TOM AND FAY, lying in bed, exchanged the curiosities and gaps in their family trees.
The mysteries came not in a roar but in sharply defined droplets, like rainwater. Fay told Tom about her young sister, Bibbi, about her turbulent adolescence, how she ran away to Newfoundland and lived for a year in a sort of New Age haze with an alcoholic cobbler who, when she decided to leave him to return home, committed suicide, hanging himself with a leather belt Bibbi herself had made for him. Pinned to his shirt was a bitter, blaming note, the contents of which Bibbi has confided to Fay and to no one else. Now she lives with a thirty-eight-year-old labor organizer named Jake Greary, an acrimonious bully, a monster of social-democratic rectitude who, nevertheless, seems to have mesmerized her. “We keep hoping she’ll leave him,” Fay said to Tom, “but after what happened in Newfoundland, she’s probably afraid to.”
All this was surprising to Tom, who by now had met Bibbi two or three times and been struck by her look of composure, her ease and candor. To Tom she had not seemed in any way oppressed or reduced to subjugation. (It was true she was beautiful, though not as beautiful as Fay believed her to be.)
Tom told Fay about his twenty-seven mothers at the University of Manitoba, and then about his real mother, who had found herself pregnant at the age of sixteen.
“I wonder if she ever thought about having an abortion,” Fay said.
Tom didn’t know. There was a good deal he didn’t know, including who exactly his father was. But he’d long ago laid that question to rest.
“Good,” Fay said approvingly.
“She’s happy,” Tom said about his mother. “She and Mike. Her life seems to have worked out.”
“Do you think of him as a stepfather?” Fay asked.
“Well, no, more of a friend, I guess.”
“It’s funny,” Fay said, “When I first saw him, I was struck by – ” She stopped herself.
“What?”
“How much alike you looked.”
“Us? You mean Mike and me?”
“Your chin. Your eyes. Even some of your mannerisms.”
“Really?” Tom said, and resettled himself on the mattress, stroking the back of her hand.
“Or else I imagined it,” Fay said.
TOM’S FRIENDS REJOICE for him, and so do Fay’s. They say such things as: “He’s perfect for you” and “She’s exactly the sort of steadying personality you need,” or sometimes, enigmatically, “Opposites attract.”
Ted Woloschuk tells Tom shyly, “I’ve prayed for you. Maeve, too.” Iris Jaffe kisses Tom on both cheeks, and Beverly Miles says, “Onward!” and Peter Knightly tapes a fond note on the door of Fay’s office: “Delighted to hear of your good news.” Jenny Waring tells Tom that she’s planning an engagement party: “I’m thinking along the lines of twenty, maybe thirty people, just close friends. A buffet, is that okay? And I want to have a few of Fay’s friends, too, and some of her family. Do you think you could get a list to me by next week?”
Fay has a theory about the general rejoicing. She seems to have a theory about everything. “It’s because people had given up on us,” she tells Tom. “Here we were, headed up the solitary path, and suddenly we’re walking hand in hand on the golden road.”
She’s noticed, she says, from her reading of fairy tales and myths, and also the inside pages of newspapers, that the greatest rejoicing occurs for those who have been elevated from the deepest ignominy, those who are abruptly, randomly saved and rewarded. Cinderella among her ashes, and the next moment she is claimed by her prince. The youngest son, deprived of his birthright, gaining a kingdom in the end. The unemployed car salesman winning the sweepstakes, the dried-out drunk writing a perfect poem, the ancient barren women of the Scriptures giving birth to prophets. For some reason people feel a need to honor those who have risen spectacularly. And they share, Fay thinks, an unconscious belief that they themselves have contributed to the rescue.
Only Fay’s godmother, Onion, reserves judgment. Shaking Tom’s hand for the first time, she said sharply, “I’ve seen you, of course, on those billboards” – an acknowledgment that brought him a stunning clout of shame. To Fay she said, her face wrinkling into a cartoon grimace, “Well, I suppose you’re old enough to know your own mind.”
