AS THE YEARS PASSED, BYRON RASKIN SPENT MONTHS and months away, was seen wandering alone through small towns in France. He did not go home often, he did not see his wife very much, did not care to. She had betrayed him in some unseen way. And that was that.
Still, he did not believe in divorce, and that was no fault of hers.
He was told what they were doing in the grand house he had built for her in 1957. She, people let him know, was now something of an intellectual. She had friends from the university and sat on a committee for the art gallery. Yet she still dressed in wide-brimmed hats and gaudy-coloured skirts, and laughed far too loudly at things that were held in reverence. Remembrance Day unfortunately being one.
She now lived a very different life than him, took courses, spoke about very wise things up at the university, read wise books, mainly of the new wave variety—new books on new religions and new diet fads. And in these books she saw many women like herself, so therefore saw her own plight far more than the plight of others. She was at the forefront of change. And she told her son he must be as well. She pushed him into things, in order to make him known as her champion.
She researched her family, found out she was a Goya, a great dynasty of ancient people. She began to write a column for the paper.
A touring opera company came in the hot August of 1965 and told her she had to leave their rehearsal because she was asking too many silly questions.
The years did pass by.
He heard that she and her son formed a group called The Wise Ears Thinking Club and held meetings at their house.
“For only the best minds,” she said.
She was now the woman hating war and all its ramifications at the very moment of protests against wars and all its ramifications. Her son, depressed, somewhat overweight, was behind her in all of it.
Her hair was now becoming orange in the sun, her chin was now pointed and her eyes narrow with blue eyeliner; and all of this great life had come to her because it was whispered by those who knew her long ago that she had betrayed her younger sister.
She never thought of it as she drove her blue Cadillac up the dirt road past Arron Brook all the way to Taintville to visit her relatives. But in fact in some way she always thought of it, and tried to succeed her way out of it.
Her son often ridiculed but had no idea of the military, no concept of the Second World War. He wore bellbottoms that were too long, and wide belts that did not fit. He was picked on at school and tried to fit in by buying things for friends.
Still and all he was a youngster doing so to protect his mother. He stuttered at times, or couldn’t pronounce letters, and she said it was her husband and his uncles’ fault. They had continually bullied him into speechlessness. This was not true, but it did not matter. After a while it was spoken about as the only thing that could be true. So he was sent to speech therapists for two to three weeks in the summer. When he came home he could speak, as long as he deliberated on what he was saying.
His mother blamed everyone, and said his uncles put things in his food to make him speak like that.
Over the years his speech impediment lessened, he became less nervous, and his mother then said it was a sign of aristocracy. It may have been.
He was small, overweight and sad, and wanted to make his mark. His room had things he thought would attract girls, like waterbeds and hash pipes. But coming onto eighteen he still did not have one—that is, a girl.
Byron’s wife had been a Goya, so her son, Albert, was also a Goya, that is, their ancient relations were the Goya clan, who had escaped from Southern France, and it had always been part of the young boy’s nature, this semi-aristocratic forbearance. It was a lark on those summer days to giffle at Byron’s uncles many times in inappropriate ways, and often when they were speaking, and interrupting each other, one could see the look of hilarity on his soft face as they spoke.
“I am out to change society,” she told Byron once during an argument at the house.
He said nothing for a long while. He went up to his study, came out, and looking down the stairs at her replied: “Yes, and it will not be for the better.”
It was during this time all the past was past, and the world was changing—and she, now in her late forties, believed in the change, and needed it, before it swept her away. Vietnam and love occupied her in the afternoons.
The last time her son asked him for a favour was one day he couldn’t button his shirt.
“Could you please help—” he said.
It might have been the last time they actually met as father and son.
Byron came and went without trying to disturb or notice them too much. He still wrote to the boy a series of instructional letters:
“Think for yourself in these matters, and conduct yourself well. Honour follows virtue like a shadow.”
But no one paid attention to poor Albert Raskin unless he paid for it. So he found himself doing more and more outrageous things in order to have people’s attention, trying desperately for their respect.
“Would you like a movie—I can take you to a movie—I can take all of you to a movie—I can get the money from Mom.”
For a while naturalists were a part of their group, young forestry majors devoted to the idea of preserving the forests and influencing Carmel about her in-laws’ tracts of land, tailings ponds, clear-cutting she had no knowledge of, spills and other things, small amounts of cyanide within certain waters that had been flushed through certain rocks, the idea of toxicity.
In the huge mahogany-walled den she held her discussions on Tuesday nights, and these young men, “talented and so kind,” were invited. She had a notepad. She took notes on whatever they said. So she was soon trying to solve problems of her husband’s company that saddened and worried her. People would phone to tell her of certain blunders Byron’s uncles had made, certain things they had neglected to do, and she told people: “No fear, no fear. I will soon be having a meeting with the minister.”
No one was ever sure what minister it was.
This happened at the moment he had come home to stay. At first he did not go back to the house, feeling after so much time away he did not have the right. He walked by it late at night. He sometimes drove by it in the day.
