I got down off the porch where the cat had finished the food and I went along the driveway past the garbage cans and into the large backyard.
Here, I was confronted by what I can only call the last bloody straw.
Katie’s beloved flower beds had all spilled out across the uncut lawn—and the only thing in bloom was a mile-and-a-half-wide carpet of forget-me-nots.
Forget-me-nots.
I ask you!
And sitting right in the middle, black as the ace of spades, was the cat, Bubastis—staring at me—asking me: why?
On either side of the fireplace, back in the living-room, all of Bud’s books had been lined up in rows on shelves. When I thought of them, I thought how Bud had loved them and been nourished by them all those years and years ago when he was young and had wanted to be a writer. That was when he’d progressed from Erie Stanley Gardner to Joseph Conrad, Evelyn Waugh and F. Scott Fitzgerald. And I thought how unjust it was that all the mad and alcoholic heroes of whom these men had written should pass along through time forever, with their tragedies perfectly formed around their names and their lives set out in lucid prose with all the points well made and all the meanings clear. And I thought if only some great, compassionate novelist had been assigned to flesh out Bud and Katie’s tragedy, they might have had a better ending to their lives than this.
Really, I thought, as I stood that afternoon and stared at Bubastis down among the forget-me-nots—real life writes real bad. It should take lessons from the masters.
ALMEYER’S MOTHER
There was a time when Almeyer’s mother chose not to visit him. The choice did not appear to be an arbitrary one—nor did it seem a calculated gesture of reproach. Mrs Almeyer had always maintained a certain distance from those who should have been closest to her: husband, brother and son. Uncle Charlie Walker, for instance, had not seen his sister in over fourteen years.
“I can’t talk, Charlie,” she would say on the phone. “Not today.”
After a dozen or so rebuffs of this kind, Charlie Walker got the picture and gave up calling. Still, it made him sad, because he was otherwise alone and had a need for family ties.
As for Almeyer himself, he assumed his mother’s refusal to visit had to do with his father’s illness. Mister Almeyer suffered from Parkinson’s disease and he needed endless attention. Even when he was hospitalized, Mrs Almeyer did not abandon him; her regimen of journeys to his bedside—twice a day on the bus—was followed seven days a week for five intolerable years.
Mornings, she would take her husband sandwiches made on homemade bread and they would sit in the rotunda, far apart from others, together in the shadows. Mister Almeyer had always been a man of impeccable taste and habit, so Mrs Almeyer carried a large, flat box of Kleenex tissues in her canvas carry-all and she would lean towards her husband, helping the food to reach its destination, dabbing at his mouth and wiping away the crumbs and saliva. During this, she would calm his waving arms by grasping his wrists and forcing them into his lap. Mister Almeyer, when he was not in bed, was a captive in a wheelchair and after they had eaten their sandwiches Mrs Almeyer would take him out for a “walk” in the grounds. She once showed Olive Marks, her maid, the muscles she had developed pushing the chair, and she gave up wearing short sleeved dresses because she thought the muscles unbecoming.
Evenings, after she had dined at home and spent the news hour seated alone in front of the television set, Mrs Almeyer would don her overcoat and set out once again for Sunnybrook Hospital. There she stayed with her husband for another hour and a half. Most times, she brought her needlework.
Wielding her threads with an artist’s precision, never once losing her rhythm, Mrs Almeyer listened while her husband repeated for the hundredth time the story of his life. She let him do this without recrimination—not really minding she had heard it all before. Her ear was keen as her eye was sharp, and she was always listening for some new detail, something she hoped might provide the explanation of her discontent.
By the time Mister Almeyer had died, however, the explanation of her discontent had still not been forthcoming. Once, she received what she thought might be a hint of it. This was when he told her that, despite her long suspicions, he had never been unfaithful to her.
The only trouble was that Mrs Almeyer had no memory of having expected her husband’s fidelity in the first place. Still, she never said so. What would the point have been, this late in the game, to call his bluff? She knew he was lying. What he was doing was seeking her approbation, not her forgiveness.
