IF YOU ASKED MOST OF THE MEN IN PRIVATE WHAT THEY thought of her they would simply say, those who were open to it, that Ms. Sackville was both deceptive and prone to grudges that she carried along with her smile and her quite bright nature.
She wore big square glasses and had her hair in a bun. She had a long silver pin thrust into that bun, and she was known to have hauled it out against some ruffians who made fun of her one night.
“Disperse,” she said, holding that pin between two fingers of her closed fist. The ruffians were startled not only by her defiance but by how her hair fell lovingly over one cheek and gave her a moment of true beauty.
She wore long grey skirts and small black boots. She had a brooch on her blouse that depicted a maiden carrying spring water. Of course she was intolerant now that intolerance was allowed as a matter of liberation. But no one should be measured simply by that. At her bravest moments she was utterly fascinating.
Still, she simply believed Ms. Bell was having an affair with Torry Peterson, because she thrived on illicitness, and loved gossip in private meetings. That, and other things, got her expelled from the convent.
Why was Ms. Bell disliked by Ms. Sackville? They had had an argument one day when Clara was visiting her husband. Right in the hallway by the photocopier and people gathered to listen.
Albert told Ms. Sackville that she had won the argument but both knew this wasn’t at all true.
“Oh, you won it fair and square. Forget it—you won it.” But he could not get away with that lie.
The day of the argument Clara had simply said: “You are myopically self-interested, callow—and you will not stop until someone dies in this town.”
Albert said, at the end of the tirade, “Never mind her.”
Until one night last year he saw Clara on television. Bell was the lawyer defending a certain Professor Eliot Slaggy, in a civil suit against the university and Ms. Sackville herself. There were seven people named in the suit. The main person was Ms. Sackville.
It caused a furore over the entire campus. Sackville kept to herself, and sent private messages to Raskin and a couple of her fellow professors that she thought she could trust. They must come out now and support her. She worked late into the night alone. She told people she was in the fight of her life. Albert’s name was mentioned as having been an early supporter of Sackville. He tried desperately to hide one moment and be on her side the next.
Because now people were saying she should lose her position or retire.
Clara wanted Eliot Slaggy reinstated with four years’ back pay. Over the next six months the tribunal was disbelieved, the account of the assault was read in court, former students now gone on in life did not come forward, and Sackville had to take the stand.
The dean and the president had both retired, and both had re-evaluated the case now that they had. And as Sackville said to Raskin with a curt smile: “Both of them bald, and both ball-less.”
Three other people were called on behalf of Sackville who were now living in other provinces. All of them sent written statements saying they were not at the party and did not remember the incident. In fact Professor Sackville did not fully remember the incident either.
This was a grave crime, Bell maintained, but one not perpetrated by Professor Slaggy.
Little Eliot was reinstated with four years’ back pay, and went around the department ignored and apologizing to everyone. Sackville would not sit in the same room with him. Her students shunned him with their heads down, moved their seats in the cafeteria if he sat too close.
She said to her students, “I, like a thousand other women, have been victimized by policy.”
No matter that, he dedicated a poem to her, called “We are Wise to Forgive”:
We are wise to forgive with the days turning cold
With all that has happened
All that unfolds,
We are wise to forgive
Before we grow old.
So forgive me, my child,
As I forgive you
As the days turn to darkness
It is all we can do.
The poem was left in her essay box in room 199.
Bell’s husband was in the Department of Criminology. He rarely if ever saw the English professors and had little to say to the sociologists, but once when Albert passed his door he waved and asked him in. Albert felt obligated to answer the request by a man who was disabled. And he went in and sat down.
“McLeish wants to start a war with your uncles. Are you with him on that?”
“No—not with McLeish so much, but with the war maybe.”
He said he knew his uncles, and knew much of the problems and though he cared for them now had to stand firm.
“But do you think that when everyone leaves them when they are being blockaded, now is the time to stand firm against two elderly men?”
Albert flushed and said nothing.
Howl then asked: “Did you ever know, Albert, a girl named Mary Lou Toomey?”
“The Toomeys—oh, something about them. Pretty sorry lot. No idea who they are, really. Lived in squalor. Feel bad people have to live in squalor. My whole life has been pitched against squalor.”
Howl nodded. “She had a child when she was fifteen or sixteen.”
“Who?”
“Mary Lou.”
“Terrible.” Here Albert shook his head, lowered his eyes.
