I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (16 page)

I leafed again through his brief account of his provenance. Born in 1912 in Montreal, his parents Irish immigrants, the father a print shop operator who died at the Somme. His mother, a devoted Catholic, scraped together a living as a seamstress while raising a girl and a boy. Sensitive, studious Dermot doted on his older sister until she died at fourteen of leukemia. He was ten.

There followed a wretched time – years, it seemed – when I ached for the smiles and hugs and words of comfort that Genevieve had unsparingly bestowed on me. I suspect I spent as much time in a detention room or talking to the counselling priest, an uncharitable oaf, as I did in the classroom
.

But all turned sunny in his teens.

Somehow a force had come into me, whether from God or the old gentleman below, I shall never know. I had made up two lost years of school and skipped two more, and suddenly I was in McGill's hallowed halls majoring in the great myths, a triumphant and arrogant eighteen-year-old
.

It was a chronological history, no flash-forwards to the roiling Squamish River, no Irene, no Gabriel. No sex either, but much self-deprecating humour of the kind I recalled from his lectures, his brittle metallic voice:
Still in fervent contemplation of the priesthood
,
I was determined to get a jump on my vows, and retained my chastity at some cost to both my sanity and my bed sheets
(a brave admission from a man whose writings shied from any form of ribald humour).

Dermot had never mentioned he'd been an amateur entertainer, so I was beguiled to learn he'd starred in varsity shows.

For some reason I found myself specializing in such nautical naughtinesses as
HMS
Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance,
and
Show Boat.
I was fairly talented, I am not ashamed to admit, cutting quite a figure in my sailor suits, with a tenor voice that lacked Enrico Caruso's range but wobbled rather prettily through the higher registers
.

Several few pages on he described how, as a newly minted D. Th., he'd scorned offers of academic posts to serve as principal of Pius XI Residential School in Torch River, Saskatchewan – locally called Pie Eleven. Though he'd served as such from 1940 to 1942, his autobiography went silent upon his arrival there.

I believed, as did every Canadian, that the Native schooling system had been a wondrous gift to our aboriginal brethren. I had watched the documentaries: china dolls in their starched uniforms, boys with their prickly haircuts, at prayer, at play, at their cute little desks. “The best years of their lives,” trumpeted the Catholic, Anglican, and United Church hierarchies, affording these youngsters a “free and equal chance” at education
.

And all seemed true and good as, on my first day as headmaster (I preferred that to
principal),
I walked into the auditorium of Pius XI School and was greeted by three hundred young voices in off-key choir, praising the coming of the Lord
.

It ended there, midway through Chapter Six. When did disillusionment come? And how?

My evening with my lovely young secretary was strained, maybe because the surroundings were too garish for comfort. Trader Vic's was a kitschy ad for the islands blessed by Paul Gauguin, and Gertrude seemed not to know what to make of it all – tiki masks and tapa cloth, an outrigger hanging from the ceiling. She was a small-town girl from Kelowna, where waiters didn't dress like tourists just back from Hawaii. Her eyes widened with shock as she looked at the menu prices. “Five dollars for steak and lobster!”

Those eyes were having a hard time making contact with mine. I supposed she was finding our out-of-office get-together novel and awkward. She seemed to have gone to the expense of buying a new outfit for the occasion, a tasteful pleated skirt of the style of the time. (Later, over the course of several decades, Gertrude would dress me, marching me off to the tailor's whenever I started to look hopelessly out of fashion.)

I in turn avoided looking at her bobbing breasts beneath her ruffled blouse. They heaved as she squirmed or as her hands disappeared for another tug at her nylons. They heaved as I entertained with my visits to Squamish, my miracle cure by boiled fir needles and bracken rhizomes. “Apparently,” said I, “the preparation also has uses as an aphrodisiac.” I almost slapped my forehead – what a stupid thing to say.

When I would look away, or deal with the waiter, I'd notice her staring at me, then quickly turning to study a hanging puffer fish. My suggestive remark must have frightened her.

She'd hardly touched her mai tai by the time I finished my Big Kahuna; I switched to Scotch. Seafood salad for the lady, and for her escort, rib-eye steak. Somehow I'd have to screw up the courage to submit the tab to the office expense account, past pinchy Bullingham.

I was probably over the legal limit as I drove her to her little East End suite. Certainly tipsy enough to give Lord Byron loud voice: “She walks in beauty, like the night / Of cloudless climes and starry skies.”

At her door she kissed me on the cheek and hurried inside with just a breathless, “Thank you.”

From “Where the Squamish River Flows,”
A Thirst for Justice
, © W. Chance

BEAUCHAMP SEEMED UNAWARE Gertrude Isbister was suffering from one of those crushes nineteen-year-olds are prone to, and it speaks poorly of him that he never picked up her signals. It's easy to assume he was preoccupied with the Swift case, but the fact is that our self-doubting, self-belittling hero has little facility for reading those close to him, as this author can attest. All of which contrasts startlingly with his unparalleled skill at sizing up strangers, at picking up cues from lying witnesses.

“I don't know how many times I flashed him some leg,” Isbister told me. She would have “walked to the moon and back” for him, and she hung in for the first few years, spurning the advances of many worthy men, while retaining hopes for this tall, awkward, Roman-nosed barrister who remained excruciatingly unromanced and unattached. Secretly, she confessed, she was relieved that his relationship with Ophelia Moore took such a “wrong turn.”

It was in Isbister's living room that I interviewed her over a few glasses of wine. I pray she'll forgive me for suggesting she was feeling little pain, but when I asked what she meant by a wrong turn, she began laughing uproariously, recalling a comment by Ophelia Moore about a “great underarm deodorant” she'd discovered. Then she clapped her hand over her mouth and, despite entreaties, nothing more was forthcoming. Do I dare conclude Moore had told her about some awkward, relationship-ending event involving a can of deodorant?

