Hunger's Brides (171 page)

Beulah's, on the other hand, seems impeccable today. She knew I would run from this. I am hand-picked. Plucked from her twisted tree of knowledge. Craziness or insanity? I would very much need to make sense of the difference. She knew why.

So she filled these papers with notes to me like a blood trail. She knew I'd run, even as she was making her last phone call to me. She counted on this. I run from everything. Her salamander, fleeing the insane swamp of family romance, lighting out for the cool temples of reason. I save myself. This is my function. The record survives through me. But I almost didn't go. There are things she could not know.

I was not always quite such a coward.

As a boy I even won a medal for bravery, though my father would not let me collect it. Instead we left town. He would find another job. This was the next story I would have told Beulah, had our game of chicken lasted that long.
Truth or dare…
.

My father was a drinker and a brawler. But he loved church music, perhaps still does, alone in his motorhome somewhere in Arizona. In his love of gospel, he took after his mother. Like her, he knew God existed. Only, he hated him for it.

My father's father taught all of his children—boys and girls both—the manly arts. Fishing, hunting, hockey, boxing, a steady escalation of brutalities. Towards the end of the war, with my father still in his early teens, my grandfather drove him from town to town for improvised bouts of backlot bareknuckles. All comers, men and boys, against a sweet-faced kid with a sneaky overhand right and a vicious left hook. Some of those contests must have been desperately, inexpressibly savage. Most of the men, read here ‘real' men, were away in France, dying like cattle. My grandfather couldn't go. He'd been disqualified from the service because of a metal plate in his head—an ice-skating accident, the infamous slew-foot incident a hundred times retold to us.

Grandfather did not forgive. There was an iron in the men of that generation, a kind of metal plate in their heads. He never once forgave. That is, until he forgot everything. To forgive, he had to forget.

Once, he caught a man exaggerating, about something not terribly important. A mild criticism of my grandfather. No one remembered anymore what, exactly. But at the time, the man was my grandfather's
best friend. For the next forty years that former friend lived on only in infamy, a spectre referred to ever after as ‘lyin' Thompson.'

Meanwhile, over that same forty years of his own domestic violence and silent remorse, he could not allow himself to apologize. Never once told anyone he was sorry. It was a word my grandmother never heard him use. She once said she didn't hold it against him.

When she died, he took her effects—and his silences and his sorrows—back to the Ottawa Valley, where he had several distant cousins. For the last ten years of his life he walked from farm to farm. Helping with the harvests, the planting, repairs. Sinking deeper into the purgatorial half-light of Alzheimer's. Each time he came to stay somewhere, he would clear—on a dresser, a night table, an apple crate upturned near a bed—enough space for three mementoes. Grandma's amethyst broach. Her silver hairbrush, with the sort of clip that slips over the hand. Their wedding photo. He continued to do this even when he could no longer recognize the woman in the picture next to him, and then himself.

I saw him around that time. One summer, when I was still an undergrad. My father brought him to see me, the Gregorys' first college boy, to say good-bye.

“I don't remember you,” he said, unsteadily, with a lost look. “I'm sorry.”

Good-bye then, old man.

My mother had a beautiful singing voice. She had looks. Her marriage prospects should have been better but she was said to have had a head for figures. This was farm code for intelligence and ambition, as much to be concealed as her hand for sketching, code phrase for a suspect creativity. Dirt-poor offspring of an Irish Protestant family scarred by legends of famine and a prairie Depression that raged on in their heads, her only permissible social recreation was singing at weddings. For the first year of their marriage the young couple sang duets together in little churches all over northern Manitoba. Eventually, some of my father's other formative influences took over.

She first started running away from him when she was pregnant with me. It was the fifties. Any self-respecting husband had better know how to keep a firm grip on his property, even if she was half crazy. Into the early sixties he kept finding us and dragging us back. It
was usually to an unfamiliar town; her flights served up the little incentive he needed to move on.

