Stones (17 page)

He knows me, now, but every time I visit, he behaves as if we were at home and children and he wants to know where I have been.

You look so old
, he will say to me.
Why have you grown so much older than me?

I do not respond to this. I simply acknowledge that I am aberrant and Bud accepts this fact as being sufficient explanation. Sometimes, he smiles. I guess he knows what aberrant means.

He wants to see our parents and I have to tell him—every visit—that our mother has been ill and cannot come, just now, to see him. And then I have to tell him—every visit—that our father is dead and Bud is not surprised, but merely curious that his father could die and Bud not know it.
He must have died while I was away
, he will say. And I say nothing.

Every visit, too, he asks me where he is and who
these people
are. I do not tell him he is in a clinic for the aged because this would distress him. He does not know that he will not be leaving. He recognizes it must be some kind of rest home because the nurses and the doctors come and go and, time to time, somebody dies and is taken away.

On one occasion he asks me; “am I mad?”

I tell him: “no. You have been ill and we don’t know why”

“Will you come and see me?”

“Yes.”

“I get very lonely here,” he says. “But the food is good.” I smile.

He looks at me, crooked—Bud grown old, a very old man—and he says: “I’m missing someone, Neil. And I don’t know who it is.”

I hold his hand. He is greatly distressed and he rides along the edge of what remains of memory—peering out into the dark and trying desperately to see who might be there and to remember.

“Never mind,” I tell him. “Honestly; no one is missing. Everything’s fine.”

“Where has our father gone?” he says.

I tell him. And I leave.

Every so often—maybe fifteen times a year—we will hold this meeting until he dies.

The day the police broke down the door and found him, I went with him to the hospital and gave him up in all his blankets and sheets to the doctors and the nurses in the Emergency Ward. Being told there was nothing to be done but wait and see if he would survive, I decided to return and await the news in Bud and Katie’s rented house.

When I got there, it was nearing four o’clock in the afternoon and Katie’s black cat was sitting on the porch. His name was Bubastis and we had met before.

Bubastis, however, would not come into the house. He seemed confused and wary and he kept his distance. I supposed he must be after food—he looked so thin—and I guessed that Bud had given up feeding him. Perhaps he had been coming for days to sit on the porch in the hopes that Bud would open the door and put down his meal.

I wished then, fervently, that we could talk to animals. How else could I explain to this beast that Katie was dead and Bud was probably going to die—as I thought that afternoon—and I would be more than happy to take Bubastis back with me to my house…

But no. He would have to wonder, perhaps forever, where all his people had gone and why they had deserted him. He went away and sat in the yard and I went into the house.

I opened a can of cat food and put the whole thing, dumped on a plate, onto the porch and called him.

“Bubastis!”

He did not come while I was standing there, but he must have come in the next half-hour because when I returned to the porch both the cat and all the food had disappeared.

Inside the house I found a wilderness of bottles and glasses and a maze of unmade beds, undusted furniture and piled-up cardboard boxes.

I looked and saw where Bud had been found. He had been lying—dressed in slacks and shirt, bare-footed, facing Katie’s bed—in the hallway between their rooms. His own dark bedroom was behind him and the sheets on his bed were grey with age. On Katie’s pillow, a note was pinned with a safety-pin and the note was in Katie’s hand and it said:
Bud—Honey—I am going now and I won’t be back. I’ve left a hundred dollars hidden in the hall closet. Look in the usual place and it will be there. I’m scared, right now, and I guess the thing is, soon I’m going to die. I wish you would come and see me. I will always love you, honey. Thank you for everything. Katie
.

She could only have written this before she made her escape to her cousin Jean, and that had been over a year ago. In all that time, the note had remained on Katie’s pillow—and her bed exactly as she left it: the coverlet thrown back—the nightdress abandoned—her glass of water spilled and fallen to the floor.

In the kitchen, the smell was that of an abattoir; all the raw meat was so far gone it was alive with maggots. Bags of potatoes were sprouting in the corner. The sink was filled with dishes and the only evidence of food Bud might have truly eaten was a brace of opened and empty cans of Habitant pea soup. Four or five wide, flat boxes indicated that pizza had been delivered—but none of it had been removed and all of it was now a rotted sequence of red-and-yellow wheels.

Bud must have had some temper tantrums. Several dishes were broken—cigarettes and ash had been scattered over the floor and a case of beer appeared to have been struck a dozen blows by a hammer.

The living-room, which had once been charming under Katie’s hand, was the wilderness already described of opened and unopened liquor bottles and glasses. Ashtrays were sprouting mould. A mouse had drowned in a vase of flowers. The telephone sat beside Bud’s chair—unanswered all those days—and the television set was playing one of the soaps. I turned it off.

There by the telephone, neatly printed in Bud’s distinctive hand, were Teddy Hartley’s telephone number, the date—April 2—and Dorothy Parker’s poem.

I hoped, in that moment, for everyone’s sake—especially his own—that Bud would die. That was the option he had chosen. And I had screwed it up by sending in the police.

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 and the road had been repointed.