ONE DAY THE SUMMER AFTER HE HAD RETURNED, Albert met a man pushing a wheelchair along the side of the wharf where his sailboat was moored. The sky was blue, almost so blue as to cause sickness, and the seagulls above were like white billowing sails. They screamed at him overhead, and the islands far away were visible, and seemed closer, much closer than they actually were.
The man turned, looked at him a second, with a rather unsettling glance, and turned his wheelchair, that looked too heavy, and pushed it away. The look disturbed him, because he did not know why it was a scathing look, and then wondered if he had just imagined that.
Well, Albert thought, he’s not the only one who can give a scathing look.
He went back to his family’s huge cottage, lay on the cot in the porch, listening to the waves against the breakwater. He thought about his mother. She was now involved in movie writing. Although she hadn’t made a movie yet, she said she was certain she would, that the world would wait for it. She dabbled in it to the tune of some forty thousand dollars, and it and the script itself was left unfinished. He told her to stop spending money, and he meant it—for he had no access to it until he do that bidding about Arron Brook. But he was overseeing it and trying to control her spending.
He was worried about her extravagance, and had proposed a meeting, to try to control the finances, and she had turned pale—her red hair and her pale skin made her look ill.
“You don’t trust or love me—I always sensed it!”
“That is not true at all—I love and trust you—and am here to protect you.”
He felt he had to protect her from herself. The money she spent—she had had one book published by a vanity press, and the copies sat in boxes in the basement—was, he knew, a symptom of a larger problem.
By now Albert had discovered some unpleasant things.
The priest, her brother, had long ago spoken to her, had told her not to interfere with their young sister. But who could stop her. So she married her sister’s fiancé.
Did it in a storm in March, and moved into a small bleak house just after the war.
Soon she was sick of him altogether. He was one of the men who never went to war but danced with all the pretty girls at dances at the Pines, who had shiny pants and black leather shoes, and danced to Benny Goodman under the waving trees. And for all of that he was as innocent as his scrub brush haircut and his heavy winter mittens. He was Albert’s father.
But he was killed soon after the marriage, filled with guilt and self-doubt. Her younger sister had moved on, applied for jobs around the river. It was 1947, and work was starting up.
She was supposed to relay to her sister that a job was available at Raskin’s. But she showed up herself. She took the job and betrayed her sister. And there she met Byron.
But who could blame her—for look what it brought her. It brought her a life none of her relatives could imagine. That is, she had become the widow of a well-known man, kept his papers, and was playing on publishing his biography someday. She had written to ten publishers so far but as yet had not written a word. All of this she had never thought of when he was alive, but now of course things had taken a better slant.
Albert, lying in the porch, listening to the waves, thought of all of this in a vague and uncomfortable way. He felt they were a damaged family and he was a product of it. Of a man with big mittens who danced in the halls when other boys were fighting Hitler. Albert was new, he was rich, and he didn’t need the past if he could help society.
It seemed his mother was drifting somewhere away from him. And he was drifting off to sleep when there was a sudden sharp knock, and a man opened the door. A man he had not seen in some years. In fact it took him a moment or two to realize who it was. He was older and there was a touch of grey in his hair.
“Hello, Albert. You look good, I must say. God, you don’t even tell your friends you’re home.” It was Shane Stroud. He came in so quickly it was as if Albert should be expecting all of it.
There was no way to tell how immediately offensive this man looked to him. His eyes were dark, and one was unable to see into them. His face was delighted always but only at the anxiety of others that his presence seemed to create. He had the same delighted look when he made a young child cry near the opened rink one March night by throwing his skates over the wires above them.
Shane now took something from his pocket and handed it to him. It was a joke—of course, like a sleight of hand or a magician’s trick. It was the date and day of Albert’s arrival home.
“You been back for months,” Shane laughed, pointed his nicotine-smudged finger at him triumphantly as if Albert would share in the humour about his own guilt. “Ahh-haa,” Shane said, as if he had caught him in a lie and could use it to torment him.
In Shane’s life there were moments of sheer and terrible dread he had caused. There was a scar on his cheek that ran to his chin. He was Mel Stroud’s younger and more dangerous brother. The torment always sooner or later started, once he discovered a weakness in a man or woman, and it widened and tightened its grasp on the victim, without Shane being completely conscious of his reasons for it all. He and his brother Mel had known Albert was home. In fact they had been watching him come and go for some time, and speaking to each other about this young man clandestinely.
He now tapped Albert on the left leg in playfulness. The touch had always a benediction to it, as if he was filling the one he touched with grace.
