The Island Walkers (32 page)

Mary was towing an old woman with a shallow cap of thin, bluish hair. “Marjorie, this is Joe, Liz’s new beau.” Mary seemed to love the word “beau,” with its hint of a life more gallant and risqué. All evening she’d been introducing him this way, as if the engagement ring were already on Liz’s finger.

“So this is the young man.”

“I’ve been thinking of running off with him myself,” Mary said. Joe dropped his gaze — there was some limit she was transgressing, just a little — and Marjorie Ford laughed with exaggerated glee, showing the gum-ridge on her false teeth. “Maybe you’ll have to compete with me,” she said.

The women left. Joe wiped down the bar. He didn’t feel he was Liz’s beau (whatever that meant), but at least being presented that way made it impossible for him to be mistaken as
only
the bartender, a point he was sensitive on. He hadn’t come up the hill as a servant but as practically a family member. He was enjoying himself, enjoying with an almost proprietorial ease the spreading, merry rooms of this house, owned by the town’s richest man, enjoying the friendliness of the town’s best people — doctors and lawyers and businessmen and Bannerman’s executives and of course their wives, done up to the nines in silky sheath dresses, their hair shaped in wavy bobs and other styles from the Thirties and Forties. He was enjoying being spoken to so familiarly by all of them, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to find him here. Even when someone said, “Oh you’re Alf Walker’s son,” the little tremor of misgiving he felt was answered by
no hint of condescension or disapproval. His presence as Liz’s boyfriend spoke for itself.

Liz came down from the kitchen.

“Darling, I’m sorry about this —”

Tonight, he didn’t even mind her theatrical “darling.” The party was all a drama, in a way; they were all on the big stage.

“Sorry about what —”

“Having to meet all these people.”

“I like it. I like your mother,” he said, spying her across the room. Mary McVey had a large, low-set bosom, nested under dark-blue silk; he watched it as she put back her head to laugh.

“I think I’m jealous.”

“You should be!” And for a split second he intuited a place — exciting and ill-defined — where both her mother and she were his. He looked pointedly at the deep slit in the bodice of her dress.

“Why don’t we lie down behind the bar,” he said, deadpan.

He sensed that she, too, was inflamed, feeling his eyes on her.

Then her mother was there again.

“I’m going to take him from you,” Mary announced. She reached out and took Joe’s hand into hers.

“Oh, Mother.”

Mary squeezed Joe’s hand and held it tight. Hers was surprisingly soft, but cold too, as if she’d been keeping it in a snowbank. “Don’t listen to her,” Mary told him. “Seriously now, Joe. Do you like older women? I think you do.”

“
Mother
,” Liz said in a fierce undertone.

“Sure,” Joe said. But this was too much, even for him. He managed to extract his hand.

Mary wandered off, strangely out of place at her own party. She bumped into a man in a garish orange sports jacket and veered away. Bing Crosby was skating effortlessly through “White Christmas.”

Liz said, “I think you better cut back on her gin.”

Since their drive back from Johnsonville, Liz had been unusually attentive to him. Perhaps she was beginning to fall in love with him.
He felt a little remorseful about this, a bit of a fraud, and yet he felt so good being there, he felt flooded with goodwill. Leaning forward impulsively, he kissed her on the mouth and told her she looked beautiful. And she did: looking up at him, testing his words, her beauty struck through to him and he remembered how the small globes of her breasts had brushed his chest in the motel. There was a hunger in Liz McVey’s wiry body, as genuine and convincing as her social manner was false — a frank hunger that suggested danger and aroused him.

Her sister, Sally, called her away just then, to see about the food, and he looked over the crowded room with a fresh surge of excitement, thinking about the next time he and Liz might be alone together. A few minutes later Mary came back, drawing behind her a man with a bald, darkly tanned head and a look in his eyes of sharp, confident inquiry. Joe had noticed the man earlier, as Mary introduced him to her husband. His name, she told Joe, was Bob Prince. She had known him at school, in Toronto, and now by coincidence he was working in Attawan.

Joe took the man’s hand and felt the shock of a hard, wilful strength. As the pale-blue eyes met his, Joe thought of his father and looked away.

