Fit Month for Dying (11 page)

“We'd die of thirst out here without water,” he says, holding on to the back of a chair. “And I added a little lemon to give it more of a kick.”

This morning he wears a T-shirt instead of a dress shirt. However, the trousers are the same ones he wore last evening, and they are wrinkled at the crotch and buckled at the knees. A ball cap is stuffed in his hip pocket.

Other complex dwellers are already seated around the pool, some chatting, others playing cards. When he sees me eyeing the group, he says, “They're all old here. A raisin farm, that's what these places are called. On account of the wrinkles. Lots of raisin farms in Arizona.”

He signs for me to sit down in the chair closest to the blossoming lemon tree and lowers himself into the other one.

“It looks so pleasant and summery,” I say, surveying the lemon trees and bougainvillea. “It's difficult to believe that back home they're shovelling out driveways.”

As I had done the evening before, I duck calling him by name. Before I left home I had ruminated over how I should address him. “Father” and “Dad” I dismissed out of hand, and the diminutive “Ed” seemed to be too chummy for someone who was fifty percent responsible for my being. On the other hand, “Mr. Strominski” seemed too respectful for the feelings in my heart. I even experimented with fusing both names — “Edstrominski” — like Grandmother did on those few occasions when I had overheard her speak of him directly.

As if he can read my mind, he says, “Call me Ski. Everyone calls me Ski.” He turns his back to me to show me the three embossed black letters on his shirt: SKI. “See! Everyone calls me Ski. Except my mother. I was always Ed to her.” He pauses, and his next words are so low and muffled that they almost evaporate before they reach me. “And Carmel. Your mother. She always called me Ed.”

If he expects me to respond, I disappoint him, although I am sure he hears my sharp intake of breath. He reaches into his back pocket and takes out his wallet. He rummages through it, pulls out a picture and passes it to me. Just as I had instinctively known who he was the moment I found his snapshot in Mother's bureau drawer, I now know it is a picture of Carmel that he is passing between our chairs.

My spine stiffens. I have no intention of allowing him to pull me down into his guilt. And I certainly have no intention of permitting him a time and a place for reliving his past — especially a reliving that will be tilted in his favour.

Still, I automatically reach for the picture. I guardedly grip it between thumb and finger, my hand trembling and my breath sticking in my throat much as it had done on the day I had come upon his picture. The only difference is that I can look at Mother's likeness open-eyed, not with a tentative squint. However, the person in the picture is a Carmel I have never known. She is standing on the steps of the Sacred Heart Church in the Cove. She is dressed in a light-coloured suit and is wearing a hat with a wisp of a veil — a 1940s-style hat. One hand clutches it to keep it from blowing off and the other holds a missal with streamers of flowers falling from it. Visible in the background is the white picket fence that surrounds the Presentation Convent garden next door to the church. Behind this fence I can see two lilac trees — full-leafed but without blooms. Behind the lilac trees a silver maple bends in the wind.

“Her wedding day,” I say.

Although no one ever told me what mother wore on her wedding day, or for that matter the month in which she was married, I know all of this. I know it just as I know so many other scraps of information having to do with her marriage, even though none of it was ever told to me — at least not straightforwardly. I continue to hold the picture in my sweating, trembling hand. Carmel looks so innocent. So trusting. So sure of the future. And so very, very young!

A few seconds pass before I feel red-hot rage course through my body, rising even as I struggle to keep it under control. I recognize this rage. It is not new. It is a rage that seeded itself deep inside me early in childhood. It is a rage against this man who has deprived me not only of a father but of a mother as well.

Up until this moment, my memory bank of my mother held a picture of a mature woman, strong and determined and capable of tossing off adversity with the ease with which she would toss my cat off the parlour furniture. It held the picture of her coming home every summer and tackling domestic jobs, jobs that would never get done unless she did them — lengthening or shortening my school uniforms, making jam, cleaning cupboards. And it held a picture of her that was laced with resentment: if she had really loved me she would have found a way to stay in the Cove! If she had really loved me she would not have turned the responsibility for my upbringing over to my grandmother! None of my pictures were of a girl so young, so innocent and so trusting that she was ripe for being duped by a fast-talking American construction worker with the unnerving good looks of a Walter Pidgeon.