Mrs Almeyer nodded then and said I believe you, Frank. Better to pretend that nothing was amiss, now that everything was over.
Later, when he died, she hoped he would not be made to pay in excess for his earthly transgressions. Surely the Parkinson’s had been enough.
Almeyer and his mother did, of course, see one another from time to time. Beside the formalities of Christmas dinners and birthday celebrations, they took occasional lunches together in the members’ lounge of the Royal Ontario Museum.
Mrs Almeyer believed the flag of family unity had to be waved periodically in other people’s faces; otherwise, the world was bound to talk. But there was no point waving the flag on Yonge Street; no point wasting your energies on chance encounters with those whose opinions gave you place and saved your face. Venue was everything in social matters, and the ROM, especially on Fridays, was the perfect place to create the image of a family’s solidarity.
Sometimes—though less and less as the years went by—Almeyer’s wife, Julie Fielding, would be present at these lunches. Julie made no pretence of enjoying her encounters with her husband’s mother. She knew precisely what Edith Almeyer was up to. The wielding of the blades had begun almost as soon as Julie was married: the light, apparently offhand references to the fashion houses where she might just find that dress she so obviously wanted…The asides, with a smile, about the mistakes Mrs Almeyer herself had made when she was young: I remember rushing out to have my hair cut off like yours. But you’ll find, soon enough, it will grow back in…
Mrs Almeyer always listened with what Julie called polite impatience to anything her son had to say about his teaching job. She had never much cared for his eager approach to education; the subject offended her sense of dignity. Almeyer’s discipline was English and his speciality was drama. This brought him dangerously close to public displays of emotion. Worse, it offered him the chance to encourage displays of emotion by others.
As for Julie, Mrs Almeyer openly resented the fact her daughter-in-law had chosen a profession that kept her so many hours away from home. When Almeyer had told his mother Julie was a social worker, she had sighed and said: oh, Peter, she will always be dealing with someone else’s problems; never with her own. And never yours. Mrs Almeyer rightly predicted Julie would decline to raise a family.
Still, Mrs Almeyer never went so far as to press these points in public. Listening to her son, she would allow her expression to register just the right degree of uncritical interest. The focus of her real attentions might more likely be the composition of a neighbour’s luncheon party or the reflection, faraway across the room, of herself, her boy and his wife as they sat above their chicken salads, safe amidst the worthy patrons of Chinese art and Ira Berg. Mrs Almeyer yearned to drift there, floating in a sea of marble table tops forever. This is us, the picture informed her, sitting where we belong.
Almeyer’s farm was south of Collins Corners, north of Whitby. The house had been built in 1839 by a man named Eli Steele. Steele descendants lived there up until 1972. Then, for five years, the house and the barns stood empty. When Almeyer took up his duties at the local high school in 1977, he and Julie had been married for a year. Seeing the condition the Steele house was in, they knew they might be able to afford it. Now, they had been there over ten years and all the fallen ceilings and the peeling walls had been repaired and the dense Victorian gardens had been reclaimed and the high stone wall that stood between the house a
nd the road had been repointed.
The land was rented out to a man whose breeding stock could use the pasture and the barns were filled with hay that smelled of sweet grass. Almeyer bought an English setter and called him George, and they took long walks together down in the woods. Julie—who was an easy mark—was given three stray cats by one of her welfare cases, and their progeny now had multiplied to twenty. Everywhere you looked, it seemed, on a summer’s day, a cat was looking back at you.
Once or twice in every season, Almeyer’s parents would arrive and his father would honk the Buick’s horn and George would bark and all the cats would run and hide. Almeyer and Julie would go out laughing and waving and bring in the picnic hampers, the rugs, the canvas bags and the one big suitcase—and Mister and Mrs Almeyer would be ensconced upstairs in the room beside the bathroom. Mister Almeyer—every single visit—pointing at the big brass bed, would say: my grandmother had a woven quilt like that. She called it “Lee’s Surrender.”
