My Present Age (17 page)

I told her no, that I was with the Benny Ferguson party. This got me led directly to a table where Benny was seated with two other men. As we approached I could hear one of Benny’s pals loudly airing an opinion.

“They’ve got to raise admission standards to Law School,” he said, “or ten years down the road there’ll be an oversupply you won’t believe. Even now I’ve got articling students begging for a place. It’s going to get cut-throat if something isn’t done.”

His companion mumbled something I took to be discreet assent. This one was a tiny, perfect lawyer. He was plump, and despite going bald on top, he clung to the fashions of his youth. A fringe of long, lank locks tumbled over his collar. He looked the way I imagine a hobbit would look.

“It’s the women,” resumed the loud one. “There’s too many of them entering the profession. Rats scrambling on a sinking ship. The trouble with women is they destroy the prestige of any profession they get into in any numbers – teaching, nursing, social work …” He faltered when he realized he’d lost Benjamin’s attention. Benny was watching me hover by their table and, from the look in his eye, was preparing to repel all boarders.

“Benny,” I cried, edging into a shallower orbit and dismissing the hostess with a nod, “what a pleasant coincidence! Mind if I join you?”

“Sorry, Ed, too bad. Working lunch.”

His lawyer friends glanced at each other. It was clear this was news to them.

I pretended to have misunderstood amid the restaurant noise what he’d said. “Great! Glad to.” I addressed Benny’s luncheon companions. “Let me introduce myself. Just call me Ed. I’m an old
friend of Benny’s. We were roomies, as a matter of fact.” I extended my hand in turn to the advocate of quotas and Frodo. As I did, I made my opening move in a play for the empty chair beside Benny. I tried to insinuate myself between the back of Benny’s chair and the pole with a horse-collar hung on it. Benny planted his feet firmly and dug in. I squirmed. Not an inch of give.

“Les Silver,” said the misogynist. “Harry Supra,” said the other.

“You see, Ed,” said Benny through clenched teeth, leaning back, hard, “we’d love to have you join us. But client confidentiality—”

“Hey, don’t I know it? No problem, Benno. Loose lips sink ships, right? Mum’s the word.” I sucked in my breath and wriggled until I felt one buttock squeezed against the peeled-log pillar. Leverage. Archimedes was right about that: with the proper leverage you can move the world. I proceeded to lever with my pelvis, short, strong, thrusting movements. Benny continued to stubbornly resist. He braced his arms against the table, which was conveniently, for him, bolted to the floor. The post began to creak rhythmically to my thrusting and the ice to tinkle in the water glasses.

“Benny, if you could just pull forward a smidgeon …” I coaxed, flexing my haunches and hips with greater authority. Both of the lawyers opposite were now steadying coffee cups rattling in saucers, eyes widening.

“What the hell do you want?” Benny cried. His voice was blurred by rage. “What the fuck do you want?”

I pointed, answered meekly. “If you could just pull up a teensy bit, Ben, so I could wriggle over there—”

“Not
that
, goddamn it! What’re you after now?
What do you want, you son of a bitch!”

I ceased struggling with his chair-back. Benny’s friends stirred uneasily in their places. A knife blade rang faintly, nervously, against the base of a water glass. Neither one of them appeared to be enjoying his lunch.

“All right then,” I said quietly. “I want a favour, Benny—”

“Get out from behind me.
Get out!”

I did. Benny impatiently rammed back his chair, stood up, flung down the napkin he’d balled up in his fist. “First, I’ll apologize for him,” he announced to his friends, “because he doesn’t have the sense to do it himself. And then I’ll take him to the cocktail lounge so you can finish your lunch in peace. Have the waiter send in the tab to me. I’ll get this one. It’s the least I can do.”

The two barristers stared at me. “I’ve been disappointed in love,” I explained. “It’s affected me.”

“Shut up and get moving.” Benny motioned me to lead.

As we wended our way among tables and diners, Benny kept feeding his shrill patter into my right ear. “What’s the matter with you, for chrissakes? Couldn’t wait to see me this morning? Well, he didn’t believe it for a second. Are you insane? Is that why you’re persecuting me?”

I wasn’t following any of this. “What are you talking about? I’m not persecuting you.”

“If you’re not, it’s the best goddamn imitation of persecution I’ve seen. You’re sick. You ought to see somebody.”

