Fever (18 page)

Then Uncle Hector would tell stories that didn’t really seem like stories but were, that were very long, with many ins and outs so that you would forget that he had started out talking about something which he had dropped, when he would go back and effortlessly pick up that thread and carry on with it as neatly as a woman knitting a complex pattern, yet never dropping a stitch.

In his stories he would explain things about the world: how coffee was made and how people got started drinking it and why; how a northern forest grew and died and renewed itself and died again, bit by bit, in the midst of life; how the people in a certain far-away, forgotten place lived; all about times lost long ago to history and times yet to come, and interwoven with these explanations about the world were bits of poetry, sometimes snatches of songs, and whole paragraphs in other languages, that sounded so beautiful you felt you understood their meaning. And there were parts about people he knew or had heard of, about the strange things they had done or that had happened to them, what they said, how they looked when they said it, what they wore, and how they knew what they knew. And when he was finished two or more hours later, the room would be so silent you could hear your own thoughts, you felt dizzy with the fall from the places he had taken you.

Then, slowly, each of us would get up from where we were and wander quietly away, and when we met again, hours later, we would blink and be embarrassed, we would take a while to be ourselves.

When Dorcas came everything was different. Everyone wanted to be where she was, even my uncle, so that the house
felt congested with everybody always crowding into the same room. It was different too, because somehow she made me feel that I was part of things, that I could talk to her too, if I wanted to, and not be afraid that she would send me back home if she noticed me, even though she had said I should go home. No matter what I had told Dorcas there was still a part of me that wished to be a member of my cousin’s family, another neglected, ungovernable, and stormy child of my aunt and uncle’s. Part of me wished to dance in the moonlight alone, to see things that weren’t there, to wear ragbag costumes, to stomp about violently and make the floor shake.

Although we all hung about Dorcas, there were times when she went off alone with each member of the household, one by one. I wanted Dorcas to have a private little talk with me too, but mulling it over, I realized that she had talked to me, that morning after she had arrived, when I had wakened feeling an adult, feeling the world had changed and not for the better, that my time in this household was over, that the world was about to fly apart, that morning when she had been invaded by knowledge so immeasurably terrible that her mourning had communicated itself to me. We had had our téte-a-tète.

One morning Dorcas left. She had told us that her visit would be a short one because she had to get back to England to begin shooting a film she had a small part in. She left very early, but my aunt actually dragged herself out of bed in order to go with Dorcas and my uncle to the airport on the other side of the city. Morgan, Rhonda, Tonio and I didn’t know exactly when she was leaving, only that it would be soon, and so none of us got to say good-bye to her.

But she had sat up with us all the night before while Uncle Hector launched into one of his stories, the only one that summer, that had gone on into the late hours of the night, and
when my uncle had finished, the pits in his skin looking deeper by lamplight, almost grotesque, so that my heart ached with love for him, she kissed each one of us, Tonio three times, and then she went to her room. I never saw her again. And even though I know the names of a few of the films she had small parts in, I never seem to be where they are showing, I’ve never seen her on the screen.

Sometimes I wonder if I imagined her, but then I remember that moment when she entered my aunt and uncle’s house and stopped, stricken with horror by something she knew was present in the room, that none of the rest of us, except possibly Tonio, knew.

That night Tonio killed himself. He hung himself from the open studding above the doorframe of his room, using a new brown hemp rope he must have bought especially for the purpose.

Rhonda found him. She had staggered out of bed at five in the morning to go to the bathroom and groggy, half-asleep, she had walked into his dangling body. She told us that she said to him, “Tonio, you’re in my room, go to bed,” and when he didn’t move, she had opened her eyes and found him hanging there, dead.

She didn’t faint or scream, but instead backed away and started up the stairs with some vague idea of telling someone to make him get down, and she met me at the top of the stairs coming back from the same errand she had been on originally. Her face was white, her blue eyes wide and dark, and unable to speak, she pointed down the stairs, only pointed, and I went down and saw Tonio hanging from the doorframe, dead.

I was the one who screamed. I was the one who went racing up the stairs and on, all the way up the second flight into my aunt and uncle’s bedroom where I had never been, screaming and screaming, and they leaped up, I pointed down the stairs as Rhonda had done before she fainted to lie in a crumpled, little-girl
heap at the top of the basement stairs, they went on past her, knowing somehow that Rhonda was not what I meant them to see, down to where they found poor dead Tonio, and Morgan kneeling at his feet, clutching him to her, her face pressed against his legs, her jaw set, her eyes wild.

