Fit Month for Dying (10 page)

“Ye'd better get to him before he dies,” she now warns, no longer even pretending to look at the television screen. “Dies like Poor Hube. From what ye tells me, yer father must be in his late eighties. Can't expect him to hang on much longer.”

“He was alive two years ago,” I reply uselessly, hoping she will lose interest. “And besides, he's not my father. He's just a man in a snapshot. I've told you a thousand times, I've no desire to see him.”

She whips around and says, “Your desire? Who cares about your desire? 'Tis for Brendan. Ye never knows, girl, and as they say, God be between us and all harm, but one day that child, who is no longer that much of a child, may come down with something, and it would be important to know if it ran in the family.”

“I know! I know!” I say, and use an excuse I've used many times before, one that had always worked with Hubert. “It's a matter of finding the time. Things are in an uproar in the House. I have all I can do to get my work done.”

She waves her hand as if she is shooing away a fly. “Things are always in an uproar in the House of Assembly. A bunch of shit disturbers, that's what they are. They create a hullabaloo just to get their names in the
Evening Telegram
to con the voters into thinking they're getting their money's worth. But like I said before, think of Brendan. Weaknesses can run in families. Ye'd be surprised what can be passed on. Stuff can show up in the teenage years. And those years are coming right up on him.”

Because she isn't at ease acknowledging that a defective gene may already be lurking in Brendan's system, poised to leap out and manifest itself in a terrible, uncontrollable disease, she offers the possibility of a more benign defect, one easily overcome with foreknowledge. “Might be able to prevent something, or it jest might be something simple. People die all the time because their systems can't handle some kind of food. Or maybe a bumblebee sting.” She looks toward the rose bush and the mass of ruby blooms swarming with bumblebees. “But ye got to know these things beforehand. I knew a fellow at home once. He died in minutes after he got bit by a wasp. And I heard of a young girl, not more than three or four, died from eatin' salt fish. Her system couldn't handle all that salt. Things like that could be fatal if not known beforehand. If ye knew beforehand, ye'd be able to do something.”

She hugs her sweater around her body, just as she had done on Dickson's Hill. It is unthinkable to her that a weakness in the Strominski line might pose such a threat to her precious Brendan. I want to tell her to stop badgering me, but I find it difficult to fault her for her lobbying on her grandson's behalf. Everyone in the family knows she gave her heart to Brendan as she has never been able to give it to another human being, her own sons included.

She keeps up the pestering until she extorts a promise from me — and this time a 'pon-my-soul promise, like Danny's promise about the deathwatch candle — that I will search for, find and go see the man who I know only through a snapshot, an unsigned postcard from Portland, Oregon, and a gaggle of family whispers that always jolted to full stops whenever I veered into sight.

“Brendan's welfare aside, girl, which I'm glad you're not setting aside,” she says, and it is her way of putting a temporary stop to the subject, “I'll never understand why you haven't been inquisitive about what he really looks like. I mean in the flesh. Not just in a picture. Something like that would prey on me day and night. I'd be picturing him all the time. Looking for him in crowds.”

She starts to pay attention again to the golf game. As she pulls the afghan around her legs, she adds, “You're sure different from me, girl. I'd never know a minute's peace until I was standing before him, sizing him up.”

She says this with surety, certain that my mind hasn't already sized him up. But she is dead wrong. I have sized him up, although not in the flesh. On the day when I came upon that black and white snapshot, I chiselled Ed Strominski's features into my memory, chiselled them as deep and enduring as the names on the gravestones on Dickson's Hill, as deep and enduring as Dennis's and my initials on the rock at the beach. And once I had chiselled his features into my brain, I was no longer content with the snippets of information about him that had randomly come my way. I begged my uncle Martin unmercifully for details.

“Tell me about my father,” I would ask him unfairly, knowing he had been forbidden to talk about Ed Strominski to me. “Does he know about me?”

Martin would furtively glance around him to see if Grandmother was in hearing distance and then chance an answer. “I don't know that much about him either, girl,” he would hedge nervously, anxious to bring the conversation to an end. “None of us did. And in all likelihood he knows nothing about you.”

I would persevere. “Does he have children?”

“I haven't the slightest idea, girl. Not the slightest.” Martin would hold his hand over his heart. “'Pon my soul,” he would say, with every bit as much sincerity as Danny, “I really don't know whether he has children or not.”

As I continued to probe, Martin would become testy, either because he was tired of being quizzed or because he was concerned about Grandmother's overhearing him.

