Friend of My Youth (21 page)

She said, “He would have died anyway.”

When the storm is over, Tuesday afternoon, Karin puts on her coat and goes out and shovels the parsonage walk. The temperature seems to be dropping even lower; the sky is clear. Austin says they’re going to go down to the lake to look at the ice. If there is a big storm like this fairly early in the year, the wind drives the waves up on the shore and they freeze there. Ice is everywhere, in unlikely formations. People go down and take pictures. The paper often prints the best of them. Austin wants to take some pictures, too. He says it’ll be something to show people in Hawaii. So Karin shovels the car out, too, and off they go, Austin driving with great care. And nobody else is down there. It’s too cold. Austin hangs on to Karin as they struggle along the boardwalk—or where the boardwalk must be, under the snow. Sheets of ice drop from the burdened branches of the willow trees to the ground, and the sun shines through them from the west; they’re like walls of pearl. Ice is woven through the wire of the high fence to make it like a honeycomb. Waves have frozen as they hit the shore, making mounds and caves, a crazy landscape, out to the rim of the open water. And all the playground equipment, the children’s swings and climbing bars, has been transformed by ice, hung with organ pipes or buried in what looks like half-carved statues, shapes of ice that might be people, animals, angels, monsters, left unfinished.

Karin is nervous when Austin stands alone to take pictures. He seems shaky to her—and what if he fell? He could break a leg, a hip. Old people break a hip and that’s the end of them.
Even taking off his gloves to work the camera seems risky. A frozen thumb might be enough to keep him here, make him miss his plane.

Back in the car, he does have to rub and blow on his hands. He lets her drive. If something dire happened to him, would Sheila Brothers come here, take over his care, settle into the parsonage, countermand his orders?

“This is strange weather,” he says. “Up in northern Ontario it’s balmy, even the little lakes are open, temperatures above freezing. And here we are in the grip of the ice and the wind straight off the Great Plains.”

“It’ll be all the same to you when you get to Hawaii,” Karin says firmly. “Northern Ontario or the Great Plains or here, you’ll be glad to be out of it. Doesn’t she ever call you?”

“Who?” says Austin.

“
Her
. Mrs. Brothers.”

“Oh, Sheila. She calls me late at night. The time’s so much earlier, in Hawaii.”

The phone rings with Karin alone in the house the morning before Austin is to leave. A man’s voice, uncertain and sullen-sounding.

“He isn’t here right now,” Karin says. Austin has gone to the bank. “I could get him to call you when he comes in.”

“Well, it’s long distance,” the man says. “It’s Shaft Lake.”

“Shaft Lake,” repeats Karin, feeling around on the phone shelf for a pencil.

“We were just wondering. Like we were just checking. That we got the right time that he gets in. Somebody’s got to drive down and meet him. So he gets in to Thunder Bay at three o’clock, is that right?”

Karin has stopped looking for a pencil. She finally says, “I guess that’s right. As far as I know. If you called back around noon, he’d be here.”

“I don’t know for sure I can get to a phone around noon. I’m at the hotel here but then I got to go someplace else. I’d just as soon leave him the message. Somebody’s going to meet him at the airport in Thunder Bay three o’clock tomorrow. O.K.?”

“O.K.,” says Karin.

“You could tell him we got him a place to live, too.”

“Oh. O.K.”

“It’s a trailer. He said he wouldn’t mind living in a trailer. See, we haven’t had any minister here in a long time.”

“Oh,” says Karin. “O.K. Yes. I’ll tell him.”

As soon as she has hung up, she finds Megan’s number on the list above the phone, and dials it. It rings three or four times and then Megan’s voice comes on, sounding brisker than the last time Karin heard it. Brisk but teasing.

“The lady of the house regrets that she cannot take your call at the moment, but if you would leave your name, message, and phone number she will try to get back to you as soon as possible.”

Karin has already started to say she is sorry, but this is important, when she is interrupted by a beep, and realizes it’s one of those machines. She starts again, speaking quickly but distinctly after a deep breath.

