,” he said. “We know very little about these people. We’re going to drop this right now.”
Bob got up to face him, but it was Uncle Punk who spoke.
“Chairman Mao’s favourite doctor, Norman Bethune,” he said, still on the chesterfield. His voice got low and carrying when he wanted to make a point. You leaned forward to listen, even though you didn’t have to. “Norman Bethune, toeing the commie line during the Spanish Civil War.”
“You should be the last to cast aspersions,” my father said. “Given the way they slander unions.”
“Some of ’em deserve it. Little too pink for comfort. My comfort, anyways,” Uncle Punk said. “But in our union, we ain’t commies, and we don’t like ’em one bit.”
“Aren’t,” I said, sure about that one, anyway. Then I realized that my uncle had used bad grammar for a reason, although I had no idea why. I hated the way my family could bristle into parts. The men could, anyway. It didn’t seem to take much in my family for the men to bristle. Right now they were like a forest of angry trees. There were only three of them, but they felt like a forest.
“What’s a communist?” I asked. But maybe I didn’t say it very loudly, and no one was paying attention to me anyway.
“If we suppose it’s true,” my father told Uncle Punk, “when you’re young and idealistic, you can make mistakes . . .”
“I imagine that’s intended for me,” Bob said.
“. . . but a great many people left the Communist Party after the Soviets invaded Hungary in ’56. It’s on the public record. Not that we have any indication that any of this applies to Jack Horton.”
“You mean that he left the Party,” Bob said. “No, we have no indication of that.”
My father held my brother’s eye.
“People move here to get away from things,” he said. “How many men around here fought in the war? From what he said, Jack Horton signed up as soon as he turned eighteen. People come here to lead a quiet life. We’re going to let them.”
“So,” Bob said. “At least we know why you’re defending him.”
My father went even more ramrod. “They have children.”
“They teach children,” Uncle Punk said, in his low and deadly voice. It snaked around the room like mist.
“They have children,” Auntie Nita repeated.
My brother and my uncle turned in surprise. Auntie stood up nimbly. She may have been a big woman, but as Bunny said, she was a good dancer and light on her feet. As soon as she’d secured their attention, Auntie Nita sat down again on the arm of the chesterfield, as if it was high enough for what she had to say.
“Senator Joseph McCarthy,” she went on in a humorous voice, addressing Uncle Punk. “Here you go again, off on a witch hunt. Why in hell’s bells do you want to stir the pot?”
“Well, that’s true,” Bunny said nervously. “We don’t need any trouble around here.”
“No one’s going to say anything,” Auntie said. “They probably came here to get away from it all, the way Hall says. Not that membership in any party is illegal. We have a democracy in this country, I would remind you.”
Bob looked as if he was going to answer but he didn’t. Uncle Punk sucked his cheeks. I looked at my father, who was very still and straight. He didn’t get like this very often, but when he did, it didn’t go away easily, and sometimes it required time in his workshop.
I thought unhappily of the barbecue, and my hot dog, and of Norman.
“Will Norman be all right?” I asked.
“With a sister named Rosa,” Bob said. “No doubt in honour of Rosa Luxemburg, the famous Marxist.”
That seemed to be a last gasp. Looking at the TV, my brother said in a fake voice, “Oh good. Joe Kapp just completed an eighteen-yard pass.”
The third quarter had started and we hadn’t even noticed.
My father swivelled on his heel and went outside to tend the barbecue. Bunny turned the sound back on and everyone stood down. I didn’t really understand any of this, and no one had answered my question about whether Norman would be all right. I had an idea I would need to double down on helping him fit in. It also occurred to me that ramrod must be a military term, although I had no idea what it meant.