Stones (18 page)

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.

“I’m going to tell you something,” she said. “I’m going to tell you something and then I don’t know what I’m going to do. I may go home.”

“Have I done something wrong?” said Almeyer. “No,” said his mother. “No. Just listen…”

Almeyer sat with George’s head in his lap and listened. His mother’s face was tilted down towards the table where her hands were wrapped around her glass and the cigarette smoke was rising into her swept-back hair. He thought he had never seen her quite so bereft of poise. She seemed immensely old and worn.

“Here,” she said. “Undo the package. Look…”

Almeyer received the brown-paper parcel handed across the table. The minute he touched it, he knew it was a picture frame—perhaps with a picture inside. He pulled the paper away and threw it into an empty chair. Then he stared. Puzzled.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” his mother said, her eyes on his.

“Yes. But I don’t understand,” said Almeyer. “Who are all these people?”

Resting in his hands, inside an imitation bamboo frame, there was a photograph. In the photograph, he recognized only his mother. She might have been as old as fifteen or as young as twelve and she was standing in a yard somewhere on a day in summer beside an older man who might have been—who must have been—her father. Both of them were smiling, each one looking at the other with almost alarming affection. Almeyer had never seen his grandfather before. His mother had said that pictures of him did not exist. Now, there he was and the sight of him—gazing down at his daughter—was so disturbing, Almeyer looked away.
Photographs that reveal such intimacy should not be taken
, he thought.
It isn’t right
.

But he did not mention this. Instead, he ran his finger along the faces of the others in the photograph: two young men and a woman leaning against a motor car. Almeyer thought he had never seen such beautiful boys, nor such a handsome woman.

“Is this your father?”

“Yes.”

“Who are these other people, then?”

“Those are my brothers,” his mother told him. “That was my mother.”

Almeyer was astonished. The only brother he’d ever heard of was Uncle Charlie Walker, and though he could recall his grandmother—just—he could not reconcile the woman he remembered with the woman standing there before him in the photograph. The woman he remembered had lived in a house on St George Street and had been appallingly bad tempered and always dressed in black. She had died when Almeyer was four. “I don’t understand,” he said, his finger passing over the two young men. “Neither of these is Uncle Charlie.”

“That’s right,” his mother said. “Uncle Charlie wasn’t born yet. Even if he had been, he never could have stood there with us. My mother would not have allowed it.”

“Why?”

“Because…” Mrs Almeyer smiled. She was nervous. “Uncle Charlie wasn’t her son.”

Almeyer did not know what to do or where to look. “How do you mean that?” he said. “Isn’t he your brother?”

“Yes.”

Almeyer waited.

Mrs Almeyer sipped her drink and let the glass go down towards the table, holding it just above the surface.

“I was thirteen,” she said, “that summer. I had two brothers: there—the two you’re looking at. One of them was older than me and the other one was younger. Harry was older. Tom was younger. Harry came of age the day that photograph was taken. Father had bought him that motorcar. Blue. It was a Chevrolet. This was in 1926. How long ago is that, now?”

“Sixty-two years.”

“Sixty-two years. Yes. Well…The long and the short of it is, my father had forbidden Harry to go out driving after dark. But Harry was young—and he had these friends—and he had to show off his motor car. Did I say it was a Chevrolet?”

“Yes.”

Mrs Almeyer continued: “I’m sure you can guess what happened. There was an accident. Harry was killed. No one knew at first who he was. Nor did they know who the other person was—the person who was killed beside him. Harry’s motor car had been hit by a train and dragged for half a mile along the track. Someone, at last, found something of Harry’s that gave his name and address and they came at seven in the morning, ringing the bell and pounding on the door. Agnes, our maid, went down and let them in and when my father was told what had happened he ran upstairs for Tom. And he called out
Tom! Tom! Wake up quick! We have to go and bring your brother home. He’s dead
…And then there was a long, long silence and Tom could not be found because, of course, he had gone with Harry the night before. They both had disobeyed my father and they died.”