“I just wanted to tell you. I just wanted you to know. Your father is fine. He is in good health, and mentally he is fine and everything. So you don’t have to worry. He is off to Hawaii tomorrow. I was just thinking about—I was just thinking about our conversation on the phone. So I thought I’d tell you, not to worry. This is Karin speaking.”

And she just gets all that said in time, when she hears Austin at the door. Before he can ask or wonder what she’s doing there in the hall, she fires a series of questions at him. Did he get to the bank? Did the cold make his chest hurt? When was it the Auction Barn truck was coming? When did the people from the Board want the parsonage keys? Was he going to phone Don and Megan before he left or after he got there, or what?

Yes. No. Monday for the truck. Tuesday for the keys, but no rush—if she wasn’t finished, then Wednesday would be O.K. No more phone calls. He and his children have said all they need to say to each other. Once he’s there, he will write them a letter. Write each of them a letter.

“After you’re married?”

Yes. Well. Maybe sooner than that.

He has laid his coat across the bannister railing. Then she sees him put out a hand to steady himself, holding on to the railing. He pretends to be fiddling around with his coat.

“You O.K.?” she says. “You want a cup of coffee?”

For a moment he doesn’t say anything. His eyes swim past her. How can anybody believe that this tottery old man, whose body looks to be shrivelling day by day, is on his way to marry a comforting widow and spend his days from now on walking on a sunny beach? It isn’t in him to do such a thing, ever. He means to wear himself out, quick, quick, on people as thankless as possible, thankless as Brent. Meanwhile fooling all of them into thinking he’s changed his spots. Otherwise, somebody might stop him going. Slipping out from under, fooling them, enjoying it.

But he really is after something in the coat. He brings out a pint of whiskey.

“Put a little of that in a glass for me,” he says. “Never mind the coffee. Just a precaution. Against weakness. From the cold.”

He is sitting on the steps when she brings him the whiskey. He drinks it shakily. He wags his head back and forth, as if trying to get it clear. He stands up. “Much better,” he says. “Oh, very much better. Now, about those pictures of the ice, Karin. I was wondering, could you pick them up next week? If I left you the money? They’re not ready yet.”

Even though he’s just in from the cold, he’s white. Put a candle behind his face, it’d shine through as if he were wax or thin china.

“You’ll have to leave me your address,” she says. “Where to send them.”

“Just hang on to them till I write you. That’d be best.”

*    *    *

So she has ended up with a whole roll of pictures of the ice, along with all those other things that she had her mind set on. The pictures show the sky bluer than it ever was, but the weaving in the fence, the shape of the organ pipes are not so plain to see. There needs to be a human figure, too, to show the size that things were. She should have taken the camera and captured Austin—who has vanished. He has vanished as completely as the ice, unless the body washes up in the spring. A thaw, a drowning, and they both disappear. Karin looks at these pictures of the pale, lumpy ice monstrosities, these pictures Austin took, so often that she gets the feeling that he is in them, after all. He’s a blank in them, but bright.

She thinks now that he knew. Right at the last he knew that she’d caught on to him, she understood what he was up to. No matter how alone you are, and how tricky and determined, don’t you need one person to know? She could be the one for him. Each of them knew what the other was up to, and didn’t let on, and that was a link beyond the usual. Every time she thinks of it, she feels approved of—a most unexpected thing.

She puts one of the pictures in an envelope, and sends it to Megan. (She tore the list of addresses and phone numbers off the wall, just in case.) She sends another to Don. And another, stamped and addressed, across town, to Brent. She doesn’t write anything on the pictures or enclose any note. She won’t be bothering any of these people again. The fact is, it won’t be long till she’ll be leaving here.

She just wants to make them wonder.

Bugs said so long to the disappearing land, a dark-blue finger of Labrador. The ship was passing through the Strait of Belle Isle, on its third day out from Montreal.

“Now I’ve got to make it to the white cliffs of Dover,” she said. She made a face, rounding her eyes and her small, adept mouth, her singer’s mouth, as if she had to accept some nuisance. “Else it’s over the side and feed the fishes.”

