Sweeter Than All the World (12 page)

“If he could only have stayed in Edmonton,” she says, abruptly inside the good memory her father can sometimes be now, after fourteen years dead. “Just kept his head inside a DC-3 engine. He said one day in 1942 over eight hundred planes landed and took off here, minute after minute, for Alaska.”

“So what was in them? Milk for burbling Russian babies?”

He feels a lurch of regret—too smart-ass sardonic again by half—but Susannah only shrugs; the length of her legs under the thin blanket remains warmly against his. She says, “Two years in Edmonton he could pretend he was just fixing engines. But then the U.S. Air Force sent him overseas.”

“His luck it wasn’t the Pacific,” Adam says quickly, trying somehow to extricate them both from her father and his thoughts against her back into a bland generality. “That’s what I mean, when he was really in it, war, nothing but shot-up Flying Fortresses his buddies flew, all he said was they hated it.”

“Oh, they hated it, of course. But … maybe they loved it too.”

“Well, love…”

“It was fun for them, finally. Years of boredom waiting in England, then the ultimate game, hunting humans. And they were so quiet when they came home, everyone at home knew the worst about war, today we’re supposed to hate it, and there was so much violent death, so they don’t dare tell anyone how much they liked about it.”

Adam hunches up a little; in bed, silent Bud Lyons is one of several subjects they usually avoid. “Well … you know how Tom’s dad is.”

“Yeah, Tom’s dad. He never says anything either, just goes to Remembrance Day parades with the other vets and cries and has a drink with his old buddies—flying over Germany at eighteen, you think he ever had that much living intensity again? Selling furniture in Eaton’s for forty years?”

Try sixty patients a day repeating a cough or a bee sting or a sliver, or depressed by one smaller breast, an indefatigable wart, a penis limp once too often.

Susannah pulls his arm tight across her stomach, never again so taut after Trish and Joel, but soft, surrounding as love. What kind of a stupid ass is he?

She talks into the dim room, away from him. “Tom’s dad never tells what fun flying a Spitfire was for a prairie boy, in the air over the burning cities of Europe, and life-and-death dogfights and watching the bright streaks of bullets, his bullets, and seeing those Nazis falling, trailing fire and exploding when they smashed into the ground, monsters who shoved people into ovens.”

“They didn’t know about ovens when they were flying.”

“Don’t quibble, they knew it all later and it just made their memories better, their intensity more moral.”

“Well, aren’t they right? They were doing a good thing, stopping unspeakable genocide. Many with their own death.”

“But what ‘unspeakable’ did they do too? One Hitler, and millions of children.”

“They had to. There was no other way to stop him.”

“Oh? Listen,
Bengjeltje,”
Susannah says. Lowgerman she learned from his mother and always a caress, but under the blanket she is drawing away from him. “Don’t argue. You know it, women never get into situations where they have to do that to each other. War is the ultimate male business.”

“Okay, okay … but fun? Tom’s dad is so gentle he’d never hurt a fly.”

“Yes! And a man never wants his son to be in a war, I know, and yet in a way I think maybe he does. Comradeship, life-and-death terror, intensity together, the most paralysing fear and still knowing, if you live, that you found the courage to go through it. Together with someone. How can shopping till you drop at the mall, playing golf—for God’s sake!”

He reaches, wraps his arms around her distant body too hard, too hard. She has boxed him in: he can only grope for a speakable moment. “Sometimes … when I’m pounding a chest, and suddenly I feel that, the heart beat, and beat—”

She says gently, “You’re a good doctor.”

“Hospital teamwork, when someone really is sick or injured, that’s intense enough.”

“I meant,” she says, “who in our generation besides you medics ever sees a corpse? We lock the coffins, we sing ‘There is no death, though eyes grow dim,’ from the ridiculous
Student Prince
. There is no death!”

“That’s the mourners, they’re in shock, they reach for anything from their happy past to help—”

“Listen,” half turned to him, “Robert Graves wrote his major inheritance from World War I was ‘a difficulty in telling the truth.’ Tom’s father won’t lie outright, he just doesn’t tell anything.”

Adam says, “Nobody needs a war to have ‘a difficulty in telling the truth.’ ”

Susannah looks at him sharply, the upper slant of her eye. “Surely not,” she says slowly. “Not in your office.”

