Late Nights on Air (22 page)

Dido’s confusion deepened after an interview she did—a native linguist in his fifties remembered his experience in residential school. He began to tell her in a calm voice what happened.

His mother died when he was three, he said into the microphone, and for a while he was raised by his grandparents, but one day his grandfather put him on a horse-drawn wagon and said in their language, “You are going away.” He was sent to Elkhorn, Manitoba, to a boarding school run by an Anglican mission. In school they were all warned not to speak their own language, but the day came when he had been caught too many times, and he was punished. The Anglican missionary slapped his face until his cheeks were red and hot, but he didn’t cry. Then he was told to take off his clothing, his coveralls, and he was smacked on his bare behind, and then he cried. His hands
were strapped behind his back, his ankles were tied, and he was put on a tall stool and left there until he fell off the stool and messed himself. Again, he was spanked. He was ordered to fill a basin with warm water, to stir a bar of soap, cut in half, into the water, then to wash his mouth with it. Soon his mouth was raw inside and he felt the most incredible thirst. Then he was put into an empty room. After a time the priest came back and brought out his penis, “but I was five, and I didn’t know what he meant, so he shoved it into me, and I fainted.”

The man’s story of childhood horror triggered a personal memory—pulled from somewhere deep inside her—of a child spanking a younger child’s bottom, and she was the child. She was five, the younger child was two or three. They were upstairs in her house, a group of them, playing. And what prompted it? All she remembered was pulling down the little one’s panties and the suffusion of feeling that accompanied the application of her bare hand to that bare bottom. It rushed through her untrammelled, a sense of dirtiness, excitement, and guilt.

She’d forgotten, she’d forgotten, and now it flooded back. A five-year-old’s upwelling sexuality. Maybe it wasn’t untypical, she told herself, maybe it was something all but a few outgrew, all but a few celibate priests who got it off by spanking bare bottoms and more, the unutterable things the native linguist spoke of, until she said to him, “This is too hard to listen to.”

“Yes,” he agreed, and he stopped, and didn’t seem to mind stopping.

She asked Harry what she should have done and what they should do next. Harry told her she’d done the right
thing by listening until it was too painful to listen any more.

“I feel like a coward,” said Dido.

The phone calls to the station were mostly from offended listeners who didn’t believe the man. He’d come to Yellowknife to appear before Berger, testifying to the long destruction of native languages and what was likely to happen in that regard if the pipeline went through. Dido had known only that he was respected in his field (Ralph Cody had told her how highly regarded he was) and had asked him, innocently, about his background.

“What should I do in the way of follow-up?” she asked Harry, sounding at once agonized and prim, sounding quite unlike her old self.

Harry suggested she take it on as a project, not doing piecemeal interviews from time to time, but gathering information for a documentary about abuse. “It’s time the schools and churches were held to account.”

“I’m not sure I have the heart for it,” she said.

Harry nodded. “I don’t blame you.”

It happened bit by bit, over the weeks, as the nights grew longer. Dido’s troubles gathered around her. She began to look seedy, sallow, unwashed. Beside her mouth pimples blossomed. Her voice had the same calm, thrilling energy on air, but in person she seemed distracted and people remarked on it. Is something the matter with Dido? Is she ill?

It was strange to see her briskness vanish and her confidence recede. At the dinner table, on the occasions when they
ate together, Eleanor noticed how Dido’s hands were always in restless motion: she would pick up both fork and knife and roll them endlessly between her fingers, or smooth both sides of the placemat repeatedly, giving the impression of agitated competence, of a newly spawned nervousness. At work, there were days when she had to force herself to pick up the phone and line up an interview. Dido, who had formerly brimmed with life, was not faring well with love.

Dido didn’t confide in her any more, and so Eleanor was left to brood about the eloquent stillness that came over Lorna Dargabble’s face when she saw Dido’s black eye, and her quiet questions about Dido’s personal life, not to be prying, she said, but out of concern. And then Lorna’s words with Eddy, her little confrontation. Lorna was sitting beside the jade plant when Eddy appeared with his coat on, heading outside. She called to him and he stopped. “I’ve seen you half a dozen times and you haven’t seen me,” she said. His eyes narrowed. He studied her. “I’m on my break,” he said.

“Your mother would be ashamed of you.”

Eddy shoved his hands into his pockets. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Lorna followed Eddy’s progress up the street by watching him through the big window, and Eleanor said, “What was
that
about? Lorna?”

“I’ve just made an enemy. But it can’t be helped.”

“Lorna?”

“I don’t care for sneaky men who can’t keep their hands to themselves.”

One late November morning, Harry found Dido standing on the shore of Back Bay, looking across at the cemetery, chilled to the bone. She smiled at him when he approached and said she’d been thinking about her father.

“Have you heard his voice again?”

“I hear it very often. I should say, I remember hearing it. It keeps me sane.”

“What’s wrong, Dido?”

“Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.” But she couldn’t stop shivering.

Harry took her home and wrapped her, fully dressed, in a blanket and set about making coffee. “I’d give you a fur coat if I could,” he said.

“Would you?”

“In a minute.”

After a pause, “Who do you suppose gave Gwen the fur coat?”

He glanced at her and didn’t answer. Then busied himself putting out milk and sugar, forgetting for a moment that Dido drank her coffee black.

“Your mother must have had a fur coat, Harry. What happened to it?”

“She wears it,” he replied. “Every winter.”

