The Boys in the Trees (13 page)

There was a folded paper on the polished hall table, a note from Lett, inviting him to supper at Blyth’s Hotel. He went to the kitchen to tell Lucy and felt a little spurt of anger at the way she set her lips, dropping the potato she was peeling back into the mounded bowl. Another when she asked about Eaton, still quiet in his room.
Let him sleep
, Robinson said, his hand rough on his office door. He sat down at his desk and opened Beard’s book but after a time realized that he hadn’t really read anything. Stray sentences snagging his attention, dragging it down
to a place far from the desk, the chair, the fingers turning pages.
Lightning never kills or even hurts unless it finds resistance in its path … They are without past or future, and only a dull present … What patients confidently expect to happen will be very likely to happen
.

He rubbed his face, gave his head a shake, and flipped forward to the chapter of illustrative cases, hoping to find something of interest. Beard’s Illustrative Case XI was a man of thirty, troubled by weekly emissions, by sweating hands, red spots on the forehead, by catarrh of the stomach. He reported that as a boy of seven he used to climb trees, and on so doing experienced sexual sensations, mingled pleasure and pain. He told Beard that he was so much annoyed by this that he gave up the habit of climbing entirely, although it had been what he had most loved to do. Case XIV was a gentleman who suffered from attacks of intense pain and heat behind the ears, and who also experienced palpitations of the heart when playing a game of cards or billiards. He could not bear the touch, even the thought, of flannel to the skin, and was afraid to use a public or a private privy or water closet. This gentleman was successfully treated with a course of bromide of potassa and tonics of quinia, strychnia and iron.

Robinson turned the page, but the ticking of the clock began to interfere. It sat on the corner of his desk, black and heavy with a porcelain face, a bronze figure on top. A man with an old-fashioned frock coat, knee breeches, one hand on his hip and the other held straight at his side. The clock was Marianne’s gift on their wedding day; she’d had a brass plate fixed to the base, engraved with the date, and
Always
. He had given her a necklace on a delicate gold chain. Stood behind her doing up the clasp, dipped his face to her scented neck. That was in the high room
in the grand hotel near the station, Marianne astonishing him with her delight, now that it was permitted. Making him laugh, her tangled hair tumbling down her back.

•  •  •

He closed the book and placed it on the little pile of journals not yet read. Wiped a few smudges from his desk, polished the face of the clock with the soft cloth he kept in the bottom drawer, with the bottle and glass. It was time he left, but he was thinking about other cases Beard’s methods had cured, women living in misery until they walked through his door. Thinking of women in beds and on couches, women sitting on the hard chair in his own office. So many women, their eyes rimmed red from crying; there was a time when it seemed that Marianne’s tears alone would be enough to sweep him away. At first it was some slight in a shop or an invitation not given; Robinson was all sympathy for as long as his patience lasted, trying to understand how a cold look from a woman she hadn’t yet met could be a tragedy in her world. From her sobbing sentences he came to see that she had pictured herself arriving in Emden like royalty, stepping down from the carriage in her dress of the latest fashion, bringing her knowledge of concerts, of entertainments, of how to live a civilized life. Certain that she was just the person the town had been sleepily waiting for, that her opinion would be eagerly sought, that cards would pile up on the new silver tray. But the town was neither as backward nor as biddable as she had assumed, the order already firmly established, and all he could think of was to give her money for new dresses, for a dining table shipped from England, a new set of dishes painted with tiny pink flowers.

More tears with the gouts of blood that were their children, refusing to stay, and each time more days, more weeks in the
darkened room. He worried about her not eating, told the girl who worked for them then to make up sweet, rich things, cakes and pastries, airy loaves of bread that could be thickly spread with butter. He carried up the silver tray with its scatter of visiting cards and she stirred them with her pale fingers, closed her eyes again. At some point he had moved to the room across the hall, so as not to disturb her when he was called out at night, and somehow he never moved back to their high, carved bed.

•  •  •

He felt a gritty tiredness in his eyes as he moved down the street, thought briefly of sending an excuse to the hotel, of lying down on cool sheets and sinking into a deep, dreamless sleep. He thought of Eaton, who would still be in his bed when the sun was high if Lucy didn’t climb the stairs to waken him, and with that thought remembered that he had meant to look in again before he left the house. There was a baseball game sometime soon, he would take him to that; they would sit side by side and cheer for the Maple Leafs. It would be good for Eaton, a noisy crowd, fresh air. It would be good for both of them.