“He’s going to university next year,” Mary said of Joe. “And when he graduates, we’re going to run away together.”

“Oh-ho!” Bob Prince said in his effortless voice. He asked Joe what university he was headed for. Mary, who had been beaming at Joe like a prize child, was called away to the kitchen.

“Are you doing a general B.A. or —”

“I’ll be majoring in history.”

“Good. Good. Great preparation.”

“Preparation —”

“For going on. Business. Law. What are you planning to do?” Bob Prince said genially.

“Just study history,” Joe said, wiping at the bar. “Maybe teach, teach university. I don’t really care for business.”

This just came out, a flash of sullenness, of defiance. He sensed he was attacking the other man and that this showed him up as gauche. But he had taken an instant dislike to him: it was his polish, his smoothness, his smooth, irresistible voice, which under the velvet carried a suggestion of plate metal. He made Joe feel insecure.

Bob Prince darted Joe a glance from his superior height — he must have stood about six-four — apparently amused. “And what’s wrong with business?”

Joe shook his head. His contact with business was pretty limited, he wasn’t quite sure how he’d come to think it was a second-rate activity, not really a profession at all. He’d worked in business, of course, and the men he thought of as businessmen — the manager of the
A
&
P
, Scott Dowd, or the various bosses he’d observed at Bannerman’s, seemed perpetually consumed by trivialities — by lost orders and deadlines, tearing their hair out over matters that didn’t seem worth it. And then there were the owners of stores on the main street, or the men who came door to door, selling brushes and whatnot: what struck him most about them was their false friendliness. Yes, business meant selling things, and selling things meant turning yourself, he thought, into a glad-handing phoney.

“Just not attracted to it,” Joe said, with another shrug. “ ‘Fumbling in the greasy till —’ ”

“Those are interesting words.”

“They’re from a poem,” Joe said. Anna Macrimmon had showed it to him one day in the library.

“I take it you’re a socialist then.”

Joe shrugged, allowing as he was.

“Tax the rich, and give it to the poor, like Robin Hood.”

“Something like that.”

“The rich who’ve taken all the risks.”

“You think poor people don’t take risks?” Joe had heard his history teacher, Archie Mann, make this argument, and had adopted it as his own. He went on. “A poor man puts his health, his body on
the line, every time he goes to work. That’s his capital, and he’s risking it. If he loses it, then he loses a lot more than some rich guy who drops ten thousand bucks he can afford to play around with.”

Bob Prince laughed, a little too tolerantly, Joe thought. Joe’s face was flushed. He was astonished at himself, his vehemence. He was not quite sure the other man was taking him seriously.

Bob Prince said, “But you’re willing to enjoy the fruits of a businessman’s labours.” And he gestured in a general way with his Scotch glass: he was indicating the room, with its deep white couches and chairs, the splendid tree, the fire licking happily behind glass. He was indicating the whole house, and somehow, deep in the house, Liz McVey. Or at least Joe thought he was. He felt the contradiction at the core of his argument and he disliked Bob Prince for putting his finger on it with such casual accuracy.

He said, “I don’t know. Is making money on the stock market labour?”

Bob Prince was shaking his head and grinning.

“I think we should all share, more fairly,” Joe said stubbornly.

“So you’d like to live like they live in Russia?”

“No,” Joe said. “They’re not free in Russia. But at least they’ve grasped a certain principle.”

They sparred like this while Joe wiped at the counter with a rag, like a real bartender, though without the neutral equanimity. He was convinced that the other man was just humouring him and this made him even angrier. After a while Doc McVey drifted over to refresh his Scotch. Behind his glasses, his babyish face seemed always on the verge of laughter, as if the world were a source of perpetual amusement: only a fool would take it
entirely
seriously.

“So, Bob, is our bartender giving you a hard time?”

“First communist bartender I ever met, Jack,” Bob Prince said.

Doc McVey’s loose mouth opened wider, happily.

“I’m not a communist,” Joe said sullenly. He felt he was becoming an object of fun. The way they called each other Bob and
Jack, with a pointed, country-club familiarity, as if they had known each other for years, annoyed him.