“Oh I meant to, I just got busy,” Albert said, sitting up to light a cigarette. He forced himself to speak as the therapist had spent months teaching him. And he spoke pretty well without becoming tongue-tied. He often remembered the one time he had gone to a certain escort well-known here. Scared, he had thrown the money on the bed and run.
He had in some ways tried to put the past behind him, do new and important things, and now realizing that the past had not gone an inch. That is, no matter how he spoke, the past didn’t listen.
“Busy for months—busy for months. How’s your mom?” Shane asked.
“I—don’t know—she is fine,” Albert said.
“She is mean to me,” Shane said.
“Mean—mean to you how?”
“Oh, I see her out walking down at the boardwalk—I come up to her and says hi and she doesn’t even say nothing. I think she’s mean.”
“No,” Albert said, “no—she doesn’t know how to be mean.”
“Great. Say hello—say Shane says hello. I want to be in that movie if she makes it—saving the seals or the moose, or some such—I could be in a movie like that there. You and I are pals and I thought I’d get a good part in that movie too.”
Albert tried to speak but his mouth failed him.
“Too busy for your pals,” Shane said, disappointed, looking at how young Raskin picked up the book, in panic, and held it before him, holding it up as if to hide. “Too too busy for your pals.” And he watched Raskin as if he was inquiring about something.
Shane looked at him curiously for a long moment. His curiosity was of a man who expects a friend to welcome him and sees in the meeting a terrible strategy.
“Well,” Shane said finally, looking around, “I gotta go. You have a great place here. A cottage—this is bigger than most people’s homes. Bet this cost a pile. How much would this cost ya?”
“Don’t know, I never thought about it. Don’t think about money.”
Shane’s eyes brightened, and his smile came back, and the scar across his cheek reddened slightly. He said: “Never even thought about it—that’s because you don’t have to. Money is no object for you, is it—ha. But this place in nowaday money?” And he sniffed hard and looked over at Albert as if scorning him. “Six hundred thousand easy—and this a cottage—ha.”
Then he stood, and suddenly without hesitation put a letter on the table, and tapped it with a finger, staring at his friend, tapped the letter again. For a moment Albert did not want to read the letter. Reflecting upon all of this later he realized that initially he did not think it was a letter. But he took it from the envelope and unfolded it.
Albert
It is not often I do this, but I feel compelled. I discovered who that girl was—do you know who it was, that girl? Annie Howl. That’s who it was!!! Do you remember?? Annie Howl. What I mean is the girl at the party. Remember that girl said she had a headache and you give her mescaline. My God why did you ever do something so dangerous to a little girl?? They said the autopsy says she was violated or whatever like that there. But so far everyone is being quiet. We have our reputations to think of. All of us do!! Mel don’t want nothing to do with this—I mean it’s a murder—so he wants to see you. Maybe you should come clean on this or we are all in trouble.
Inside the folded letter was a card:
“Arnie and Arlo, Consultants.”
Young Raskin did not know what that card did mean.
It had never happened like that. Never, never—she was willing and it was all in fun. But no—of course it had—that is, he had given her mescaline—and he had attempted to make love to her when they were alone.
He took her to the greenhouse, to the row of plants, to the smell of midnight, to the soil in jars that his stepfather had innocently worked with to save himself from memories of war. You see it was pure bedlam everywhere and he felt he had a right to do what he did.
He had started to undo her clothes, and he pushed his hand between her legs.
“Why are you naked?” he remembered her saying.
“Because,” he whispered, “you should be naked too—can’t you see your clothes are afire?”
He didn’t know why he had ever ever ever said what he did; she would become hysterical. He did not know this would happen. He put his hand over her mouth, and became frightened. He offered her money to be quiet. He offered her a new bicycle.
And he had thought it must have all been forgotten by now. He suddenly thought of his mother—her universal mind, as frivolous as it was—and how she had an article on the universal mind—that a universal mind respected women, and that she relied upon young new thinking men like him.
“My son is the kind of man women need—he is an advocate for mental health and well being—”
This article had actually been published. Poor Carmel didn’t know that many people scorned or laughed at these articles.
Carmel was frightened of a man named Shane, worried that he would come back. It was beginning to bother her to distraction. And now he knew why. Suddenly he knew why. When he was away Shane must have harassed her.
She told Albert that he had sent her two letters two months before—she had hidden them, crunching them up. He told her to forget about it.
So this is what the party had caused, and he thought suddenly of the innocence of Joanie Donaldson’s party, and wondered why had they crashed it?
