I'le Dor, page 7
“Nothing serious.” She saw Dan’s deep brown eyes, the blotches on his dark back, his muscular legs. “Until recently,” she added. Would it surprise Lucien that Dan was black? Or was it her father who would have been surprised by that? Libby’s earliest memories contained stories of her father as a small boy in a mining town in South Africa. He’d often told the one about the dog that saved him from a snake. A puff adder. Another about the gun his mother, a nurse, carried. Then there was the black nanny who cared for him until his family left South Africa when he was five. Libby recalled the first black person to come to Ile d’Or was a student who came north to work in the mine one summer. Before him there were no blacks at all, only one Jewish family who owned a jewellery store and the movie theatre. There were no old people either then. It was a frontier town and the early settlers were all young. It took a very long time for there to be old people, for the Chinese restaurant to open, for the main street to be paved and for cement sidewalks to replace the old wood ones.
“He enjoys art and going to galleries,” she said. “We’ve been to the one in Buffalo and a lot of little ones in Toronto. To lots of movies. Occasionally, the theatre.” The times in bed together she didn’t mention, although it was then that they’d shared the most, talking as their arms and legs were interwoven, as they basked in the warmth of having made love again. “But that wasn’t enough, I guess, because there’s some other woman now as well. And things he never bothered to tell me.” She didn’t sound angry, but she felt it.
“Are you in love with him?” Lucien asked.
Libby didn’t know how to answer that. Their last night together, only a few weeks ago, Dan had said he loved some woman called Daphne. He’d looked up at her from the tangled knot of the bed sheets. “It’s just too soon for me. I need longer.” Yet he also added, “You know I want to be with you.”
“None of that makes any sense,” she’d said angrily. Soon after he’d left and he hadn’t called her since.
After reading the article in the magazine her son had given her, she was even more confused. What did she really know about Dan? Her relationships with men had left her skeptical, but she’d trusted something about him from what she’d read and seen of his public persona, as if his private life would be a reflection. As if he wouldn’t have the same problems and complications as everyone else. She had fallen into the same trap as most people. Either public figures weren’t to be trusted at all, or they were placed on pedestals. The dichotomy was as great as imagining some politician was tall only to be shocked by his or her actual diminutive stature. René Lévesque, Pierre Trudeau, David Crombie. But Dan was not small. He was more like a huge mountain lion, watching and pacing. When she met him on that night at the gallery, the idea that he might become her lover did not occur to her. Although a fleeting thought had brushed her heart gently, like the touch of a feather or an autumn leaf spiralling in a breeze.
“We were both lonely,” she said.
A week or so after her show, Dan had called and they’d met for lunch. Three weeks after that, with another lunch or two in between, dinner and a movie, he came to see her house on Walken Avenue. For a long time, he’d looked at a photograph she’d framed of a yellow canoe heading out into unknown territory of water and tree covered hills. The paddler was shrouded in mist rising from a river, but the canoe’s prow was moving out into the distance.
“Wonderful,” he’d said, turning to her. Then, “You’re beautiful,” leaning slightly toward her.
Sensing he was about to kiss her, she could have moved away, but she’d wavered. He reached out simultaneously so that their lips came together in a long, slow kiss that left her tingling.
12.
AFTER THEY LEFT the restaurant, Lucien drove Libby to the front door of the hotel and walked with her into the lobby. The room throbbed with loud music from the bar below and it felt almost as if the building itself were shaking.
“I hope you’ll be able to sleep,” he said.
Looking toward the door to the side of the reception desk, festooned with green twined ropes around the lattice at the sides, Libby was curious about who might be down there.
“Does it go on all night?” she asked, too tired to suggest exploring.
“Pretty late. I can go to the store and get some of those wax ear plugs the men use when they’re blasting.”
“I’ll get them tomorrow.” If the sound kept her awake, she would accept his offer. For the moment, she felt too tired to wait for him to get them.
