Late Nights on Air (26 page)

“Did
you
give Gwen the fur coat?”

He looked up from where he was kneeling on the floor. For a moment he was silent. “It was my grandmother’s,” he
admitted. “Gwen looked to be the same size.” He shrugged. “It’s a loaded gift, a fur coat, that’s why I don’t want her to know.”

“You thought she might take it the wrong way.”

He bent to his task.

“You’re an unusual man, Harry Boyd. How did you happen to have your grandmother’s fur coat?”

“I had my mother put it in the mail.”

“That’s a lot of trouble to take,” she said quietly.

“She didn’t mind. It didn’t fit her. The coat was going to waste.”

“I mean a lot of trouble for
you
to take.”

Harry knew what she meant. A trace of a smile crossed his face. “It was an act of charity. I know Gwen. She’d never spend money on a good parka.”

“I’ll say it again, Harry. You’re an unusual man.”

He ran his eyes from corner to corner of the black and white linoleum. In a quarter of an hour he’d be finished and have to return to his own house, for which he no longer had the slightest enthusiasm.

Eleanor poured him a Scotch when he was done. “You signed the card ‘your secret admirer.’“

“Did I? I suppose I wanted to put her off the scent.”

He took his drink and went to look out the window. Eleanor came over and stood beside him. No one was outside. Nothing flew by. Or moved.

“One of these days,” said Eleanor, “this winter’s going to end.”

“Right. Why should love last when nothing else does?”

“Poor wretch,” she said, and put her arm around him. She
said there was a beautiful ode by Horace to that effect. It made the very point that earthly love turns with the seasons, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

“The seasons return, though,” she said after a moment, “and so can love.”

“It didn’t for Horace,” he said.

At the end of March, when Harry was thinking that only one month of winter was left, his third stroke of bad luck occurred. It was a bright and sunny Tuesday. He sat at his desk going through the mail.

A bit later, when he saw Gwen pass by the door of his office, he called her to come in. He had his feet on his desk and a letter in his hands. His glasses were on his desk, too, beside the phone.

“You didn’t sign this,” he said, waving the letter.

She looked mystified, and he said, “I thought so. You didn’t know about it.”

“About what.”

He handed her the letter and she read it, then sat down and read it again. It was dated March 18, 1976. It was addressed to the head of the Northern Service in Ottawa and it was signed by George Tupper, Bill Thwaite, Jim Murphy, and Andrew McNab. Calling themselves the most senior employees at the station, they said they’d heard that Harry Boyd was going to be appointed permanent manager and they wanted to express their views about his unsuitability before it was too late. Then followed a list of Harry’s sins and errors in judgment: his autocratic style, his anti-news bias in favour of current affairs,
his inappropriate public statements, his infringement of union rules that prohibited management touching the equipment, his negative attitude towards television, his trouble with the bottle. It would be a grave mistake, they said, to appoint to the job someone who didn’t understand the role of manager or the future of the
CBC
in the North.

Gwen looked up. Harry was watching her. He pointed at the letter, and said it was a copy of the original; his buddy in head office had sent it to him so that he’d know what he was up against.

His eyes looked old and worked over. He ran his hand slowly down the side of his jaw. “I wouldn’t have taken the job anyway, not that I think they were about to offer it to me.”

“Harry, I’m sorry.”

“It just makes it awkward as hell.”

“Let
them
feel awkward. They don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He smiled. “That’s my girl.”

“But you’ll stay on.”

He looked out the window. “I just called Ottawa. I made them swear they’d have my replacement here by the first of June. Not a day later.” The sun was shining and he squinted his eyes. “Whoever takes over, it won’t be me.” Still looking out the window, still squinting, “Anyway,” he said, “this makes three.”

She understood. Dido, his dog, his job. It had to be the end of his run of bad luck.

BY LATE APRIL
, the long hours of light were back. In town all the snow was gone, and all the garbage, so thinly but effectively disguised, had resurfaced, soft and soggy and in unbelievable amounts. It was the time of year when winter secrets got revealed.