“I will take care of Shane Stroud” he had told his mother. He thought of Professor Dykes and how he had run away that night, how he and the editor of Floorboards had run. Terrified of the very things they proposed in private.
He did not know that the man he saw in the wheelchair was Annie Howl’s brother, the one who jumped in the water in a vain attempt to try and save her, smashing his legs on a rock. He did not know the man had been over these years investigating the death of his sister. That he would never give it up. That is, he too like Albert would be a professor, and teach at the same university. That the university itself would become terribly divided over a thousand different issues oscillating to a fever pitch, and he Albert would be determined to be on the right side.
The day had turned cold, and an east wind came as he walked down the shore. Sand blew up in the wind and hit his face.
Mel Stroud was sitting on a log on the beach, swiping at the sand gnats about him. He looked at Albert with a terrifying self-righteousness that lasted but a moment, but cut into Albert’s heart.
“My brother just wants to do what’s right,” Mel said. Then Mel spoke of the liquorice he was chewing, and you could hardly get good liquorice and asked Albert if he wanted some. He held up a piece and nodded with his mouth full.
“Why—no, thank you. I mean, what has come up?”
“Well, Darren Howl is asking a lot of questions about his sister—you know, Annie Howl. Shane is some worried. He still lives with my mother—he had a girlfriend but it didn’t pan out—and he is broke. He thinks of Annie Howl and he gets broken up and cries. What if mom finds out? He wanted to go and talk to your mother about it—I think he might have even wrote her something like a letter, about getting some money for the Howls—that’s it, you see—he wants some money for the Howls.”
Mel looked stern, even more self-righteous, as he spoke, for he wanted young Raskin to know this was no joke—things must be done to alleviate their worry. Young Raskin suddenly became aware of the situation he was in. And the situation his mother was now in. He tried not to panic. But he suddenly realized, this was always the position he was going to be in.
“A letter, my mother, talk about it—no,” Albert said. He looked out at the bay water and spit again, and then tried to light a cigarette in the wind. “I can give them some money.”
“No, that won’t do,” Mel said simply. “This is going to be between us.”
“He wouldn’t go to that family, would he?”
“I told him not to, but he is upset—he has a bad conscience about it—and he’s dead broke—so he keeps thinking if he could get some money he would give it to them as charity or something like that.”
“I plan to give him a thousand dollars,” Albert blurted. “If he wasn’t so impatient he would have known that today. I am writing him a cheque tomorrow—you tell him that, okay?”
Mel shrugged, perhaps at the amount offered, and the wind blew sand and old seaweed across the flat low tide. There were sand gnats in the hot seaweed, and he said: “Oh—that’s the Frontenac—” pointing lazily to the freighter far out in the waves, as if he was distracted and had not heard. In fact he was already thinking of other things to ask, and would begin to compete with his brother.
Young Raskin walked back to his cottage, not even saying hello to all the people he passed by. Not even looking at the girls in their skimpy bathing suits.
Albert did not write the cheque. He thought of going to his uncles but they had just paid for all his time away, and he had been on an allowance with them. Besides they had heard he had gone to meetings. They weren’t sure what meetings—but they did know—there were meetings.
He knew right near him in a bank was thousands and thousands he could not yet access until he do something at Arron Brook. Then he would personally have about three hundred thousand—plus what would come to him from Raskin Enterprises at a certain time.
But now everything was tied up. Mel and Shane and how he had ever met them began to plague him.
He went to his mother, but just as he was about to ask she told him Shane had asked her for a lot of money.
“They never would if Byron was here,” she said. “He would have handled it like a man. Now I have no one.”
“Well you have me,” he said, “so don’t worry.”
But he felt sick about all of this coming so suddenly upon them.
“I will phone the police.”
“No you can’t,” he said quietly, “please mom—you can’t. We are in trouble if we do!” Then more forcefully he almost shouted: “You can’t—if you want me to be anything in this life—anything—you can’t. Didn’t you want to become writer in residence—how will that happen?!”
And he scared her. He truly scared her.
They were in the huge comfortable den with the huge fireplace and the three solid bookshelves.
“Why?”
For moments he was silent.
“The naked girl,” he said finally.
He sat with her until dark, and all the memories of that night came back to each in a different way.
He tried to be firm.
He did not pay the money and twice Mel Stroud looked at him with sad disappointment when he passed by, in his car with the white bucket seats.
I should go to Constable Donaldson. You might not thinks so but I’s do think this is some kind of case of rape and murder—and I am scared to my bones.