But he listened to the stories emanating about that house, and felt something mimicking and perhaps even pathetic was happening.
He realized she was inner-lit with the idea of correcting his family’s mistakes.
“I am planning a book,” she told her friends, “about all the right things. First of all I think most women are prophetic.”
This became known to him a week later. She told people she would go to the river, seclude herself for a few months, and write a book about his family, and how she—in a way—was the new prophet, here to adjudicate the parting of the sea.
That he did not see this as part of her nature that very first day she asked for a cigarette was something he wondered about. For now he saw it all clearly. But you see, as he explained to Bell those years before, he had seen it.
That is, he saw the very first day he had met her, far more clearly than he admitted, how she held the paper cup, how her eyes fastened on him in a predatory way. If she had hated them so long and harshly, why did she take the job with them when she was alone?
So one night he went to the house, uninvited guest in his own home, and walked in through the back basement door. Here he found himself in her son’s bedroom and living quarters. He stared at the pictures of rock stars on the walls, the smell of hashish in the small tin ashtrays, the shirts all of a different colour, and he felt saddened he hadn’t helped.
He had not seen either of them in two years. He was a stranger in his own home.
He walked up the carpeted stairs and came into the hallway, and stared at a painting of mother and son, done a year or so before by the artist they knew. He looked at it, the closeness of the two, hands just touching, the boy’s face pudgy, and somehow surly; the mother’s eyes dulled by the dabbling of the paint. The pearls he had bought her celebrating their engagement on her neck. Showing that they, mother and son, were schemers in some sense. Jealous that he was not in the painting. He heard her voice suddenly:
“I’ve long said something must be done with all of it.”
She was in the den with her group of young boys, poets and artists. Yes, he forgot it was Tuesday. He barged through the door.
She looked at him startled, as if it was a mirage or a joke, as if he himself should realize he was a mirage. She had aged, was thinner. She wore comfortable slippers on her feet, but garish lipstick.
Her reddish hair was orange like the sunlight and she had a cigarette in her mouth. She looked at him in surprise, and also, after the shock, with aversion. He had interrupted her life. It was as if he ran into a place thinking a great upheaval was taking place, to see people in quiet repose drinking tea.
Too many of them came to these events just to see the house. To be inside the house of a Raskin. To be in a house that the owner almost never entered. To walk the floors, open the French doors, lounge about the patio, walk out to the large greenhouse among the flowers. This was revolution, but it was done with upper-middle-class decorum, soft evenings under the copse of elms. In fact it had to be, in order for them to come and be party to it. They were seen in his study going over his books, seen in the library next to it, with its bookshelves, chessboard and globe of the world. Two of his first editions—of Hemingway—were taken. Yet most of them said they disliked Hemingway. What did Hemingway know?
There was a certain hierarchy involved. Certain women she had gone to school with who came to see her. Relatives who turned up and cluttered about as if they owned his Scotch but looked pained when his name was mentioned, because he was the disappointment. But even they would not be accepted for long, and after drinking his Scotch and looking over his wardrobe—one of them stealing one of his expensive jackets—they were sent on their way.
There were many students who were entertaining and had deep concerns for the world. And one night he saw a boy, sitting all alone, listening to it all, with pale skin and deep expressionless eyes, overweight, and he trembled slightly, realizing it was her son. Who he had adopted as his son.
He had not seen him since he had been home.
The editor of Floorboards, the student magazine, was often there, speaking of publishing some of Carmel’s “trains of thought.” She told her husband the man was brilliant and had suffered.
“Ah, I see,” Byron said.
That was the greatest of compliments—to be brilliant and to have suffered.
To Byron his son seemed an outcast in all of this—yes, even made light of as a lightweight by those editors and poets and brilliant philosophy students—until he suddenly spoke up one night and said he would have a party.
“A party?”
“Yes. You want something different, then we will have a party.” He looked at them all with a kind of disdain, as if they had made fun of him too long. He smiled as if to tell them that this party would be the real party. There was a certain sustained silence.
“You’re going to have a party? You?”
“Wait and see,” he said.
If you want a party I will give you one, his eyes said. You think I am a lightweight—then come to my party, his eyes said, and his eyes admonished them while he smiled. For perhaps the first time, he felt a certain power surge through his body. His small white hands with ornaments that didn’t fit and his watch that was too loose on his wrist.
He spoke about a party a young girl had had, a Donaldson girl, who tried to have a party for her graduation. She had sent out little handwritten invitations.
“I promise my party won’t be like that,” he said.
This was the first time he had ever spoken in the group. He was in fact quite shy, because of the impediment he had struggled with, and he was, as they knew, quite rich because of his stepfather. So he was an oddity to them. Especially when he spoke about helping the poor, which he simply said because a million others were saying it.
“All this will change,” he said.
