The 10 P.M. Question (28 page)

And then instantly it was as if he were being pulled through the bed, through the mattress and the base and the floorboards. An immense force was drawing him under in a heavy rush, down and down and down, and he was asleep.

The Aunties lived in a big house on Old Mill Road. The original house, they said. Not the Mill House, but the mill
owner’s
house. The mill owner was some character from last century called L. Cuttance Boyd, an early settler who’d made it big in the new country. There was a little metal plaque and several framed photos in the Aunties’ hallway testifying to this fact: L. Cuttance Boyd and his large family (and servants) seated outside their splendid wooden residence. L. Cuttance Boyd and his workers outside the sawmill. L. Cuttance Boyd and his fine new Thoroughbred, His Lordship.

L. Cuttance Boyd was a big man with a big belly and a bushy mustache; he had lived to the age of ninety-two. Alas (Alma’s word), good health and worldly success had bypassed his children and grandchildren. The Cuttance Boyd line and fortune had died out several generations back. The Aunties had researched L. Cuttance Boyd and his ignominious descendants when they had bought the house and begun restoring it to its former glory. That had been years and years ago, before Ma was born, and now the city had spread out to meet the mill owner’s mansion; now you could take the bus there in fifteen minutes from the midtown terminal. The old sawmill had disappeared without a trace, but Frankie liked to think that L. Cuttance Boyd’s portly ghost lingered around the area. He had always thought L. Cuttance Boyd looked rather jolly. He liked to imagine he’d been called Cut for short, which would have been perfect for a miller.

So the mill owner’s house had been the Aunties’ for more than forty years now, and Frankie loved the place. But it was a seesawing, roller-coaster love, a love diluted by dollops of melancholy and visiting unease. The house was a child’s paradise — so many rooms, so many interesting objects and books. And outside was better still — a garden with trees and places to make your own, and a river down at the bottom. Of course, the Aunties were great pamperers and wildly entertaining and most tender and solicitous when you needed them to be, but when Frankie thought about living at their house, he seemed to remember that in the midst of all the laughing and big dinners and hilarious visitors and card games and rides in the Morris Oxford, he had been somehow quietly haunted.

All that time, he had been waiting for something; whatever it was, he had wanted it and he had feared it, too. The something was behind him or it was just over his shoulder or just around the corner, out of sight. He worried about it; it made him nervous and uncertain and sometimes sad.

It was such a cavalcade of memories, those times at the Aunties’— bursts of color and music and loud activity and discussion — and there in the middle of it all, something like a faint, insistent tune, some wordless song in a minor key that kept catching his ear.

Frankie was thinking all this as he rode first the number 40 bus into town and then the number 83 bus out to Marshlands, which was both the name of the Aunties’ house and the suburb that had grown around it. The bus stopped outside the primary school where Frankie had been going to start years ago until he had cried bitterly and said he must go to the same school as Gordana and Louie. So the Aunties had taken him across town every day, except when they thought it would be more fun at home or touring around the city in the Morris Oxford.

Frankie got off the bus and sat for a while on the low stone fence that bordered the school. He’d biked down here sometimes when he was older and practiced his bowling on the school cricket strip with some of the local boys. He remembered a big kid called Simon Stanhope, whose name had sounded just like a great cricketer’s. Frankie’s own name was pretty good, too; hadn’t Sydney said so, back on that first day, on the school bus? But he wouldn’t be a great cricketer; he was just a trundler, really, accurate enough, but no flair. Gigs was planning to use his real name when he was famous. Gregory Angelo. Gordana said Gregory Angelo sounded like a slimy, afternoon soap star and he should change his name altogether. Or his career ambitions.

Frankie yawned copiously. It was warm; he could fall asleep right now, here on the stone fence. He had slept properly last night for the first time in a week, but it had only been five hours. His thoughts were a little clearer but his exhaustion was still epic. His head and torso and limbs felt as if they had fused into something amorphous and nearly immovable, a granite boulder, or a waterlogged tree-trunk beached after a storm. He had lifted himself out of bed with enormous effort and dressed as slowly as an invalid. In the kitchen, he had moved clumsily around Ma, like the proverbial bull with china. And he had dropped his cereal bowl, which had shattered in a dozen pieces. Ma had been rather sharp with him and Frankie had abandoned the idea of breakfast. He had left the house without really saying good-bye. Ma would think he’d gone to Sydney’s.