“Oh my office, hell, that’s just S.O.A.P. ritual, scribble scribble sixty times a day SOAP!”

Susannah laughs out loud. “It’s so cute! Your perpetual of cleanliness, S for subjective, ‘And how are we feeling today?’ O for objective, ‘Does this hurt when I press, here?’ A for assessment, ‘Now, there may be a heart murmur, or an ulcer…’ P for prescription, ‘An antibiotic—”’

“It’s ridiculous. Your leg is broken, but there is order, I have to inspect your inner ear.”

“How’s our whining friend Andy T with his ulcer?”

“He’s okay. You know what they say, ‘Assholes live longer.’ ”

“I know, but I think he wants more of him than that to survive.”

They are laughing together, and for a moment lightness settles over them like intertwining sleep. But Susannah stirs out of it, as she always does. Once she’s started something, she can never leave it alone.

“You remember,” she says, “Tom’s father hinted at a story, he escorted a bomber squadron and his best buddy from Thorhild was the pilot in one of the Lancasters? He got back okay, no dogfights, and then his buddy’s bomber returned all shot up and more or less crash-landed, with only the navigator alive, and then he died too before he could tell what happened. That’s the classic war story: never talk, and when you do, only about death. That way you tell nothing. It’s told to keep us, who weren’t there, ignorant. He’s saying, ‘That’s the way war is, it means nothing.’ ”

“You think that’s why your dad never spoke?”

“Nothing can mean anything.”

She is talking about her father and war, but Adam senses she is talking men and women more; he feels her leading him along the high sharp ridge of what their life together is no longer; if either of them slips, they may fall, and split.

“Did you ever ask him,” she persists, “sort of ‘between men’?”

“He was always easy, he sounded so open, but he deflected things. I’d ask something and he’d explain the difference between a B-17 and a B-24, again. Never about loading bombs he knew would kill civilians. He couldn’t be pushed, I never heard him say ‘Dresden.’ ”

“He told me 450 Flying Fortresses and 764 Lancasters flew that night, packed with 650,000 firebombs.”

Adam feels a surge of emotion rise, twist in his throat.

Susannah feels it too. “You loved him, I loved him.” Her hand brushes his face. “He talked even less after Mom died.”

“I wish I’d known your mother.”

“I knew yours, so good.”

“I know, I know. Yours would have said I wasn’t good enough for her ‘golden princess.’ ”

She hiccups, stirs in his loose arms. “That was just Dad, a joke.”

“Well, whoever it was.”

For once she does not pick up, thank god, on the opening for disagreement, perhaps argument, he has blundered into again. His arms are still around her, if he leaned lower he would hear her stomach gurgle as stomachs do, but as usual now she feels very far away and in one lurch he decides—he overwhelmingly wants to push her, out of or into what or where he is not thinking—and he reacts quick and deep as a kitchen knife turning.

“You’re right, that’s the classic war story. Tell nothing and your life is a secret and—” Adam catches himself, his voice rougher. “Is that why he never said anything about Idaho, about
Pocatello? He had some kind of personal ‘war’ there, is that why he said nothing? Just nothing? That’s an American past?”

Susannah seems to be returning from some other place even as she shifts almost imperceptibly under the sheet. “I’ve told you,” she says calmly, “we never lived in Pocatello, that was just the hospital where I was born.”

“A mother tells her child no more than a birth certificate? What about the green town you remember? The big lake?”

“I was barely four when we left. I don’t know.”

“How about,” and he says it fast, so he won’t think what this means, “you delay Europe a week, I exchange time with somebody and we drive to Hillcrest? Then through the mountains, all the golden fall leaves into Idaho?”

“I told you, he liked Edmonton so much, when he got out of the Air Force he went back to Idaho, married my mother and brought us here.”

“Where in Idaho, what lake?”

“You know I don’t know.”

“And you’d never met him, or seen him before he showed up in 1946 and married your mother?”

“That’s what Mom told me.”

“But he was your biological father?”

“That’s what Mom told me. I don’t remember meeting him, I was four and we lived here, in Edmonton.”

“And you never looked at a map together? The only place is on your birth certificate?”

She is staring at him so fixedly he cannot face her eyes. “Adam,” she murmurs at last, “he was my father, and they’re both gone. And next week we’ve been married twenty-five years.”