“Communist, socialist,” Bob Prince said, waving his glass. “Same thing.”

Joe remained silent, refusing to be baited. He was convinced that Bob Prince, whatever his cleverness at making money, was essentially stupid. There was something thick about him that made subtlety impossible.

“So when does the revolution start?” Doc McVey said.

Joe wiped at the bar. “In ten minutes,” he said. “You’re all being taken to the basement and shot. Then your bodies will be dragged outside and burned.”

Of course it was a joke, but there was a savagery in his remark that he instantly regretted. The difficult moment was quickly covered by the older men, who laughed indulgently and drifted away, but Joe was mortified, feeling he’d been hopelessly crude.

He stayed to the end, though: stayed through the uproar at midnight when everyone blew horns and kissed and on the
TV
Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians played “Auld Lang Syne” over the throngs packing Times Square. Just as the melee was subsiding, Mary found him and, pressing her body against his, kissed him hard. The quick darting of her tongue alarmed him and he gently extracted himself, but a minute later, remembering her soft mouth — the hint of experience beyond anything he had known — he became so excited he had to sit down, to hide the swelling in his pants.

Later, when the last guest had left, Liz asked him to come back to the family room, where her mother and father already were. Liz retrieved two packages from under the tree and held them out for him. “Your payment for tending bar so well. And because I like you.”

“We
all
like you,” Mary said, slurring a little. She was slumped beside the fireplace, in a deep armchair, and was staring at his chest. Doc McVey stood at the window with his back to them, gazing
towards the yard where a black, solitary tree leaned into the floodlit space above the patio, releasing a few clots of windblown snow.

Joe took the packages, beautifully wrapped in gold paper. He could feel the flat softness of the sweater, the stiff horseshoes of shirt collars.

For a second he hesitated: something passed through him, leaving only a metallic taste, an emptiness.

Liz was beaming, a bit frantically, while Mary smiled sleepily to herself in her chair. Beyond Liz’s shoulder, her father continued to stare into the floodlit yard.

“For you, darling,” Liz said.

In her chair, Mary clapped her hands rapidly, like a child.

26

IT WAS AFTER TWO
when he returned to the Island. He found his father in the kitchen, his plaid dressing gown sagging open to reveal the unbuttoned top of his pyjamas, a scrawl of hair on his pale chest. He was drinking a bottle of beer. Something about the man — his sunken eyes, with their aggressive glint, watching him sourly — put Joe’s back up. He brushed past with his bag of presents.

“So how’s life in the palace?” his father said.

“Better than here,” Joe said. Why couldn’t the man just leave him alone?

“What did you say?”

Joe didn’t bother responding. He had almost reached the door to the hall.

“Hey, you!”

He kept going.

“Stop!”

He stopped, let out an exaggerated sigh — what nonsense this all was — and turned to meet the man shuffling across the floor towards him. He knew he’d gone too far, knew it by the old, familiar fear slipping through his chest like cold water.

He stared back, lifting his face as his father loomed in at him.

“What did you say?” his father asked again.

“I think you heard me.”

“So you think you’re too good for us now? Is that it?”

“Oh God,” Joe said, starting to turn away.

As his father gripped his arm, Joe shoved him. They were at it in a second, slapping and pushing almost awkwardly, scuffling around the floor. Often, over the years, they had fought for the pleasure of it: wrestled or boxed on the living-room rug or in the backyard. But they had never fought in anger before, never set out seriously to hurt each other. Even now they seemed held back by old constraints, not quite sure what to do with the energy surging into their arms. But the fury was real enough. It had come up so fast it seemed to have always been there, in some deep well where all the resentments and rivalries and sheer hellbent love of chaos had been put away over the years. Finally immobilizing each other in a tangle of arms — in some part of their brains they knew it was less dangerous to wrestle than to box — they crashed to the floor. The table went skidding. The butter dish landed on a chair. They rolled together in a wave of tartan bathrobe and Joe felt the soft flop of his father’s genitals against his leg. He shoved his father’s head against the fridge and outside, Red, waking in his den under the back porch, put back his big head and howled into the wraiths of snow drifting from Lookout Hill.