“But what should have happened to those boys?”
“What boys?” Albert asked.
“The boys who got her so terribly drunk she fell asleep and then stripped her naked, and had their fun with her—or some of them, not all of them. I can only imagine a few of the youngsters—some of them wouldn’t have been able to get it up, some of them wouldn’t have been able to complete the act. Kids themselves. Don’t think I don’t feel some empathy for some of them too—but I have to ask this question of you. It has taken me a long while to get up the gumption to ask you.”
“It did? Get up the gumption?”
“Yes.”
Albert looked at poor Howl sitting in his chair, one of his hands twisted, and a lever to ride him about.
“Why do you ask, Howl?”
“You know, I don’t know why I ask, really. It is just conversation, I think. Maybe it is time we had a conversation about what happened some time ago.”
Again Raskin found nothing to say.
“I am teaching a course called Higher Virtue in Our Legal Affairs next semester—I am writing a book on it, with the help of Clara. You know Clara, my wife?”
“Oh yes, of course. Nice lady.”
“You think?”
“Oh yes—wonderful lady.” Raskin flushed.
“She got six hundred dollars.”
“Who—Clara? For what?”
“No, little Mary Lou Toomey. Six hundred dollars from the parents of those boys, the standard payment for devil-may-care. And that’s all it was, to the boys.”
“No!”
“Yes.”
“Six hundred—that’s all?”
“Yes. Back in the day this was still the accepted level of response, you see.”
“Horrible!”
Then Albert spied his book on the asbestos mining, which he had published the year before, along with his friend Ms. Sackville, and said: “Can I sign this for you?”
“Oh—if you would like. It does have certain wrong—very wrong things about Premier Bell in it.”
“But fair, I think.”
“You think it’s fair? I’m not sure it came close to being fair. He cannot answer once he is dead. And you seem to make yourself as important to the province as he was.”
“I do—?”
“I think so.”
“Not at all—”
“Well then, your book does one thing—it holds a light to a kind of voguish academic thinking that usually hides in classrooms in front of impressionable young students, in faculty lounges, or always in like-minded journals of higher thinking where academics publish each other to earn points for tenure. That’s what I thought reading it.”
“It’s an independent book, Howl.”
“Oh come now—if it was, Ted and Bill and Nancy and Kent wouldn’t have invited you to dinner—they would have treated you like they treated the Nova Scotian. You see, you are being played, Raskin—by all of them—McLeish and the rest—even Sackville a little—they need you with them—just like—well like—”
“Like who?”
“Like Mel and Shane—you might know them, I’m not sure.”
“Mel and Shane—not really.”
“Well you have a name—the Raskin name—so anyway in a way—you are being used.”
Raskin thought this over, looked at Howl’s twisted feet which seemed to mitigate what he had just said, and shrugged.
“No one uses me,” he said.
At any rate Dykes and some of the more revolutionary students liked the book. But still he knew, secretly, he had hurt people. He remembered that after he had written it, or Sackville did, standing over him, peering down over his shoulder, with her big square glasses, directing him on what and what not to write—how articles called him brave and level-headed, but one review in the paper was not too kind.
“The body snatcher,” the review called him, “digging up the bones of our greatest premier to promote his career.”
He told Clara that the book was not about the premier but about the Raskins. He telephoned his uncles to tell them the book wasn’t about them but about the awful premier.
His uncles pretended they hadn’t heard a word about it.
“What a book—well isn’t that something—a book—good for you—a book—what did them rock ’n’ roll fellas say: ‘Paperback writer’—well that’s something—good for you!!”
But he knew he had hurt them terribly. He knew he had hurt Clara’s family terribly too. He hadn’t meant to—no he had not meant to. In fact he had always hurt his friends—he hadn’t meant to—it was just that way. He’d always thought he was brighter than those his money allowed him to feel superior to. He didn’t mean to be. People like him could say grand and wondrous things and turn on anyone in a moment. Sackville and he interviewed people and then wrote what they wanted. He didn’t mean that either.
Howl said: “Yes—please do sign it.”
So he picked it up, thought for a moment what he should say, and wrote: For you, Howl, a man of many parts, Albert T. Raskin PhD.
And as he was signing the book Howl kept speaking: “Yes, it was a different age, so she was left all alone—except for one poor man, who brought her to his home and claimed the child as his own. The others all fled. That is, the parents of those boys, affluent and well—well-adjusted. I mean, so many people here talk about being well-adjusted, seeking a new road. A new world. I sometimes wonder what that ever had to do with the human soul.”