“Drop by any time, Libby,” he said. But his eyes were guarded and Libby wasn’t sure what he might expect from her.
“I remember scooping out ice cream cones for a nickel,” she said. “I think there were four flavours. Chocolate, vanilla, strawberry and Neapolitan. Your father let me eat all the ice cream I wanted.”
“I’ll let you do that,” Lucien said with a hint of laughter in his voice. “I’d like to invite you to dinner again, too.”
She smiled at him, “And I’ll accept!”
As she walked across the lobby to the elevator, she heard the slow, creaking rumble of machinery and turned instead to the stairs.
“Bonsoir,” Lucien called.
Even four floors up, Libby could hear the music, the last strains of one of the songs in Plume Latraverse’s album, En Noir et Blanc, with its loud, earthy lyrics. It appealed to her, but she realized it would keep her awake. Turning the key in the lock, she opened the door and closed it firmly behind her. The sound was slightly muted and she hoped she would drift off quickly.
As she turned down the blanket on the bed and put on her pyjamas, Libby was thoughtful. What a day this had been. Susan of all people. It was incredible. Susan, often in her dreams, had once told Libby and Cathy McNab she rode a horse out by Lac Leboeuf. Libby had pretended not to hear her. Dismayed that it still haunted her, Libby hoped she wouldn’t dream about the horse again. Or about her father stumbling around after another bender. She didn’t remember the music that played when she went to the sump to find him, just the lilting sound of French surrounding her.
“It’s Elizabet’,” the man behind the bar said. “Monsieur Muir. Votre fille.”
Her father would stare at her as if he’d never seen her before.
Libby wondered what Dan would say if she called him. Propelled by a sudden strong urge, she dialled his number and listened to the tone. There was no answer. When she replaced the receiver, she felt the room tremble, like the rumble of the subway under the ground a block away from her house in Toronto. But more than that, it was the same sound she’d heard as a child, the sound of dynamite underground at two every morning as regular as the mine whistles that blew during the day to mark shift changes.
When she lay down and looked up at the ceiling, she could see long cracks criss-crossing above her, and wondered if the plaster would begin to fall. Maybe Guy had staggered out of the same bar as her father. Time after time. Guy. The one person she’d wanted to see in Ile d’Or. Noticing the books on the night table, The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories and The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant, which she bought the same day she picked up her ticket from the Air Canada office on Bloor Street, she thought of her father again.
“You’ll never be lonely as long as you have a book to read,” he’d often said in sober moments, but she was lonely now. More lonely than she’d felt in a long time. More lonely since Dan. Sometimes even worse than after her marriage ended.
Why hadn’t she gone to Paris? She was there once with Barton. And once with her family. As a teenager, she stood under the Eiffel Tower while the rest of her family saw the city from a vantage point high above her. More interested in the young soldier she’d met while waiting for them, in the concièrge in their small hotel on the left bank, with the elevator that moved slowly between the floors making strange noises, she had not wanted to be engulfed by her family. Savouring chocolate éclairs, milles feuilles, fruit and cream-laden tarts in the windows on the streets everywhere they walked, she’d imagined living there. She’d wanted to take a long trip to France ever since Barton left, but it hadn’t happened. Instead she’d begun to dream more often about the horse sinking. There were always French voices in the background.
Finally she fell asleep only to toss and turn fitfully. Fragments of dreams flitted through her restlessness. Dan in his jockey shorts on a street in Toronto. Moving away from him to hail a taxi. Leaving him standing on the curb in front of The Flamingo where a pink bird landed on his shoulder. He reached for a bathrobe. She couldn’t remember the name of the street she was looking for. “Mais peut-être tu veux autre chose,” the driver said as she struggled to remember. There was something about a place where there was mud. A place where there was a horse sinking in mud. “Mais il n’y a pas les rues comme ça ici maintenant.” Stopping, he turned off the meter and began to touch her.
