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His Uncle came on Frederick Hyde
Carousing in the Dirt.
He shook him Hard from Side to Side
And Hit him where it Hurt-
If I decided to send all this to you, where would I send it? When I think of writing the whole address on the envelope I am paralyzed. It’s too painful to think of you in the same place with your life going on in the same way, minus me. And to think of you not there, you somewhere else but I don’t know where, is worse.
Dear R., Dear Robin, How do you think I didn’t know? It was right in front of my eyes all the time. If I had gone to school here, I’d surely have known. If I’d had friends. There’s no way one of the high-school girls, one of the older girls, wouldn’t have made sure I knew.
Even so, I had plenty of time in the holidays. If I hadn’t been so bound up in myself, mooching around town and making up ballads, I could have figured it out. Now that I think of it, I knew that some of those evening patients, those ladies, came on the train. I associated them and their beautiful clothes with the evening train. And there was a late-night train they must have left on. Of course there could just as easily have been a car that dropped them off at the end of the lane.
And I was told-by Mrs. B., I think, not by him-that they came to my father for vitamin shots. I know that, because I would think, Now she’s getting her shot, whenever we heard a woman make a noise, and I would be a little surprised that women so sophisticated and self-controlled were not more stoical about needles.
Even now, it has taken me weeks. Through all this time of getting used to the ways of the house, to the point where I would never dream of picking up a paintbrush and would hesitate to straighten a drawer or throw out an old grocery receipt without consulting Mrs. B. (who can never make up her mind about it anyway). To the point where I’ve given up trying to get them even to accept perked coffee. (They prefer instant because it always tastes the same.)
My father laid a check beside my plate. At lunch today, Sunday. Mrs. Barrie is never here on Sundays. We have a cold lunch which I fix, of sliced meat and bread and tomatoes and pickles and cheese, when my father gets back from church. He never asks me to go to church with him-probably thinking that would just give me a chance to air some views he doesn’t care to hear.
The check was for five thousand dollars.
“That’s for you,” he said. “So you’ll have something. You can put it in the bank or invest it how you like. See how the rates are. I don’t keep up. Of course you’ll get the house too. All in the fullness of time, as they say.”
A bribe? I thought. Money to start a little business with, go on a trip with? Money for the down payment on a little house of my own, or to go back to university to get some more of what he has called my u
Five thousand dollars to get rid of me.
I thanked him, and more or less for conversation’s sake I asked him what he did with his money. He said that was neither here nor there.
“Ask Billy Snyder if you’re looking for advice.” Then he remembered that Billy Snyder was no longer in the accounting business; he had retired.
“There’s some new fellow there with a queer name,” he said. “It’s like Ypsilanti, but it’s not Ypsilanti.”
“Ypsilanti is a town in Michigan,” I said.
“It’s a town in Michigan, but it was a man’s name before it was a town in Michigan,” my father said. It seems it was the name of a Greek leader who fought against the Turks early in the 1800s.
I said, “Oh. In Byron’s war.”
“Byron’s war?” said my father. “What makes you call it that? Byron didn’t fight in any war. He died of typhus. Then he’s dead, he’s the big hero, he died for the Greeks and so on.” He said this contentiously, as if I had been one of those responsible for this mistake, this big fuss over Byron. But then he calmed down and recounted for me or recalled for himself the progress of the war against the Ottoman Empire. He spoke of the Porte and I wanted to say that I’ve never been sure if that was an actual gate, or was it Constantinople, or the Sultan’s court? But it’s always best not to interrupt. When he starts to talk like this there’s the sense of a truce, or a breathing spell, in an undeclared underground war. I was sitting facing the window, and I could see through the net curtains the heaps of yellow-brown leaves on the ground in the rich generous sunlight (maybe the last of those days we’ll get for a long while by the sound of the wind tonight) and it brought to mind my relief as a child, my secret pleasure, whenever I could get him going, by a question or by accident, on a spiel like this.
Earthquakes, for instance. They happen in the volcanic ridges but one of the biggest was right in the middle of the continent, in New Madrid (pronounced “New Mad-rid,” mind you) in Missouri, in 1811. I know that from him. Rift valleys. Instability that there is no sign of on the surface. Caverns formed in limestone, water under the earth, mountains that given enough time wear away to rubble.
Also numbers. I asked him about numbers once and he said, Well, they’re called the arabic numerals, aren’t they, any fool knows that. But the Greeks could have managed a good system, he went on to say, the Greeks could have done it, only they didn’t have the concept of zero.
Concept of zero. I put that away in my mind like a package on a shelf, to open someday.
If Mrs. B. was with us there was of course no hope of getting anything like this out of him.
Never mind, he would say, eat your meal.
As if any question I asked had an ulterior motive, and I suppose it did. I was angling to direct the conversation. And it wasn’t polite to leave Mrs. B. out. So it was her attitude to what caused earthquakes, or the history of numbers (an attitude not just of indifference but of contempt) that had to be deferred to, had to reign supreme.
So we come round to Mrs. B. again. In the present, Mrs. B.
I came in last night at about ten o’clock. I’d been out at a meeting of the Historical Society, or at least at a meeting to try and organize one. Five people showed up and two of them walked with canes. When I opened the kitchen door I saw Mrs. B. framed in the doorway to the back hall-the hall that leads from the office to the washroom and the front part of the house. She had a covered basin in her hands. She was on her way to the washroom and she could have gone on, passing the kitchen as I came in. I would hardly have noticed her. But she stopped in her tracks and stood there, partly turned towards me; she made a grimace of dismay.
Oh-oh. Caught out.
Then she scurried away towards the toilet.
This was an act. The surprise, the dismay, the hurrying away. Even the way she held the basin out so that I had to notice it. That was all deliberate.
I could hear the rumble of my father’s voice in the office, talking to a patient. I had seen the office lights on anyway, I had seen the patient’s car parked outside. Nobody has to walk anymore.
I took off my coat and went on upstairs. All I seemed to be concerned about was not letting Mrs. B. have it her way. No questions, no shocked realization. No What is that you have in the basin, Mrs. B., oh what have you and my daddy been up to? (Not that I ever called him my daddy.) I got busy at once rooting around in one of the boxes of books I still hadn’t unpacked. I was looking for the journals of A