The Divine Ryans, page 8
My defeat at the dinner table notwithstanding, I could hardly sit still for excitement when Saturday arrived. Another season had begun. All week, I had been able to think of nothing else. The Habs had won the Cup the last two years, and had won their first five road games of the season. They seemed unbeatable. Now they were coming home to the Forum. I brought out my many hockey souvenirs from the closet, including a puck which my father had given me when I was seven. It had previously occurred to me that some sort of connection might exist between this puck and the one my father had lately been appearing with, though I couldn’t imagine what that connection might be. On a piece of paper taped to one side of the puck, these words were written: ‘Deflected into the stands by Canadiens goalie Gerry MacNeil at 1:03 of overtime. Caught by Donald Ryan. Nineteen seconds later, Elmer Lach scored to win the Stanley Cup for Montreal. Montreal Forum, April 16, 1953.’ How I envied my father. I’d have given anything to be there when the Habs won the Cup.
Among my other hockey souvenirs, the most unlikely of the lot was a hardbound copy of the Aeneid which my father had given me for my birthday when I was five, an illustrated adaptation for children. The Cartoon Virgil, it was called. The full-page drawings were in the manner of the old Classics Illustrated comic books, full of lurid detail – I can still see the Frightful Forms, Death-dealing War, and Mad Discord with ‘snaky, bloodstained hair’. I knew The Cartoon Virgil by heart. Of all the adapted classics my father had had me read, I liked it best, particularly those parts which took place in the underworld. (There were also underworlds in The Cartoon Homer and The Cartoon Dante, but Virgil’s was my favourite.) My father had shown me how the black, laminated cloth cover of The Cartoon Virgil could itself be a kind of underworld. On Saturday nights, I always had to go to bed after the first period of the hockey game, so my father, using a pen that had run out of ink, would ‘write’ the score of the game on the cover of The Cartoon Virgil. At breakfast, after mass on Sunday mornings, I would put a sheet of paper over the book and shade it with a pencil until I found the score. ‘Here it comes,’ my father would say, ‘here it comes, emerging from the underworld.’
And so it would. A kind of ghost of what he had written would appear. Montreal 5 – New York 3. After a while, there were so many scores invisibly engraved in the cover of the book that my father had to start writing in the date to help me tell them apart. Montreal 3 – Toronto 3, 02/12/65. A kind of memory slate is what the book became, for, in the process of trying to find the score of last night’s game, I would call up the scores of games played years ago, and we would stop at each one to see if we remembered it. Scattered haphazardly across the cover of The Cartoon Virgil in my father’s handwriting were the scores of every televised Habs game from 1963 to 1966 when, because I was then allowed to stay up late, my father had stopped writing them. From then on, I had written the scores on the cover myself, with the used-out pen my father had given me.
Now, to remind me to write the score and date of tonight’s game on the book, I laid the pen on the cover of The Cartoon Virgil and went downstairs just as Uncle Reginald was descending in the lift. We were both wearing Habs sweaters, his with number 9 and mine with number 4 on the back. ‘Good evening hockey fans from ghost to ghost,’ said Uncle Reginald. I grinned.
Aunt Phil, Sister Louise and Father Seymour were already in the living room when we got there. None of them had any real affection for hockey. As far as they were concerned, God had created hockey for the sole purpose of allowing Catholics to humiliate Protestants on nationwide TV. Most of Fleming Street was Catholic, but there were a few Protestant families. In fact, one of the city’s staunchest Protestants and monarchists lived near the end of the street, her house just visible from Aunt Phil’s. Millie Barter was in every way Aunt Phil’s opposite – a tiny, fragile woman who, according to Aunt Phil, considered work to be beneath not only her, but her entire family. The Barters were supposed to be distantly related to some obscure, umpteen-times-removed cousin of the Queen, prompting Aunt Phil to refer to Millie as Queen Millie and to her family as The Royal Family. The Barters had a fortune, said to be so old that even they could not remember how they came by it. The Barters, Aunt Phil said, had done nothing since coming to the New World but live off some Old World fortune. God only knew where their money came from, she said. They had lived on that side of the street for as long as the Ryans had lived on this side, and, in all that time, no Barter had ever been seen to do a day’s work. As far as Aunt Phil was concerned, all Millie Barter did was back such Protestant causes as the retention of the Union Jack and royal visits.