Bugs was dying, but she had been a very slender, white-skinned woman before she started that, so there wasn’t a shocking difference. Her bright-silver hair was cut in a clever fluffed-out bob by her daughter Averill. Her pallor was by no means ghastly, and the loose tops and caftans that Averill had made for her concealed the state of her arms and her upper body. Occasional expressions of fatigue and distress blended in with an old expression she had—a humorous, hardened plaintiveness. She was not looking at all bad, and her coughing was under control.

“That’s a joke,” she said to Averill, who was paying for the trip out of some money left to her by the father she had never seen, to remember. When they made the arrangements, they hadn’t known what was going to happen—or that it was going to happen as soon as now looked likely.

“Actually, I intend to hang around making your life miserable for years to come,” Bugs said. “I look better. Don’t you think? Anyway, in the morning. I’m eating. I was thinking I’d start taking little walks. I walked to the rail yesterday, when you weren’t here.”

They had a cabin on the boat deck, with a chair for Bugs set up outside. There was a bench under the cabin window, occupied now by Averill and in the mornings by the University of Toronto professor whom Bugs called her admirer, or “that professorial jerk.”

This was happening on a Norwegian passenger-carrying freighter, in the late seventies, in the month of July. All the way across the North Atlantic the weather was sunny, the sea flat and bright as glass.

Bugs’ real name, of course, was June. Her real name, and her singing name, was June Rodgers. For the last year and three months she had not sung in public. For the last eight months she had not gone to the Conservatory to give lessons. She had a few students coming to the apartment on Huron Street, in the evenings and on Saturdays, so that Averill could accompany them on the piano. Averill worked at the Conservatory, in the office. She biked home for lunch every day, to see if Bugs was all right. She didn’t say she was doing it for that reason. She had the excuse of her special lunch—skim milk, wheat germ, and a banana mixed up in the blender. Averill was usually trying to lose weight.

Bugs had sung at weddings, she had been the paid soloist with church choirs, she had sung in the
Messiah
and the
St. Matthew Passion
and in Gilbert and Sullivan. She had sung supporting roles in Toronto productions of operas with famous imported stars. For a while in the fifties she had shared a radio program with a popular drunken tenor, who had got them both sacked. The name June Rodgers had been well enough known all the time that Averill was growing up. It was well enough known,
at least, among the people that Averill usually met. It was a surprise for Averill, more than for Bugs, to run into people now who didn’t recognize it.

People on the boat hadn’t recognized it. About half of the thirty or so passengers were Canadians, most of them from around Toronto, but they hadn’t recognized it. “My mother sang Zerlina,” Averill said during her first conversation with the professor. “In
Don Giovanni
, in 1964.” She had been ten at the time and remembered the occasion as one filled with glory. Apprehension, flurry, crisis—a sore throat cured by yoga. A peasant costume with a ruffled pink-and-gold skirt over piles of petticoats. Glory.

“Honey, Zerlina is just not a household word,” Bugs said to her afterward. “Also, professors are dumb. They are dumber than ordinary. I could be nice and say they know about things we don’t, but as far as I’m concerned they don’t know shit.”

But she let the professor sit beside her and tell her things about himself every morning. She told Averill what she’d learned. He walked the deck for one hour before breakfast. At home he walked six miles a day. He had caused a certain amount of scandal at the university a few years ago by marrying his young wife (his dimwit wife, said Bugs), whose name was Leslie. He had made enemies, stirred up envy and discontent among his colleagues with his dalliance, and then by divorcing his wife and marrying this girl who was one year younger than his oldest child. From then on, certain people were out to get him, and they did. He was a biologist, but he had devised a sort of general-science course—he called it a scientific-literacy course—for students in the humanities: a lively, unalarming course that he hoped would be a modest breakthrough. He got the approval of the higher-ups, but the course was scuttled by members of his own department, who devised all kinds of cumbersome, silly requirements and prerequisites. He retired early.