As he passed the corner of Powell Street he met a group of men coming up the hill from the factory, nodded to their greetings, and thought about the fact that he knew almost every face in Emden, that he was part of the town in a way he never would have imagined when he first shook Dr. Poole’s hand. He had hoped at that time that it might still be a temporary banishment. Some years, maybe five years, and then surely all would be forgotten, forgiven. Not the end of his golden road after all, but a side track that would join up again. It wasn’t a hope that he remembered setting aside, but he was quickly busy, long days and nights and drives through the countryside, until he was enmeshed
in the town, tangled in other lives. Some years ago he had read the Professor’s obituary in the city paper, read that he was survived by his daughter, Faith, and for days he had thoughts that he had to tamp down.

Behind him he could hear the men needling someone who was going directly home, most of them veering off to Pond’s tavern, or Malley’s. No doubt giving a saucy greeting to Sarah Barnes, who would be stationed outside the door, her eyes fierce behind her spectacles, leaflets in her clenched hands. He had been called often enough to the factory to know what kind of day those men had spent, but they walked with easy steps, some with arms about each other’s shoulders. Robinson knew almost every face in the town; there were men he talked with, shared a cigar with, men he was glad to run into on the street or at a meeting table. But he realized there was no one he would ever walk with in that easy, unthinking way, maybe never had been. He and Smith had been close for a time, with their shared trials and aspirations, but only for a little while. Smith was in Montreal, maybe had been for years, something Robinson only knew from reading the articles on contagion he occasionally contributed to the
Medical Record
.

He thought of Eaton and the O’Neill boy, sticks clattering in their rolling hoops, and the way he sometimes saw them running and whooping through the long waving grass in Badgers’ Field. He must have had friends like that, when he was a boy in that other place, but he couldn’t summon a memory of any. All that came was a picture, the rough bark of a tree, up close, lit by blazing sun. A slender caterpillar, an inchworm, bright green like the color of new leaves, making its slow, deliberate way upward. Pausing at each gnarled spot, the front part of its body flailing free in the air until it adjusted to the different surface,
came down flat and continued on its way. A boy’s hand reaching, grubby, broken fingernails, flicking it away, and he didn’t think it was his own hand, but he didn’t really know.

•  •  •

How could he not know if it was his own stained finger or someone else’s, flicking the caterpillar away to be crushed beneath a cracked boot sole, or maybe for the pleasure of watching it start again, watching it struggle again and again. The kind of casual cruelty that Robinson saw everywhere, some days of his life, along with the more calculated kind. The way of a man like Lett, with his ruddy cheeks, his booming laugh. The very picture of jovial good nature, but ruthless in ways that Robinson knew, and ways he’d heard about. Married to Marl’s plain-faced daughter, Lett ran the factory, owned property in all four corners of the town and half the center block, sat on every committee there was. A finger in every pie, he liked to say, bullying and pushing through his scheme for a competing railway line, which was good for the town, in the end, but better for Lett, better for Marl, who stayed in the shadows in his big house on the hill.

Lett was a great talker at his dinner table, in meeting rooms, but he had nothing to say about the men who couldn’t hold out until the railway profits came through. Nothing to say about the new dry goods merchant who came to town with his wife and young family, who left a year later, a broken man. The fire that took most of his stock finished him off, and Lett was right there to buy the building lot with its mounds of blackened timbers, broken glass. Paying a fair price, perhaps, considering the condition, but far from a good price. Right there again to bail out Heath the night he was arrested, although that was an odd thing. Heath was Marl’s bookkeeper, after all, for the factory
and his other interests, and it was Marl who had brought the embezzlement charge, sent the constables immediately to his door. There’d be a reason for it, maybe some kind of lesson being taught, but Robinson didn’t care to puzzle it out. The business of living complicated enough, he thought, and harm done for enough plain reasons without having to dream up new, twisted ones.