He stood and stretched and began walking toward the Aunties’. It was only half a mile or so. It was Tuesday. Nearly midday. They would be long home from tai chi and pancakes with Johnny Mac. Since it was sunny, Teen might be in the garden, though there wasn’t much to be done in May. Nellie would be writing letters or reading or on the phone to one of the parish ladies. Alma might be writing letters, too, or studying one of her university art books.

But sometimes on winter mornings, and before the sun disappeared over the back of the house, Alma sat in the wicker chair on the front veranda, reading, or smoking and watching the fountain. Naturally L. Cuttance Boyd had built a fountain in his front yard. It was a tiered stone structure, like an oversized cake-stand, and Alma could watch the water shooting out the middle and tumbling down the platters for whole hours at a time.

This picture of Alma was in Frankie’s head as he walked the length of School Road and then Boyd Road and as he rounded the corner into Swan Road — where there were, in fact, swans gliding in regal fashion on a large pond — and as he turned into the drive of Marshlands, Swan Road, RD 1. He traipsed up the driveway, along the curving line of poplars, and he fixed his mind’s eye on Alma and the wicker chair and the fountain playing in the winter sun and the pretty curl of smoke from Alma’s cheroot. And the picture was so clear and settled that it made something burst warmly in his chest when he looked up and saw that very picture made real. Alma was indeed sitting, blowing smoke to the sky, her plump legs raised up on a stool, a heavy book open in her lap.

Frankie thought later that he called out, like a kitten, a wan and creaky sound. He knew that he wanted to run to Alma, but his tired, somehow elderly body was too dreary a thing now to hurry. He could see Alma, pushing the footstool aside, heaving herself up from the wicker chair and standing, immense and dependable, smiling widely, and then the smile faltering, but her arms were up and out, anyway, just as they used to be when he was small.

“How’s my darling boy?” she called.

It seemed such a long way up the six steps to the veranda and to Alma’s wide-open arms. He was like an albatross now, Frankie thought, wind-buffeted and injured and gasping, after a tumultuous flight. He felt like a wounded bird and an ancient human and a small boy all at once, not a twelve-nearly-thirteen-year-old, who was much too grown up, surely, to sob on the large chest of his great-aunt. But that is what he did. He flung himself at Alma and he let her gather him in, and then he cried and cried.

Frankie sat on the bed in Frankie’s room, looking through his old sketchbooks. It was the first time in years and years since he’d opened them.

After their long talk, Alma had told him to lie down and see if he mightn’t doze. Frankie had done so obediently, staring up at the Japanese bird kite, its washed-out colors, the paper-thin wings, and his first thought had been that before this was Frankie’s room, this bedroom was
Francie’s
room. Ma’s room. Of course he had always known this, but now the fact seemed part of some important tapestry only just coming into focus. He let the thought lie there in his tired brain, unexamined for the moment. He couldn’t doze. He wanted to look at his sketchbooks; he wanted to think about everything he and Alma had talked about.

The early drawings were all shades of purple — in imitation of Harold, of course. Frankie could actually remember doing them; he could remember the feel of the crayon under his fingers, the new satisfaction he experienced as his hand moved across the paper and the pictures sprouted beneath it. The pictures were all of his family. A dozen variations, a dozen different settings, but in every picture were Uncle George and Louie, with great nests of curly hair; Ma and Gordana in dresses, Gordana differentiated by a ponytail; and then himself, small and skinny, with a black cat — their old cat, Stanley.

The Aunties and Walt were in the pictures, too, nearby but just a little apart. There they all were — everyone at the park, at the beach, on the street. There they were, standing in front of L. Cuttance Boyd’s fountain. At a zoo. At the supermarket. At the river. There were birds and dogs and fish and lions and horses, too, sometimes earthbound, sometimes airborne. They were all in there together, an exuberant confusion of people and animals, and they were — all of them, Ma included — always outdoors.

“It will be all right,” Alma had said to Frankie as he cried against her chest. “It will be
all
right.”