The foursome who would be canoeing the Thelon River were already in harness, walking miles in the early morning or in the evening with brick-filled packs on their backs. They were meeting regularly to plan the expedition, the maps, supplies, equipment, freeze-dried foods, mosquito nets, new tents, extra-warm sleeping bags, life preservers, extra paddles. Firearms, given the likelihood of grizzly bears. But none of them knew how to use a gun, and they agreed that having one along would endanger them more than a grizzly would. They read books on canoeing skills. Only Ralph had done extensive trips with whitewater—he had special paddles he was attached to, his favourite one having been made by a native wood carver in eastern Ontario from a single piece of cedar. But all of them had paddled, Harry and Gwen since childhood, and Eleanor since her early twenties. Ralph, with his customary relish, became the chief organizer. Had they ever formally chosen a trip leader, had they ever agreed that it would be Ralph, then
some of their initial difficulties might never have arisen. They were going forward with a kind of informed innocence, with the naive faith that they had the physical and mental resources to make the journey and come back unharmed.

Teresa couldn’t resist ribbing them. Only you white people, she said, approach the land like it’s some great undertaking. You have to do fifty miles a day with your maps and your compasses. You have to count up the miles. Are you sure you don’t need a guide? she smiled. Babes in the Barrens, she called them. At least take a gun, she advised. I’m serious.

They were gathered at Harry’s house one evening when Ralph Cody arrived late. They heard him before they saw him, his familiar, humour-filled voice talking loudly to itself as he came up the driveway.

“Ralph!” Gwen called from the front door.

He saw her waving.

“I feel like Odysseus,” he yelled.

He came striding in, jacket unbuttoned, beret in hand. He had walked to Frame Lake and back, a distance of several miles, and this after jogging five miles earlier in the day. Even Harry was lifting weights, though he had no small view of his own strength, being stocky and able to lift heavy things with ease. Quietly, he’d cut back on his drinking.

That evening Gwen took one look at Ralph’s tentative list of supplies—the thirty salamis, the forty bars of chocolate, the forty-two rolls of toilet paper—and accused him of going wild. How much liquor was he planning to bring? A case?

Ralph called her a cheap Scotswoman.

Her retort was brisk. An aunt of hers used to write down
all the things she wanted and couldn’t afford, and then burn the list. It was very effective.

Eleanor agreed. She had used the same method for losing weight: write down all the foods you want to eat on a sheet of paper, then burn it.

Ralph accused them of being female missionaries to his bold adventurer, and Eleanor promised not to sing “Jesus Loves Me,” just to think it.

Gwen’s thoughtful, emboldened eyes remained on Eleanor. “That’s what you really believe.” It was almost a challenge.

Eleanor smiled and didn’t take the bait, and Ralph saw and approved. Harry was right. Eleanor had the necessary temperament for a trip like this. Even-keeled, unruffled, steady.

The two women had spoken privately about what it would mean to spend six weeks in Ralph’s and Harry’s company. Gwen had wondered aloud what sort of lover Ralph might be, and Eleanor surprised her by saying she thought he might be rather good.

“He eats so fast,” Gwen said thoughtfully. “That’s never a good sign.”

“He would
enjoy
sex.”

“But would I?”

Eleanor smiled. “What about Harry?”

A cloud came over Gwen’s face. “Fast, furious, drunken,” she guessed.

“That’s not what Dido implied,” said Eleanor.

Harry read books about the Barrens to take his thoughts off Dido. Whenever he stopped reading, she floated into his
mind—the sandal markings on her swinging bare foot, the winter imprint of a knitted sock, the memory of thinking that nothing wants to be forgotten. Summer doesn’t. The sock doesn’t. I don’t.

One day his eyes rested on Gwen and she understood his bleak expression perfectly, she thought. He was thinking about Dido. Wishing she were Dido.

He had a book under his arm and a fresh mug of coffee in his hand. They were in the announcers’ office and he said to her, “Silence is an incredible weapon.”

Gwen had suspected as much: Harry hadn’t heard a word from the fugitive pair. She’d thought of asking him once or twice if he’d had any news, but it would have been cruel if it turned out he hadn’t.

“I’ll show you,” he said.

They took facing chairs. He fastened her with an intent look, then pulled a question out of the air. “Why do you hate your father?”

She lifted her hands and shrank back in her chair. A long pause, and then she struggled to say something.