He poured the coffee and she laced her fingers through the handle of the mug and stared down at it.

“Drink,” he coaxed.

She lowered her head and sipped.

He looked at her pale face, her hair damp and pulled back as if she’d been swimming in the wrong season. “You’re deeply loved,” he heard himself say, but she didn’t respond.
He pulled out a chair and sat next to her. “Leave him,” he urged. “He’s not right for you.”

Her voice was quiet. “Why don’t you like Eddy?”

“He has no soul.” For a moment he held his own against her glittering eyes, but then he backed down. “Maybe I’m wrong.”

“You
are
wrong.”

Her face had colour again. That much he’d accomplished—putting the blood back in her cheeks.

“You deserve so much more,” he said.

“Are you so much more?” She would punish him for pitying her. “Should I settle for you?”

Harry winced and rubbed the back of his neck. He stood up. “Let me run a bath for you,” he said.

Ten minutes later, alone in the bathroom, she sank under the hot water, remembering how Eddy had once bathed her by hand, every limb, every inch of her.

That was the day Harry fed her hot drinks and hot food, made up the spare bed, tucked her in. She slept. When she woke up in the middle of the afternoon, feeling rested for the first time in weeks, she gazed around the peaceful room and heard Harry in the kitchen, talking to his dog. Suddenly, also for the first time in weeks, she felt safe. And she stayed.

To Dido’s great surprise Harry was uninhibited and appreciative in bed. His vulnerability descended like a wave from his balding head to his yielding eyes and responsive mouth and down to a softly furred chest and belly, to sturdy hips and to a penis more narrow than wide—more O Henry bar than
chocolate slab, more spring rhubarb than autumn gourd, more canoe than motor boat.

He appreciated everything Dido did. He responded to everything. He was animated, uncritical, and ardent.

For six weeks they lived together in Harry’s house on Latham Island, the little white house he’d been renting and just recently had managed to buy. He planned a party for the new year, complete with champagne and roast caribou, to celebrate his new house and new life with Dido. But there would be no roast caribou, no champagne.

Harry would remember Dido’s big wristwatch, not least because she continued to wear it after he bought her a new one. At Eldonn Jewellery, in the first week of December, he selected an elegant watch with a narrow band that looked like beaten gold. But Dido put it away in a drawer and continued to wear the watch her father-in-law had found on the beach and slipped onto her wrist. Her large hand was always turning it, as someone else might turn a wedding band. It clicked against tabletops, including the one in the studio covered with baize for that very reason, to mute every rustle and thud. The green baize was like the winter footgear that muffled the sounds of your feet. Harry wore caribou-hide mukluks with felt liners, and the only time they failed to keep his feet warm was after he walked across the wet floors inside the doors of the Hudson’s Bay Company store. Nothing else, not front hallways or vehicles or other stores, or even the floor of the Strange Range, had enough meltwater to soak
through the hide-and-wool combination and interfere with his footwear’s capacity to insulate. In a frozen world you dressed for the cold. Mukluks, snow pants, parka, parka shell, fur hat, fur-lined mitts. None of the barehanded, bareheaded going-without of southern Canada.

On the coldest days and nights, chimney smoke rose straight as a plumb line. One of those days was Dido’s birthday. She was twenty-nine on December 5, the date, she told Harry, when children in the Netherlands put a shoe beside the stove to be filled in the night with gifts from Sinterklaas. Dido put her hands on Harry’s face and looked into his eyes. “I’ll leave my shoe beside the stove tonight and you can put a gift into it. I don’t want anything else.”

“What about a cake?”

“I love cake.”

He made her a glorious Black Forest cake. He started at eight o’clock in the evening, little realizing how much time he would need. Four layers, and his oven too small to hold more than two at a time. The last layers came out of the oven at midnight. Dido was in bed, the dog curled up beside her. The bedroom door half open and the fragrance wafting in. Nothing could be cozier, she said, when he came in with a tray and on the tray the whipped cream beaters and the bowls, the cake itself too warm to assemble. They had a little picnic of tastes and lickings. The next morning she had a piece of triumphant cake with her coffee in bed.

“You would make a wonderful mother,” she smiled.

He would, in fact, like to be a father. “Have you ever wanted children?” he asked.

“I can’t seem to picture myself as a mother, Harry.”

After the cake and coffee, she inspected her shoe and found the gold watch she said was too good to wear. He asked her if everyone in Holland set out their shoes for gifts, and she said, “The Netherlands, Harry. There are two provinces, north and south Holland, inside the Netherlands. And yes, we put a shoe by the stove or fireplace with hay and carrots in it for Sinterklaas’s white horse. No, your ordinary sturdy leather shoe, and in the morning the hay and carrots are gone and there are the presents: toys, books, candy, chocolate letters. The initial D in thick Droste chocolate. I used to eat it between two slices of buttered homemade bread, and if it was raisin bread, even better. My mother made the best raisin bread. We never had to bicycle between the raisins, my father used to say.”

Later that week, all-too-transparent Harry tried his hand at several loaves of raisin bread. He left work at noon, and when he returned at six o’clock to pick up Dido, he walked into the station carrying the smell of hot bread on his wintry clothes. Together they went out to his van and it was like stepping into a heavenly bakery. All the way home Dido breathed in the homey fragrance, touched by Harry’s devotion, but impressed even more by the enduring nature of certain evanescent things. The sound of her father’s voice. The taste of Christmas marzipan. The smell of Eddy’s skin.