Light filtered in through the curtains and Libby woke up with her heart pounding. She lay there for a long while, before finally slipping out of bed and placing a white bath towel on the carpet. The name of the hotel, Alpha, was stitched in blue on the top edge. Stretching out on the floor she did some back rolls to warm up her spine, still conscious of the anxiety coursing through her. Then she did the cobra, the shoulder stand, and the camel. The yoga didn’t seem to help. Would she always be lonely? Only Guy had broken through to share the silence with her. Barton hadn’t and then resented time she tried to carve out for herself. Breathing deeply into her abdomen, she moved into a sitting position, letting her breath out with the sound of Om. When she was finished, it was just after seven. She dialled Dan’s number again, but there was still no answer.
She reached for her suitcase, and drew out the packet of letters she had brought with her, the letters her father had written during the war. Her mother had given them to her some time ago, but she’d never read them. She thought that it would be fitting finally to read them on this visit back. The letters he’d sent to Libby when she was at university invariably had short notes scrawled at the end by her mother. She wished she’d kept them, but she guessed there was a time for discarding. As there had been for her mother who kept her husband’s letters in a red chocolate box until she moved to Friendship Villa from the Toronto apartment she’d shared with him until his death.
As Libby opened the packet, the letters leapt out at her as if a spring had been released. The first one was from the troop ship that carried her father to England.
March 21/1945. At sea. The final move came very suddenly. I only learned on Tuesday in the afternoon that I would be leaving today, even then had no idea that I would be coming through without any stopovers. This letter may, or may not, give you some idea. I asked Newkirk, after a time lapse to allow for security, to drop you a line and let you know I was on my way.
Six of my roommates are French so I expect to be able to speak the language by the time the trip is over. They are a good crowd, but just a trifle too ebullient for me under the crowded conditions in which we live.
A long time since she’d read anything written by her father, his handwriting was instantly recognizable. She smiled at the letters so neatly and evenly formed and slanting to the right. Yet at first glance they were almost illegible.
The next letter had CENSORED printed on it. The return address was Capt. Walter Muir, No. 1, CERU, Canadian Army Overseas. The content was innocuous.
Here I am safe and sound in a northern British port. We passed through a number of places that were familiar from hearing Dad and Mother speak of them, particularly Berwick, the place where my Grandmother Muir spent her childhood. Some of those watercolours she did were of scenes in the area. I only wish I had the novelist’s eye and pen to describe it all.
When Libby heard the mine whistle blow, she put the letters in her shoulder bag and went out. Walking until she came to a small diner, she went in and ordered pancakes and peameal bacon. As she sat over a cup of coffee, she flipped once again through the letters, soon engrossed by her father’s remarks on politics. He was glad the Progressive Conservatives had received a clear majority in Ontario. I hope it is some indication of the way the Dominion election will go, but I am afraid my friend Mac King will get in again. In the next letter, he exclaimed on his wife’s winnings at poker. They are phenomenal. I suggest you try the market.
Libby recalled the day she came home from school and asked what a strait was. It was something the teacher had talked about along with islands and peninsulas.
“It’s a series of cards,” her mother had said. “In numerical order.” She would have to remember to tell Lucien that story.
13.
NICK WANDERED DOWN the highway toward the mine. He would ask at the gate to see if he could walk around on surface, to see the mine where his father had worked. Instead he veered toward rocks on the side of the road and sat on a flat one across from the main entrance. From this vantage point, he watched the men as they emerged from the cage that came up from underground walk toward the dry. As a child, he’d given no thought to the change area for the underground miners. Or the name for it. Now he recognized it as quite odd.
Bikadoroff seemed like a good name for this character, a Russian name. Steve maybe. Steve Bikadoroff would have to go through life as a miner. A DP like Nick. Although he didn’t think Steve was a Russian name.
Serge? Boris?
