Homesick (28 page)

Once inside the church her doubts diminished. It came as something of a relief to discover that there were some women seated in the audience as shabby as she, maybe even shabbier. There were a lot of very young, very wan, very pinch-faced girls whose hair was cut like Joan of Arc’s that she guessed were likely music students. Then there were the sleek, well-groomed dames huddled in their fur coats besides their bored-looking husbands. Why was it that all these women had the pointy chins and sharp, bright eyes of the small creatures trapped to furnish pelts for their coats? Vera was determined not to be their victim, not to cringe in a trap. She drew herself up to her full five feet eleven inches and sailed down the aisle.

The seats Stanley chose were in the third row, very near the front. Once they had settled themselves he lost himself in studying the program. This was fine with Vera. Having survived one ordeal she was content to recover in peace, to drink in her surroundings without the strain of making intelligent conversation. As she ran her eyes over the scenes from the Bible depicted on the stained glass windows she could sense the church filling behind her and the atmosphere thickening and tensing with anticipation. It must be almost time. She checked her watch. A few minutes before the hour.

Vera directed her gaze to the choir screen. There stood the four apostles carved in stone, granite eyes staring blankly out at the restless flock. Vera recalled a childish blasphemy. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, hold the horse while I get on. As she smiled to herself, a paunchy little man (nothing like the sinewy stone apostles) mounted the steps leading upwards to the altar, turned, and launched into a description of the evening’s program. Vera, her mind wandering, soon lost interest in what he was saying. The unfamiliar words, toccata and fugue, were often repeated and she was dimly aware of his fat white hands flogging the air as he talked.

A hush fell. Vera realized that the man had disappeared. For the first time that evening, she asked herself where the organ was and searched the front of the church for it. She couldn’t find it.
Then, just as her eyes passed over the reader’s desk with the great eagle carved in relief, the eagle of St. John the Divine, the opening notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor tumbled down from the organ loft above and behind her, from where she had least expected them to come, as if rolling thunderously down from heaven itself.

She was stunned. The eagle with the outspread wings, each feather distinct and bristling, neck ruffled, curved beak agape, took wing on the stately wind of soaring music. It filled Vera with yearning. She, too, wanted to whirl up, free. What was lost did not need to be lost forever. Couldn’t Stanley teach her? Couldn’t he tell her the wise books to read? Couldn’t he play her the music that fine, educated people listened to? Couldn’t he explain to her the pictures he hung on his wall, teach her the names of their painters? There was no need to remain forever ignorant and common. People could rise. She would rise.

Instinctively, she turned to Stanley and found him sitting hunched on the edge of the pew, elbows propped on his knees, chin jacked on his palms, face rapt. He appeared to be a man leaning forward into the warmth cast by a fire. Watching him, Vera felt that she, too, had a share in the comfort it shed. Already the music had melted the deep lines in his forehead and to Vera he looked ten years younger than when they had stepped into the church.

At the end of the recital Stanley and Vera rose from their seats, reluctant but happy. Outside, the snow which they had both predicted earlier was falling. It was a heavy, wet snow which blurred the darkness and swirled a mysterious code of white dots and dashes through the arcs of the streetlamps. Among the last to exit from the church, Stanley and Vera found themselves virtually alone in the street, the rest of the crowd having hastily dispersed in the snowstorm. There was not a taxi in sight.

“Should we start out walking?” suggested Stanley. “Just until we find a cab, or a streetcar comes along?”

Vera agreed that was a good idea. The big, drowsy flakes surrounded them in a curtain which cut Stanley and her off, isolated and screened them from the rest of the world. If this sense of privacy did not lend Vera the courage to take his arm, at least it made her feel easier in his company. The two of them went down the long, empty prospect of a tree-flanked street, wrapped in snow and their own thoughts, frequently halting so that Stanley could remove the Homburg and dust it with the sleeve of his coat before the snow melted and left water stains. That done, he would press the hat firmly back down on his head and travel another block before it was necessary once again to pause and sweep the hat clean.

Stanley and Vera were forced to wait for a light to change on a busy road. The snow streamed down brightly in the light of windows, the light of streetlamps, the beams of car headlights. Traffic had churned the snow into slush on the pavement. Without daring to look her in the face, Stanley reached out and shyly rested his arm across her shoulders. Before they crossed the road she slipped her arm around his waist.

Two months later they were married.

14

I
n the weeks before Christmas,
wild
and
frantic
were the words Vera most often employed. “That old man is driving me absolutely
wild,”
she could be heard muttering under her breath. Or, “They are goddamn driving me
frantic,”
they meaning the scabby crew of buzzards who tracked in and out of the house morning, noon, and night, eating and drinking them out of house and home. What really irked Vera was that her father assumed it was
her
duty to feed and water these old hogs. “Vera, could you make another plate of ham sandwiches for the boys?” he was always asking. “Is there another pan of date squares?” The last time her father had ordered up sandwiches she had told him where the bear shit in the buckwheat. “You want sandwiches, make them yourself. I don’t see any piano tied to your ass.”

She was surprised when that was what he did. He hadn’t made a scrap of fuss, just meekly left his rummy game and started slicing up a loaf of bread crooked as a dog’s hind leg, so crooked she couldn’t bear to watch and finally took the knife away from him and tackled the job herself.