She had said it over and over, hugging him hard and patting his back. Dimly, he was aware of Teen and Nellie coming out to the veranda, patting his back, too, then going indoors again, down the long passage, back to their various tasks. He was four years old again, crying over a fall or a bad dream, or wanting to go back home, wanting to see Gordana and Louie.

He had stopped crying at last and loosened his way out of Alma’s hug and they sat down together on the top veranda step. Frankie fastened his eyes on the plant tendrils fighting up through the stone path. He felt despairing again. He had no idea what to say, where to begin.

“It’s times like these, you really need to be able to smoke,” said Alma. “Smoking is such a good thought-gatherer. But I mustn’t corrupt the young.” She pulled the packet of cheroots from her sagging cardigan pocket and lit up. “I’ll do the smoking and you do the thought-gathering.”

Frankie breathed in the woody perfume of the cigar, and his breath turned into a hiccup. His face ached from crying. He felt as if someone had punched him in several parts of his body — his cheekbones, his lungs, his legs. Alma smoked patiently, saying nothing. A gull squawked overhead.

“Things,” Frankie began tentatively, speaking to the stone path. “Things —” He stopped and closed his fists, pushing his fingernails into his palms, trying to clear his dull head with that small pain. “Things have gotten out of hand,” he said.

“Yes,” said Alma. It seemed like a statement of fact.

“But I don’t understand it,” said Frankie. “I can’t talk to Ma anymore. It’s terrible. I don’t
want
to talk to her. I don’t want to even look at her.” He said this last very low, ashamed, waiting for Alma’s recoil. But she patted his knee, hummed some kind of agreement.

“But all the rodent thoughts are out of control, and it’s always Ma that helps me —” Frankie felt the wisps of panic rising on the back of his neck. He wanted to clutch at Alma’s skirt, gather up big folds in his hands.

“Rodent thoughts?” said Alma calmly.

“It’s like a voice,” said Frankie, slowing down. He didn’t care if Alma thought he was crazy. He knew he had to say it all. He made himself breathe evenly. “A ratty voice saying everything that I’m afraid of. Which is just about everything in the world now. It can get so loud. But if I talk to Ma, it always goes away . . . It’s so
stupid
. I get into bed and the voice starts up, so I go and talk to Ma. There’s always something I’m worried about,
afraid
of. I’m just always
afraid
. . .”

He felt the pressure of Alma’s hand again. “This is brave,” she said. “Talking like this. You know that, don’t you?”

The tears sprang back. If Alma were too kind to him, he’d never get through it. He dug his feet hard into the step, pressing on.

“Ma calls it the ten p.m. question, sort of a joke, which made it seem almost all right, but it isn’t. It’s gotten worse and worse. I couldn’t go to camp. I don’t like to stay anywhere because of it — and because of Ma —”

“Because of Francie?” said Alma.

“Because she needs someone to help — and it’s usually me. It has to be me because of Uncle G being busy and Gordana not being around much and Louie moving out . . . But now —” Frankie stopped again. Alma was bending with effort, stubbing out her cheroot on the side of the step. She dropped it into the shrubbery beside the veranda.

“But now?” she prompted.

“Now
Sydney’s
going,” said Frankie, and this time tears leaked right out. “And that’s all a mess. It’s been so much better while she’s been here! Everything was better somehow, more bearable. She asked questions. I could tell her things, and I thought maybe everything could change after all. But she’s going. And she
accepts
it! She
accepts
sad endings. That’s what I can’t bear.”

Frankie spat the words into the air, sickened by them. Sad endings. Gulls squealed, as if in agreement. Alma waited. He tried to put his thoughts in order, work out what should come first, work out what he felt.

“It was when Sydney said Ma loved sad endings — like the Russians — that was when it all went so bad. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stop the rodent voice, but I couldn’t talk to Ma. I don’t want Ma to love sad endings. And I don’t want to
have
a sad ending, either. I don’t want to be just like Ma, Alma! I want her to leave the house. Why can’t she? Why
won’t
she? Why does everyone just accept it? Why doesn’t anyone ever,
ever, ever
talk about it?”

Now he looked up at Alma, not caring about the tears. She was looking straight back at him, her face puckered, her old blue eyes full of loving concern.