Despite the fact that the Ryans and the Barters had never spoken to each other, it had somehow become the custom that after each televised game between the Habs and the Leafs, the family whose team had won would phone the family whose team had lost, not to speak to them, of course, but only to let their phone ring three times – three rings, three gloating cheers. Just as the Americans and the Russians had the hotline, the Ryans and the Barters had what Uncle Reginald called ‘the knellephone’, their only cold war communication.
Aunt Phil stood at her bedroom window just before the game, peeking out through the curtains, watching the Barter children arrive at what she derisively called Buckingham Palace. ‘Here they come,’ she said, ‘the Royal Family.’ Aunt Phil followed the comings and goings of the Barters as closely as other people did the real royal family. She began to announce their arrivals like some palace doorman. ‘Prince Pimple-puss,’ she said scornfully, ‘accompanied by his wife, Princess Pasty-face, and Child William, the Earl of Dirty Diapers.’ Laughing, Uncle Reginald wondered if Millie Barter referred to Aunt Phil’s house as the Vatican, and watched it as closely as Aunt Phil watched hers. Perhaps she too had nicknames for all of us, he said.
‘Like what?’ I said.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘what about His Mouldiness, Reg Ryan? What about The Infallible Philomena?’
‘Don’t be absurd,’ Aunt Phil shouted from her bedroom. ‘Don’t be putting ideas in the boy’s head.’
Then she came out and, as she always did before a Habs/Leafs game, put the phone on top of the television set.
‘We’ll ring that woman’s phone tonight, Draper Doyle,’ she said, ‘you just watch.’
‘Maybe she’ll ring ours, Aunt Phil,’ Mary said, exchanging a smile with my mother.
When Montreal were playing Toronto at the Forum, as they were tonight, it was not a hockey game, but a holy war, a crusade carried on nationwide TV, Rome’s Canadiens versus Canterbury’s Maple Leafs, ‘the Heathen Leafs against the Holy Habs’, as Uncle Reginald put it. Uncle Reginald said that the real coach of the Montreal Canadiens was the Pope, who was sending Toe Blake instructions from the Vatican, where he and his cardinals were watching the game on closed-circuit television.
As it turned out, the Pope and his cardinals had seen better days, because to everyone’s astonishment the Leafs took a 3–1 lead in the first period. Never mind the Leafs, Uncle Reginald said, assuring us that, between periods, the Pope and his cardinals would find a way of beating them. No-one, he said, no-one on the face of the earth knew more about hockey than Pope Paul VI. And no-one knew less about it than Aunt Phil, I felt like saying. All Aunt Phil knew or wanted to know about the Leafs was that they were Protestant. Throughout the first period, because she was never entirely sure when something helpful to the Habs’ cause was happening, she had me sit beside her and, in a low, confidential voice, asked me questions from time to time. When, near the end of the period, Montreal scored to make it 3–2 and the room erupted, she waited for the noise to die down, then said the score of the game as if she was keeping track for those who didn’t know hockey as well as she did. ‘Three-two Toronto,’ Aunt Phil said.
It was a strange sight indeed, a roomful of people who otherwise never watched a hockey game, including Sister Louise and Father Seymour in their habits, acting as if their lives depended on the outcome. ‘C’mon Montreal,’ Sister Louise said, leaning forward in her chair, rocking back and forth. Father Seymour, standing up with arms tightly folded, would advance towards the television each time the Habs went up the ice, backing away when they failed to score.
The trouble was, Father Seymour knew almost as little about hockey as Aunt Phil and Sister Louise. ‘Yes,’ he said, when the puck bounced off Henri Richard’s backside and somehow found its way into the net; ‘yes,’ nodding his head, as if he had seen the goal shaping up, as if it was a classic example of the skill for which the Montreal Canadiens were famous. ‘It was a fluke,’ I said scornfully, looking at Uncle Reginald who winked at me and shook his head slightly. It seemed to me that, as well as being a warning, the wink was also meant to tell me that he, too, was thinking of my father.