That was a note put inside his cottage porch door two weeks later. With this note was a picture of Annie Howl that had been with an article written by Darren Howl and published in the local paper about his ongoing investigation.
He went to meet them. They spoke in secret. Mel said he was upset, for Shane’s sake. But his voice sounded both certain and cruel.
“I will pay you once,” Raskin said.
Dykes was expelled from University Campus and was living in a house with young radicals, and for some reason, some pique against Albert, they wouldn’t let him in or tell their revolutionary father that he was there. That is because some two years before Dykes said he, Albert, should be ambitious enough to rob his uncles, and use the money for projects the group was interested in. Dykes was disappointed that this revolutionary act had never happened.
“Remember Stalin’s robbery of the bank in Tbilisi?” Dykes said. ‘That’s the kind of man I’m after.”
“Right on man,” the young woman said.
Dykes, by the way, had never robbed or spent his own money, and was in litigation to get his pension.
So at this time Albert was turned away, and as he left he could hear Dykes laughing at some inane joke the young lady told.
He went and asked his uncles for the money. First they were not sure who he was. He had been away, and he had thinned and his teeth were no longer crooked.
“You want money—well let me ask you this—who are you?”
“I’m your nephew—your great-nephew—I’m Albert.”
“Oh yes—of course you are—glad to see you,” Dexter said, “You’ve done something to your face—spruced it up.”
“Happy days are here again,” Chester said. “But we just can’t give you the money.”
“No we shan’t just give you the money.”
“You can work for us—we’ll hire you.”
So they gave him a job.
“I have to get up at seven in the morning for God sake,” he told his mom. “Then I have to wear a hard hat!”
“Yes—well if you wear a hard hat too long your aura will go—it will.”
He went to work with a lunch bucket and a pair of workboots, and a hard hat.
All day long he had to change lightbulbs or clean couplings on pipes.
He couldn’t stand it—nor could Mel stand how they were left waiting.
Things were getting desperate whenever he saw Shane’s car parked outside his house.
So then one summer night, about two weeks after this, Albert was caught trying to take some money from Raskin’s safe in the main office of Raskin Enterprises. Since he hadn’t written the cheque it had gone from one thousand to three thousand. For the dire thing, the terrible tarot card they held, was that Darren Howl had advertised in the paper a three-thousand-dollar reward for any information. It was in fact all the money Darren Howl had at that moment.
The paper’s notice read: “Please contact Constable Becky Donaldson, 677-6767, with any information.”
Albert should have gone to the police—to Constable Becky Donaldson.
But he couldn’t bring himself to. People were thinking of him as a new force for the Raskins. A new voice.
He had been called by Doris Simpson—who wrote a gossip column:
The young Raskin, hope for our community and our planet.
Yes—the entire planet.
So in trying to hang on, there just might be a trip into hell.
The idea of that man in the wheelchair, who they informed him was Darren, Annie Howl’s older brother, terrified him. The sight of the wheelchair disturbed him.
Why does he need to push it around like he does to remind me? Raskin often thought.
Because he was put into a wheelchair in trying to save his sister.
His mother hid in her house—spoke about moving away. That is, Shane had proposed to her in one of his letters, and told her how he knew she had been “taken by him, and he by her.” He wrote, “What we is, is like two little bitty peas in a pod that’s what we are. Remember when we smooched right in the yard—ha—and I even for a second touched your—you know what—ha.”
So Albert was in a bind, not only for himself but for his mother.
Then the worst thing happened that night.
He was caught taking the money from the huge lumbering safe with “Raskin Brothers” in faded letters on the doors, which had been left open accidentally that afternoon.
He tried to explain it all to the cleaning lady who had caught him, and he tried to stop her from going to tell his uncles. He stood at the door, with his hand on the crease of the ornate cabinet.
But the little grey-haired woman stood before him. Her eyes peered at him from small puffs of skin, and her cheeks were puffed like a chipmunk’s. Her feet were noticeable because she walked so quietly and they were so small. She was only four foot eleven tall. Yet she stared at him out of those watery eyes, and her little mouth grimaced in amazement at what she had just caught him doing. Putting money down his pants.
He stared at her, at her small homely body, with a rag in her left hand and a can of Pledge in her right. She had come in to dust the table, and he suddenly remembered she did that every second day.
In the centre of the room was that military field table, a beautiful maple table that was used as an officer’s dining table in the field; it had suited members of the Raskin family well from the time of the Boer War on. That is where the documents of pension payouts and other obligations had been left.
