Famished Lover (13 page)

The doctor finally arrived, later in the morning, and locked himself in the bedroom with my shrieking wife and that apostle of God, Maisie Campbell. Mr. McGillis puttered about the ruins of his farm, moving boxes of bits from here to there, then back again, and winding up odd coils of loose wire and stacking rotting lumber in corners of the barn unvisited since the invention of the automobile.

I stood by.

The water I boiled did not seem to be needed, the soup I heated went uneaten, McGillis seemed content alone with his boxes.

And Lillian's shrieks pushed like glass shards beneath my skin.

“This is the way the Lord has arranged it,” McGillis said
to me on the porch, when I could not sit and I could not stand and the hours scraped by. “A breech birth could last all night. You might want to walk into town and have yourself a drink.”

“I won't abandon her!”

“She might abandon you,” he said ruefully. “All depends what Jesus wants.”

A day and a night passed, and Michael George Crome was born, a scraggy kid with crow-black hair and a healthy set of lungs and wide, blue, irresistible eyes. Lillian lay back in the shadows, chalk white and exhausted, still as death. I sat with her hour upon silent hour, holding her hand, gazing at the boy, sick with love.

“I thought I was dying,” she said to me, and felt my face with her chilled hand. “I thought I was going to be all alone.”

“No. You were never alone.”

She touched my cheek where she'd struck me. “You said you would never hurt me. Do you remember, on our honeymoon?” She searched my eyes. Of course I remembered. “Now look what I've done to you. We can harm each other terribly, can't we?”

“It's nothing,” I said. “I hardly feel it.” “

I can't bear to go back to Montreal. Do we have to bring Michael to those awful rooms?”

I stayed silent.

“Surely we can rent something better now. Frame will pay
you more now that you have a baby. I'll help you look. As soon as I'm stronger —”

I silenced her with a kiss.

“I just need a little bit of a garden. And Michael will need a yard to run around in. It doesn't have to be big —”

The boy was snuggled in my arms, wrapped in a blanket and sleeping like an old man.

“Ramsay, look at me! What's wrong?”

I didn't want to tell her. It felt as if we were all wrapped in our blanket.

“Why can't we get a better place? We have the money, I know we do!”

I kissed the baby and stared at his scrunched-up, brown little face.

“I just got the wire today,” I said, as gently as I could. “Frame's gone under with all the rest.”

I'd been out of work about eight months and was trying to make a thin pair of trousers last through another season rather than spend on a new pair now. But the cold March wind cut through them. Out of optimism I'd neglected to wear galoshes as well, and so my shoes were soaked by the sudden slush of a bad storm, and I had to fight my way up the street with my hand on my hat and my face lashed with wind and snow.

I was in no way prepared for what was waiting at the hotel. Father's message had said simply to meet him there. He had given his room number. When I knocked on the door he was a long time answering, and when it finally opened I barely recognized him: a shrunken, pale gnome, his body wracked with coughing even as he stood before me in his shirtsleeves.

“Father! Sit down!” He was so diminished he followed orders and meekly sat on the edge of the bed. In the dismal grey light by the window I could see better the craggy outline of his skull beneath a sagging face: the great beaklike nose, the prodigious steel grey eyebrows, the drooping ears and
long teeth of age. His eyes were the most changed: their usual fierce light had given in. His hands were shaking and cold, his shoulders as thin as those I'd seen years before on starved men of many nationalities.

“How long have you been here? Have you seen a doctor?”

His chest heaved just to draw the slightest breath. I tried leaning him back on the bed, but he fought himself upright again and through motions with his hands, while hacking and spitting into his handkerchief, he made me realize that he needed to sit up to keep from drowning in his own fluids.

“Just . . . just in . . . from Managua,” he said. “I was much better . . . in the warm air.”

“Does Mother know where you are?”

“I sent her a letter . . . from New York.” He hacked and coughed again, and the terrible shuddering recaptured his chest and shoulders. I drew the blanket round him and again felt the iciness of his limbs.

