View From a Kite (15 page)

“Look at me now!” He flings his arms out in a dramatic gesture. Denise and I duck. “I'm a lost dithering fool. A drunkard of no substance or style. My da would be ashamed to see me drinking this horse piss.” He sucks another off his jam jar and begins to croon “Washed In The Blood Of Jesus.”

“I'd like to join the Sally Ann,” he says, halfway through the chorus. “I look good in a uniform.”

Denise thinks the bootlegger is Nick Sangster's aunt, because she comes every week and lugs a big bag of knitting she won't let anyone else carry for her. I suspect the Anglican minister, myself. He looks rumpled and malnourished and sympathetic and he always carries a canvas bag of second-hand spy novels and hard candy he passes around. I think he is a secret drinker himself and bootlegs out of a misguided sense of brotherhood.

Not all of the men in Ward D drink. Quite a few of them don't, but they don't tell on the ones who do. All except Lance. Lance is a stoolie and he sucks up to MacConnell so no one tells him anything. Patrick loathes him, he makes up musical limericks about him and the men sing them in the showers. Lance is under siege and it makes him meaner and nastier than he was when he first came in. He's afraid to leave his bed because he never knows what he will find when he returns. He lugs a bag of possessions to the dining room with him so they won't take feet in his absence. What he hates most is the low, contemptuous laughter that drifts behind him in the halls. His jaw is always clenched.

“Chicken-necked bastard,” growls Patrick.

Lance has a wife. She comes to visit once a week with her friend, Ruth. Ruth stays a quarter of a minute at Lance's bedside and then excuses herself to read
National Geographic
in the coffee shop. The wife, Annie, brings cakes and candy, flowers, magazines, bottles of Pepsi, new slippers, books—she brings him stuff by the carton. Then she sits in a plastic chair by his bed and nods and agrees with everything he says. She clucks in sympathy, she coos in support, she shakes her head at the awful, awful abuse he suffers.

Lance is snarky to Annie because she doesn't visit him more often. It's his fault, although she never reminds him of that. They have a car, but he would never let her learn to drive in case she scratched or dented it. Now she has to depend on the kindness of her friend Ruth to drive her. Annie won't ask Ruth to bring her more than once a week. Ruth works and it's a long drive; it's a great deal to ask a working person to give up their Sunday afternoons as it is. Annie can't take the bus; it's a mile from her house to the bus stop. She could never carry his treats that far because she has a bad leg and her doctor has forbidden her to walk any great distance. Lance thinks the walk would be good for her and she agrees that he's probably right and her doctor is probably wrong, but she doesn't do it. He grouches about how she shouldn't be so timid, she should get Ruth to teach her to drive in Ruth's car. Then she could borrow Ruth's car and come to see him more often. Annie agrees it's a good idea, but she doesn't ask and she doesn't learn.

She stays for two hours, then kisses his freckled old sour head, waves at his roommates and smiles goodbye to the nurses. Patrick always blows her a kiss and it amuses her, he can see the quirk at the corner of her mouth, the sparkle under her lids, but she is careful not to let Lance see. Patrick says nothing to Lance about this though he would dearly love to torment him. Patrick imagines himself in love with Annie and he tortures himself with daydreams about her pretty mouth and her soft, pillowy bosom.

“Chicken-necked bastard,” he mutters.

Annie walks down the hall in Ward D, smiling and saying her goodbyes.

The elevator doors close behind her and Lance starts stuffing treats in his mouth. Patrick positions himself near a window so he can watch Annie leave. Annie collects Ruth from the coffee shop, then they head for the front door at a brisk trot. Bum leg or not, Annie rockets through that door to the outside world and if you're not careful you'll get sucked into her wake and find yourself mashed into the front seat of the car, slippers scattered across the parking lot.

They drive the long way home along the coast, stop for Kentucky-fried, and then go to a seven o'clock movie. Ruth is Annie's best friend. I guess she'd probably drive Annie to the hospital more often. If Annie'd ask.