“But then, so what if he does have children?” he would say crossly, a hint to me that he knew more than he was willing to tell. “It won't change the water on the beans. We think he's somewhere back in the United States. But we really don't know where the son of a bitch is now. And not to make you a saucy answer, girl, we don't care, either.”

He would then veer the conversation in another direction, usually toward the topic of school, which was always guaranteed to divert my attention temporarily. However, the bits and pieces of information he would supply always left me with plenty of room to manufacture bits and pieces of my own. And from these and from others that had come to me through more indirect means, I was able to fashion a marauding pirate out of Ed Strominski. He had come from the United States, and on solid rock instead of on the high seas he had commandeered the lives of the Corrigan family and plundered their happiness. I imagined that one summer day he had come to our village. Why he had come to our village and, specifically, why to our door were questions I never posed to myself. It was simply that he did come, and Grandmother invited him in for a cup of tea and a Purity caraway biscuit, like she did with peddlers whose suitcases were filled with stuff she couldn't afford, beggars with empty stomachs, and children selling raffle tickets.

After I had pooled all the bits and pieces of information regarding Ed Strominski's visit to our house, collated it, synthesised
it, analysed it, I came to believe that on the day he arrived, Carmel had been sitting by the kitchen stove crocheting, as usual, a Star of Bethlehem doily for one of the parlour chairs or perhaps for a donation to the church bazaar. He took one look at her — at her neat and clean dress, at her long red hair, at her ability to whip the crochet hook in and out through the little loops of white thread — and he knew he could not leave the house without taking her with him. So he simply shanghaied her. He dragged her out of the house while Uncle Martin, Grandmother and I looked on in; while Carmel shouted for us to help her; while the ball of white crochet cotton trailed after her like a fishing line floating downstream.

There was just one problem with this scene. It wasn't in Martin's makeup to stand by and let anyone bully his family. Or, for that matter, to allow anyone to bully another person, family or not. I reconciled this contradiction by telling myself that the shanghaiing must have occurred during one of the times when Martin had a setback with his tuberculosis and was bed-bound. Or perhaps it had occurred when he was away in that sanatorium on the outskirts of St. John's.

However, despite the fact that bits and pieces of Ed Strominski were chiselled into my mind, despite the fact that morsels and fragments of him were scratched into my soul, there were still times during my childhood when I could almost convince myself that he was a figment of my imagination. He was a character in a book Martin had read to me, like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or I had him mixed up with Barabbas, the thief I learned about in Catechism. But even on those few occasions when he almost vanished from my reality, there had always been someone to remind me that Ed Strominski was very much alive. Sometimes it would be my childhood playmate, Sarah Walsh, who would sing-song,

Spoons, forks, cup and knives,

Her Yankee father had two wives.

Or perhaps it would be Sister Rita, my teacher, who would whisper my special conception to our parish priest, Monsignor Myrick, whenever he visited our classroom. Unless she jogged his memory, Monsignor would forget my unholy beginnings and ask me where my father worked, or some other question involving a father in residence.

In fact, even Grandmother's voice held this same sorry information whenever she would fold me into her great aproned lap and croon,

Bye baby bunting, Martin's gone a-hunting,

Gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap the baby bunting in.

I knew that when other children had this rhyme sung to them, it was always Daddy who had gone a-hunting.

And there were other times when I could feel the reality of Ed Strominski rushing blood-red up my neck and filling my eyes with thick shame. Whenever anyone referred to me as Poor Carmel's Tessie or asked me about Poor Carmel, I would stare at the floor, hoping an earthquake or a tidal wave or some other catastrophe would instantly befall the Cove and the ensuing ruckus would jerk all eyes away from me. No such calamity ever rescued me, however, and I always had to stand there helplessly and inform people that Poor Carmel was fine, that she worked in a factory in Boston, and, God willing, she would be home in the summer for two weeks.

When I promised Philomena that I would search for Ed Strominski, I think I was also hoping for the equivalent of an earthquake or a tidal wave to liberate me from the promise. But, as before, I'm not rescued, so, with the help of Greg, I begin the search. In a surprisingly short time we locate the man in a semi-retirement complex in Scottsdale.

Finding him permits me no recourse other than to follow through with my promise to contact him. My quandary is whether to do this by telephone or by letter. After to-ing and fro-ing for a couple of days, I settle on writing, preferring the distance a letter will allow me. I stress that I want to meet him for my son's sake, and my insistence that I do not intend to encroach upon his life also implies that he is not to encroach upon mine. I give him possible dates for my visit.

