The Divine Ryans, page 7
‘A toast to Mom,’ Mary said, looking about in panic for someone to join her. She looked beseechingly at me, as if to say that for me to let her down at this moment would be unfair, even by the standards of the war that we had been waging against each other since I was born.
I looked around the table. Aunt Phil, who seemed not to have noticed that Mary was in mid-toast, went on clearing the table. At last Uncle Reginald stood up and solemnly held out his glass of water, winking at my mother as he did. Then Father Seymour rose, and, smiling indulgently, as if to say that toasting your mother with a glass of water was a lovely gesture, raised his glass, at which my mother reddened and, once again starting to cry, asked Mary to sit down.
Mary looked at me again, at which point I stood up, held up my glass, and said, ‘A toast to Mom.’
When I tried to touch my glass to hers, however, she pulled away and, smiling, said, ‘Not yet, Draper Doyle.’
Our mother sat there, staring at her plate.
‘Mom,’ Mary said, ‘I’d just like to say—’
Her voice broke and she paused, concentrating on the glass of water. ‘I’d just like to say—’
Her voice breaking once again, she stopped. Her bottom lip began to quiver and her eyes welled with tears.
‘Mom, I’d just like to say that you’re—’
Before she could say another word, Aunt Phil reached out and, quite matter-of-factly, as if Mary was extending it to her, plucked the glass of water from her hand. The tears that Mary had been holding back came flooding forth, and as, with considerable embarrassment, the rest of us sat down, she went running to her room, our mother following soon after.
7
Reg Ryan Sr had left to my father the editorship of what Uncle Reginald once described as the world’s worst newspaper, The Daily Chronicle. It was a morning paper, ‘a mourning paper’, Uncle Reginald said, a paper in mourning for its own past greatness.
At one time a major paper in the city, back when newspapers were expected, even required to be biased, it had fallen on hard times. The problem with The Daily Chronicle was that while other papers in the city had changed with the times, toning down or disguising their biases, it had stayed the same, continuing to denounce those who, as its editorials often put it, were of the ‘wrong’ politics or the ‘wrong’ religion.
Even the layout of the paper had stayed the same. Every morning, The Daily Chronicle appeared with an ad for Reg Ryan’s funeral home in the top left corner of the page, and a short quote from the bible in the top right corner. The quote was called ‘The Word of God’, and had been appearing in the top right corner since the first day the paper had been published. That’s how ‘The Word of God’ had become the nickname for The Daily Chronicle, even among people who liked the paper. ‘Is The Word of God out yet?’ people would say at newsstands. ‘I wonder what’s keeping The Word of God today. It’s usually out by now.’ People would read stories aloud from the paper, concluding by saying, ‘This is The Word of God.’
Always sensational, The Daily Chronicle, by the time my father took over, had been a strange combination of scandal sheet and church bulletin. The only thing that distinguished it from other tabloids, apart from the church news, was the complete absence of sex scandal stories, stories which neither Sister Louise nor the other members of the editorial board, Father Seymour and Father Francis, would tolerate. Side by side with stories about how construction of a new church was proceeding were stories about UFO sightings, aliens from other planets, celebrities returning from the dead. Aunt Phil, who spent much of her spare time reading about such things herself, saw nothing wrong with this – ‘sugaring the pill’, she called it. How strange it must have been for my father, who had studied metaphysical philosophy at Oxford, to edit the Chronicle. He had often joked that what the paper lacked in philosophy, it more than made up for in metaphysics.
Every morning, when I got up for breakfast, there was a copy of that day’s Daily Chronicle on the dining-room table, left there by Aunt Phil who, before going to work, had gone through it page by page, assessing the job the new editor – the third since my father’s death – was doing. I always looked at the editorial page, the ‘sermon’ as it was known throughout the city. I had delivered my first sermon when I was six years old. That’s what my father called it, ‘delivering the sermon’. Depending on whose turn it was to write it, I would stop by the rectory, or the convent, or the orphanage on my way home from school to pick up that day’s editorial, then take it to my father at the newsroom. ‘Here he is,’ my father always said, ‘Draper Doyle, delivering the sermon.’
Sister Louise, Father Francis and Father Seymour, ‘the board’, as my father called them, wrote the editorials, which appeared in the paper unsigned, so that most people were under the impression that my father wrote them, an impression which we were all sworn to do nothing to correct. Usually, an editorial was an endorsement of the church’s position on some matter, on birth control perhaps, or abortion, or the celibacy of priests. ‘There’s no harm in people thinking that Donald writes them,’ Sister Louise said. ‘We’re only putting into plain language what Donald would say in that sophisticated way of his.’
This was the accepted notion, that while my father’s views were doubtless entirely proper, entirely in line with those of the board, he might express them in such a way as to make them incomprehensible to what Sister Louise called ‘the average reader of the Chronicle’. This, Sister Louise said, far from being a criticism of him, was to his credit – it was only because the board lacked his ability with language, only because of what she called their ‘plodding minds’, that they were able to make themselves understood by the common person. It was better that my father apply his talents to the running, rather than to the writing, of the paper, she said, especially since he was the only one of them who knew how to run it.