CHAPTER 30

The writer George Sand dragged her lover Chopin and her kids and a pile of household goods off to Majorca in an attempt to stave off Chopin's demise from tuberculosis, and to have some kind of life together as a couple. It wasn't a total success. The weather was cold and damp and they had trouble finding a place to live. The owner of one house they rented threw them out when he discovered Chopin was tubercular. Chopin and Sand and their entourage ended up in the monastery of Valdemosa, where he attempted to write music and she attempted to write fiction. No one would work as a servant for them out of fear of contagion. Eventually they gave up and went home, but because of the regulations in that part of the world regarding consumptives, nobody would loan or rent them a carriage to take Chopin to Palma to catch a ship home to France. Anybody who did would have had to do such extensive cleaning and restoration inside their vehicle that it wasn't financially feasible, and Sand couldn't afford to buy an entire carriage and then abandon it. They ended up wheeling Chopin over bumpy side roads to the coast in a sort of a wheelbarrow affair.

The relationship fell apart and Chopin settled into his last apartment, in Paris, to die. His doctors—he kept changing them, hoping to find a good one, I suppose—made house calls every day and prescribed herbal infusions, lichen concoctions, and Pyrenees water.

He got worse and worse, choking, coughing, gasping, bleeding. Most of the time he was conscious and in great pain. At one point, he asked that Mozart's
Requiem
be played at his funeral. Later, unable to speak, he wrote requesting that his body be opened after his death. He was afraid of being buried alive. It took him four days of final agony to die, and as news spread throughout the city that he was on his way out, a crowd of the terminally nosy began barging in and out of his apartment for a look. Chopin, after all, was the Great Romantic, Tragically Dying, and anyone who was anyone wanted to be seen swooning in grief at his deathbed. Would-be artists sketched the Fateful Scene. A photographer, who needed more light for his Death of Chopin, tried to persuade everyone to help drag the deathbed over to the window. Finally, the doctor of the moment threw everybody out.

Chopin died early in the morning, his face black with suffocation.

I have been in such a filthy mood after reading about Chopin. I'm going to have to give up this research. It's morbid. Nobody dies of tuberculosis anymore, at least not here in this country. I'd rather have a scar than die like that, but I'd rather not have a scar. Actually, I'd rather not have tuberculosis.

Denise has begun asking idle questions about my parents. I think she's fishing for information to feed Miz-etc. in exchange for favours. I think she's selling me out. I told her so and she denied it and now we are hardly speaking. She's begun hanging out with one of the men from Ward D, instead. He's about thirty, and married, but she says it doesn't mean anything, they're just having fun and anyway she's not sleeping with him. She's an idiot.

I'm still waiting to hear my test results. Time drags by. Evvie has a cold and sniffs constantly so I can't stand to stay in my room without wanting to pitch things at her. Elaine is in full-bore wedding-plan mode. At mealtimes our table is covered with two years' worth of
Brides Magazine
, and
Your
Wedding
, and
Modern Bride
, and our opinion is solicited—but not taken—on every tuck, flounce, tint, lighting arrangement, engraving style, shape of bouquet, choice of music, everything. Should she throw her garter, or not? She'd like to keep it for a memento, but there's tradition to consider. I tell her to buy two, throw one, keep one. You're a baby genius, she crows, patting me on the head. She can't settle on a colour scheme, that's her biggest problem. Maroon and black, I say, and she revises her opinion of my intelligence. My biggest fear is that she'll ask me to be a bridesmaid. She wants dozens of them, but financial considerations are raining on her would-be parade. We don't have the final number, yet. I've hinted broadly that I'll probably be gone by then and am not to be counted on. She's going to stick them in lavender, or spearmint green, or sunny peach. I'm lobbying heavily for her to make Evvie a bridesmaid.

“It would mean so much to her, she admires you so much,” I say, and Elaine crashes her bangles and allows she'll consider it. The thing is, Evvie got married in a blue-and-white polka-dot polished cotton dress, her best dress at the time. She is dying to wear a lavender chiffon monstrosity with a matching lavender chiffon cartwheel on her head and carry a mess of dyed lavender shasta daisies, pink rosebuds, and white baby's breath.