His reply, also by letter, comes swiftly. In his shaky and hurried handwriting I detect sincerity, although I remind myself that Carmel also had presumed sincerity and had been soundly duped. He says his health won't permit him to meet me at the airport, but he gives me directions to get to his place via airport shuttle. Because of his hospital commitments and my work commitments, the earliest we can meet is the second weekend in March.

Between obligations to work and family, the time goes by so quickly that the second weekend in March is upon me almost without my awareness of time having passed. Just hours before I am to leave for the airport, I begin to pull my travel wardrobe together. As my hands toss articles of clothing into my travel case, my mind frantically tosses around questions that I must put to Ed Strominski before I leave Arizona to come back home. I line them up, each one having to do with the suffering he had inflicted upon us. Why had he so heedlessly brought so much pain upon the Corrigan family? I become so intent on my tally of these wounds and bruises that I pack my clothes helter skelter and forget that my sole purpose in meeting with Ed Strominski is to obtain his medical history. It is as if at the last moment the central purpose of my quest has changed from information to reparation. I tick off the wounds and bruises, and with each check mark my anger plumps up. I can barely wait to lather this man with Carmel's pain, with my shame, with Martin's disgust and with Grandmother's weary acceptance of what was instead of what could have been. My flesh itches with the need to weight him down with a lifetime of culpability. Only incidentally do I remember that I am meeting with this man for the benefit of my son.

Chapter Five

My plane lands at the Phoenix airport in the late afternoon, and I take the shuttle bus to Scottsdale. All during the ride, I fret about the moment when I will first set eyes on Ed Strominski. Like the three holy women on their way to anoint Jesus in the tomb, worried over what they would see when they rolled back the stone, I worry about what I will see when Ed Strominski pulls open his door. And I worry about what I will say to him. For that matter, about what he will say to me. I wonder whether he will be the one to speak first. And, if so, will he say, “Hello, I'm your father”? If I speak first, will I say, “Hello, I'm Tess, your daughter”? Or will I say instead, “Hello, I'm Tess Corrigan”? Will we shake hands? If he extends his hand, can I bear to have his flesh touch mine even in such a cursory manner?

I get out of the shuttle bus at the entrance to the gated complex, and as I walk up the flagstone path to his building, my travel case slung over my shoulder, I can hear my heart beating deep inside my ears, beating as if it is going to burst out through my breastbone. When I press my hand against my chest to try and slow it down, I leave a sweaty wet stain on my blouse pocket. Because I'm not accustomed to such heat, or maybe because I am nervously gulping air and taking in too much oxygen, I begin to feel light-headed. The flagstones on the path start to heave and swell as if I am out on the mid-Atlantic, and I have to cup both hands over my mouth and breathe into them to regain my equilibrium.

Ed Strominski's apartment is on the second floor of the two-storey building. A handwritten sign on his door says, No Solicitors. I read the sign, recheck the number on the door, swipe my sweaty hands across the thighs of my cotton slacks and snag one more mouthful of air before I press the bell.

A great deal of time seems to pass without a response, and I am just about to recheck the door number again when it is pulled open by a stooped, pale-fleshed, sunken-jawed old man in beige cotton pants and a white shirt buttoned to the neck. The pants hang slackly on his hips, and his shirt is buttoned crookedly, so that one side jibs upwards towards his chin. There is a wide gulch between his neck and the collar of his shirt.

Over the years I fantasized many meetings with Ed Strominski, but in all of those meetings I never took into account the intervening years. The man I always met was the jaunty construction worker of the black and white snapshot, the man who could bulldoze a navy base out of windswept rock, the handsome scoundrel who could flimflam Carmel with romantic postcards, Evening in Paris perfume and a disarming, roguish smile.

At the sight of the threadbare old man standing in the doorway, I am so certain I have rung the wrong doorbell that I am about to excuse my intrusion when he says, “Tess? You must be Tess Corrigan.”

When he speaks my name he hesitantly extends a pallid hand towards me. My own hand refuses to budge from the shoulder strap of my carrying case. It might just as well be welded there. For a few seconds his fingers flounder, and then he stuffs them into his pants pocket as if that has been his intent all along.

“Yes,” I manage to squeeze out. “I'm Tess.” My mind, however, is intent on reconciling this frail old man with the Walter Pidgeon look-alike in the dog-eared snapshot.

His eyes rake over my face like the searchlights that during the war had reached out from the bases in Argentia, frisking our sky, ferreting out enemies. I surmise he is searching for resemblances. To Carmel perhaps. Or maybe to himself.