“Human soul—what do you mean?” Albert said, closing the book slowly and putting it back on the desk.
“Thanks,” Howl said, about the book, and continued quickly: “Well, who had the most integrity? Who had the most love? That deranged man—and he is a tad deranged—who took the child in, or the parents of those boys? That is what I am asking in my course. I am asking if integrity in the matter of human dealings will destroy the need for courts.”
“You are saying that in your course?”
“Yes.”
“That’s very strange—very strange—”
“Yes, I know. But are there greater lessons to be learned?”
“What lessons? Don’t understand.”
“The lessons—well, about the seeds of right and wrong, not in the law but in our very souls.”
“In our souls—here you go with souls again. It doesn’t work like that.”
“It doesn’t?”
“No, never!”
“But then, where was God in all of this?”
“God—”
“Yes.”
“Hiding, as usual,” Professor Raskin said.
“Perhaps. But just perhaps God was with the broken-down derelict who took Mary Lou in. You see, perhaps that is where the idea of right and wrong superseding the law and the courts and the obligation back then of six hundred dollars comes in.”
“Really?”
“Perhaps it is not money or education that will ever stop this—and boys will be boys and who knows what we might have done at the moment, kids of fifteen, for God sake, all drinking themselves and with a young girl naked on a bed. How would I have acted as a kid? But perhaps as I have thought since the day I was twenty and lying in the hospital with my crippled legs, what we do is never a matter of the law so much as a matter of the conscience. That is the first order—the law always attempts to adjust that to fit individual circumstance. But integrity comes first.”
“Yes, well, whatever. I am sorry about your accident. I remember you played baseball.”
“And my sister was a very decent barrel racer.”
“Oh, your sister? What’s a barrel racer?”
“Horses,” Darren said. He paused, looked into Albert’s sudden mystified face for a second, now showing its age, his age, and his ears and chin struck one as having gotten larger and sharper, and his head was now balding.
“But I have thought, if here and there, during those nights, those two nights, someone really for a moment thought those children should have been protected. But you see, certain people did—an older man wounded in his own soul, who delivered telegrams as a child and suffered because of it, who took her to his little trailer and kept the child, and a First Nations boy, Gordon Hammerstone, who was ashamed at what he saw at a party, and recently wrote me a letter about it. Over time I have come to some conclusions about it.”
“What conclusions?”
“Well, the test was not Mary Lou’s test. It was those who maybe stood by and watched it—it was their test, for some of them knew it was deeply wrong. That she was a little girl passed out. God, if he exists, wanted them to pass the test, and they in their souls did not.”
Darren cleared his throat, and his left arm began to shake as it did at times so the chair rattled just a tad.
“You said two?” Albert stated, looking up at him.
“Two?”
“Two cases.”
“Oh yes. Well, I was thinking of two. The letter I just received from Gordon Hammerstone is about the second case. It is why I asked you in here.”
“He was Catholic, I think.”
“Who?”
“Daddy,” he said. “At least he took me to church now and again, and the priest with his hocus-pocus did his rituals.”
“Yes.”
“Sins of omission. What man has not done that causes turmoil. That’s what he told me. Sins of omission. You see, it was the war—I mean the war destroyed him in some way. Gave up his position at Raskin Enterprises and became a wanderer.”
“Ah yes, sins of omission. Those are the daily ones, the real ones,” Darren said. “Did you know that your uncles realize that too. Since you mention them.”
They were both very silent for a long moment.
“Have you come to terms, Howl?”
“What do you mean?”
“About your condition?”
“Oh, I suppose, in a way. As best I can.”
“That is very heartening,” Albert said. “Very heartening.”
So Howl continued. “Still, I believe your uncles did want to move away from asbestos in the sixties and get into potash, but there was immense governmental pressure for them not to. Now the government is mute on the subject, and other younger men have taken over the potash mining here. So should these two old men pay for other people’s sins, even our country’s sins, for it was our country’s sin of omission? And when they realized something was amiss they did donate much to the reserve for the last fifteen years. They are just two old men who believed they were doing good things for their country until their country turned against what they were doing. They wrote letters asking for explanations.”
“But I have looked and I can’t find those letters,” Albert said. “I know Clara’s father works for them, and Clara is one of the lawyers over there, but I know as much as she does. I did look for those letters—I did!” He was very passionate about this because he had looked for those letters some years before.