“I was almost done with the railway there . . . in Rivas. But they ran out of money and then . . . this hit.”

“Have you eaten?”

He nodded then fell into another weak-breathed round of coughing. After it subsided I brought up a bowl of broth from the hotel kitchen. Gradually, as he sipped, he gained control of his voice and breathing.

“Have you found work yet?”

I shook my head. “I've heard of some openings. We're fine. Lillian and the baby are well.” I did not tell him how little of the savings remained, how fearful we had become of each month's remorseless expenses.

“Everybody healthy?”

I assured him we were. “Except for a certain lack of sleep. Michael is a cherub by day and a howling terror at night.”

“Montreal has always had rotten air. I'm sorry I brought you here when you were young. I suppose you've gained an attachment of some sort.”

“There's work here. Or there will be again.”

He looked at me dubiously. “It's a bloody awful system. And I'm not just saying that because I never won for long.” He winced then as some stabbing pain ripped through him. Finally he let out a deep, exhausted sigh. “I've spent half my life waiting to get paid by one group or another. Bridges, harbours, tunnels . . . those I can build. But trying to get paid . . . now that's terrible work.” He looked around as if just discovering his surroundings. It was not the finest hotel but not the worst either. The mattress was sunken and the curtains looked rat-chewed, but it had heat and the sheets were clean and pressed.

“Live in the country if you can,” he said, and started wheezing again, his great fists doubled in a gesture of fight. Perspiration now bathed his face as if the soup had gone straight to his pores.

I found a towel by the sink and wiped his brow, and for some time he closed his eyes. He marshalled his considerable will to smother the cough into submission.

“Have you room for an old man?” he asked weakly. “And Mother too, when she arrives. I don't expect I'll last more than a couple of months.” He stared coldly into his chilling bowl of soup.

“Yes, of course,” I said. “Plenty of room.”

He turned his gaze out the window. “I hate it when the workers are starved,” he said finally. “I could have finished
that line and the backers would have made their money.” He took another deliberate sip of the broth. “Those rich bastards, they're not entirely ignorant men. They don't expect horses to work if they don't get fed.”

Some days later Rufus arrived from Boston in a black coat and tie, as if he expected to be attending a funeral. As always his face shone like a polished apple and his eyes were full of the easiness of things. He had brought his new wife with him. She wore a cloche hat and pearls and fashionable brand-new shoes, and her eyes scanned our sorry flat quickly and with undisguised pity.

“You must be Vanessa,” I said. “Hello, Rufus.”

We'd missed the wedding. And now Lillian stood with the baby beside those two shiny, rich young lovers, looking as if she should be sent out to wash the potatoes. I was aware, acutely, of how tired her dress was, of the unwashed plainness of her hair, the hardness that had crept into her face over the accumulating months of bad news and rotten luck. She fit in now with the poverty of our surroundings, with the darkness of the room, the lack of running water and toilet facilities, the sheet pinned across the main quarters to make a stab at privacy. We both did.

Rufus too was examining things closely. “Are you
all
living here?”

Mother came out then from the other room where Father was sleeping. She'd grown stout in recent years and was not as easy in the limbs as she used to be. And with Vanessa she too looked nervous, afraid of offending. She shook hands
formally with the tall, slender, pale young woman, then embraced her youngest son, Rufus stooping to envelop the round brown body that was so far from the Colombian plantation where Father had first spied her as a striking young girl.

“I'm so glad you coming,” she said. She had been crying and crying for days, ever since she'd arrived from Victoria, and had hardly left Father's side. For hours, while he lay sleeping or semi-dazed, she would sit stroking his hand and weeping. And when he was awake he would insist that she pull herself together and read to her from Shakespeare and Homer, quietly nudging her when she dozed off.

Now I sat outside and smoked on the stoop while Rufus and Vanessa visited with the two of them. The sky was as blue and clear as it gets in Montreal. A group of children played stickball down on the street. The best hitter was a skinny girl with long legs who knew how to put every ounce of her little body into smashing that ball. They cheered and yelled and laughed while I felt numb inside, as if all my blood had turned to grease.