I remembered the way my father had acted the last few times we had gathered for a game. For someone who knew so much about hockey, he had been very subdued while watching it. He had sat there, in the corner armchair, staring at the television set, speaking only when someone spoke to him, smiling when the Habs scored, or rather when, by the cheer that went up, it was evident that the Habs had scored, for he hadn’t seemed to notice until then.
Halfway through the second period, with the Habs down 4–3 but coming back, Aunt Phil started in with her very annoying habit of calling the Leafs ‘the Leaves’.
‘It’s not the Leaves,’ I said. ‘It’s the Leafs.’
‘The plural of leaf is leaves, is it not?’ Aunt Phil said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but no-one calls them that. They’re called the Leafs.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know why, they just are.’
‘Well that’s not good enough for me. I’ll call them the Leaves until someone shows me why I shouldn’t call them that.’
‘Didn’t I just show you?’ I said. I could just see her correcting this ‘mistake’ in the next edition of The Daily Chronicle, the Leafs turning up as the Leaves all over the sports page.
Then Father Seymour joined in, joking about Protestants giving their team a name that contained a mistake in spelling, thereby leaving millions of people with no choice but to make the same mistake, over and over. ‘Well, I won’t make it,’ Aunt Phil said.
‘They score,’ screamed Danny Gallivan, and he didn’t mean the Habs. I felt like telling Aunt Phil that it was her fault. I knew that because I had taken her up on it, she would say ‘Leaves’ as often as possible throughout the evening and I knew that this would so irritate me that the Canadiens were bound to lose. I had a theory that any team’s fortune depended on the mood of their fans, the spirit in which they viewed the game. I further believed that, on any particular night, this mood, this spirit, was the same among all their fans throughout the country. At this very moment, all across the country, I believed, Habs fans were becoming irritated, and this did not bode well for their team. It was still possible to turn the mood around, however. All we had to do was concentrate, focus on the game, try to ignore everything else.
At the start of the third period, I set about doing exactly that. I lay down on the floor in front of the television set and had soon regained my concentration to the point where the Habs scored to make it 5–4 when Father Seymour sat down on the floor beside me. I knew what was coming. It was his make-contact-with-the-boy routine. I could imagine how Aunt Phil and Sister Louise were smiling at each other, no doubt charmed by the sight of Father Seymour doing what they thought he did best. ‘Hello Draper Doyle,’ he said, sitting cross-legged beside me. He picked up my Pepsi and took a sip from it, and as if by this, some sort of bond had been established between us, laid his arm lightly on my shoulder.
‘Do you know what the CH on Montreal’s uniform stands for, Draper Doyle?’ Father Seymour said.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘Canadiens/Habitants.’ Father Seymour said nothing, only looked around the room as if to see if anyone had heard us. Then he informed me that CH were the letters with which the words ‘church’ began and ended. I nodded and went back to watching the game. I tried to think of a way to hurry his routine to its inevitable conclusion before the Leafs scored again.
‘But you know,’ he said, ‘the word means nothing unless “u r” in it.’ I must have looked mystified, for he laughed. ‘Do you get it, Draper Doyle?’ he said, looking around the room. ‘U r in church. The word “church” means nothing unless u r in it.’
I rolled my eyes and, once again, rather nervously this time, Father Seymour looked around the room. I considered pointing out that UR stood for Uncle Reginald who hadn’t been inside a church in twenty years, but thought better of it. Then he got up and went back to standing between Aunt Phil and Uncle Reginald, his arms folded, eyes intently focused on the television set.
Once again, I set about concentrating on the game. By now, however, my mood was all wrong. There was no way the Canadiens would win with me feeling so anxious and irritated. ‘They score,’ screamed Danny Gallivan, and once again he didn’t mean the Habs. The Leafs had put one into the empty net to make it 6–4, which was how it ended. When the siren sounded to end the game, I saw that Father Seymour was looking at me as if he was about to say something. The Leafs had won, Uncle Reginald said, despite Richard’s fluky goal and despite the infallibility of our team’s coach. It was obvious that Mary and my mother were delighted to have witnessed one of Montreal’s rare defeats, though they didn’t dare show it openly, what with everyone else looking the way they normally did at wakes. Mary gave me one of her ‘inside I’m celebrating’ looks and my mother kept her head down to hide a smile that was pulling at the corners of her mouth.