“But what if the letters did exist?”
“What if they did?”
“Would you have a different opinion of your uncles?”
“It’s hard to say. We need reconciliation now.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps. But it all smacks of revenge—revenge rather than reconciliation. At least to me.”
“You can never say that about the Indigenous.”
“Of course you can—they have no instant moral higher ground. Many are no more protectors of the land than you are,” Darren said. Here his left hand began to shake again.
“Can you actually say that?”
“Chester and Dexter gave more and cared more for the Natives than Professor McLeish or Professor Sackville who until four years ago had never seen a Native man or woman.”
Albert, bothered by all of this, began to look about the room as if quite suddenly interested in different things.
To him the books here were very alien—not the ones so much on criminology, the study of everything from tort law to civil litigation that defined two walls of the office, but on the far bookshelves: paperbacks of historical texts. Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Antietam was one book. Von Paulus and Stalingrad was another. The Fighting Farm Boys: History of Our North Shore Regiment was a third. Beaverbrook by A. J. P. Taylor was another.
Raskin had lived in such a different world. Trips to Europe paid for and even his protests in Washington paid for by his family. He stayed at the Hilton in Washington when he went there to protest, and appeared the next day with others who had slept on the street. He was the only one in the group with a credit card. The second night there certain students sleeping in a van noticed him and Dykes dining at a restaurant near the Canadian Embassy. Dykes pontificated about the CIA, ate his shrimp and complained about the students not being dedicated enough.
Annie had a pet dog named Corley who for over two years waited at the front of the lane for her to come home. Every night she went to Annie’s bedroom door and slept.
Suddenly thinking of all of this, Howl’s leg began to tremble so the chair began to rattle.
“I am sorry—could you hold my left leg?”
“Pardon me?”
“Could you hold my left leg, please?”
“Yes—sure.” And Albert got up and kindly did so and after a moment the leg stopped shaking.
He was prepared to leave now, but Howl asked him to sit again.
So he did. Then he thought a second.
“Is it because of your dire illness?” he said with sudden concern.
“My dire illness?”
“Well, someone gets ill, or has a blowout, and gets all religious on us, maybe a little scared of sex, becomes all moral. I notice those things.”
Darren Howl seemed to bend forward in his chair, as if he was trying to catch this statement better, and not quite understanding what was being said, as if both of them had been speaking on two different planes. Raskin could see the hair in Darren Howl’s ears as he bent forward.
“It happened in a split second. My sister ran over in the rain, she wanted to see the water. She said, ‘Oh look—let me out—I have to see the goldfish.’ She ran to it, climbed, slipped and fell off a fifty-foot bridge, and I went in after her. It all happened in twenty or thirty seconds. Her life was over, my life was changed.”
“She was at a party, and there was mescaline, young men being very cool. You know the time of being cool with drugs, we both lived through it, you and I.”
“So she got into the drugs. Lots of people did back then—I know that.”
“No, she had a headache.”
“Headache?”
“I am positive. She had migraines since she was fourteen years of age. There was an Indian boy there—Gordon Hammerstone. I think he became ashamed.”
“Oh,” Raskin said, startled suddenly.
“Yes, she had sex that night—or at least someone tried to—so I am going to say it was murder. Someday someone will come forward. No one knew where she was. Until her clothes were found all over the street. She was seventeen years old. But you see it all comes down to Shane Stroud,” Darren said.
“Shane Stroud, for God sake—why him?”
“He watched this man leaning over her, and she was extremely agitated, then she said, ‘Why are you naked?’ ”
“Let me ask, if you found this man who tried to get fresh with your sister, what would you do?”
“I would ask him to change—for nothing else can happen until he does.”
Sometimes when he looked in his wallet and saw his credit cards, he thought of Annie Howl, and realized her humble means, and her determination to go to university and everything he wanted for himself or others would stop.
He never again went down the hallway by Howl’s office. One day in the Sobeys parking lot he began handing out hundred-dollar bills. He didn’t know why. And suddenly someone was there, going to people and getting the money and handing it back to him. He looked at her, startled when she put the money back into his coat pocket.
She gave a slight grimace of exasperated love. Yes, he knew her, the girl who had broken up with him long ago. The one who said she didn’t love him for his money. The girl who had gone away.
“I will start a charity,” Raskin thought later that day. “A big one—”