In those early moments, despite the fluster of my thoughts, I, too, begin to search for resemblances, and I gratefully recall Martin's constant reassurance that I am Corrigan through and through. Certainly I have no desire to harbour any likeness to the transparent old man who stands aslant in this doorway.

“Sorry I couldn't meet you at the airport,” he says in a voice that is surprisingly substantial for such an insubstantial frame, “but, like I said, I've been in and out of the hospital a lot this winter, and I thought that standing around and waiting would be too much.” He pauses before adding, “But if I had gone I would have been able to pick you out in the crowd because...”

He turns quickly and leads the way into his apartment, beckoning me to follow. As he walks along he touches things for support, the door frame, a wall, a chair.

I jabber nervously to his retreating back. “I had no problem at the airport. It's an easy airport to find your way around. But when I saw your apartment complex, it's so big I was certain I'd never find you.”

In contrast to the brightness outside, his tiny apartment is dark. Although it is only late afternoon, he has two lamps lit, and the slatted window shutters are closed tight. He directs me to sit on the couch and says, “Eats up everything in its sight. The sun does. I keep the shutters shut most of the time. Easier on the air conditioning, too.”

He anchors both hands on the arms of a sofa chair and lowers himself into it.

When I see him glancing at my travel bag, which I have placed on the floor by my feet, I hurry to assure him that I have my own accommodations, something I should have made clear to him in my letter. “I have a motel just up the street. The Sequoia,” I tell him. “The travel agent said it was no more than ten minutes away. I asked the shuttle driver to drop me off here first. Save me the walk in the heat.”

He crosses his legs and lets a brown felt slipper dangle from his bare foot. “Good idea,” he says, and his tone relaxes. I take this to mean he has wondered whether he would have to be my host. “The Sequoia. So that's where you're staying. Everything out here is called after a cactus or an Indian tribe. I would have offered to put you up, but it's so cramped here. You'd have to sleep on the couch.”

He asks if I would like a drink of juice or cold water. I decline, mostly because I want to spare him the struggle of hoisting himself out of the wing-backed chair. He advises me to drink lots of water while I am in Arizona, otherwise I'll get dehydrated in the hot sun. He asks me what airlines I flew with and what airports I stopped at, so I give him my itinerary.

He tells me he had triple bypass heart surgery ten years ago and even traces a line on his shirt to show the length of his incision. He has been having a little trouble with his heart lately; it races madly, like a chuckwagon going down a canyon, and this was the reason for his last hospital stay. I say that it is marvellous what doctors can do nowadays, but I don't ask him how he's feeling. He asks me whether I am married and if I have children, and seems satisfied with my skeletal answer.

Each splinter of small talk is punctuated with long silent spaces, as if we have difficulty tying sentences together into a meaningful thought. In between the bits and pieces of conversation the room fills with dead air. I can actually hear the silence, as if the motor in the refrigerator has suddenly cut out, or as if the television has been turned to an inactive channel, with nothing but hissing snow on the screen. Neither of us can make it easier for the other by opening up substantial conversation. Or perhaps it is too soon for substantial conversation.

After less than twenty minutes of this sidestepping and word shuffling, I am exhausted from keeping the conversation afloat, and I suppose he must be feeling the same. I get up to go on the pretext that I want to get to the motel before dark. He doesn't counter by saying there is still plenty of light.

As he creeps me to the door, his breath labouring, his walk wobbly, a rush of compassion ambushes me. I want to plead with him to go back and sit down, that I can find my own way out. I want to sew the missing buttons on his shirt, and when he teeters and has to clutch his cane for support, my hand automatically darts out to steady him. I jerk it back as if from a flame.

“The old legs aren't what they used to be,” he apologizes, quickly righting himself. “It's that last spell in the hospital. Took the strength out of my legs. They get tired so easily now. Especially towards evening.”

I tell him I am going back home on Sunday and ask him what time will be suitable to come to see him the following day.

“In the morning,” he says without a halt or a shake in his voice. “I'm always up by seven. My best times are the mornings. Before the sun gets too hot. We'll sit outside.” He leans out the door and points to the area beside the swimming pool where there are chairs and some shade. “Over there. We'll talk then.”

“Yes,” I reply. “We'll talk then.” I am already starting down the steps to the flagstone pathway before I finish.