The Ember Room was graced by a natural-gas fireplace flaring variegated jets of flame. A number of people basked in its hiss and livid glow. I chose a remote, unpopulated corner of the room where we ordered drinks.

“I’ll give you fair warning,” said Benny. “He’s considering going to the police.”

“What are you babbling about? And who is considering going to the police?”

“You know who.”

“Riddle me, riddle dee. I haven’t the faintest.”

“Your friend Tom Rollins. The talk-show guy. He got your letter this morning and he phoned me as soon as he read it. Not that he was taken in by it. He just wanted to know if I knew anyone who might be using my firm’s stationery and forging my name to juvenile letters.”

I sipped my drink. “My dear Benny, the mystery deepens. Elucidate your raving.”

“Just one more letter and he goes to the police. I hope the fuck he does. He says he gets a lot of mail from disturbed individuals, but nothing quite like yours.”

I was surprised. All those letters of admonishment I’d written to The Beast in the past weeks must have taken root in the thin and stony soil of his mind. Interesting. I hadn’t thought they were having any effect.

“Am I to understand you suggested to this person that I and some lunatic at large were one and the same? Benny, Benny, Benny. Ed smells slander and a generous settlement.”

I was ignored. “Let me give you some advice, Ed. I don’t know how much of my stationery you got your hands on, or even how you got it. But here’s a word to the wise – burn whatever you have left. Just to rid yourself of temptation.” Benny paused to shake the ice in his glass before proceeding to dispense more counsel. “And another thing, don’t ever sign my name to another letter if you know what’s good for you. Rollins and I have your signature now, or rather your forgery of my signature. We’ve got you by the balls, Ed.” Benny smiled, swelling with confidence. Power, as it had in the old days, was invigorating him. “You see, the first letter you wrote I couldn’t very well ask the Telethon people to return, and I couldn’t take action on it. So I had to ignore it. But this is a different matter. This time you committed a forgery. Big mistake.”

Benny had a point. Unlike the first letter, the second was not foolproof. But then the first letter was pure inspiration, a flash of genius. Something given to one once in a career. Nobody would have dared set the law on me because it would have been much too embarrassing for those concerned.

You see, a short time after I’d pinched Benny’s lovely parchmenty stationery, advertisements began to appear on my
TV
announcing an upcoming, locally produced Telethon to raise money for crippled children. The ads made me think of Randy.

When I was growing up, Randy lived several blocks down from my house in a split-level painted a brilliant turquoise. Not only was he confined to a wheelchair, he was also retarded. From what wasting illness he suffered, or had suffered, I don’t know. But I remember dangling, shrunken legs, and strange, curling hands whose fingers actually touched the insides of his wrists.

Randy was the only child of an optometrist and his wife. During the summer the wife used to place Randy on the sidewalk outside their home for hours on end. Our suburb was a new development, all brightly painted houses and spindly trees that didn’t offer a scrap of shade. Neighbours wondered about Randy’s being left unprotected under a hot sun like that without even a hat. When someone mentioned this to his mother, she said, “Randy likes it outside.” Later it was said the optometrist didn’t know what his wife did when he was at the office.

Randy spent his afternoons in a painful progress up and down his block. His withered hands couldn’t grip the wheel of his chair to turn them, but by holding an old broomstick in the crooks of his arms he could pole himself up the sidewalk, inch by inch, like a bargeman driving his boat slowly upriver against the current. With infinite patience, in a kind of blind questing, he toiled away under a fierce summer sun, making his torturous epic journeys.

He both terrified and fascinated me. I hated to confront him face to face on the sidewalk. His head would loll loosely from side to side and he would part his lips in the grim reflexive smile that is meant to ingratiate and ward off possible harm.

When I was in the religious stage of childhood, Randy presented me with a problem. Sunday school taught me that I should make friends of the afflicted, that I ought to visit the sick. But I didn’t want to, not if they were like Randy. In any case, the authors of my Sunday school magazines apparently had no acquaintance with kids like Randy. Their stories were illustrated with coloured pictures of radiantly healthy children visiting other children in hospitals, children who may have had a touch of tonsillitis but who
looked not a whit different from their visitors, except that they were lying in bed, rosy-cheeked. They invariably assembled model airplanes on the bedclothes. Fat chance of doing that with Randy.