There was a party he had gone to a few years before, at Donaldson’s house. They had become bored, and started to wreck the house, with Joanie’s sister Becky Donaldson and young Clara Bell (her father worked for his family) trying to stop them, and they left and ran when Joanie’s father came home. Yes, things got out of hand, but it was all in fun.
One of Albert’s friends tipped over a lawn ornament of a guardian angel right in front of the girls and ran down the lane shouting obscenities.
A boy with the chip dip he had stolen, another boy with a plate of cold cuts and carrot sleeves, showed up later at Raskin’s. Then others crowded into the house, their white faces beaming. They had stolen some records.
One of the records they stole had been playing when Albert’s group arrived. It was “Hello Mary Lou” by the Everly Brothers.
He remembered the absurd and outmoded little record player Clara Bell and Becky Donaldson had placed in the corner so people could dance.
Later upon reflection he thought that ruining that party was not as brave as he initially imagined. However, his party would be. That is, brave.
This Clara Bell was Mr. Bell’s daughter. Her first cousin was Eva Mott, the girl Mrs. Mott was pregnant with the night of her wedding.
But before his party happened, Carmel declared she was writing a book, and so was interviewed about the book she was going to write. She was a real writer, did push-ups every morning to raise her temperature, and intended to seclude herself in a room. The editor of Floorboards magazine published the article. “Fed up with male convention, a courageous woman speaks her mind about woodlots and streams.”
Carmel said it was the first article of its type ever in the history of the province. Yet it was exactly like a thousand other articles about courageous women speaking their minds.
These were the early sentiments about pollution and industry that would evolve into grave discontent over the next number of years. Many academics would apply to get funds to do research to write similar articles. And where would some of these academics get this money? From the endowment of five million given to Saint Michael’s by Raskin Enterprises. One demanded that if the money were given to him, he wanted no “overlord” interference from “those Raskin brothers.”
The day after the article was published, Byron came into the den. She was alone. He had not spoken to her in a week or more. He said—his voice shaking slightly, as was his right hand, which held the article—“This is my family. You are mocking what we have lived and worked for. What allows you this house, this comfort, these paintings on your wall?”
But she was thinking she had hit a mark and made a wonderful impression, and believed he was jealous.
“I don’t see you in so many magazines,” she said.
Byron planned to leave the wife the house, and moved away before he struck her. He had hit her before, and was in agony lest he do it again. Neither of them knew the deception that would be fostered on each of them by each other, until they had married in a small gilded courthouse at the end of the street.
“Oh, your family is so chauvinist. They haven’t dealt with a woman like me,” she told him one day, as she walked behind him.
“Leave me alone,” he kept saying. “For God’s sake, leave me alone.”
“Well, my son is not really a Raskin, that’s what I’m pleased about.”
That’s when he turned and struck her. The shock and hurt in her eyes at that moment never left him, not for a moment. The worst of it, the boy was standing in the corner of the den and saw it.
He told her now, shaking and holding the article, that it was improper. To do this to old men who had not done anything to her.
“You are so old-fashioned, improper. I am simply following my conscience—you often told me I should—and now that I do, you are upset, aren’t you.”
She told him a certain professor said she was very forward thinking.
So he had the trust fund for her son; the money for his wife was intact. His only stipulation was that her son help the people of Arron Brook. He felt this would give him a motive to be honourable.
On November 11 he went to Hammerstone’s house on the reserve. He did this whenever he was home on Remembrance Day because Mr. Hammerstone had fought alongside him from Juno Beach.
There they waited for him in the little white house at the end of nowhere, Melissa the daughter, Gordon the son, Mrs. Francis the sister, his wife Donalda, and Mr. Hammerstone too, all waiting for him to transport them up to the Remembrance Day ceremony, all in their poppies in a country where they had been displaced and dispossessed. The wind shook the house—the plates shook in the wind, the cramped little place was almost barren—and there they waited hopefully, their poppies shining upon their hearts.
Carmel refused to go onto the reserve and therefore never came with him.
He had for some years provided a taxi twice a week for Melissa to go to the convent and take piano lessons under the tutelage of Sister Camilla Arsenault, of the Sisters of Notre Dame. That is why he had danced with her at the wedding, but now she was remote, her lessons stopped, her brilliant talent halted, and yes, the wind would blow across their little tortured world.
So Byron had things in order and his passport in his valise. He would fly to Montreal and from there to Valencia. Then he would travel down the coast and buy a villa near Alicante. They would not find him, and he would live alone.
The only problem was Carmel came into the living room and became aware of blood spots on her new carpet. She followed them through to the grand dining room, walking gingerly on her new high heels. (Her new priorities did not negate her constant wardrobe improprieties.)
Her husband was seated on a piano stool, playing with the metronome, thinking of little Melissa and her extraordinary talent, and that nothing more seemed able to be done. He had begun the week before to bleed from the mouth. He would become a casualty of the asbestos mine that had kept his concerned and forward-thinking wife in furs.
A grand feeling came over Carmel when she read her name in the paper. She felt she would have more influence than all the writers at UNB.