Mrs Almeyer had an allergy to cats and the door to the bedroom had to be closed against their intrusion every night. George would sit outside the door and whine for hours and throw his paws against the handle, rattling it and trying to get inside. He had taken, for whatever reason, a liking to Mister Almeyer and sometime after twelve o’clock every night, Almeyer would hear his father padding to the bedroom door and opening it. In you come, Georgie! Don’t wake Edith, his father would say, and George would click across the boards and leap up right onto Mrs Almeyer’s feet.
This midnight ritual, with all its attendant curses, whisperings and struggles for bed supremacy, was the one clear picture Almeyer had of his parents’ final years together. Mister Almeyer always won the day by convincing his wife that George would act as a guarantee against the intrusion of Julie’s cats. Silence would ensue. And sleep.
Mister Almeyer treated Julie much as if his son had won her in a contest. Look what our boy’s brought home, he would say as he put his arm too far around her shoulder and gave the underside of her breast a flick with his fingers. Mrs Almeyer would go on sewing and pay no attention. Her husband had played this game with his nieces until their father had put a stop to it one Sunday afternoon. Julie, for her part, tolerated his touch because she wanted to see what effect the spectacle would have on Mrs Almeyer. Maybe, if she pushed it far enough, she would drive them from the house and they would not return. It never came to this, however. Time intervened and Julie herself departed.
During their visits, Mrs Almeyer tended to disappear in the late afternoons and did not return until the cocktail hour. She would come in from the gardens, carrying either a branch of coloured leaves or a rough bouquet of grasses, weeds and wild flowers. She would place these trophies in one of Almeyer’s collection of blue china vases or a pressed-glass tumbler and these, in turn, she would disperse about the lower rooms of the house—searching for the very place to set each one down as if she was afraid of being still.
Why don’t you sit, for heaven’s sake, her husband would say, and give us all a rest.
Almeyer’s mother, distracted and distant—not yet fully recovered from her afternoon outside—would say I will. I will, Frank. Yes…and perhaps in twenty minutes she would stop and find a chair. Her drink was always the same: a double scotch with one piece of ice. She drank this very slowly, waiting for the ice to melt before she finished.
In the evenings after dinner, Mister Almeyer wanted to sing. Almeyer’s old and out-of-tune piano took a mighty beating beneath his father’s lurching hands: still, it provided rousing renditions of “Lili Marlene” and “Waltzing Matilda.” This way the days would end, and whenever Mister and Mrs Almeyer left, the house retained the echoes of their bickerings and songs. Two or three days later, Almeyer would move through the lower rooms and gather up the blue china vases and the pressed-glass tumblers filled with leaves and grass and drooping flowers and, passing the fireplace, he would throw these remnants of his mother’s bouquets amongst the charred remains of cereal boxes, paper bags and the emptied containers of dog and cat chow that had served as the kindling for Mister Almeyer’s unsuccessful fires.
Very often, walking with George in the garden, Almeyer would discover an abandoned crystal goblet, a dew-stained paperback book or a wad of Kleenex left behind from his mothers visits. She seemed to have a predilection for the yard, which gave a view, one way, of the orchard gently sloping down towards the river. Looking the other way, east, the side yard gave a view of the screened-in porch that ran across the front of the house. Mrs Almeyer evidently sat out there in the yard on the swing suspended from one of the maple trees, because Almeyer found the detritus of her presence mostly in the swing’s vicinity. The goblets might enclose an amber drowning pool of undrunk whisky showing the corpses of ants and bees. One of the wads of Kleenex contained the butt of a cigarette. The books were less explicit in their declarations of his mother’s state of mind: what could you learn from a Martha Grimes mystery? Once, he thought he might have tracked her down when he found a ruined copy of John Cheever’s stories and he thought of all the unhappy people crowded in between its covers. Here, as if to place herself amongst the others, his mother had written her name in the flyleaf: EM. Almeyer.
