The Romantic (6 page)

I ask (thinking of Texas),“Do you have a horse where you live?”

She guffaws. “
I’m
the horse where I live!”

I now remember my mother saying,“Verna’s a card.” So she is, but of a kind I’m not used to in that the jokes are on her. She’s goofy, she crashes into the furniture, she buttons up her blouse wrong and wears different-coloured socks on each foot, and when I draw these mistakes to her attention she slaps her own face and bellows,“What a lamebrain dame!” She burns our suppers. Grease splatters the walls, the ceiling, pots boil over, the spaghetti clumps into one sticky ball “resembling a brain,” as she herself points out. “I could scorch ice!” she roars. When she laughs, her lips ride up her long teeth and show a span of gum I look away from with a shuddering feeling of having glimpsed nakedness.

But I’m glad she’s here. She is so obviously devoted to keeping our spirits up, although I’m hardly the pining orphan she thinks I am. She clamps her big Texan’s hands
on my shoulders and blares,“I’m on the case!” At least once a day she says,“Don’t be glum, chum.”

“I’m not glum,” I say.

I ask, what if she finds my mother, and my mother tells her to get lost? “Some people don’t want to be found,” I say, quoting the police detective.

“Depends whether or not she left of her own volition,” Aunt Verna says crisply, professionally.

“Whether she got lured away, you mean?”

“Somebody or something might have balled up her good sense.”

“Fancy Dan,” I offer.

“Maybe some snake in the grass, maybe not. Maybe a blackmailer. Maybe narcotics.”

“What are narcotics?”

Her face slams shut. She didn’t mean to let that slip.

Whereas I am careful never to let anything slip. I believe, even if nobody else does, that my mother left simply because she hated Greenwoods. She was always saying she did. One day, off she went, with a man or without, what does it matter, nobody ever bossed
her
around. Why should she have to come back? We’re doing fine without her. We play Scrabble every night after supper, we watch television, and nobody ridicules the actors or the way the women in the commercials are dressed. When I wake up with a migraine headache, instead of forcing aspirins down my throat, Aunt Verna rubs my temples until I fall back to sleep. The possibility of my mother returning sickens me in the same way that the brewing end of the summer holidays always does, and to postpone and even extinguish the
possibility, I am not above planting the odd false lead. When Aunt Verna asks,“Did Grace ever mention a place she had her heart set on going to?” I answer,“Australia.”

“Australia?” my father says, dazed.

“Also Japan,” I say.

The investigation is uproarious. Aunt Verna flips over the mattresses and seat cushions. She empties out all the drawers, closets and cupboards, paws through the contents, then just tosses everything back in. At first I am horrified, and I refold sweaters, neatly arrange cans on shelves.

“You take after your mother,” Aunt Verna observes, and it’s such a perplexing statement—I am
nothing
like my mother—that I let drop to the floor the opened box of white sugar I happen to be holding.

So the house is a mess, and I don’t care, and my father doesn’t seem to notice. Specifically, Aunt Verna is looking for a diary, a note, a map, a letter, a private keepsake, a suspicious doctor’s prescription. We find none of these. But inside the white leather-bound Bible my mother was given as a child and claimed not to have opened in twenty years, we find her birth certificate. It’s a break, of sorts. Aunt Verna maintains that if you run off and don’t take your birth certificate, nine times out of ten you intend to create a new identity.

And that, she says, is “easy as muck.” She tells us how you do it. You go to a city library and ask for the obituary pages from a newspaper published in the year you were born. You look for the death notice of a baby who is the same sex as you and who lived only a few hours or days. When you find such a baby, you record its name, parents’ names, the exact
date and place of birth. You take the information to a government office and pass it off as your own history. If anybody double checks, and usually nobody does, all they’ll discover is that there really was a baby born when and where you say. You get your birth certificate. You soak it in coffee and bask it in the sun to give it an aged appearance.

“Grace wouldn’t know to do all that,” my father says, rasping his hand over his unshaven jaw.

Like the house and Aunt Verna, my father is a mess. Hair spiking out, nobody ironing his shirts. Nevertheless, he goes to work every morning, cleans his plate at supper, wins at Scrabble. He’s more than coping, it seems to me. In the middle of the night when I wake from Aunt Verna’s snores and hear the floorboards creaking down the hall, I don’t picture him pacing in heartbroken torment (since I don’t yet know that he misses my mother’s laugh). He is a man who has flung himself around his study plenty of weekends simply out of frustration that one word in the cryptic crossword continues to elude him. He is pacing, yes, I picture that. He is punching his fist. Wanting answers.