In July 1939 a German ship flying the swastika left with asbestos ore for Hitler’s Germany. The last shipment to that country for seven years. The last payment came from some officious clerk in some small Hamburg office. Dated July 18, 1939. That was in the books too.
He studied all of this, rifling through his uncles’ papers, to see if he could force his uncles to pay his mother all the money he believed she was owed.
There was a late nineteenth-century couch and matching chairs sitting in front of the window, and a three-tier chandelier shone down over the room.
Albert told the elderly cleaning lady that she was the guilty party. That he had caught her stealing, saying: “You? I didn’t think you’d be grabbing at the funds.”
The little Pentecostal woman almost screeched: “What are you saying, are you blaming me?”
“Well I don’t see anyone else here to blame, do I?”
Dykes told him that to change the world one must not ever admit any wrong. So he said:
“I did nothing—the door was ajar because you were pilfering. I’m trying to keep the money safe, that is all.”
She frantically hurried past him down the stairs and across to the house, and inflamed by his terrible words informed his uncles because she knew she was powerless against this young Raskin man if she did not. She looked distraught and held the rag in her left hand and her Pledge in her right, as if in a way these objects sanctified her.
His uncles told her to go back and finish the room.
“Dust up and polish,” Chester said.
“Yes, polish and dust it up,” Dexter made clear.
His uncles had to get up and come out to the office in their pyjamas, with big cigars in their mouths. Confronted by them, Albert still tried to blame her.
The Raskins had known about his mother’s family too. Those ancestors who were supposed to have stolen a pot of gold lost somewhere on a ship out of the Bay of Biscay. They had tracked her life before she met Byron.
“I catch a housekeeper trying to take money and you suspect me?” he asked.
“I’ve known her for thirty-five years!” Chester said, meaning the cleaning lady. “She had a mastectomy and still took care of her crippled niece.”
“Crippled niece no bigger than a little bun—little as a pea.”
“That’s why she took it,” Albert said, “for her midget crippled niece—that was what she just told me. It was all for some dwarf crippled niece or some such.”
“Her crippled niece died seven years ago,” Dexter said.
“And we paid for the funeral,” Chester added.
Albert tried to leave, but they grabbed him and a bundle of hundred-dollar bills fell from under his shirt and landed on the floor. He stared at the money, and then looked at them, then all of them looked at the money again.
There were no charges laid. But he was told not to come back to the mine for a year.
He tried to get the money on his credit cards, but they had been suspended. Mel had accompanied him to the bank. Had waited for him outside, looked at him eagerly when he came out, almost wantonly. Looked displeased and shocked at not getting the money there and then.
“Goddamn we’re in a pickle,” Mel said. “A real pickle here.”
Then he stopped him and looked at him almost in bereavement saying:
“What are we going to do, Albert—what are we going to do?”
Young Raskin went back to his house, to his basement apartment, and seeing Aleister Crowley’s maxim “Do what thou wilt” was overcome with anger and fear.
He sold his stereo and records to a friend, and sold his waterbed to a young woman and his guitar to a teenager to pay off the debt that no one spoke about. Now, he thought, it will all be forgotten.
“Of course, it’s forgotten—it had nothing to do with me in the first place.”
Shane, Mel said, was the bad apple.
“Oh he’s crazy—Shane is absolutely nuts, don’t ever let him near your mother, he said he was going to ask her on a date. He’ll end up bedding her,” he said proudly. “Wait and see.”
Then he said:
“You shouldn’t have asked him to your party—he’s so unpredictable we almost never ask him to ours.”
Albert Raskin went home, venting very much to his mother about campaigns to relieve their poverty.
“See what you did,” he said in a frustrated moment. “Now Shane wants to go on a date with you.”
“Oh! A date with me?”
“Yes. Take you to a good restaurant.”
“What restaurant?”
“I don’t know. Some restaurant.”
“I will die first—”
“But—” He looked at her. “Why did you flirt with him? Why did you let him kiss you! It was like watching a car wreck.”
She said she did not know—said it was a new age, and he, Albert, had talked her into it, talked her into wearing flowers in her hair.
“Now he’ll tell everyone you are in love with him. He said he is going to star in your movie.”
“No!”
“Yes—yes, yes, yes!”
“Who does he want to play?”
“Who does he want to play? Who the hell cares—he’s a lunatic!”
His mother suddenly changed the subject. She spoke about his commitment to change—that in fact unlike so many other young men, he was a saint.
She knew why she couldn’t call the police. It was because of that young naked girl fleeing in terror down the road.
The great adventure, whatever that was, and whoever it was for, seemed to be now over.