Watching Jimmy (3 page)

A
unt Jean asked me to come home directly after school.
Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.
She has to run up to Bloor Street to the bank. She has an appointment with the bank manager.

I don’t mind. Mom is working an extra shift and there’s no one out on the street to play with because the days are getting so short now.

I’m supposed to watch Jimmy while Aunt Jean is gone. Sometimes that’s very hard to do, depending on whether he’s having a good day or a bad day. When I come in the front door, I can tell it’s been a so-so day. Aunt Jean has managed to do some things like the laundry and the dishes. The potatoes aren’t peeled. So, I help. I sit at the kitchen table with a pot of water filled with muddy potatoes from
the garden. I select a paring knife that I test with my thumb. Aunt Jean keeps her knives very sharp, because you are more likely to cut yourself with a dull knife than a sharp one.

Jimmy swipes at me, wanting the knife.

“No, Jimmy.” I try to distract him with a rag doll.

He lunges at me again. He’s bigger than me. Two times as big as me, but I’m quick and wiry.

I put the potatoes and the knife on the counter, well back. Together, Jimmy and I cover the table with newspaper. I carve a star in one of the potatoes and dilute a bit of food coloring in water and pour it in a pie plate.

Jimmy stamps the star all over the paper, letting me finally get at the potato peeling.

“Stay on the paper, Jimmy. You’re making a mess.”

I hum a tune and Jimmy stops to listen. This is New-Jimmy behavior. I mean, he liked my singing before, but it never captivated him like it does now. It really didn’t.

I won’t tell my mom that I’m watching Jimmy for Aunt Jean. Aunt Jean is paid to watch me, not me to watch Jimmy. Since the troubles, I know my mom has paid Aunt Jean more wages. Half again what she used to pay. It’s expensive to take the streetcar downtown to see the
doctors at Sick Children’s Hospital. The doctors who looked at Jimmy are all specialists. They think he has terrible headaches but because he can’t talk, they can’t tell for sure. They poked and prodded and X-rayed Jimmy’s poor little brain, but other than that, Aunt Jean says they don’t seem to know what to do.

Except Dr. Phillips. He has a plan. He thinks there is pressure on Jimmy’s brain. Jimmy has a bruise on the brain and Dr. Phillips thinks he could relieve it by drilling a hole in Jimmy’s head and sucking out the blood like a vampire.

I’ve noticed something about troubles. When Jimmy first “fell off the swing” and he was lying in a coma, his house was filled with ham and scalloped potatoes. There were Empire cookies and date squares. Cold roast beef and coleslaw. There was so much food that it spilled over into our side of the semi-detached house, because my mom has a refrigerator that my grandfather bought before he died. Aunt Jean is still using an old-fashioned icebox and it’s not that easy to get ice anymore. The food lasted for two weeks. I mean, the delivery of the food, and then it stopped. Just like that. It didn’t dwindle down to one canasta lady bringing one thing, and another coming
forward a few days later. I mean, it just stalled out at the two-week mark, like two weeks was sufficient time for us to get used to the new Jimmy.

Well, it wasn’t.

I heard my mom and Aunt Jean talking over their teacups while I was supposed to be memorizing my spelling list. An operation for Jimmy will be very expensive. Aunt Jean will have to mortgage the house. She’s gone up to Bloor Street to sign the papers and the scent of Chanel No. 5 that she dabbed behind her ears to impress the bank manager remains in the house.

I’m not stupid. If you mortgage a house, you get money from the Bank, but you have to pay it back. If you don’t pay it back, you can lose your home and be on the street with your suitcases. Aunt Jean is always reminding us what it was like in the Great Depression. The war didn’t hold a candle to the Great Depression, except that Bertie died. And Aunt Jean has had to sell so many of her grandmother’s things and her wedding gifts. You might think my mom and I are fairly well set in comparison, because my grandpa left us his house with all the stuff in it, including a piano. But we’re not. There are expenses, real expenses for heating oil and food. We stopped my piano
lessons shortly after Grandpa died. Like Aunt Jean, we just get by now.

Jimmy likes show tunes. And big band tunes. He’s partial to Glen Miller. I turn the radio up when he’s on, but even so, it’s not as calming for Jimmy as my voice singing Glen Miller. I hand Jimmy a wooden spoon. He beats the table and keeps pretty good time. I sing into a whisk. We make such a racket that we don’t hear Aunt Jean come in. She’s been standing watching us for some time, I think. Me singing and Jimmy beating on the drum.

Aunt Jean’s face is pale. Bits of hair, gray and brown, straggle out of her bun. She’s twisting her hands like Jimmy does when he’s agitated.