“I suppose because he preferred my brother to me. And because he never asked me a thing about myself. And because he wasn’t too kind to my mother.”

“See? Silence is an interviewer’s greatest asset. All you have to do is wait, and the person feels obliged to fill the vacuum with a serious answer.”

But it didn’t seem entirely fair, what she’d said. Certainly it wasn’t the whole story.

“Why do you love Dido?” she asked.

Harry glared at her, but she held his glance. Fair is fair.

“That’s a dirty question.”

“So was yours.”

Slowly, Harry’s face gave way, and Gwen felt gratified and sorry, fascinated and pained.

He said, “I think I loved her before I ever saw her. I loved her voice, first of all. Then I loved the way she looks. Then I loved the way she entered a room—” He stopped. “I don’t need to teach you a thing.”

In the beginning Dido didn’t change when she entered a room, that’s what Gwen remembered. She didn’t gulp for air and something to say. There had been a smoothness to her entries and exits. Rather than the winter of shyness and the summer of over-effort, she was all of a piece and natural. But then she did change. Her personality darkened and shifted before Gwen’s eyes, and reminded her of Ralph’s grasses moving under water, of words dissolving on a page.

Gwen didn’t miss her, or Eddy. The station was easier without them. She had even read the news a few times, on days when Jim Murphy couldn’t, and the usual hadn’t happened; she hadn’t stiffened; her brain hadn’t slammed into the hard, cold fender of nervousness. But it was wrong to say Dido and Eddy had left. They were here, she thought, present in every sad ounce of Harry’s body.

In his office Harry was reading about John Hornby. There were nights when he didn’t bother to go home. In a grim and sardonic act of defiance, he’d had a La-Z-Boy installed. His successor would have the chair removed in a month’s time, and would discover on the floor, gathering dust, a multitude of
balled-up memos about television and the impending new building.

There were two ways of looking at Hornby, thought Harry. If you took his life as a series of disasters in rapid succession, if you saw him as a distillation of his shortcomings, then you’d call him a loser, feckless, under-prepared, dangerous. If you saw him, instead, in all his complexity, in the fullness of his extraordinary life, then he was no less irresponsible, but he was also astonishingly vivid, driven, solitary, intense, endearing. Harry was all for seeing people in their complexity and having them return the favour. But what spoke to him most was the duality of the man—his courage and his foolishness, his loyalty and his carelessness, his shyness and his poetic, almost erotic attachment to the land. Also the size of his mistakes, and the way death spared him from having to live with the consequences.

Harry set aside Whalley’s biography, and thought about what lay ahead. Ralph, he suspected, wanted to prove himself—prove that at sixty-one he was still youthful. And Eleanor had indicated that she and the Barrens might be a good spiritual fit. And Gwen had the young person’s all-consuming desire to see a place for the first time, especially since it would complete a story that had captured her imagination as a child; she would see with her own eyes where its final chapter unfolded. As for himself, he was looking forward to a clean break from old dissatisfactions, a summer that would help him forget his winter.

A week later, as it happened, George Whalley’s daughter brought her father in to see him, as she’d promised to do when
he came to visit. Harry chatted with George Whalley, only a little surprised by the mid-Atlantic accent, neither Canadian nor English but cultured, the sort of voice that used to be the only voice on
CBC
Radio. Whalley looked to be in his fifties, tall and grey-haired, forthcoming yet reserved, a professor poet. He told Harry how he’d first read Edgar Christian’s diary in 1938, soon after it was published in England, where it caught everyone’s imagination to the extent that it was reprinted several times. Like many other readers, he couldn’t forget the events it recorded. He’d thought of writing something at the time, but it took fifteen years before he saw how to do it, making a radio version of Edgar Christian’s diary, a broadcast that was then heard by people who’d known Hornby and got in touch with him to fill out the picture. What followed was the seven years of research and writing that produced the full-length biography,
The Legend of John Hornby
. Harry listened and thought of his own life, his years in Toronto when things had gone from bad to worse to bizarre to desolate, until the moment his old friend Max Berns stumbled upon him and put his hand on his shoulder and said
Harry? Harry?
and he’d snorted awake into what he knew was a rescue. How much better, he thought, to have encountered something as a young man, to have been ignited as Whalley had, and to have remained on fire ever since.