Of course, when Mister Almeyer’s Parkinson’s disease overtook his abilities altogether, the visits came to an end. This way life remained until about the sixth week after his death, when the telephone rang one evening and Almeyer’s mother said from her house in Toronto: I’m coming out.
The Almeyer car, while Mister Almeyer lived, had always been a Buick and had always been maroon. Now that he was dead, Mrs Almeyer favoured something smaller and something more in line with the range of colours in which she dressed. A week before she phoned her son to warn him of her arrival, she had gone up Yonge Street in a taxi one day and looked in all the windows of the major dealers. Nothing really pleased her until they got to Richmond Hill. Here, she suddenly told the driver to stop because she had seen a flash of royal blue beyond an expansive sheet of glass.
The car turned out to be a New Yorker two-door sedan and she bought it on the spot. She had never done anything so extravagant in all her life and when she got back home and told Olive Marks what she had done, she was sure that, any moment, Mister Almeyer would come around the corner from his bedroom and ask her what the hell she thought she was doing.
Olive Marks reached up over the sink and brought down a bottle of the whisky kept for company. (Mrs Almeyer drank a cheaper brand of whisky when she was alone.) Then she poured two neat drinks and handed one across to Mrs Almeyer.
“Here’s to that motor trip you always wanted,” she said.
Mrs Almeyer went and sat in the living-room. She did not turn on the lights. Tippling her whisky, she gazed out the windows across the lawn and into the street.
I’ve bought a blue sedan, she thought. And then she wondered what to do with the rest of her life. Maybe she would drive away and not come back.
Almeyer had lived alone for the last two years before his father died. Julie Fielding had developed a battery of seniors in her department who thought she had “more potential than was useful” in Collins Corners. At their behest, she had returned to improve her status at the University of Toronto. She took up living there with a girl whose name was Sandra Givens. Sandra was somewhat younger than Julie, and her coterie of friends and acquaintances opened doors to ways of life that Julie had not before considered. Her manner changed—and the style of her aggression. Almeyer, at first, had been happy to run a few carloads of her books and winter clothes to Toronto, but when she telephoned one day and told him to bring her favourite cat, he refused.
“Why are you refusing me?” she asked.
“Because the cat is happy where it is,” said Almeyer. Then he hung up.
Next day, he called the telephone company and had them change his number. He never heard from Julie Fielding again. Someone told him they had seen her with a man called Benson. That was all he knew of her, now.
His mother arrived on an afternoon in March. It was a Saturday. Almeyer had heard a crow that morning and he was excited. Hearing the first crow meant you had survived the winter.
He took his mother up to the room she had always shared with his father and showed her the improvements he had made in the bathroom. George walked everywhere they went and Mrs Almeyer reached down and petted him before she took her gloves off.
All that afternoon, he heard his mother roaming about the upper reaches of the house. He wondered if he ought to go up and see what might be troubling her. Maybe she needed something she could not find. He was on the point of starting up the stairs when he heard the door to her bedroom click and he thought: she’s going to have a rest.
Round about four o’clock, he went outside to bring in firewood and, by the time he had filled the box, his mother had come downstairs and was waiting for him in the kitchen. “I’ve brought you something,” she said. “It’s something I want you to have. I think it belongs with you, but it’s also something I have to explain.”
Almeyer noticed an oblong package wrapped in brown paper sitting on the table. His mother had set it over on the far side, resting next to an already opened bottle of scotch. She held an empty glass in her hand, the glass he had left in the upstairs bathroom for her to put her toothbrush in. She was not by any means drunk but he could hear that she had started drinking. The sound of it was in her voice.
“Let’s just sit out here in the kitchen,” she said. “I haven’t sat in a kitchen for years.” She raised the bottle and filled her glass and then she passed the bottle to him. “Your health,” she said, “and mine.”
“Your health and mine,” said Almeyer, getting himself a glass before he sat down. “What’s in the package?”
Mrs Almeyer lighted a cigarette. Her first that month.