CHAPTER 31

Mrs. Oikle traps me in the sunroom, skeins of yarn holding me prisoner while she rolls off balls of wool for her next knitting project. She's got a carton of skeins: tweedy brown yarn flecked with rust, red, and black. She's making a cardigan sweater for Junior, her youngest child and only son. Junior is in Dorchester Prison. He finds it chilly. It's his fourth time there. Junior robs gas stations: four robberies, four jail sentences.

He'll be out in seven years to try for number five. He's spectacularly incompetent. Last time, he dropped his wallet full of ID by the pumps and didn't notice.

Mrs. Oikle shakes her head, limp grey curls nodding half-heartedly. She says, “I don't know what happened to Junior. I pray and pray and pray. For all the good it does.”

I wonder if she means she prays he'll reform or she prays he'll stop getting caught?

“I could never give him the things he wanted. His father ran off with the receptionist at the Fair Isle Hotel and left me with three little girls, and Junior in the oven. When he was a little boy at school the other kids always had nicer things, painted wooden pencil boxes from Boston and money for candy every day. If he took any of it, they beat him up. They were always so mean to him.”

I think I'm starting to see the problem with Junior. She hands me another skein. I shake my hands out, then oval it around my outstretched wrists.

“He's had such a hard life. He can't keep a girlfriend—of course they all want a fellow with a regular job. You can't really blame them.”

Well, yeah, I think, and maybe they prefer somebody who's available to take them out to the movies once in a while, somebody not prone to disappearing into correctional institutions for years at a stretch.

“Poor boy,” she sighs.

I've seen a picture of Junior. He's closing in on forty, paunchy and balding. Spent more years of his life in jail than out. They're still being mean to him for taking other people's stuff.

“It's all my fault,” she says. “I married the wrong man. If I'd married Wilbur DeWolfe none of this would have happened. Junior needed a good male role model and what did he get? A liquor salesman with his brain in his pants no one's seen for over thirty years. He left that hotel floozy for a stripper from Saskatoon. I never got a nickel off him. Wilbur DeWolfe now, he was a good man.”

Christine, my new best friend since Denise and I are on the outs, comes to the doorway of the sunroom and beckons me out into the hall. She's got something good, chocolates or cigarettes or a refill of gin for the flat silver bottle she keeps in her housecoat pocket. I wave her off; Mrs. Oikle's on a roll.

“He had a pig farm. Well, it didn't smell too pretty, but money don't stink and he had plenty of money. Pretty white house with climbing roses on the porch, and his Mama in the back bedroom too senile to interfere if you want to rip up the linoleum to put in new cushion floor. Wilbur was fifteen years older than me, big slow hands and lots of dark curly hair. They say you get used to the smell, but I was young and didn't think I could. Big bank of purple and white lilacs between the house and the barn, but how much of the year do they bloom? Got down on his knees on those shiny parlour boards and begged me to marry him, said he'd already ruined me so I'd have to. I didn't feel ruined, I felt like I finally knew what all the fuss was about and I was pretty sure I wanted to try it with Junior's father instead of Wilbur. I did, too, behind every tree and bush in Cumberland county, and then got married in a hurry on my eighteenth birthday. Five years later he was gone. I should have married Wilbur and learned to live with the smell and his big slow ways, but by then he'd been caught by the MacLeans' youngest. She couldn't talk right, but she had big bosoms. Down to her knees, now. Junior would be a respectable farmer instead of—well, he hasn't had much of a chance. That's all for now, dear.”

She dismisses me with a peppermint, picks up her needles and begins casting on stitches.

“Christine,” I ask, “is it this place or is it just me?”

“What, honey?”

“People tell me stuff. They ramble on like you wouldn't believe. I'm not complaining, but I don't get it.”

“It's this place. Their minds go numb and nobody else wants to listen to them. After a while, they get desperate for the sound of their own voice. Got to go over their lives out loud, make sure they really happened. You sit there all quiet, innocent face, big ears, you suck it in.”

“Naw,” says Jeannie, my other new best friend, who's liberated orange juice from the kitchen to mix with the gin. “It's because of her folks. People drag up all the bad, weird stuff in their own lives and tell it to Gwen so she won't think she's the only one ever had shit happen. They feel sorry for you kid, so they spill their guts. What'd you learn from old Mrs. Oikle?”