Homesick (4 page)

Not having one of those kicking around the place is another reason I suppose for going back to Connaught. I don’t mean Dad. He couldn’t be trusted to raise a cat. Look how he terrorized the life out of poor Earl with his shenanigans. I wonder about this Mr. Stutz. During the war Earl thought a lot of him; I could read it between the lines in the letters he wrote me. Brother seemed to
worship the very ground this Mr. Stutz walked on. So he must be something special because Earl wasn’t one to take to people. Too shy and too timid. I think Earl was afraid of most people. What was it once that Mother said to me about Earl? That he ought to have been born a girl so he could marry and be taken care of for the rest of his life. He was an odd duck, Earl. Which makes me think that if Mr. Stutz could make a favourable impression on a wary one like him, it’s possible he could be a Male Influence for Daniel.

Daniel was waking. He yawned, scrubbed his face with his hands, rolled his shoulders. He was a slim, fine-boned boy with the promise of extraordinary height if the rest of him caught up with a pair of long, skinny legs. His narrow, foxy face appeared slightly sullen despite being sprinkled with cinnamon freckles. Or maybe it was his hair that suggested sullenness; a twelve year old patterned on James Dean. He combed it now, using the window as a mirror, raking it with a rat-tail comb until every tooth mark stood out in his thick, lank reddish hair darkened with Brylcreem to the colour of an oily old penny. When he had finished, he stuffed his hands in his pockets, lowered his neck into the collar of his jacket, planted the soles of his shoes on the chair back in front of him, and jiggled his legs so fiercely that his trousers shimmied up his calves, revealing his sagging white socks. Not once during all this did he allow his mother to catch his eye.

Look at him sitting sassy. Trying so hard, so soon to get old. Now everything’s an occasion for him to try and put distance between us. Even his socks, that jacket. The jacket’s casual but decent – not cheap either. But if I like a thing, he won’t.

“I’m not wearing a golf jacket,” was what he said. “Have I ever seen a golf course? Who do you think I am? Arnold Palmer?”

I tuned him in on what he should and shouldn’t wear but that doesn’t mean I won. He’s got the jacket on, but look at it. Cuffs turned back to the elbows and collar turned up to the ears. To provoke me.

“You explain to me the percentage in looking like a hoodlum,” was what I said to him.

To think his father had operated a men’s wear store; wore a suit and tie every working day of his life. Put a briefcase in his hand, walking down the street he could’ve been mistaken for a lawyer. I told Daniel, “People draw conclusions about you according to how you dress.”

Looking at him you’ve got to conclude he’s another Lyle Gardiner. The sort of brat who lives with his mother in a one-bedroom apartment and sleeps on a fold-out in the living room with his socks and underwear lying on the floor. A kid who thrives on wieners and canned pork and beans, who drinks Coke with his breakfast toast, who reads nothing but comic books and falls asleep in front of the television watching the late movie on a school night. That’s what my kid looks like.

And how to make sure that he becomes the other? Like that medical student up front with his short hair, clean shirt, tie, purpose in life? Appearances do matter. From the look of him the medical student is the only person on this bus I’d risk a pleasantry on. With a young man of that type you could have a sensible, intelligent conversation. That’s because people like him are taught reserve and tact and courtesy in their homes from knee-high on up. Not like the majority of people on a bus who no sooner drop in a seat beside you than they light into a description of their latest bladder repair operation, or some equally gruesome and edifying topic. It causes my head to hammer all the harder just to think about it.

Exactly the kind of people Pooch and Lyle are. And when I’m at my worst, I don’t deny it, people like me. The difference being I know better and Pooch doesn’t. As I told Daniel a thousand times, “We may have to live with these people but we don’t have to act like them.” Although I have difficulty remembering that, what with a bad mouth, swearing and all. An Army habit that’s hard to break.
But as I said to Daniel, “Me, I’m a lost cause. It isn’t me we’re preparing to succeed. It’s you. So as the old saying goes, ‘Don’t do as I do. Do as I say.’ ”

When I look at him over there I’ve got to trust it’ll all come right. It has to, with so much of Stanley in him. Not just the intelligence either, but the rest too. That funny shade of strawberry red hair; the tall man’s stoop to his shoulders even though he isn’t tall yet. The spitting, walking, talking image of his old man.