Then my uncle took charge. The details are lost to me, or rather, even now, years later, waking from a sound sleep a detail will pop into my head, something I had forgotten, what my uncle said to me, what Morgan was wearing, or where my aunt stood at the service for Tonio. I remember that since my parents were there that same day, someone must have called them, and they took me away to a hotel where we must have stayed, since I also remember being at Tonio’s service, and my aunt and uncle scattering his ashes on their land in defiance of the law, out toward the river, into that view that you couldn’t see anymore from the house. I can’t put it together very well, don’t actually remember, sometimes even wonder if it wasn’t all a story my uncle told and there wasn’t, never had been, Tonio or Dorcas, or that gloomy, tumultuous house set in a ruined garden in the country, outside a city I never entered. My memories are confused and incomplete, yet there is a layer as clear and as dark as a forest stream, a layer where I know everything that happened.

Of course, I never went back to my cousins’ house and as they never had visited us, I don’t think I saw them again, although somehow or other I know what happened to each one of them. I suppose my mother phoned me and told me, in her many unwelcome, late night phone calls she began to make after she started drinking so heavily.

“Why did you go away and leave me alone? Come back, come back, I love you,” she would implore me, her mouth too close to the phone so that the words always came out cracked and thick.

After Morgan and Rhonda left, my aunt and uncle went their
separate ways, my aunt to Europe, probably to find Dorcas, though I have no way of knowing that. Since Aunt Jacqueline wasn’t a relative by blood, only by marriage, I didn’t feel an obligation to keep in touch, nor did I want to, nor apparently, did she.

My uncle continued with his writing, but he travelled more and more, we used to get torn and wrinkled Christmas cards from him, the ink blotted and smeared, in February or March, mailed from Lusaka or Kuala Lumpur or Reykjavik. ‘Merry Christmas,’ that was all they said. I saw him once on television, giving an interview about another book he’d just published, and though he looked much the same as when he took all that long summer night to tell us, in a voice both quiet and compelling, one of his long runes about something which I’ve never been able to remember, I found, when I saw his square, pocked face, his tormented, distant eyes, that I didn’t love him anymore.

When I first thought about it I was driving down Twentieth to visit Donna and Doug. Since I had last been in the city they had moved from a downtown apartment to a house in a suburb on the far west side of the city, a place that had been a wheat field when we were kids. I was thinking about the ways in which Twentieth Street had changed since I had last driven down it, very few actually, and at the corner of Avenue B, while I waited for the light, I found myself peering down the Avenue to see if a certain house was still there, the one we used to watch the prostitutes going in and coming out of. Prostitutes?

The word caught me by surprise, the picture it evoked rising up suddenly, vivid and richly-coloured. The aging, black-haired woman with the painted face punching the side of the bus under the window where I sat. Perhaps I had dreamt it?

The light changed, I edged forward into the traffic which was as heavy now as it had ever been. The street was still only two lanes wide with cars parked bumper to bumper down each side. Why had I chosen to drive down it when I knew Twenty-Second was wider and designed for cross-town traffic?

My mind would not let that flash of memory alone. The high heels, their staccato drumming on the cement getting louder,
drawing closer through the darkness. I could feel a prickling on the back of my neck. If I could remember so much and so clearly, it must surely have happened.

The traffic suddenly halted for an old lady crossing the street at an angle, oblivious to the line of cars backed up in each direction waiting for her. She was short and stout and wore a brightly coloured flowered and fringed shawl over a shapeless black dress. She carried a bulging shopping bag hanging from each hand. I had to slam on my brakes to keep from hitting the car in front of me and I knew by the screech behind me that someone had almost run into me. I thought all such old women had long since died. I watched her cross and, without willing it, without being able to prevent it if I had wanted to, the whole thing ballooned up at once from whatever darkness it had been hiding in all these years.

I was thirteen. I was with Erin. It was Saturday night and we were on our way home from a movie. The bus had stopped at that corner to let somebody on or off. It was dark, it was summer. The bus windows were open, it must have been hot and I could feel the warm night air on my face and bare arms.

When suddenly we heard the sound of high heels clattering up that dark side street toward where we waited, the bus door open, in front of the beer parlour that used to be on that corner. A woman burst out of the shadows into the light, leaped onto the steps close to where we sat near the front, the bus scooped her up, the doors shutting behind her, when two more women pounded into the light, their faces contorted, shouting curses, and just as we pulled away, one of them hit the bus just below my window with all her strength. I had looked full into her black eyes, I saw her sagging, rouged cheeks, her shiny, purple mouth; I saw the wrinkles in her neck, and that her long, black-as-coal hair was dyed. I saw where the dye had stained her scalp.

I gave my full attention to my driving and found I was climbing Pleasant Hill now, the traffic was lighter and I was passing my old school where I had gone for a year, passing the church hall where we used to go every night, passing—but I didn’t recognize anything else. From there on everything seemed different.

Even though they had given me good directions, it took me some time to find Donna and Doug’s house. It was because I was disoriented by this maze of crescents and bays that had sprung up in what had always been the mysterious, shimmering blue edge of the city.