Why did he think he could write a novel? His patients were enough drama for him. Maybe it was because some of their confessions sounded more like fiction than any reality he could have imagined. Maybe he would have a priest hear a high-grader confess. Although not Bikadoroff. He never confessed to anyone and he never got caught either. The priest could be the main character.
There would be a lot of research to do. Nick wanted to understand mysteries of his childhood he’d taken as givens. As soon as he’d left the town in his late teens, he confronted people who had no idea about a mining town, about prospectors, underground, pyrite, the sounds of blasting and whistles blowing, the gong at the cookery. About high-grading and how the fence would get it to a runner. And then to the mob connections in cities far away like Hamilton and Buffalo. He’d begun to understand that he was different because of growing up in Ile D’Or, not only because he was the child of immigrants. Sure, that played a role, but as he garnered high marks in school he also attracted the encouragement of teachers and the principal to further himself, to go to university. They had been disappointed when initially he went to take the course in photography, later congratulatory about the quality of his work. He thought they were pleased when he went into medicine, but that wasn’t why he had. He’d always had many interests and maybe now his passion about psychiatry had also run out. Twenty years of practice was either the entry to some new level of wisdom and compassion or the endless stream of misery was more than a mortal could deal with any longer. Maybe he should have been a priest and listened to confession. At least he would have been able to grant some kind of absolution. Not the role of a shrink. Absolution. Nor was what he heard confession. Maybe a psychic would be a better healer. Well, he couldn’t be either priest or psychic. For one he didn’t have faith in some strange God with all the trappings, for the other he lacked prescience.
The whistle blew and men began to stream across the surface toward the dry. When they emerged, they headed toward the gate and the road to town. Not to the bunkhouses that were no longer in use. He sat with his chin in his hands, not sure what he was doing here. Ever since he’d gone into medicine, there’d been a route to follow. His career and his marriage had provided some structure around his life. Would he be able to reset his compass by returning here to a time that preceded that? What did he think he was going to find in this place that he had left so long ago? He remembered a colleague once remarking that a person sometimes needs to return to the last place where they were happy. Nick wasn’t sure he’d been happy here, but life was simpler. He spat on the cold surface of the rock beside him that in summer would be covered with blueberries, and pulled his jacket and sweater tighter around him.
As Nick stood up, he looked up at the sky. It seemed to go on forever. In the city he missed it, as those who came from the prairies said they missed wide expanses of sky. And more sky. Yet Toronto was home to him now in a way he never could have dreamed would happen. Pockets of neighbourhoods that felt like small towns. Yorkville and the Annex. Bloor West Village. Greektown. The subway joining them. Little Italy along the streetcar tracks on College Street. The lake at the foot of the metropolis, the hub of transportation for the early settlers. Now blocked off with huge buildings and highways, seemingly lost to the inhabitants. The railroad was there from early times and could have been incorporated in some exciting vista of the future. Instead there was a crunch coming. Either his city would rise to assume some prominence or it would sink into mediocrity.
Walking down the side of the rock toward the highway and heading back to town, he didn’t try to enter into the mine property. Enough to sit and watch and ponder, he thought, and now he would go back to the bed and breakfast and have a shower. Maybe call Michelle and ask her to join him for dinner.
When he arrived at the bunkhouse, the boy was waiting on the wood steps.
“Bonjour Monsieur.” Hello, Mister.
“Hello.” Nick didn’t ask what the boy was doing there as he went up to the front door and turned the knob.
The boy grabbed his arm.
“What do you want?” Nick was irritated. If he’d wanted this attention, he could have stayed in Toronto. He could have been seeing patients in his office in the building across from the art gallery. The ambience on nearby Queen Street West, and a few blocks where the strip was becoming increasingly arty, pleased him. What he was trying to escape was the feeling of being needed. Everyone needs someone, Marie would have said. She’d needed him, but so much of the time he’d been absent. “Oh, yes, you’re here,” she said. “But you might as well not be.” Who do you need, Nick? You won’t admit it, but you do need affection and warmth. And people.