Other people, Pooch for one, can say he takes after me, but I don’t see it. Unless it’s the eyes, which are blue like mine, only brighter. Set against that pale skin they shine like all get out. When he was small I’d call them his stars. “The stars are out and shining,” is what I’d say when he woke up from his nap, just like he has now. I wonder what his reaction would be if I tried that on him again? Say it good and loud so everyone on the bus can hear.

They come out and shine at what they oughtn’t to come out and shine at, those eyes. By Christ, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back when I stumbled on that peekaboo. Sunday, I was cleaning the apartment. No rest for the wicked. Of course, as soon as I got ready to wash and wax the floors who turns up like a bad penny but Lyle Gardiner? Nothing for it but to send both boys upstairs to watch television at Pooch’s until I got my floors done. Let Pooch entertain them and then when I was finished we could send them downstairs to amuse themselves at my place and Pooch and me could have fifteen minutes of peace to put our feet up and have a coffee. Or a coffee and a bit, as Pooch puts it. The bit being liqueur. Courtesy of Pooch’s boyfriends. So she was well-supplied and most Sundays got into her stock. I never took more than a sprinkle of Tia Maria in my instant to make it drinkable, but some Sunday afternoons didn’t Pooch get awful carefree drinking coffee?

I did my final buff and was off. Knocked on the door but the television was roaring so loud you couldn’t have heard cannons
fired off in the hallway. So I walked in. It’s not often you get treated to a scene like that, Pooch in her easy-chair, still in a housecoat in the middle of the afternoon, both of her big yellow feet resting on a hassock spread with newspapers and her three sheets to the wind. Giggling and holding a glass of liqueur with her pinky out. I suppose she thought the extended pinky made her look gracious and was the accepted way to sip Drambuie out of a Melmac mug that had been the bonus offer in a box of dish soap.

“Don’t tickle! Don’t tickle!” I can hear her crying it now in her phoney girlish voice.

The two boys on their knees around the hassock, snorting with laughter, painting Pooch’s toenails. Each with his tiny brush. Daniel doing the left foot in pink; Lyle the right in red. And Pooch so far gone she had no idea that with her legs drawn up like that on the hassock the boys could see clear up her housecoat. And her without panties on.

“Don’t tickle! Don’t tickle!” It was enough to make your stomach turn. I’d never have believed it of Daniel, scooting a peek. I could hardly believe it of Lyle, who a moment before I’d have said couldn’t have fallen any lower in my estimation and now had. What boy with a shred of decency in him would laugh and think it funny to have his friend look at that?

“What do they think of us?” I caught myself saying aloud. “It can’t be this, can it?”

I better leave all that now. Dragging it up only makes my head hurt worse. Two aspirins every two hours for two days and not a bit of improvement. I swear these temples of mine are a pair of blacksmith’s anvils.

Here comes the medical student up the aisle. Even doctors have to pee, although they never look it. No harm in a friendly smile to establish there’s another human on this godforsaken contraption.

The young man returned Vera’s smile. He even hesitated by her seat. He looked as if he wished to begin a conversation but didn’t dare.

Now that’s a nice smile. Not brassy. A nice smile like that comes from taking proper care of your teeth. But he’s shy. You can tell that.

“Buses. What a way to fly,” Vera said.

The young man kept smiling, picked at his tie clasp with the nail of his index finger. “You don’t like buses?” he asked diffidently.

“Do I look like I’d like buses?”

He did not reply. Only stood swaying in the aisle, watching her.

Vera waited for him to speak. When he didn’t, she finally inquired, “Going far?”

“Oh, not very.”

Another moment of silent awkwardness. “Well, I won’t keep you,” said Vera, a little disappointed. “Have a nice trip.”

“Thank you. You, too.”