This was supposed to be Christmas? A collection of derelict old farts cluttering up her kitchen, tracking in snow and leaving
puddles on the floor wherever they stood or sat, the door swinging open every five seconds so that the day was one long continual draught, all of them eating as if it were their last meal and drinking up the rye and beer as if it were their last chance for a drink. The house getting dim and blue with cigarette smoke and loud with accusations of cheating and arguments over who played what card in the games of poker and rummy that went on most of the day and night. Daniel and she having
their
home (in fairness it was theirs, too) disrupted by a bunch of dirty old men, who shouted in their deaf-men’s voices, laughed wet, gargly laughs that rumbled into coughing fits, hawking and spitting, and generally conducted themselves in a pleasant and attractive fashion.

And the feeble excuse her father offered for this holiday invasion was that every merchant in Connaught is obliged to dispense Christmas cheer to his customers. Yes, yes, said Vera, she knew that. But every other merchant in town invites his best customers to step into the storeroom for a quick nip out of the bottle kept there for that purpose. None of the other businessmen turns the family residence into a Sally Ann or Harbour Light where every moocher feels free to camp out for as long as the fancy takes him.

Well, countered her father, he couldn’t really offer drinks out of the businesses because Mr. Stutz doesn’t approve of alcohol and won’t have any part in distributing it. And he can’t be expected to be everywhere, can he? One minute pouring drinks at the garage, the next at the hotel? So really the most sensible arrangement is to have the boys drop by the house.

It suits him but not Vera. As the lady of the house she’s responsible for keeping it cleaned and the larder stocked, tasks which are endless when you’re faced with guests the likes of them. As she’s pointed out to her father any number of times, there might be some reason for tolerating these nuisances if any of them had ever spent a nickel in any of his enterprises but she is willing to bet dollars to doughnuts they never had. They couldn’t rustle up a nickel among them if they went shares. So what was the percentage?

Besides, they were a rebuke and an insult to family pride. Of the half dozen or so regulars which were underfoot, not one of them would have been permitted to darken the door of any of Connaught’s respectable citizens. They were taking advantage of the Monkmans, turning them into laughing-stocks.

All scrubs and good for nothings of one description or other. A couple of serious drunks, a suspected dog poisoner, a pair of shiftless bachelor brothers, aged sixty-five and sixty-seven, who’ve whiled away the decades telling each other smutty stories and signing social assistance cheques until they shifted to signing old-age pension cheques. The leading light of this peerless band was Huff Driesen, the man with the sugar diabetes who comes to her father to get his needle whenever he’s been drinking and doesn’t dare show up at his daughter’s for his injection. Of all the renegades and reprobates it’s Driesen that Vera dislikes the most. He fancies himself God’s gift to women, a lady-slayer. Whenever he finds himself in Vera’s vicinity he makes calf eyes and says, “I care for nobody, not I/If no one cares for me.” This is supposed to be witty or charming, or something. Vera would like to play a tune on him with the cast-iron frying pan.

Whenever she draws the dreadful behaviour of his guests to her father’s attention he just shrugs and says, “I don’t see the harm.” “They only get a chance to have a good time but once a year. I can hardly begrudge them that.”

Vera can.

There’s more. Daniel, now that he’s on Christmas holidays, spends all his time playing cards with this sorry testament to humanity. That began when they were short a player for rummy and his grandfather staked him in the game. He soon got the hang of it and proved himself a natural, instinctive player, quick-witted, attentive to the cards, blessed with more than his share of luck, patient as Job. In the course of that first afternoon he won more money than was good for him. He was hooked on cards.

Vera doesn’t like him to gamble. It’s not that she worries about
the money he might lose, or even win. It’s the way he behaves when he plays, cold-blooded, like a reptile. Most kids his age are restless and impulsive playing for stakes. The young are optimists inclined to trust that luck, fortune, is principally concerned about them and unlikely to let them down. So they lose. Not Daniel. He is a twelve-year-old crocodile who is content to lie disguised as a log until one of the old boys forgets himself and splashes down into the shallows during a poker game. Then the jaws snap shut. Vera’s seen it. Watching him gamble she can’t help thinking that he’s years and years older than twelve. How did he get so old? The old fellows he plays with sense this unnaturalness also and it shows in the way they treat him – sometimes like a boy, sometimes like a man. They’re not entirely sure which he is, or what is due him. They get mad as hell when Vera hauls him away from the table and sends him upstairs to bed at a decent hour. Winners don’t walk away from a table, the old men grumble and complain.

Another thing, Vera knows they’ve been giving Daniel whisky to drink. She’s smelled it on his breath. And she doesn’t care if it’s mixed nine-tenths water to one-tenth whisky, which was her father’s justification when she cornered him on it. “He’s not getting enough to hurt,” he said, “and it’s Christmas. Anyway, getting it at home spoils the novelty and takes the curiosity out of a boy his age.” Whatever he says, it’s just plain wrong to give a kid Daniel’s age whisky. Of any amount.

What a shit of a Christmas it’s turning out to be. And her father hasn’t done one single, solitary thing to make it better, as Christmas ought to be. The other day she asked him when he was going to pick up a tree and he acted as if the thought of a tree hadn’t even occurred to him. “Christmas tree?” he said. “What do we want bothering with a Christmas tree? I mean to say there’s no little kids here who believes in Santa Claus, is there? And they’re nothing but a goddamn fire hazard. You weren’t really wanting a Christmas tree were you, Vera?”

No, not really.

Learning that he was intending to give Daniel money for a Christmas present was the last straw.

“Well, why not?” he wanted to know. “I’ll just pop ten or twenty bucks into an envelope. Thirty, if you think that would be better. What’s wrong with that?”

What was wrong was that that was the sort of Christmas present cleaning ladies got at Christmas, bills in an envelope. She had no doubt that he planned the same for her.

“It’s not very personal is all,” she said. “It doesn’t show much care and consideration, much thought, you ask me. Money stuck in an envelope.”