I came upon the house suddenly, accidentally. It was handsome, a two-story white stucco with dark brown trim and a deck all around the back which I could see as I approached it. There were at least two other identical houses on the crescent. I was nervous, I hadn’t seen them in four or five years, but I rang the bell without hesitating and Donna answered it at once.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” she said to me, as we embraced.

“If only it were true,” I said. Doug was standing in the living room at a teak bar across from a white brick fireplace. There was no fire in the fireplace, it was summer after all, and the bricks were pristine.

“Marion,” he said. “It’s good to see you.” He made us drinks and Donna and I sat on the sofa while Doug sat across from us in an armchair.

“The strangest thing happened to me on my way here,” I began to fill the sudden silence. Doug laughed.

“A funny thing happened to me on my way …” he said. I had to laugh too. Donna, frowning, took a sip of her drink, then quickly a couple more.

“I suddenly remembered something that happened when I was
thirteen,” I said. “Something I had utterly and completely forgotten.” I told them about the prostitutes, and although they listened intently, when I was done, I was left with a curious, unfinished feeling.

“What were you doing on Twentieth Street at night when you were so young?” Donna asked, half-disapproving, half-amused. We hadn’t met till we were in university when my father owned three not very profitable florist shops which had made our family name a familiar one in the city. Her father had been a gynecologist.

“When we first moved here,” I explained, “my father was just starting his own business. It was quite a gamble and for a year or so there, we could only afford to rent an old house on Twenty-First Street, off Avenue H or J. I forget which.”

“Really,” Donna said. “I never knew that. That must have been … an adventure.” I looked at her but she was smiling so falsely at me that I hardly recognized her. I couldn’t remember why I had liked her well enough to ask her to be my bridesmaid. Eddie had been Doug’s closest friend so naturally he had asked Doug to stand up for him, and since I had no sisters and we double-dated all the time—that must have been how it had happened.

“How is your mother?” Doug asked. “How’s dinner coming, Donna?” he said to her before I could answer. He had gone back to the bar to refill our glasses. Without answering, Donna went into the kitchen.

“She’s recovering, but it’s slow,” I said. “She’s in her seventies, after all. Anyway, I’ll be able to go back to Winnipeg in a few days.”

“That’s good,” he said. “I don’t remember her, you know. When you called Donna, I was trying to remember all about that time. I know the four of us spent a lot of time at your parents’ house, but I can’t remember what your mother looked like.”

“Tall,” Donna called from the kitchen, “with dark brown hair and glasses.” Doug’s face went blank, as though he had heard nothing.

“I look like her,” I said. He handed me my drink. He wasn’t listening. “Lately I’ve been thinking that a person should try to remember everything. To go over his whole life, I mean, and try to fill in everything.”

“Why?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders.

“Because …” he said calmly, and wouldn’t say anymore. Donna returned from the kitchen and took her second drink from the bar.

“Not me,” she said triumphantly. “The less I remember, the better. It’s all water under the bridge anyway.” She drank half her drink at once. Doug watched her. I looked away. At home Eddie would be drawing the drapes, switching on the television.

“On my way here I saw an old Ukrainian lady crossing the street, you remember, the kind we used to see? All dressed in black with a babushka over her head and shoulders, carrying a couple of full shopping bags. She was like an apparition out of the past. I thought that generation had all died.”

“I can’t remember ever being on Twentieth Street when I was a kid,” Donna said. “It was the wrong side of town.” She sighed, and looked around the big room disapprovingly.

“We got this place for a song,” Doug said to me. “The contractor went broke.”

“It’s a beautiful house,” I said.

“When the market improves, we’ll sell it,” Donna said. “And move across town to something a little more …”

“Fashionable,” Doug said, straight-faced. “To a smarter address.”

“It’s funny how Twentieth Street has changed and yet not
changed,” I said. I couldn’t seem to let the subject go. “There used to be a big department store on the corner …”

“Out of business years ago,” Doug said. He’s a salesman of some kind and always knows about things like that.

“I remember little shop after little shop. They sold all kinds of strange things: peasant shawls and scarves and handiwork, all sorts of religious things, and embroidery thread, musical instruments, and fresh vegetables. And there used to be an old-fashioned soda shop, when I first came here.” I could see it, the oily wooden floor, the old man who ran it leaning on the counter, smiling at Erin and me as we drank our cherry cokes. “It had those old-fashioned, round-bottomed chairs with the heart-shaped wire backs …”

“Really?” Donna said. “I thought those only existed in movies.” She got up to go back to the dinner, but I couldn’t stop.

“I went to school on Pleasant Hill,” I said. “What a year that was! And I’d forgotten all about it. Can you imagine that?”

“Sure,” Doug said. “People forget important things all the time. I’m trying to remember them. Every one of them.”