Rufus came out and sat beside me. He refused the offer of a cigarette. “Vanessa doesn't like me smoking,” he said lamely. But his face was full of another thought. My cigarette was hand-rolled, not the fancy kind he was used to. I had a sudden memory of him showing up at my door shortly after he'd landed his first job: night accountant at the Ritz-Carlton. He was green as lettuce and I'd been to the wars and somehow he thought he would impress me with his new position. I asked him the pay — it was pitiful. “But think of the wealthy men I'll meet!” he said, his face already full of the accomplishment. Just the way he was looking now. Like a young scamp desperate to prove himself the better man.

He put his hand on my shoulder. “I'd like to bring Father and Mother to Boston. We have a much larger place, and the staff to take proper care — though I know Lillian is taking care. Of course I do. She's wonderful. But you have a baby, and this place is —”

He took note of my withering look.

“Why did you wait so long before telling me your firm went down? You know I still have contacts in this city. Or you could come to Boston. Not every business has been flattened, you know.”

“The work will pick up,” I said grimly.

He reached into the vest of his expensive suit. “At least let me leave you some money for expenses, for doctors and medicine. I know this must be draining and I'm certainly in a position to —”

“Your money is no good here,” I said coldly.

“Don't be ridiculous! We're family.”

What can you say to someone who has prospered in hard times by marrying well and charming his way through a world sick with troubles?

“I am the oldest now,” I said stiffly. “I've handled far worse than this. Now put your pocketbook away before I rip it up.”

The hand went back in the vest. The pocketbook was replaced by a silver cigarette case.

“Try one of mine.”

I almost sent the case flying but looked away instead. The clatter of children increased. A young boy scooped up the ball expertly and hurled it back towards the flat rock that was serving as home plate.

“Just for a moment I saw Will,” Rufus said. “Throwing to
Thomas. God, they were good together. I idolized you guys.”

I finished my skimpy fag and took one of his fine, store-bought brand after all.

“That summer of the war was the very worst. Till now, I'd say,” Rufus murmured. “First you were captured, and we were told you were dead, you know. Mother fell apart. You should have seen Father concocting schemes to get you out. He was going to study German and pose as a wealthy industrialist. He almost went crazy with it. I think he loved you the best. He saved everything you drew. Maybe you didn't realize —”

“Stop talking about him as if he were dead!”

“He was hard set against Alex joining. But with you captured and still alive there was no way to stop him.”

The same boy had the ball again. He chased down the skinny girl, the one with the powerful swing.

“I knew I wasn't old enough to serve. I couldn't be a hero like you and the others. But I swore I would never let this family down. And I haven't. Ramsay, look at me! I'm in a position to help.”

I flicked his cigarette away. Thomas and Will were swallowed in the soup of battle. Alex fell from dysentery behind the lines. I was a bloody fannigan. There wasn't a lot of heroism any way you sliced it.

Rufus shifted his weight. “Father tells me there's this commission for war reparations for the prisoners. You
must
sign up for that. There will be money for what you went through. You deserve it, Ramsay. You need it.”

Now even the old man is grasping at straws, I thought. Government money! As if there could be any hope in that.
Without comment I stood up and left Rufus on the stoop to finish his smoke.

Father was in a bad way, tossing with the pain. Vanessa had taken over trying to do something for the gang of us on the coal stove. She was surprisingly dextrous in the kitchen — in such a pitiful kitchen — considering the most she probably did at home was give orders to her staff. Lillian stayed in the back room, feeding the baby, and Mother was wiping the old man's brow with a dampened cloth. He jerked his head suddenly and eyed me in a fit of clarity.

“Come here, boy!” he said in his old way, as if he had just set foot at home again after months of being off.

I stepped to his side.

“Leave us, Mother,” he gasped. She did not move until Father tore the cloth from her hand and hurled it at the far wall. “I need to talk to my boy!”