I pass the snapshot back to Ed Strominski. I pass it back without comment, scrupulously avoiding eye contact. The trembling of my fingers is the only giveaway that my mind is searching for scourging words to hurl at this marauder who had pillaged the innocence of a young woman and swindled an unsuspecting family out of happiness.

He takes the snapshot from my outstretched hand, and as soon as it is out of my possession, I squirm about on my chair to unstick my bare legs from the sun-heated vinyl seat strapping. In doing so, I inadvertently look his way. I see that he is still holding the snapshot, and his fingers are trembling just as much as mine had trembled when I had held it. Oblivious to my presence, unaware of my scrutiny, he continues to stare at it.

In the morning light he seems even frailer than he had the day before, even more unkempt. His uncombed hair is pushed up towards the crown of his head as if he had stood back on to the wind. His white T-shirt has the grey-blue cast to it that white takes on when it has been washed with jeans and other coloured clothes.

Just as on the evening before, a surge of compassion — or something akin to compassion — douses my escalating rage. I want to take hold of this scruffy old man and shake him out. I want to shake out his wrinkles, his creases, his uneven folds so that he will no longer look like something pulled from the bottom of a laundry basket. I want to turn him back into that jaunty construction worker who could build a base out of rocky pastureland and push a road through a cliff of solid granite. I want to turn him back into someone who is strong enough to take my fury, a fury heightened by seeing Carmel in her wedding dress but now beginning to flag.

I refuse to allow this surfacing compassion to scuttle my fury. I frantically try to pump steam into it, racing through the storehouse of slights and bruises and open wounds that I have stored over the years to let loose upon a fast-talking scoundrel called Ed Strominski. That they now have to be let loose on a dishevelled old man is of minor consequence.

My mind swiftly scans the years I have spent hating this man, all the years I spent needing him, dreaming that one day he would turn up on our doorstep and I would hear Grandmother's gasp as she pulled open the porch door — “Oh my God Almighty, if it ent Edstrominski!” And then, all out of breath and in a fluster, she would shout to me, “Come here, child! Come here, Carmel's Tessie. Yer fauder's here.”

“Why did you do it? Why did you marry her when you already had a wife back in the States?” The words shoot out of my mouth like a volley of arrows, rupturing his reverie and even flabbergasting myself. My question is so fierce and unexpected that he jerks his gaze from the picture and turns to me, so startled that even after a few seconds he can't rally. Had I stuck an ice pick in his back he wouldn't be more shocked. His chest heaves inside his T-shirt, and I spare a moment of concern for his runaway chuckwagon heart. He fastens his gaze on the bougainvillea-covered fence, stares at it as if he has to memorize every detail of the scarlet blooms.

“Why? Why did you destroy us?” I prod, letting the words sink in deep as daggers.

He makes no response, simply moves his eyes from the bougainvillea back to the picture. Something in this gesture deflates my fury, reduces its bloat. Once more, I feel the nippy edges of my rage dissolving. Against all of my defences, my breath takes on the hitch that always told Grandmother that Sarah Walsh had been taunting me again about my unholy beginnings, the sound that always told her that within a few minutes I would be sobbing into her big apron. But I refuse to shed tears in the presence of Ed Strominski. I bridle them while I wait for his excuses, excuses that I am prepared to shoot down with one explosive negation after another.

“She was a
wonderful woman
, your mother,” he says after an interminably long time. His features slacken as if he is relieved that the worst is now over with, as if he has been waiting for my question ever since I arrived. Indeed, I am willing to grant that he may have been waiting to hear it for even more years that I have been waiting to hurl it at him.