“She might know,” Aunt Verna says, regarding the fake birth certificate,“might not. All we can be sure of is that she had her secrets and kept them tucked under her hat. Anyways, her accessory might know plenty along those lines.”

My father nods. “Small-time hoodlum.” Because he adopts this slangy tone only when talking about fancy Dan, I immediately grasp who “accessory” refers to. “Fraud artist,” he says, his eyes taking on a crazy gleam.

“Crook,” I say. “Pickpocket.” To me, this is no longer the true story it is to my father. And yet I somehow know that
the more lost my mother becomes, the more substantial Dan must be, and so I tend to nudge the biography along.

As does Aunt Verna. “Never did an honest day’s work in his life!” she bellows.

“Freeloader,” my father mutters.

My father and I aren’t much help. It’s during the day, while we’re out of the house, that Aunt Verna does her real work. She badgers the police, hospitals, modelling agencies, beauty salons, clothing stores, tracks down many of my mother’s old Montreal connections, gets copies of her medical and dental records. She keeps notes and every morning types them up and sticks them in a copper-coloured accordion file labelled “Case Report: Helen Grace Kirk, née Hahn.” For a couple of hours most afternoons, in her drab skirt, mismatched socks, paddle-sized penny loafers and man’s tweed topcoat, she stalks up and down the streets of Greenwoods, banging on doors and interrogating housewives. On my way home from school I sometimes hear her booming voice—“I won’t take but a minute of your time…. Sawyer Kirk’s sister, Verna”—and I hide behind bushes in terror of her spotting me and shouting,“Lou-Lou!”

Back at our house she lies flat-out on the living-room floor to ease her aching hips. I lie beside her. She has explained to me that an investigation is not so much a gathering of evidence as an elimination of the universe of possibilities. Litde by little the universe contracts. She demonstrates by bringing her hands together in a strangling motion. She keeps me posted as to what can be ruled out: My mother is not an inmate of any Canadian jail or mental hospital. She is not wanted by the Mounties. Under her real
name she has not taken out a library card or contacted the Canadian office of any Swiss bank. Since she is striking enough that, even if she were wearing a wig, people would remember her, it’s a safe bet she has not personally picked up an airplane, train or bus ticket at any Toronto travel agency. She has not checked into any southern Ontario hotel or motel. She has not pawned her jewellery. Her accessory, her fancy Dan, is no local husband. Nor is he an Eaton’s delivery man.

Over supper she repeats her day’s findings to my father, and his reaction veers from anxious attention to brooding cynicism (aimed at Dan) to dumb astonishment. He says, finally, invariably,“I can’t believe it.” He can’t believe she disappeared without a trace. Without a word, not even to Mrs. Bendy.

He has phoned Mrs. Bendy, of course. “That sneaky bitch,” Mrs. Bendy snarled venomously enough to convince him she knew nothing. She then came up with a couple of suggestions as to who should be tracked down: some heavy-drinking model from Flin Flon, Manitoba. Jane or Anne or Joanne. And my mother’s high-school sweetheart, a guy with webbed feet and the incredible name of Duck. Tom or John or Ron or Rob Duck. “Dead ends,” Aunt Verna predicted, but she phoned every Duck in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. She also phoned everybody my father phoned, including my mother’s mother, Grandma Hahn, who for a decade has lived in a mobile home outside of St. Petersburg, Florida, and whose annual Christmas gift of three red-and-green crocheted placemats—the exact same gift year in and year out—my mother
always threw in the garbage but not before calling attention to the flaws and stains and saying,“That woman is out of her mind.”

Coincidentally, Grandma Hahn said the same of my mother when my father told her the news. “Must be,” she reasoned,“to throw away a steady meal ticket.” She said my mother always did have a reckless streak. “Miss Anything Goes,” she said. “Miss Free and Easy. Miss Devil May Care. Well, she’s Miss Devil Take Her, as far as I’m concerned. Miss Don’t Come Crying to Me When You Get Thrown in the Gutter,” and the escalating pseudonyms did not go unappreciated by my father, who reported them with a kind of wonder.