THE PARTY at 307 Yale begins at seven o’clock, although the guests of honor, Richard and Peggy McLeod, will not arrive until a quarter to eight. Everything is planned. More than a hundred guests stream through the front door, and most of them exclaim over the beauty of the invitations, each of which has been handmade by Bibbi to resemble a miniature photo album framed in soft leather and containing two photographs: on the left are Richard and Peggy McLeod as they looked on their wedding day forty years ago, all veiling and smiles backed by thin tree branches, and on the right is a recent snapshot taken by Clyde in their own back yard – their twin thatches of white hair giving them the look more of brother and sister than husband and wife. They both appear remarkably youthful. Peggy McLeod is leaning toward Richard with one hand resting flat on his knee and the other lifted in a gesture of airy emphasis. Typically Peg, everyone says, just like her. The invitation reads:
Clyde, Sonya, Fay, and Bibbi McLeod invite you to a celebration of their parents’ 40th wedding anniversary October 4 ~ 7:00 P.M. 307 Yale Avenue
No gifts please; just a single long-stemmed flower.
Shhhhh! This is a surprise.
Please park cars on adjoining streets.
RSVP Sonya or Clyde: 747-6290
SONYA, BRIGHT-FACED, ebullient, exuberantly hostessy in a dress of blue silk banded with green, opens the door to arriving guests. This is a role she loves, standing in the lit doorway of her own cherished house, welcoming group after group of friends. Clyde stands nearby taking coats – the evening is cool – and ferrying them to the bedrooms on the second floor. The house fills quickly with celebratory noise, with color, a happy convivial murmur. Fay and Bibbi take turns leading guests through the hallway, into the living room, the dining room, the sunroom beyond, then out through the sliding doors to the glassed-in porch.
One month ago Tom Avery was a stranger to the McLeod family, yet here he is tonight pressed into service – in fact, given a privileged role. It is his job to present guests with a welcoming glass of wine as they enter the dining room and, at the same time, keep an eye on the sound system he has spent the afternoon installing. Fay’s nephews, Matthew and Gordon, by turns solemn and reckless, pass dishes of smoked pecans and black olives, and allow themselves to be patted on the head and even kissed.
The house, with its lit candles, its flowers, and its aggregation of social warmth, has grown rosy with heat. Tom keeps the background music mellow, some Sinatra to start with, a little Aretha Franklin. He has never attended a party like this, and now and then he stands back, observes, and feels the strangeness of it pour through him.
Onion is helping in the kitchen, making sure the caterer finds what he needs, keeping track of food and drink, and inspecting the buffet table set up in the dining room. Earlier there had been a crisis (only dimly perceived by Tom), when Onion suddenly announced she would not be attending the party, that she would be spending the evening at the hospital with Strom. It was Fay who finally persuaded her that she was needed and that Strom would be perfectly all right for a few hours on his own. Next to Muriel Brewmaster, Onion was her mother’s oldest friend. Her presence was crucial. “I don’t know what’s come over her,” Fay told Tom. “She’s been so odd these last few days.”
Everything else goes perfectly. Sonya is a born organizer, as everyone keeps saying. At precisely ten minutes to eight Richard and Peggy McLeod, believing that they have been invited by their son and daughter-in-law for a family dinner, drive up and park their car in front of the house. “Shhhhh,” Fay tells everyone in the living room, “they’re here.”
Sonya opens the front door. “Why you look all dressed up,” Peggy McLeod says.
In the other rooms there is silence, heat, anticip
ation. Then, from somewhere, a whistle blows: the signal. Tom puts “When the Saints Come Marching In” on the tape deck, and a minute later Richard and Peggy McLeod are standing at the entrance to the living room. “Surprise,” the assembled guests shout, sing, yell, and Tom sees Richard McLeod pass a hand over his face.
The evening ripens and swells. The lights are kept low, and the walls rise into darkness and acquire a look of watered silk. Tom is astonished at all the white heads and eager thirst. He is grateful to be kept busy, pouring wine and providing music. He plays a flutter of 1950s songs, borrowed from the CHOL archives and from Big Bruce’s private collection, music so quirky and crimped, so full of the swells and concavities of sentimental yearning, that it seems designed for exactly this: an evening of nostalgia in an unimaginable future. A suburban house. An October night. A graceful assembly of friends.