He did finally feel the urge to settle down, though, get a double-wide, have his flighty wife institutionalized. It was supposed to be a short stay. A rest cure of the kind then widely available to the hysterical daughters of a Victorian colony. A cure that worked wonders for the colony's sons.

I quit boxing when I turned twelve as my mother died in captivity. The hunting I quit soon after. It was late November, the last time we went out. Hunting season over, not that it made any difference, half-drunk father and sullen son were driving home late after a weekend's unsuccessful hunting, about to take a shortcut across the ice. When I expressed doubts, he boasted it was a lake he'd driven out on a hundred times for ice fishing. Only twice, I countered. And only in mid-winter.

No, it was shallow at this end, ten or twelve feet, would already be frozen hard. The cut across would save an hour. See, two or three fishing shacks out there already. A shack is not a car, I said.

He was right about the depth, wrong about the ice. The precision-welded cars of today would have floated for several moments. In 1967, ten-year-old Mercury station wagons sank in less than a minute. The car heater was broken, so we were wearing our heavy clothes, hunting mitts and overcoats. To mock my anxiousness he'd buckled on his seatbelt, pulled imaginary goggles down over his eyes, then revved the engine before we shot out onto the ice.

We were both good swimmers. The conditions were less than ideal, true. But he might have made a serious try at getting out of the car. He was a big man, by then with a big gut. With the car filling fast, he couldn't find the seatbelt buckle lodged under his paunch and in the folds of his parka. Slipping my head under the chin-deep water I found it for him. I thought he'd follow me to the surface.

I stood on the car hood and my shoulders cleared the water. It wasn't deep. It was stunningly, mind-numbingly cold.

All I had to do was get my feet under me on the roof. From there, half-jump and clamber onto the ice. I wasn't sure how long I would have the strength. Not long. Huge air bubbles were bursting up around me, and as each broke I told myself it was him. But it wasn't.

I filled my lungs with air. The hardest thing was ducking my head back under water so cold it struck your skull like a hammer. I like to
imagine that I could see his eyes. I'm not sure. I could, though, see the outline of his head, shaking, no. The window was still up, the door was locked. I don't remember ever seeing him drive with his door locked. No?
No?

The part of my heritage that I have most wanted to escape is the homicidal rage that rides as a quiet companion to even the most casual family cruelties.

My father loathed quitters. Had tormented me for years by claiming to detect such tendencies in me. I should drive down to the Sun Belt now, look him up in his trailer park and compliment him on his prescience. At that moment, I wanted to kill him.

Was it the drink, the cold? Was it his embarrassment, a long-held despair? I couldn't have cared less. I planted my feet in the mud, gripped the door handle in my right hand and struck the window glass again and again and again with my left elbow. I wanted to feel the satisfaction of breaking something—my elbow, the glass, his face, my lungs.

Once the glass did break he snapped out of it, whatever it was. As I recall, when we got to the surface he was mostly pulling
me
out of the water. An ice-fisherman had seen the whole thing. The motorist who drove us to town called the story in. I was named for some kind of medal, minted in London, England, the papers said. Such medals were to be awarded to a whole group of us by the Lieutenant-Governor. I was a boy hero. The stuff of frontier legend. Reporters came.

He waited upstairs.

He never thanked me. Never mentioned it in fact, or referred to it in any way I could detect. On the other hand he never called me a quitter again.

We moved to British Columbia for a while, just before the ceremony. The medal caught up with us later.

I do not blame him now. Heroism is overdone.

Donald you'd never believe—they've named their Smoking Mountain Saint Gregory and make a volcano effigy of amaranth seed and eat it at the solstice. I wonder has anyone ever bolted the volcano whole?—volcanohole, bolted, that would be me. San Gregorio del Popo they call it. The funniest thing was in the Church where Juana was baptized they had a history of all the Saints Gregory.
Why?—
and which Gregory is the mountain—why so many Gregory popes and saints. Nobody knew, nobody could answer me.

And you, Doctor, which one would you be? If you could, if I could make you….