Weeks later, in reference to that phone call, Aunt Verna says,“I, for one, don’t think your mother is crazy or unhinged or anything like that.”

She and I are lying next to each other on the living-room floor. After weeks of going unvacuumed, the carpet is opulent with colourful specks whose source I cannot imagine, also threads, hairs and dead flies kindled within the rungs of light that come through the
Venetian
blinds.

“She’s nothing but high-strung,” Aunt Verna says. “Beautiful, skinny creatures often are, you know. Wound up so tight they snap.”

“She never screamed or yelled,” I say. “She never hit me.”

This is simply information. It hasn’t yet occurred to me either to defend her or to blame her or even to wonder very strenuously where she might be.

“Well, who said she hit you?” Aunt Verna shouts, all agonized. “My lord, I would hope she never did!”

Usually I lie on my side facing Aunt Verna, arms pressed against my ears to protect myself from her blare. Sometimes she’ll give my leg a pat, clutch my knee. In my every utterance she detects either an orphan’s sorrow or a daughter’s loyalty. I say, purely speculating as to my mother’s activities,“I wonder if she’s curling her own hair,” and Aunt Verna cries,“Oh, honey, I’d curl your hair but I’m all thumbs!”

One afternoon in early March she says,“Lou-Lou, we’re at the end of our rope.”

“What do you mean?”

“We’re out of leads.”

“We are?”

“It doesn’t mean we close the file, though.” She squeezes my knee. “The file stays open.
UFO
. Unsolved, Fully Open.”

“So,” I say,“she got away.” I can’t believe it. She’s really gone.

“For the time being, yes, ma’am, she got away.”

We lie there looking at each other. It takes me a moment to sense that her failure to find my mother is only her most recent disappointment. The sorrows of the homely spinster whose paramount achievement is that she remains hopeful, I perceive with the gauzy, unimpeachable understanding of my nine years. I say, a pain in my throat,“Don’t worry” (because while I may not fully understand everything I am just then seeing, I
have
learned to recognize the glint in the eye that signals a person’s imminent departure),“I know how to cook.”

In my father’s brain are an infinity of analogies attaching everything to everything else. Provided he is his normal, expansive self. After my mother leaves, in those first weeks,“everything” narrows to thieves and smooth-talkers, and “everything else” to sharks, snakes, leeches, rats, cockroaches, nuclear rain, hot-air balloons, silver tongues.

But as his attention shifts from the culprit to the loss, so the world cracks open to show all its pathos. Anything that goes missing, and in our overturned house much does, anything that falls to the floor, that runs out, such as cereal, he sighs and waxes over. Eating his meals, long back hunched in woe, he stares at the stool my mother used to perch on to fix supper. There it is, awaiting her. A pillar of faith. A bastion of trust. Or Time, all of it: the present because it is empty, the past because it hasn’t changed, the future because it is unknowable.

And yet, like his sister, he remains ever hopeful, convinced that one day my mother will return to her sweaters and shoes, her blue Noxema skin-cream jar. None of these does he view as remnants. Even while they bring tears to his eyes he flaunts them as evidence of an absence merely temporary. Each little thing of hers is so incontestably
there
(if not exactly where she left it), so imperturbably itself that, apart from its siren call to her, the simple fact of its existence seems to
sustain him. He will open the door of the hall closet and take one of her hats out of its box, any hat, it doesn’t matter which. He’ll turn it in his hands, study it. If it’s her matador he’ll remove the pin and say,“A cultured pearl.” Enchanted, holding the pin to the light. “A real cultured pearl.”

Around the time that Aunt Verna announces her intention to leave, he begins to retreat from this kind of idolatry. He stops speaking of my mother at all except to say “She’ll be back” when Aunt Verna suggests her clothes be stored in the basement or donated to charity. Our two family photo albums, formerly kept on a shelf in the linen closet and filled mostly with studio shots from my mother’s modelling days, he transfers to the locked bottom drawer of his desk. Out of fear that Aunt Verna will confiscate them for investigative purposes, or so I presume. Not for years will I imagine him looking at the pictures, immersing himself in memory, fury, lust. Blame. I’ll be twenty-six and Abel will be dead before I’ll understand that even blame can be a memento.