Fay and Bibbi, passing trays of food, seem to Tom like beings from the planet of youth. Girlish, lithe. They ought to be barefoot, he thinks, and decked with flowers and amulets. “How’re you doing?” Fay says into his ear at one point in the evening. Later she says, placing the flat of her hand between his shoulder blades, “You’re doing fine.” Later still she asks, and now there is a rise of concern in her voice, “Have you seen my father? Clyde wants to start the speeches in a few minutes.”
Tom juggles his assigned duties, sips a glass of Burgundy, and keeps a close watch on the time. He’s expected at the station no later than 11:50, and meanwhile he’s been introduced to the Swedborgs, the Comings, the Scotts, the Rumfords, the Lambdas, the Skochucks, and more and more – people that Richard and Peggy McLeod have known for years, some of them all their lives. There’re Caroline somebody-or-other, Muriel Brewmaster in dusty-pink velvet, Abby Aldrich, Deborah Goldsmith in a wheelchair, Alma and Edward Hicks, Lewin and May Gables and Marianne Gables, Mark Whischer, Dr. Hazel Moore, Charles and Simmie Fair. There’re Tim Hale, the McBriens, the Lloyds, David Chin, Eric and Emily Haigh, Jim and Hjordis Lake, the Jaffes, Carl Peggs, Alison Konkol, Andrew and Mary Ballstaeder, the Levys, the Hollinghursts, Simon and Stephanie Birrell, Julie Freemantle, and on and on and on. Over a hundred names were on the guest list, says Sonya, and almost everyone was able to come. It was a good idea, after all, to hold the party on a Thursday night, since some people were still going to the lake on the weekends. Yes, Clyde says, but they would have come back anyway for an occasion like this. Ben Katz, after all, an usher at the wedding forty years ago, has come all the way from Montreal.
In addition, a few old friends have cabled their good wishes – from France, from Hawaii, from India. Glasses are lifted. “Happy days,” a voice calls out.
Someone puts a hand on Tom’s shoulder and says, “Tom, I’d like you to meet Foxy Howe. Foxy, this is Tom Avery.”
Tom spins around and stares into the face of his ex–father-in-law.
“We’ve met,” says Foxy Howe. He does not put out his hand to be shaken, nor does he flinch or recoil. He stands solidly in place and registers across his broad, beefy, implacable face a look of hatred.
∼ CHAPTER 27 ∼
I Want
“I WANT TO HAVE A CHILD,” FAY TOLD TOM.
“What about two?” he said.
“Yes, two.”
“I want us to put one of those engagement announcements in the newspaper,” Tom said.
“Really? You do? Why?”
“I want everyone to know.”
“Did you ever – before? In the newspaper, I mean? The other times? With your other – ”
“Never. It never came up. I can’t remember why not.”
“I want to give you a wedding ring. How do you feel about wedding bands?”
“Yes, a wedding ring.”
“Something very plain,” Fay said.
“I want you to sit down and tell me everything there is to know about mermaids,” Tom said.
“You do? Everything?”
“Well, maybe not everything. But something.”
“I want you to stay the way you are.”
“The way I am?”
“Well, all the strange parts about you.”
“Strange?”
“Like the way you come and go in the night.”
“You mean,” he said, making a face, “that’s not normal behavior?”
“Not just that.”
“What else?”
“Hmmm. I’d have to think.”
“Think.”
“Well, the way you duck your head in the shower, that’s one thing, and scratch your scalp, hard. Why do you do that? Like you’re reminding your brain of something important. And I like that you come from Duck River. Duck River! I like to say to people, ‘He’s from Duck River, you know.’ And – now, I admit this is a bit hard to describe, but I like the way your skin stretches across your back.”
“Go on.”
“Well, I love the things you do. What you do to me.”
“I want you.”
“I want you, too.”
“That’s all I want. You.”
SOMETIMES FAY lies in bed in the dark and listens to “Niteline.”
“Hello out there,” she hears. “This is Tom Avery and this (pause) is ‘Niteline.’ A good, good end of the evening to listeners old and new. I’ll be here to keep you company for the next four hours – a little music and a little talk, and we’ve got a great interview coming up in an hour or so with hometown songwriter Benny Kaner, one of our own, who’s going to bring us up to the minute on what’s humming in the avant-garde pop scene. So stay tuned. And now, how about some Bruce Cockburn to get us into the mood.”