St. Gregory I: born Rome; elected Pope 3/IX/590; died 12/III/604. During the plague of Rome an angel appeared to him on the rock now called the Castil San Angelo. What did the Angel say that Gregory defends himself as a servant serving God?—
servus servorum Dei!
Thus instituting Gregorian Chant. Was that the first one—a thousand lines of
servus servorum Dei
chanted after school? Was the plague angel satisfied?

St. Gregory II: elected Pope 19/V/715; died 11/II/731. Expelled sect of iconoclasts. Ordered destruction of their fetishes.

St. Gregory III: born Syria; elected 18/III/731; died 28/XI/741. Dubbed the mite of Saint Peter, how strange how odd—mite as pittance or insect? Or was that
mitre?

Gregory IV: born Rome; elected 20/IX/827; died 11/I/844. Organized armada against Saracens. First of the Pope Gregorys not canonized. How painful, for you all.

Gregory V: born Saxony; elected 3/V/996; died 18/II/999. Forced to flee Rome by anti-pope Juan XVIII. The Gregorian descant picks up speed. Hang on for the ride of your lives.

Gregory VI: elected 5/V/1045; died 20/XII/1046. Took personal command of the Papal army against invaders, all second-comers.

St. Gregory VII: born Tuscany; elected 22/IV/1073; died 25/??/1085. Devised formula
Dictatus Papae. ‘
Only Pappy is above judgement.' Yes definitely saint material this one.

Gregory VIII: elected 25/X/1187; died 17/XII/1187. Friend of Barbarossa, helped Christians in Holy Lands oppressed by infidels.
Teeny tiny little sixty-day papacy. May have devised formula
‘Carpe Diem.'

Gregory IX: elected 21/III/1227; died 22/VIII/1241. Excommunicated Frederick II. Canonized Saints Francis, Antonio and Domingo. Prepared the 6th crusade. INSTITUTED INQUISITION.

St. Gregory X: elected 27/III/1272; died 10/I/1276.?? The rest is silence. So saintly, so obscure.

Gregory XI: elected 5/I/1371; died 26/III/1378. Rabid chessplayer. With help of another Saint Catherine, moved Holy See to Rome. The better to wholly See you with my dear.

Gregory XII: elected 19/XII/1406; died 18/X/1417. First Gregory to quit Papacy. Most miserable period of the Holy See (not to mention, of the
nomenclaturum
Gregory).

Gregory XIII: elected 25/V/1572; died 10/IV/1585. Opened seminaries in Vienna, Prague, Japan. Celebrated 11th Jubilee in 1575. Reformed calendar from 4/X/1582 to 15/X/1582. Pope of lost time.

Gregory XIV: elected 8/XII/1590; died 16/X/1591. Incompetent, deceived by counsellors. Excommunicated Enrique IV and quit. Took a professorship.

Gregory XV: elected 14/II/1621; died 8/VII/1623. Took a paternal interest in the missions. Instituted orwellian confraternity of
THE PROPAGANDA FIDE
.

And never forget Gregory of Nazianzus, toasting ants and termites as the architects of labyrinths while ordering Sappho burned. And Gregory of Nyssa who linked Christ to Theseus, Dionysus to Horus, lame god of Isis. ‘Nyssa'—Arabic for birthplace of Isis. Another coincidence probably.
¹⁴
So synchronistical.
¹⁵
So many fished up in one bright shining net of electrum.

  Doctor, don't you sometimes wonder if all the Gregorys aren't … One?

H
ARLEQUIN: OLD
C
OMEDY
        

V
ERY SOON NOW
they—you: my public—will begin asking by what right I've appointed myself editor and taken over Beulah's project.

By the same right she
makes me a character in it
.

And no, not just a character but chorus and audience, accused and executioner. It has not always been an easy thing, seeing myself in the reflections of her journals, but here, in her notes on Old Comedy, I've found something else again. It is not really my area, but such are the forsaken pleasures of scholarship that I've played my part and done some extra research.