“Mercy, Aunt Jean, you look like you’ve seen a ghost. Sit down.” I push a kitchen chair toward her. I run some tap water and hand her a glass.

I’m afraid to ask the question, but I need to know. “Did the bank manager say no? Can’t you get a mortgage?”

Aunt Jean takes a tiny sip and closes her eyes. The lids are fluttering. It’s going to be a long one.

“Aunt Jean. Tell me.” I try to sound bossy. “Now.”

“There’s already a mortgage.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

“Neither did I. Apparently, Ted holds a mortgage. The bank did a search at the Registry Office and there’s already a mortgage in Ted’s name. The bank won’t give me any money.”

“But this is your house!”

“Three years before my Jake died, he needed money and borrowed some from Ted. Ted registered a mortgage.”

“And Jake never told you?”

“Never. I haven’t paid back a red cent to Ted. He never asked me to.”

I take the potatoes to the sink and dump them in. I wash all the garden dirt down the drain. I’m buying time.

I turn around and face Aunt Jean. “It’s simple. Tell him to forget the loan. Tell him to make you a gift.”

Aunt Jean straightens her shoulders. “I already did. Ted has another solution. He wants to move out of his apartment and into your room upstairs. I called him from the bank.”

“Oh, no!”

“Ted says I can’t afford to pay him back so the house is as good as his.”

Jimmy gives the wooden spoon a mighty
swack
. The handle splinters and breaks in his hand.

Jimmy snorts and wails. I want to wail, too, but I’m far too grown up.

A
unt Jean is very determined to get to St. James Cathedral early, well before the 11:00 service begins. She needs to pray. She needs to pray very badly.

I let Jimmy run outside on the lawn. The church is magnificent with tall trees reaching up to heaven. Some of the shrubbery is red, like the burning bush in the Bible. There’s a carpet of yellow maple leaves for Jimmy to slide on. I chase him, he chases me. Jimmy’s cheeks are pink like crisp McIntosh apples.

There are strangers hanging about. Men, grizzled and sleepy, smelling of drink. One of them is raving about the war. It’s like the fellow knew Bertie, but of course, that’s impossible. He’s talking about war heroes and all
the medals they would have got if only they weren’t shot down in flames. Listening to him, you can almost imagine Bertie’s plane exploding and raining fire over the English Channel until he just sizzled right out.

I stand between the man and Jimmy protecting him. If Aunt Jean were here, she’d yank Jimmy away. Aunt Jean is a Temperance Leaguer and can’t abide drink. Before Jimmy “fell off the swing,” she used to march to keep our neighborhood closed to taverns. It’s a source of great pride to her that our neighborhood is still dry.

Did I mention Jake, Jimmy’s dad, died from drink? He wasn’t a mean drunk, but he couldn’t keep a job, not even during the war when able men dwindled down to nothing, which is why he needed to work for himself. Aunt Jean said it was God’s will that her oldest son, Bertie, got her husband’s feet instead of her own. Jimmy got his mother’s flat feet too, but never mind, if there was a war tomorrow, they’d never take Jimmy, feet or no feet. Jimmy is far too addle-brained.

The soldier is telling Jimmy about how the church property is really a cemetery. Underneath the green sod are masses of bones from a cholera epidemic. Bones of children and old people, mothers and fathers, just shoveled
into a mass grave like the Jews and the Poles and the gypsies were shoveled into pits in Europe.

“Come on, Jimmy.” But Jimmy won’t leave. Finally the man takes Jimmy’s hand and walks him to the church steps. The church bells are ringing now, and Jimmy is anxious to get inside. He tugs the man up the steps.

“Sorry, son,” he says. “I have renounced the Lord. I’ll not enter his house after everything I’ve seen.”

Jimmy takes off on his own and runs into the church.

“Do you live in the streets?” I ask. The man looks dirty and poor, but he talks sensibly, like a teacher.

“I’m a citizen of the world. I live where I can.”

I give him an apple I’d been saving for Jimmy. The man palms the apple like I’ve given him the keys to Uncle Ted’s car.

I find Jimmy with Aunt Jean. The men and boys choir is just finishing up their rehearsal, singing a motet in old English. Their voices move like waves on a beach, up and down the scale, tone by tone. The final note of the organ is suspended in the air and I feel like I can reach right out and grab it.

The Rosedale ladies are filing in. Some in black, all in flouncy hats. I like sitting at the front of the church
smelling the face powder and the different perfumes. It’s like sitting in Aunt Jean’s garden in the summer.

Usually we have lots of room in our pew — we usually have it to ourselves. If someone opens the door and sits in our box by mistake, once they get a whiff of Jimmy’s urine smell, they usually find a reason to move elsewhere — a friend they need to see across the aisle, a sidesman they need to chat with. The Rosedale ladies are polite or try to be. Aunt Jean says that they have good breeding. Like her hybrid tea roses, I guess.