The show picks up a glow, a buzz. Fay, drifting toward sleep on her bunched pillows, feels the music merge with Tom’s voice, a voice that surprises her by becoming a slidy tenor with pliant honeyed bands of laughter. His loose tensionless melody seems after a while to form a long seamless wall she’s feeling her way along. She melts in and out of consciousness, shifts on her pillows to find a cooler spot. She’s come to understand love’s crippling inability to look at itself but knows with certainty that Tom Avery is her star-spangled man.
“And this, listeners, (pause) is your own Tom Avery, signing off for another session of (pause, voice lowered) ‘Niteline.’”
A matter of minutes and he’ll be here. Twenty minutes at the most. Tiptoeing into the dark bedroom. His bare arm folding back the sheet. His body sliding into bed, next to her, moving his chest up to fit against her back. His breath on her shoulder, light and alert. Oh, she loves it, this having, this being, coming closer and closer now, turning her body to face him. Her rounded-out fullness. Her lover. Tom Avery. Her love.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE for us to live outside the culture we’re born into. Our communities claim us from the start, extending a thousand tentacles of possession, and Fay, a reasonable, intelligent woman, has long recognized that reverence for individualism is one of the prime perversions of contemporary society. It is illogical and foolish. Oh, yes. We are bound to each other biologically and socially, intellectually and spiritually, and to abrogate our supporting network is to destroy ourselves.
Yet it troubles her now and then that she is connected, albeit tenuously, with all three of Tom’s ex-wives. Something tribal and primitive about these human links threatens her, offends her sensibility. She wants to weep, thinking of it. She suspects herself of harboring an exaggerated fastidiousness and entertains brief, private fantasies in which she and Tom move to another city, perhaps even another country, where she will not be required, ever, to plan, to adjust, to avoid, to accommodate, to explain, and, worse, much worse, to be endlessly aware of Clair, Suzanne, Sheila.
Clair, Suzanne, Sheila. The wives.
Clair. Clair Howe is the only child of Foxy and Lily Howe, who are old friends of her parents. They are a fat, sweet, sorrowing couple. Lily drinks far too much, as everyone knows, and sinks on social evenings into a dull, kindly, embarrassing reverie. Foxy is clever and has done well in real estate and land develo
pment, and they live, along with their crazy daughter, in a large tree-shaded Tudor-style house in Tuxedo Park. Crazy Clair. An apartment has been made for her over the garage. Fay remembers Clair as a child, turning up at birthday parties, a heavy, silent little girl. It was said that something was amiss. She was sent to a school in Toronto for emotionally disturbed children and came home thin. Her parents rarely mention her name, but Fay has always been aware, distantly, vaguely, of intermittent hospitalization, and later a term or two at the University of Winnipeg, where she disrupted classes by shouting. For a time she did volunteer work at the Art Gallery, and people spoke of the wonder of the new stabilizing drugs. There was a brief, unsuccessful marriage. (Ah, yes, now she remembers, yes, of course.) A rumor of shock treatments and their terrible failure. Something about a suicide attempt, perhaps several attempts – Fay has forgotten the details if she ever knew them. She hasn’t seen Clair Howe in years. She hasn’t even thought about her, but now she must.
Suzanne. Sue? Fay never did know her last name. But she recalls the slow-moving girl/woman who stood, or rather lounged, behind the counter at Chimes Bookstore on Osborne Street – thin face, long blond hair hooked behind childish ears, wide waxy hands, a lascivious mouth, greedy, blurred. Yes, you could say she was pretty. This was the person who accepted Fay’s money, placed it in the drawer of the cash register, and, ditheringly, extracted change. The same person who dropped Fay’s purchases, making no comment on what they might be, into one of the slippery, bright Chimes bags – and who at that very moment was married to Tom Avery, well-known radio host, well known at least to a sector of the community, the night people, but certainly not to Fay. Now Suzanne has disappeared from the bookstore. She has remarried, it seems. To someone rich. Someone called Gregor Heilbrun. The name rings a bell in Fay’s head. Of course! Gregor Heilbrun’s first wife was Lee Heilbrun. Who sings with the Handel Chorale. Or used to, before she moved to Vancouver last year. On and on it goes.