I walk slowly back to the motel along the seemingly endless stretch of flat street, absorbing the foreign landscape. Camelback Mountain, which the shuttle driver had pointed out on the way from the airport, is straight ahead of me, and in the fading sun its raw flanks and humped spine are turning a deep shade of lilac. Both sides of the street are lined with blossoming citrus trees and milky petals fall softly to the sidewalk. Some of them land on my shoulders and some on my hair. In almost every yard there are blooming rose bushes, salmon and pink and white, and scarlet bougainvillea cascade over back yard privacy walls, tumbling over the adobe brick like waterfalls of blood. In the midst of this summery landscape, it is hard for me to grasp that back in Newfoundland spring hasn't even begun to try to push winter out of the way, or that when I return home it will be to snow squalls and ice-covered streets and sightings of icebergs in the Narrows.

In this unfamiliar environment I feel as alien as Ruth in the land of Naomi, a stranger amongst the parched sheaves, a foreigner under the beating Palestinian sun. Everything is so strange I might as well have tumbled down a rabbit hole. I have to keep reminding myself that I am actually in Arizona, that I have just met my father and, indeed, that I have come away from this meeting without pelting him with accusations of betrayal and deception.

I walk past a group of young men clumped in a driveway tinkering with a motorbike. Music blares from a radio they have propped up beside them, and the sultry voice of a female singer asks do I know where I'm going and do I know why I'm here. I presume the singer has the planet in mind, but I apply her questions to my trip to Scottsdale. Why am I here? Am I hoping to learn that there is no terrible disease in the Strominski genes that can be passed along to Philomena's grandchild? Am I hoping to learn, strictly for the sake of satisfying my curiosity, why the faded old man in the sunless apartment had married my mother while he was still married to the woman in Oregon? Or am I hoping that his mere telling, even if it is without remorse, will be enough to fill the wounded emptiness inside me, an emptiness that so far no one's love has been able to fill — not Greg's, not Brendan's, not Carmel's, not Grandmother's, not Martin's, not even Dennis's.

I undo another button at the neck of my blouse and take a couple more turns on my full-length sleeves, rolling them above my elbows. I regret not having paid more attention to my packing, and I wish I had worn a cotton shift dress instead of pants so I would be able to expose more of my flesh to the soft desert air. As I trudge towards my motel, I vow to wear my walking shorts in the morning.

Although I arrive at the motel shortly after six o'clock, only a wash of sunset remains on the horizon, and the last traces of red and lilac and orange sky are dropping into the desert. It jolts me into remembering that despite the heat of the day, it is only March, and the long daylight hours of summer are still months away.

I am bone weary and want only to sleep, but I force myself to stay awake long enough to telephone Greg to let him know I have arrived safe and sound.

“I can't understand what Mother saw in him,” I blurt out almost as soon as Greg comes on the line. “He's so...he's” — I stretch my mind looking for a word that will describe Ed Strominski and express my stunned disillusionment, but I can't find one — “so ordinary. So unimpressive. Like the old snowbirds you see on the Florida beaches. Pale and frail and lurching along on resocketted hip joints. You know the type. I can't understand what Mother ever saw in him.”

Greg laughs his hearty Hubert-type laugh. “What were you expecting, my dear? Robert Redford?”

“But it's not just his physique,” I say, rankled that Greg can't sense how cheated I feel. “It's his whole presence. There's no flaunt. No swagger. And it's not that it's gone. I don't think it was ever there.”

“Tess,” he says, as patiently as if he is explaining to a small child why the Big Dipper has to stay in the sky, “the man is pushing ninety. Even Helen of Troy's face wouldn't have launched a thousand ships when she was pushing ninety.”

After I hang up, I lie face-down on the motel bed and try to reconcile the Ed Strominski of the black and white photograph with the old man in the apartment. Severe disappointment settles in the pit of my stomach as I admit that I wanted him to have the exact rakish smile and swaggering walk that I had fashioned for him. And I also reluctantly admit that I had coveted both that smile and that swagger, the outward signs of the assurance, certitude, confidence and conviction that I believed were mine simply because they were his and because I always knew, Martin's exhortations to the contrary, that I was not all Corrigan.

As agreed, in the morning I go to the swimming pool at Ed Strominski's apartment complex shortly before eight. He is already there by the time I arrive. In fact, he has been there long enough to set our lawn chairs in place, off to one side in a shaded area under a clump of lemon trees and facing a concrete privacy wall with blood-red bougainvillea spilling over it. He has placed a jug of water, along with two plastic glasses, between our chairs. Considering how slowly he walks, I wonder how long he has been out getting the area ready.