There is only one person in the whole congregation who doesn’t care about Jimmy’s smell. The General. I don’t even know his last name. Aunt Jean and I just call him the General. Perhaps his nose has been blunted by nerve gases and gunpowder and he can no longer smell. The General sits right beside the door of our box so he can get out quickly to read the lesson. Since he retired from his post in Germany, the General reads the lesson every week. He’s a regular feature.

I like to look at the General’s face. He has young skin, smooth and pink. His eyes are bright like a baby’s, darting around looking at everyone. His most shocking feature is his white hair. It’s as white as the dean’s surplice, and sticks
straight up like the bristles on a shoeshine brush. They say he was in Europe two weeks and after a day of fighting, he went to bed with black hair and when he woke up in the morning, his hair had turned completely white. As if the color was scared right out of it!

When the General gets up to read, people shift in their seats and lean forward. A murmur goes through the crowd. The General is a true hero. He has things to say, and he never sticks to his notes.

Aunt Jean pokes me in the ribs. It’s time to check on Jimmy. I pull my arm in tight and ignore her. I want so badly to stay and listen. Every week, the General wanders into war.

“Carolyn!” Aunt Jean’s annoyed.

I sigh loudly, dramatically, so they can hear me right up to the front of the church, but I go. I dawdle all the way to the nursery, punishing Aunt Jean. Punishing my mother for working all the time so that I have to come to church with Aunt Jean. Sunday is supposed to be a day of rest, but my mother never rests. And yes, punishing the new Jimmy.

Did I mention my mother was out again last night? There must be a fella that she’s keeping from me. She
probably doesn’t want me to frighten him away. The last time I actually met one, I pretended I was a dog with distemper, frothing at the mouth and baring my fangs in his face. He couldn’t get out the door fast enough. I don’t get to see much of my mother as it is. We don’t need outsiders.

I find the choir room. There are rows of benches facing each other with a piano in the middle. The sheet music is everywhere — on the floor, on the benches. Boys can be so careless. I pick the papers up off the floor and pile them neatly on the piano. Then I sit down on the piano bench. I finger the first line of a Gregorian chant without depressing the keys for fear that the congregation might hear me. I play to the end and start again, humming now. I go back to the beginning and sing softly. Then I change key and sing the chant that is running through my head.

There are always new tunes in my head and I have to,
HAVE TO
, let them fall on the page or they will drive me around the bend all day long. I keep one dictation book between the mattress and boxspring at home and a similar one at Aunt Jean’s, since the music flows best first thing in the morning, before I’m truly awake. There was no time for writing down my music this morning.

I open my eyes and the General is standing before me.
He’s holding the hand of a towheaded toddler, peeking out at me from behind his Grandpa’s leg.

“This is Armstrong.”

“Hi ya, Armstrong.” I ask the General if he wants me to take the kid to the nursery.

“Please. Maybe he’ll mind you. I’m not having much luck.”

I take Armstrong’s other hand and we swing him up some stairs and down the hall. Armstrong wants to go by himself and he runs toward the brightly lit room.

“My daughter-in-law is supervising the nursery. He doesn’t like to share his mother with the other children so he makes a fuss.”

“He’ll learn,” I say. “There’s no point in making a fuss.”

Jimmy’s glad to see me. I reintroduce him to the General who has met us just once before. He shakes Jimmy’s hand and calls him “young man.”

“What happened?” the General asks and I know exactly what he means. I’ve told the story about the swing so many times, even I almost believe it happened that way. I tell it again.

There is a long pause while the General waits for me to add more. There is nothing left to say.

“I don’t like the sound of that, young lady. A big strapping boy falling off a swing. There’s something not quite right with that tale.” His bright blue eyes scour my face, looking for the truth. I turn away first.

The General’s daughter-in-law, the nursery lady, wants me to sing. I begin to protest and then figure singing might divert the General from asking further questions leading to Uncle Ted, Aunt Jean’s only living relative — such as he is.

I sing the “White Cliffs of Dover.” It’s a war song, not a church song. I can see by the look on the General’s face that he’s no longer in the nursery at St. James Cathedral in Toronto, but back in Europe, during war time.

I don’t end it, the song, I mean. I make a key change and switch into “Jesus Loves Me.”

One thing I know for sure. Jesus doesn’t love Jimmy or Aunt Jean. He must really be mad at them for something. As Aunt Jean says, things go from bad to worse. I would say to
worser
, which I know is not a word, but it says how I feel.

Things go from bad to worse to worser. Worser and worser.