“I know. God, I knew him eleven years and he never told me anything except motors.”

“In Canada twenty-five years is a life sentence.”

“Only in the Criminal Code. Your parents were immigrants from the States, and they just never talked about a past, not a word about family?”

“Adam, why are you cross-examining me?”

Her abrupt hardness, like a body tremor, jolts him. What if she were to cross-examine him? But even as her body straightens slowly under the sheet, her voice finds its habitual understanding. “You’re just so sick of that office, your hypochondriac patients, the only time you can even read the newspaper is falling asleep in bed—your obsessed keep-every-waiting-room-full, pile-up-the-money partners.”

His stupid partners—his guilt can explode in defensiveness: “I don’t give a shit about them! How can you know nothing about your grandparents? Everyone has to have them. So okay, you’re not Russian Mennonite, they hear a name and they’re sniffing for relations way past the third and fourth generation, but Bud Lyons—what kind of name is that? Is it English?”

“We’re not criminals.”

“Was I implying that? War trauma can beat a person into silence—god knows in this century there’s enough—but he helped win the war for the good guys. So why? In Idaho are there any Jews?”

“The trouble is,” she says slowly, “no fire ever burns clean. Not even the best firebombing.” Abruptly her body lengthens out straight and hard. “It’s been twenty-five years.”

“And I’ve practised, as they say, medicine for twenty-four years and four months.”

“It’s still a life sentence.”

Adam’s memory is reeling back; he peers at her staring up, as it seems, into a beyond. So close he smells her, but indecipherably far away. It will be some time yet before he understands what he has been hearing; what has happened before his very eyes while he was so carefully protecting his “this-has-nothing-to-do-with-her” life. His secret life, lived not previously like her father’s, but parallel.

“Am I,” he says with particular care, “am I supposed to be getting this? You don’t want to serve a longer ‘life sentence’? With me?”

Susannah does not move. She seems to be looking down the length of her body under the thin cover, at the twin peaks created by her feet.

“You know that’s a mirror question,” she says. “Do you, with me?”

Under Adam’s quick knife the inner body of the beaver slowly revealed itself. It was a knifepoint unzippering, the gradual removal of a rich fur coat to expose a glistening, pale yellow nakedness.

“You ever see a seal lying on a rock?” he asked. “In a zoo maybe?”

Jean was looking intensely at the body and his curved knife with a certain abhorrence. She said nothing, as usual, but Adam sensed the slight shake of her head, which might be little more than a suppressed shudder.

“They’re a lot bigger, but they have the same fat-layered, seemingly boneless body,” he explained. “Water mammals. When I was a kid, north of here, there were no beaver at all, now
they’re ubiquitous pests, dams and houses everywhere, and look. An inch of fat, turning beautiful trees into lard, the bugger.”

Jean said nothing. His left hand, clenched in the roll of greasy fur, was trying to tear it aside over short slashes of the skinning knife. Both his hands were thick with fat and blood.

“ ‘I’d rather be in Idaho,’ ” he sang in his monotone, ‘“than any other place I know, in Ida-Idaho…”’

He had worked his way around to the head, more carefully now, slicing to leave the tiny ears in the fur, and towards the eye. “See,” he pointed with the knife-tip, “transparent eyelid, they can see perfectly under water. And here,” he lifted the mouth wide behind the two enormous cutting teeth, “a second set of lips too, behind these daggers,” he tapped them, like steel on steel, “so they can carry wood or stones between them under water and never get water in their mouth. That’s real evolution, millions of years of purposeful—”

She interrupted him, “You cut a hole in it, there.”

“Ugh! Good thing I never tried to be a surgeon.” Adam’s hands stopped and he looked up. Stocky body, but that face could sell any man TV toothpaste—and he ducked his head, ashamed of his thought. “You’re too close,” he said, “watching me.”

“You don’t like it?”

“Maybe you don’t like it. Anyways, trappers always cut the head right off, this fur’s no good for anything.”

“So why leave it on?”

“I’m not a trapper.” And added, suddenly annoyed with her, “Don’t you think even a skinned animal deserves a face?”

For a moment only the sound of the creek, and a movement of air as if it had turned to ice below them, rising. Adam covered up quickly. “I always hated skinning. I was on a caribou hunt
once, a century ago, up north with the Dene, and all I could do was pack out the butchered meat.”