This was how they all talked about him, as a kind of behind-the-scenes genius, on the one hand an adept in the mysterious process of putting out a paper, on the other the family intellectual who had been sent to Oxford to study scholastic philosophy, acquire the arguments, the proofs of Catholicism, and who now could trot them out, to the discomfiture of non-believers, at a moment’s notice. It was commonly believed that not even Father Francis or Father Seymour had his command of metaphysics. He knew that this was how they thought about him. He once said they were all waiting for some sidewalk confrontation, during which he would be called upon to quote at length from Thomas Aquinas. The routing of some Protestant in public, in broad daylight, that was what they wanted.
But he had never said as much to them. Sister Louise had disarmed him by making token deferrals to his authority whenever church matters were being discussed. ‘Donald will correct me if I’m wrong,’ she’d say, then go on to voice her opinion, while my father sat there, as if in tacit agreement with every word she said.
He had rarely spoken at family gatherings. His often distant, preoccupied manner had been put down to what Sister Louise called ‘the fineness of his mind’. They spoke as if between arcane technical matters on the one hand and metaphysics on the other, most of what went on in my father’s mind was incomprehensible to anyone but him. It was for this reason that they were not especially troubled by his breakdown, which had happened when I was five. In fact, they had seemed almost reassured by it, as if it confirmed, beyond all doubt, their assessment of him. It was the kind of thing that people with minds like my father’s were known to do, even expected to do, it seemed.
‘The mind that man has,’ Sister Louise said, shaking her head, as if it was inevitable that, from sheer proximity to that divine spark, his body would burn out from time to time.
That it was his body and not his mind that was the problem was obvious, Sister Louise said, from the high spirits he was showing in the hospital. It was a case of sheer physical exhaustion, that’s all it was. The wonder, her tone implied, was that it had taken this long to happen. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if this was just the first of many breakdowns,’ Sister Louise said, making ‘breakdown’ sound like some sort of benign growth which, every so often, would be removed. Everyone had nodded, as if this observation somehow clinched the matter. He was five weeks in the hospital, then came home without fanfare of any kind – my father, Sister Louise said, was not the kind of man who liked you to make a fuss over him. He went straight back to work, and soon it was as though that five-week interval had never happened.
I was not surprised that, despite his young age, my father had died of a heart attack. One of the reasons we had been able to keep The Daily Chronicle afloat was that our father had been willing to work impossibly long hours for next to no salary, running the newsroom more or less by himself and even overseeing the running of the other departments – paste-up, circulation, even advertising. He worked from three in the afternoon to three in the morning, six twelve-hour shifts a week, his only day off being Saturday, because there was no Sunday edition of the Chronicle.
Mind you, a seventy-two hour work week was not unusual among the Ryans. The rest of the family put in just as many hours in the other corners of the empire. ‘It’s hard work that got us where we are,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘And it’s hard work that will keep us there.’
The strange thing was that my father had first taken to working impossibly long hours after his breakdown. He had gone from seeing less of his family than most people would have thought proper to hardly seeing them at all. For the last few years of his life, he had all but lived at the newspaper, leaving the house before noon, coming home at four or five in the morning to have breakfast with our mother, then going to bed just as Mary and I were getting up to go to school. Whole days went by without us seeing him. We always ate breakfast in hushed silence for fear of waking him; most of the time, when we came home to lunch, he had already gone back to work.
Every day, my mother said, the same scene of panic was repeated. Every day, my father was convinced of the absolute impossibility of getting the paper out by six o’clock the next morning, but somehow, every morning without fail, The Daily Chronicle appeared. Each morning’s issue was a miracle, Aunt Phil said, another routine miracle from Donald Ryan.
During the last few months of his life, we had seen him so infrequently, he had seemed more like a boarder than a husband or a father. ‘The boarder’, in fact, was what our mother had taken to calling him. It was hard to believe, she said, that two people who lived in the same house could see so little of each other. And Mary and I saw him even less than she did. You could count on the fingers of one hand, she said, the number of hours in a week that we were all at home and all awake at the same time. She had begun joking with Mary and me about how the three of us might not be the only ones living in the house, that she was beginning to suspect that someone else, ‘possibly a man’, was living with us. She had seen evidence, she said, that a man might be hiding from us, sneaking out to use the toaster while we were sleeping, running water late at night, leaving doors and windows open. Yes, she was almost certain that some fourth person was in the house, leading a kind of shadow existence, a life parallel to ours but somehow never intersecting with it.
This was only a slight exaggeration. At the end, aside from a few hours here and there, his life had only coincided with ours from noon on Saturday when he got up, to early afternoon on Sunday when he began another week of work. It occurred to me, sitting in Aunt Phil’s dining room, eating my breakfast while Reg Ryan Sr looked down from the wall, that it was the ghost of a ghost that I had been seeing lately, the ghost of the ghost my father had been while he was still alive. These were literally his old haunts that he was returning to, for his existence now was hardly less solitary, less disembodied than it had been before his death. I remembered how my mother had looked in the weeks after he was buried. She had seemed more puzzled than anything else, as if his premature death was just the latest inscrutable thing that he had done. For her, his death might have been no more than a completion of, a perfection of, the absence that had been his life.