Yet on the way back from his visit to the toilet the young man paused by her seat. He had steeled himself to speak. “Ma’am,” he began hesitantly. “Ma’am, I couldn’t help noticing when you spoke … well, I thought maybe you had a problem. I think I have something that might help.”

“Why yes,” said Vera, surprised, “as a matter of fact I do. I have this terrible …” But already the young man was gone, headed back to his seat.

Imagine him spotting that. That I had a headache. Of course, they’re trained to spot symptoms. Now he’s off to get some new painkiller out of his bag, a sample probably. The drug company salesmen are always pushing samples on them.

He was back and clearly excited now, shyness evaporated. “I knew it. I had a feeling. I could tell.” He thrust something at Vera. A pamphlet. She took it. Stared at a bold type headline.
TIRED
?
SICK
?
BROKE
?
JESUS IS THE ONE FAIL-PROOF REMEDY
.

“You know,” said the young man eagerly, “I never thought the Lord would make use of me to proclaim Him so soon, this being my first field mission. But, ma’am, if you would allow me to sit beside you and if you would join me in an earnest prayer of appeal,
I know your burden would be relieved. Would you do that now, ma’am? Would you join me?”

Suddenly Daniel was at his elbow. “Hey, you,” he said, jostling the young man rudely to one side, “this is my mother and my seat. I’d like to sit down if you don’t mind.”

3

A
lec Monkman sat at his kitchen table wearing a straw fedora with a striped hatband of grey and burgundy. The hat was clean and neat and obviously new; he had purchased it in honour of Vera’s coming a week before at Kleimer’s Men’s Wear, one of the stores he didn’t own. Strangers might have assumed that Monkman didn’t own it because of its name – Kleimer’s – but they did not know that names did not signify much in Connaught. When Monkman had bought a business he had never bothered to change its name. His garage, of which he had been proprietor for fourteen years, was still Collier’s Auto; his hotel was still known as Simpson’s Hotel. Whatever vanity he possessed did not assert itself in a wish to see his name painted on a sign board, or even more luxuriantly spelled out in gaudy neon light. Alec Monkman seemed immune to the desire to commemorate his success. The house he lived in, shabby and cramped, with long hair-like fractures creeping and fingering their way across the plaster walls of all the rooms, was the same house his daughter Vera had walked away from seventeen years before and today was returning to. It was just as it had been then, with this exception. Two years before, the room off the kitchen that had always been the baby’s room, the place where
they had put the youngest child’s cot because it was warm there near the old, black, nickel-plated stove, had been turned into an indoor bathroom.

He wondered what Vera would think of that. Perhaps it was an odd thing to wonder, since he had not seen his daughter in seventeen years, or ever seen the grandson she was bringing home with her. But he was an old man now, seventy-three, and of all the alterations in his circumstances and surroundings he had made in nearly twenty years, it was the most recent he was likely to recall and seize upon. There had been a misunderstanding with the plumber and he had come home to find himself the owner of a pink toilet. He had let it pass. He had even found it funny, laughed about it with Mr. Stutz, inviting him to step in and try on the new facility for size. Now he was worried Vera might think him gone foolish in the head with a pink toilet.

Mr. Stutz was at the
STC
stop at present, waiting for Vera’s bus. He could imagine Stutz, slow, solid, patient under the tin sign emblazoned with a bounding antelope which was the symbol of the bus company. The sign was fastened to the wall of his, Alec Monkman’s, hotel. In the last year he had earned the government contract to peddle bus tickets and sell coffee and sandwiches to travellers. Won it, he supposed, on the strength of clean washrooms. He had Mr. Stutz to thank for that, the cleanliness of the public washrooms in his hotel.

Well, they were both waiting, he and Mr. Stutz. Mr. Stutz there and he in his kitchen. He had resolved not to go to them, but instead have them brought to him. He was making a point. It might be a good idea, too, if he wasn’t discovered in the kitchen hovering by the window when they were brought to the door, but in his bedroom, so relaxed and easy that it was possible for him to snooze minutes before their arrival. Showing eagerness over her return would not be wise. If Vera ever felt she had the upper hand she would not hesitate to use it. He’d seen her operate before.