“I had a best friend named Erin. I wonder whatever happened to her. We used to go skating together on the outdoor rink at Avenue L every night in the winter and on Saturdays we went to movies. And we looked for boys.”

“Sounds pretty harmless to me,” Doug said.

“I suppose so,” I said, bewildered, “but when I remember those women and the bus, there was so much more there. I could feel it.” It was strange, like I had had a dream and could remember only snatches of it, impressions, but I thought if I struggled with it, it might all come back. “Erin was a funny girl, now that I think of it. Wild for excitement. Nothing scared her. But then, the kids were tough, the school was tough, there were gangs …”

“Gangs!” Donna said. “Open the wine, will you, Doug?” She handed him the bottle and a corkscrew. “My, you do have a shady past.” Whoever Donna had been was retreating farther with every sip of alcohol and this brittle mask was sliding into place. What had she been like when we were young women? I couldn’t remember.

“Yes,” I said, doggedly. “There was a gang of girls, older than we were. Some of them, now that I think of it, might already have been prostitutes. I’m not sure about that. They used to get into fights all the time, with other girls. They wanted us to fight them.”

We went into the dining room and sat down to dinner. The meal was simple, but excellent: wild rice, shrimp, mushrooms, salad. The dining room seemed very big for the two of them and empty. Donna’s first baby had died. Her second had grown up and gone to university, married, and gone away somewhere to live. I wasn’t sure if it was a boy or a girl.

“My father died five years ago,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“Yes,” I said. “I was so sorry. He was a fine man.”

“He was,” she said. “He was a wonderful father.”

“This is a marvellous dinner,” I said. “I didn’t know you were such a good cook.”

“Mother hated my father,” she said. “Can you imagine that? And last year when she was so sick and we all thought she was dying, I asked her why? Why did you hate daddy so much? And do you know what she said?” She raised her head and looked into my eyes. Doug had set his fork down with a patient air. I shook my head, no.

“She said, ‘I don’t remember. Oh, Donna,’ she said. ‘I can’t remember anymore. He was only a man.’ “ Doug picked up his fork again.

“Maybe she just didn’t want to tell you,” I offered, “to spare
you something.” Donna shrugged as though she had lost interest in the matter.

Doug said, “I’ve been over my whole childhood, every second of it. I had a happy childhood. My father was a farmer.”

“I remember that,” I said, although why I should remember such an unimportant detail, I don’t know. Doug must have lived in the city for thirty years.

“I remembered my first experience with a girl,” he said. “I was twelve.”

“Really, Doug.” Donna lifted her head and stared at him as she had done to me a moment before. “I’d be more interested in your more recent experiences,” she said slowly. He ignored her. I rushed on.

“I think that was the year I discovered sex too. When I was thirteen, although I didn’t know that was what I was doing,” I said.

“How could you not know?” Donna asked. “And anyway, what is there to discover? Sex is sex. You have it, you’ve discovered it.” She paused, took a sip of wine, set her glass down. “And then you can forget it.” Doug moved his glass a little to the right, then put it back where it had been. But by now nothing she said would have made a difference. I was in the sway of a compulsion and had to go on.

“Our teacher was a man, principal of the school, and he was big and violent, always hitting the boys and pushing them around. And he was never in the classroom, always busy somewhere else and they used to do anything they wanted when he wasn’t around. Grab at us in the classroom, say dirty things to us and about us,” I said. “We got to like it,” I said. Doug laughed. Donna stared at me again. “One time, I remember, during health class, we were taking artificial respiration. They call it something else now.”

“Resuscitation,” Doug said. “C.P.R. Whatever that stands for.”

“He was teaching us how to do it so he had us all standing around him in a circle at the front of the room, and he looked around for somebody to be …”

“The drownee …” Doug offered.

“And naturally, we all thought—well, I guess we didn’t think about it, we just took it for granted that he’d pick one of the boys. But he didn’t. He looked around at all of us and he said, ‘Erin.’ “ Donna and Doug were both listening to me now, not eating. “I can still remember the looks on the boys faces. They looked sort of uneasy, and right away they hid their looks, smoothed their faces out, but I can’t remember how the girls looked. We were just scared, I guess, and embarrassed.”

“Why?” Donna asked. I went on as if she hadn’t spoken.

“We were only kids but some of us were grown up physically. Erin was the most grown up girl in the class. And we were all wearing skirts. It was a Catholic school, we weren’t allowed to wear slacks. He made her lie down on the floor in the middle of the circle, on her stomach, and he knelt over her, straddled her with his knees just at her hips and every time he lifted her elbows, that was how they did it then, his tie brushed her back.” I can still see that tie. It was navy blue with diagonal red stripes. It had moved down her back, lifted, moved down her back. His face had been closed, like the boys', his eyes half-shut.