‘Toronto 6 – Montreal 4,’ Mary said.
‘That’s nothing,’ said Father Seymour. ‘It’s only one game.’
‘But it was the first game,’ I shouted at him, on the verge of tears. ‘The first game!’ by which I meant not only the first of the season, but the first since my father had died, a fact which, though it had gone unmentioned, had obviously been on everyone’s mind.
‘Don’t you speak to me like that, young man,’ said Father Seymour, advancing towards me, then looking at my mother in a kind of ‘I really think that was uncalled for’ sort of way.
‘Draper Doyle didn’t mean anything by that, Father,’ my mother said, her voice strained with embarrassment. ‘He’s just tired, that’s all. Apologize to Father Seymour, Draper Doyle.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, feeling my face flush as Father Seymour, rising on his toes, looked down at me. My apology seemed to settle things. ‘The Habs will win the next one, Draper Doyle,’ he said. I nodded and gave him the smile I knew everyone was waiting for.
The prevailing opinion was that the game was a minor setback, the kind of defeat that would make victory that much sweeter when it came. Of course, there was still one thing left to do. We had to wait for the knellephone to ring, for Millie Barter to break the cold-war silence for as long as it took the phone to ring three times. It had been ten minutes since the game ended, and the phone on top of the television set had yet to ring.
‘She’s making us wait,’ Aunt Phil said. ‘She always does.’
We sat there for another ten minutes, in silence now that the TV had been turned off. We sat there, looking at that mournfully black phone until it rang at last, the first ring causing all of us to jump, then the second ring, then finally the third which trailed off into a kind of shrill silence.
‘Ask not for whom the phone rings,’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘It rings for us.’
Because I had always gone to bed right after the game and the next morning had gone to mass before breakfast, the hockey game and the mass, separated only by an interval of dreamless, timeless sleep, had seemed to run together. The Sunday after the Habs lost their home opener was no different. Weary from having stayed up late, I only half heard what the priest was saying, and the fact that the priest was Father Seymour, whose voice I had also heard throughout the game the night before, further added to my confusion. As I stood there in the pew, still half asleep, the dreams I had been too tired to have the night before began, snatches of Father Seymour’s mass mixing with the play-by-play of both Danny Gallivan and Foster Hewitt, so that a kind of hockey liturgy went running through my mind, a strange game in which there were swirling litanies of saints and hockey players, and the Habs and the Leafs were being asked to pray for one another, a game in which St Peter was ‘ad libbing his way to centre ice’ and Toe Blake was saying, ‘Upon this Rocket, I will build my Church.’
I saw the referee and two opposing centremen line up for the face-off. But instead of dropping the puck, the referee broke it in half, held the pieces above his head for a moment, then gave one piece to each player. ‘Do this in memory of me,’ he said. Then, at the sound of the angelus bells, I thought our phone was ringing, ringing three times for someone or something that was lost. I turned and, looking out through the halo of one of the saints in the stained-glass window beside the pew, I saw my father, walking slowly up Fleming Street, his hands in his pockets, as if he was headed to work, headed to The Daily Chronicle perhaps, despite the fact that it was Sunday morning.
Through the yellow-tinted glass of the halo of St Anthony I saw him stop suddenly and turn towards the church, then raise one arm as if to wave to me. Then I saw that there was a puck in his hand. He held it to one side of his head, between thumb and forefinger. He might have been a hockey player, posing with the puck he had used to reach some milestone in his career. But he kept glancing back and forth from me to the puck, a look of quizzical distress on his face.
I decided to wave to him, to tell him to come inside with the rest of us. I removed my hand from the pew in front of me, the hand which, as it turned out, was all that was keeping me up, for I had been asleep on my feet and now woke to find that I had fallen forward against the pews, and then to the floor. I sprawled out on the kneeler, my legs on either side of it, wrapping my arms around it and resting my head against the soft cushion. I would quite certainly have gone to sleep had my mother not reached down and, without so much as taking her eyes off her prayer book, grabbed hold of my blazer collar and pulled me to my feet.