Some mornings, I had woken up to the sound of Aunt Phil downstairs in our kitchen. She would come over from next door, barge in unannounced to talk to my father, to give him what amounted to his morning pep talk, despite the fact that his day was just ending. The ink was not dry on that morning’s paper, and she was already hounding him about tomorrow’s. She always told him that the family was counting on him to keep the paper going, ‘to keep it alive’, as she put it.
The phrase conjures up for me now a vision of my father running around in the machine room in which the wire-service machines spewed out copy, day and night, copy that, because we could not afford reporters, comprised about 99 per cent of the paper. I could see my father loading the teletypes, the life-support systems of The Daily Chronicle, frantic about them breaking down or running out of paper when he was not there to reload them – my father, endlessly maintaining those machines, the ceaseless noise of which drowned out all other sounds.
One day, when I had gone to the newsroom to deliver the sermon, I was told that my father was in the machine room. I went to the door of the room and was about to knock when, looking through the window, I saw him, bending over one of the teletype machines. At first, I thought he was reading the printout, but then I saw that the movement of his head was too exaggerated. In addition to moving from left to right, following with a kind of mock fascination each line of type across the page, his head was going rapidly up and down, as if he was mimicking the striking of the keys, or else pretending that he was making them move, that he was typing at this impossible speed by sheer telepathy. He stood there mocking that machine, until he happened to look up to catch me staring at him.
I smiled, thinking I had caught him in some harmless game that he was fond of playing. Without straightening up, still with his hands on either side of the teletype, he stared at me for what seemed like a very long time, then said something. I couldn’t hear him, any more than I could hear the machines, for the room, because it bordered the newsroom, was soundproof. When I shook my head to indicate I hadn’t heard, he spoke again, his lips moving soundlessly. Again I shook my head, and again he spoke, his face now expressing irritation with what he seemed to think was my stubborn refusal to hear what he was saying. I pointed to indicate that I was coming in, at which his expression switched to rage, and he began shouting, shouting soundlessly at me, still bent over that machine, still looking at me sideways. I began to wonder if he had somehow failed to recognize me. I stood there a little longer, staring at the soundless tantrum he was throwing, then turned and, dropping the sermon on the desk, ran from the newsroom. He never afterwards said one word about it.
I could think of only two things our family had done together on anything like a regular basis – one was watch the hockey game on Saturday night, and the other was go to early mass on Sunday morning. It had been Aunt Phil’s practice to, as Uncle Reginald put it, ‘convene’ a meeting of the Divine Ryans at her house whenever the Habs were playing the Leafs on TV. There had been no meetings since my father’s death last March, not even during the playoffs in the spring when the Habs had won their second straight Stanley Cup. When, at dinner one night, Aunt Phil announced that the whole family was getting together for the Habs’ first televised game of the season this coming Saturday, I screamed, ‘Hurray,’ causing Mary and my mother to roll their eyes.
‘You’re not normal, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said. ‘You’re a fanatic.’
‘What’s a fanatic?’ I said.
‘A fanatic,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘is a fan who is so crazy you have to keep him in the attic.’
‘It’s only a hockey game you know, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said.
‘The Habs have won more Cups than any other team,’ I said. ‘Thirteen.’
‘Why do you like statistics so much, Draper Doyle?’ Mary said. ‘They’re only numbers, you know.’ Mary had a habit of reducing things to their basic elements to prove their worthlessness. ‘Why do you like all that candy?’ she’d say. ‘Candy’s only sugar, you know.’ Anything that could thus be broken down was worthless, as far as she was concerned.
‘Hockey,’ she said, ‘all it is is people hitting a piece of rubber back and forth with sticks.’
‘Water,’ I said, ‘all it is is hydrogen and oxygen. Why drink it?’
‘Just tell me one thing, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said. ‘Do you hate the other teams?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘They’re human beings too, you know,’ she said.
‘No, they’re not,’ I said.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m not saying Montreal is not the best team. I know they are.’ The inevitable superiority of the Montreal Canadiens was something to which Mary was resigned, a concession she begrudgingly allowed me whenever we had these arguments, which was often. ‘I just want you to admit,’ she said, ‘that the Boston Bruins for instance are human beings too.’
‘They’re not,’ I said. ‘Canadiens are human beings. But Bruins are bears. Black Hawks are birds. Red Wings are birds. Leafs are plants.’
‘What about the Rangers, Draper Doyle?’ my mother said, looking triumphantly around the table. ‘Aren’t they human? Aren’t they?’ I had forgotten about those damned Rangers. What were Rangers anyway – forest rangers? Were they human beings? I supposed they were. The New York Rangers hadn’t won the Stanley Cup since 1947, but they were human beings, any way you looked at it. I thought about pointing out that Smokey the Bear was a Ranger, but decided against it.
‘Shot down, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said, ‘shot down.’ Getting up from the table, she stretched out her arms and made the noise of an airplane, then did a sudden nosedive to the floor. ‘Boom,’ she said, so loudly that Aunt Phil was startled. ‘Shot down,’ she said, sitting down again.
‘You never shot me down,’ I said. ‘Mom did.’