“Yes, a wonderful woman,” he repeats. His gentle words fall so lightly that he might have been tossing away the stray blossoms of the lemon tree that are falling on our shoulders. “She deserved more.”

He puts the picture back in his wallet. He squints into the sun, takes the ball cap out of his hip pocket and pulls it on over his tangled hair, tugging the visor down hard against the sun. The cap is maroon-coloured, and just behind the visor in heavy gold letters are the words “Sun Devils.” The cap triggers thoughts that have nothing to do with Carmel. Or perhaps it offers him a conversational escape from thoughts of Carmel.

“My team,” he says, fingering the lettering on the cap. “After I retired from the Seabees I came out here just for a visit. I went to see the Sun Devils play, and that did it. I've been here ever since.”

There is now a cocksureness about him, a cocksureness reminiscent of the Ed Strominski in the snapshot. He leans back in his chair in much the same way as he had leaned back against the piece of earthmoving equipment. His body no longer seems so shrunken. It is as if he feels that he has given out all that he needs to give out on his bigamous marriage, and he can go blithely on to ordinary conversation.

A gust of wind, hot and breathy, forces him to grab his cap. Just as suddenly as it sprang up, it dies down again and eddies the loose sand and dirt around at our feet. Seconds later it pelts this grit into our faces. The few moments it takes me to brush the lemon blossoms, grains of sand and fragments of tumbleweed out of my face are enough to allow Carmel in her wedding dress to parade before my eyes, to allow Sarah Walsh to sing,

Spoons, forks, cups and knives,

Her Yankee father had two wives.

Still wiping my face, I pull my chair around so Ed Strominski and I are facing each other directly, like two passengers on a train. I am so close to him that my knees almost brush up against his, although I am careful not to let this happen.

“Is that all you have to say? She was a wonderful woman! You start talking about your damn football team just like that” — I snap my fingers — “just as if I didn't grow up being called Poor Carmel's Tessie.” My hands flail and my voice rises even higher in pitch. “You spoiled our lives. Mother's! Martin's! Grandmother's! Mine!”

In the once-again still Arizona air, my voice carries beyond our chairs. The card players stop their game and stare at us. Embarrassed, I lower my voice, calm my hands. But because my insides are still raging, I can't stop the accusations.

“Carmel never remarried. Do you know that? After her experience with you she couldn't trust another man. She had to leave the Cove to get away from the scandal. And to earn a living to support me — a little something you happened to leave behind.”

Past hurts spin through me. They suck the breath out of me, and I have to stop talking to snag air, as I had to do before ringing his doorbell. Once again I look directly at him. He has wilted back into being an old man, his body sagged back into its creases. Again I have to stifle an urge to reach out and touch him, to try and shuffle him back into the Ed Strominski of the black and white snapshot, the Sun Devils fan so venturesome he could move his life to Arizona on a whim. I especially want to shuffle him back into being the Ed Strominski strong enough to command my rage, not the Ed Strominski frail enough to spur me to pity.

“I'm sorry,” I say. “I came here to find out your medical history for my child's sake. I'm sorry.”

“I'm sorry, too,” he says. “Sorrier that I can find the words to tell you.” He pauses, wiping his eyes with the sleeve of his T-shirt. The sun is getting high and very hot. I'm certain it is perspiration that he is wiping away, although I'm willing to allow there could be some tears mixed in with it.

“I never intended to hurt anyone,” he says. “It just happened that way. And I always wanted to find Carmel to tell her that. But I never got the courage.” He reaches out his hand to touch mine but quickly reconsiders and pulls it back. “She was the love of my life, but I never even told her. It would have given her too much of a hold on me. After Christine, I vowed never to let another woman get a hold on me.”

Once again my spine stiffens. My voice becomes an icicle. “What do you mean,
hold on you
? You married her, didn't you? Or at least pretended to? If you didn't want her to have a hold on you, you shouldn't have gone through that bogus marriage ceremony.”