After five years Isbister finally gave up on Beauchamp and found a husband. During her boss's interregnum on skid road (see “The Wet Years”) she took leave of absence from
Tragger, Inglis to raise her two children, returning to the firm when Beauchamp did. This handsome woman is now fully retired, a widow and devoted grandmother of three.

As for Beauchamp, erotic opportunities were regularly opened up to him by his playboy friend Hubbell Meyerson, who had family wealth and claimed to know every blind pig and cathouse in town (or, as he put it, “the boils on the bum of staid Vancouver”). Beauchamp has admitted jocularly to a phobia about women of easy virtue – it's probably just old-fashioned moral fear – and insists that during such sojourns he didn't partake in any pleasures more earthly than drink. Knowing Beauchamp as we do, that's undoubtedly true.

He spent the first weekend of May with Meyerson at the family ranch in the Skagit Valley – the senior Meyersons were in Paris – where they took long, healthy treks, swam laps in the pool, and sampled rare vintages from the cellar while the cook grilled beef ribs. A womanless weekend, unthreatening, a chance for Beauchamp to unload his romantic woes on his trusted friend (who, as he confided to me, sought to discourage Beauchamp's pursuit of Ms. Moore: “It was typically guileless of the poor sod to get tangled up with a fox like her. He wasn't ready for a modern woman”).

In any event, Beauchamp felt in fit form for his return to the office on Monday.

I
walked to work that morning along Coal Harbour and the inlet side of the
CPR
tracks, a lovely, sunny day, mists rising from the sea, the North Shore mountains still capped with snow. One of Hubbell's reminiscences had stirred a memory of my own, long buried, and I couldn't stop playing with it.

“Remember back during law school?” he'd said. “It was your birthday. I took the one that looked like Grace Kelly with tits.”

My memory jogged, I saw myself as in an old, shadowy movie, a scrawny eighteen-year-old at a makeshift bar in a cathouse, drinking hard, terrified by the offerings of the several women for hire.

“Couldn't drag you out of there!” Hubbell's raucous laughter as he raised his cognac in salute.

I remembered a slender young Native woman, so gentle, so hungry for my feed of poetry …

I got off the elevator at the Sweatshop floor, intending to pop in on Ophelia and hear about her visit with the medieval studies scholar Toby Schumacher – Schumie. He was well published and I'd read a few of his works: solid research, insightful, but marred by the prolix, unrhythmic prose typical of academic writing.

Several women were in the waiting room, all there to see Ophelia. Two were likely of ill repute, to use the Victorian term: tarty in attire, little heart tattoos, net stockings. Two were older, one with a black eye. My junior's practice had burgeoned since her coup at the women's prison. She was attracting not just a criminal clientele but, it would seem, abused wives who, until Ophelia made the news, were unaware our town had any woman lawyers to turn to.

Her door was closed but I saw through the glass partition that Gertrude was with her. They were laughing.
I never had a worse date. He wouldn't shut up
. I was spotted, so had no recourse but
to go in. Gertrude blushed deep red but Ophelia didn't even try to stifle her smile. I had a sinking sense she'd just recounted the armpit episode.

“So what's with the fir needles, spruce pitch, and fish eggs? I hear they bestow stud-like powers.”

Gertrude fled and I slumped into an armchair. Barely able to meet Ophelia's eyes, I took refuge in testiness. “It seems you've become the champion of ladies used and abused.”

Ophelia looked at me with either dismay or disgust. “I have a woman out there whose husband was acquitted of assault by a prick of a judge who told her to go home and be a compliant wife. She got beaten again for making her complaint. What's it feel like being a man in a man's world, Arthur? Pretty good?”

“Why am I being treated like a symbol of what's wrong with the world?”

“Because you have a typical ego-testicle mindset.” She softened. “Also, I guess because you're handy. I'm sorry. Schumacher set me off with his patronizing; he's very smug now that he's got his wife back. He didn't hedge much on his dislike for Mulligan – a few crocodile tears. He'd like to believe his threats of legal action drove him to suicide.”

That was worth developing. “What was his proof of adultery?”

“A private eye caught them
in flagrante delicto
in Schumacher's bedroom. Guess who? Your pal Jimmy ‘Fingers' O'Houlihan.” She added, “There's some bad news on your desk.”

“They matched the shells to Gabriel's rifle? I'm not surprised. This is the biggest railway job since the Great Train Robbery.”

En route to my office, I slipped quickly past Gertrude so we wouldn't have to look at each other. The firearms report was on my desk, with photos from a microscope camera; the grooving, the impact dimple, everything matched. The serologist's report was there too – they had indeed found “pecker tracks” on the pink panties. There was no way to prove the semen's authorship, but I hazarded it was more likely spillage from masturbation than from coitus.

Gertrude had put a few phone messages on top of Ophelia's dictated notes. The first was from Mary, the waitress at the Big Chief. She would phone again in half an hour.

Mother had reported in, complaining of having caught my “beastly” cold. Gertrude's note:
She wonders if you're trying to kill her
.

Jim Brady again. Our meeting was overdue.

My return call was answered with a bold, “Communist Party campaign office.” Upon being fetched to the phone, Brady was relaxed and jocular, not dour and obsessive as befitted a proper Marxist. Gabriel had told him of his high regard for me. I was an “up-and-comer.” The Party was hoping to run a handful of candidates in B.C. Would I be interested in Vancouver Centre?

Then he laughed. “That's for my comrades in the Red Squad – this ain't exactly a private line.” Nonetheless, he had to be near his phone all day. He gladly accepted my offer to come by with Chinese takeout.