I never did steel myself to speak to him, nor did I ever do any of those small Christian kindnesses Mrs. Hoffner, our Sunday school teacher, urged on us. I was afraid of him; Randy was a sign of the perils of life, and it was best to keep my distance. So I was glad to be relieved of my religious problem after he was injured by the dog, and the Children’s Aid Society, claiming neglect, had him removed from his parents’ care. Randy disappeared and I had no longer to suffer childish scruples as I watched him crawl along the sidewalk, or feel him as a constant reproach to my charity.

It was a passing stray that attacked him. His mother had left him alone and unattended while she went to have her hair done. Perhaps the animal was aroused by the strange, creeping chair, or thought that the feeble, contorted human with the stick meant it some harm.

The boy’s screaming, people said later, was horrible. I can well imagine how those screams of terror, those screams of helpless rage, sounded on our ordinary street of bright, new houses. He was bitten once on his flaccid, curved hand boneless as a seal flipper, once on his wasted thigh.

I never thought of Randy after he was taken away from the optometrist and his wife. That is, until two years later when my mother mentioned she ought to send his parents a sympathy card. Randy had died of a respiratory illness. She added: “I don’t care what anybody says, they let that kind die in those places.”

For two weeks afterwards I had the same dream. I dreamed of a black dog with eyes hot as red coals, and a stick striking weakly, tip tap tip tap, all around its dancing legs. Who was in the chair, Randy or me, I never knew. Because all I could see was the stick and the nimble dancing dog, its blackness, its red eyes.

Which is a confused way of beginning to explain why I did what I did when the advertisements began. I wrote a cheque, of course,
not a very large one because I didn’t have much. I wondered what else could be done and I thought of Benny.

I fed a sheet of the letterhead of Fitch, Carstairs, Levine, and Lemieux into my Olivetti and pounded out my announcement to the organizers of the upcoming Telethon. With it was a challenge to be read aloud at the beginning of the 48-hour fund-raiser. This was exuberantly enunciated by the sincere and quite-honestly-moved master of ceremonies. Still fresh as a daisy, perky, full of zip, and as yet unrumpled, he gave it his all.

“Who says lawyers don’t have hearts?” he bellowed to the cameras. “Who says it? The guys down at Fitch, Carstairs, Levine, and Lemieux have ’em. They went to the bottom line to
prove
they have ’em.” He ferociously waved my letter as evidence. “I’ve got a note right here from a Mr. Benjamin Ferguson written on behalf of all the boys at Fitch, Carstairs and whatchamacallit, and they pledge
two thousand bucks in aid of crippled kiddies!”
He waited for the figure to sink into the collective mind of his audience before continuing his paean of praise. “Not only that, but Mr. Ferguson challenges all other legal firms in this wonderful, crazy, generous city to match or better that! Yes, match or better it! And the judges! Mr. Ferguson doesn’t want to forget the judges! Dig down deep under those robes, your honours! Ha ha! Just a little humour. Seeing as I got to be in traffic court Wednesday. No, I tell a lie. I perjured myself. Just kidding, folks.” Suddenly he assumed a different demeanour, became earnest, sincere. “Seriously though,” he said, lowering his voice, drooping his eyebrows, “I’ve worked a lot of generous cities, but this city has a special, generous spirit. What a challenge to meet. What a cause. Handicapped kiddies. So I’d like to dedicate my first song of the Telethon to all the lawyers listening and watching, because, all kidding aside, we all know they’re great guys. It’s a little number called ‘Climb Every Mountain.’ Just remember, no one ever stands so tall as when they stoop to help a child. Come on, you legal eagles, help those kids climb their mountains!”

Then he proceeded to belt out “Climb Every Mountain” with agonized contortions of the body, succeeded by a more placid rendering of “Dream the Impossible Dream.”

That afternoon the legal community forked over $26,800.

“Benny,” I said, “all this talk of letters and forgery is making me fear for your feeble reason. I repeat: I know nothing of any letters. A letter to a talk-show host? A further letter …” I hesitated, “to Telethon people? Whatever is Telethon? A world, a civilization, far, far beyond our galaxy?” I pitched my eyes upward as if studying the uncharted emptiness of space.