There were other things Robinson knew about Lett, among them a condition treated more than once, like one or two others who sang the Sunday hymns with great feeling and supported the movement to ban communion wine. In some ways, he thought, it was easier to deal with a man like Brendan O’Neill, everything plain to see. Hot tempered when he had been drinking, and he had usually been drinking. Lashing out at anyone who was near. His wife, before she took sick, was almost as hard. Had once swung an iron skillet and laid Brendan out flat on the floor, sent for Robinson because she thought maybe she’d killed him, although she was still too angry to be much bothered about it. She was half her own size now, paring away to nothing. Those wild, hulking sons talking softly in the tiny rooms of their house. The one that was Eaton’s friend kept the hard-packed floor swept, washed plates in a tin tub by the crooked front door. Stuffed a clutch of purple flowering weeds into a jar on the sill beside her bed.
He’s a good boy
, she said, and Robinson thought she was probably right. Wondered if the two of them knowing it would be enough.

There were many who wouldn’t agree, but Robinson didn’t mind that Eaton ran off with the O’Neill boy to the woods, to the river, whenever he could. Even after the thrown stone, Meyer losing his eye to a jagged piece of the overturned wagon. He still thought that it would be good for his son to learn a little toughness,
to have more of the rough and tumble of a boy’s life along with his other lessons. Marianne insisted on tidiness and good manners, the weekly Band of Hope meetings, and there was nothing wrong with that. But there was more involved in becoming the right kind of man, something to do with scraped knuckles and bloodied noses, with taking chances. The thought of his son swinging out on a rope over the deep green river or playing dare on the railroad tracks still clenched his heart, brought pictures of bodies crushed and slashed, a shock of hair stiffened into icy spikes above a small drowned face. He could only trust that it was something like the story of Abraham, that he had to be prepared for a sacrifice that would not, in the end, be required.

Robinson knew many fathers of sons, and most of them had an idea of the future. A path long mapped out, someone to follow in their footsteps, to take their place in a business and eventually step aside for their own sons. He had maybe thought that too at one time, taking Eaton along on long country rounds, teaching him the position of the organs in the body, the names of the instruments in his bag. But more and more as he sank, bone weary, into his chair, his bed, he wondered why he would wish this life on anyone, let alone his clear-eyed son. Alice Barnes said that Eaton had a fine, inquiring mind, told Robinson that much as she would hate to lose him, she thought it was time to send him on to the Grammar School, to others who could teach him more. She said he had a keen sense of justice, of fairness, that perhaps he was destined for the law.
I can see him in the courtroom
, she said, and for a moment Robinson could too. As Eaton grew older, grew into himself, it happened sometimes that Robinson caught a glimpse of his adult face. A face something like his own, in the shape of the chin, the way the brown
hair lay, though the blue eyes were his mother’s. A glimpse of Eaton grown, maybe with a pen in his hand, or swinging a child up onto his broad shoulders, a glimpse of him even older; at times when Eaton sat reading his schoolbooks Robinson saw a shadow of a face so old that he knew that he himself was long gone, and he was swept with an almost unbearable sadness.

It happened the other way too, some movement bringing such a clear picture of Eaton stumbling on learning legs, holding tight to his hand. He had the fanciful thought that each person moved around with the shades of themselves in the past and the future, the seed both foretelling the tall standing flower and contained within it. Talking to Alice Barnes, in front of Allen’s store on a drowsy afternoon, he remembered the girl with flying skirts, the way she and her sister Sarah, looking so alike, would pinch and kick at each other all through church, pull each other’s hair in rages on their front walk. He remembered their father saying that he’d have to get them married off early, more trouble than a whole herd of boys.

Andrew Barnes was a man he had liked, a man who might have become the kind of friend he was thinking about, if he had lived a little longer. Mrs. Lewis sent a cab to bring Robinson to Neeve Street one still Christmas night, when the snow fell in fast, soft flakes. Upstairs in her tall, narrow house, Barnes lay dead on an iron bed.
His heart, was it?
Mrs. Lewis said from the doorway, while Robinson lifted back the thin sheet, checked the cooling body, and he told her that it seemed so.
How long ago?
he asked, and she said that it had been a little while, that she’d had to clear the house, find a boy to go for the cab. But he’d been dead as a doornail, beyond saving, she was quite sure of that.