The Sign on My Father's House

by Tom Moore

  All was Ellen. Ellen was all.

  We soon settled into a routine. It became almost normal to sit beside her as she discussed socialization pressures on the Yanomami. The only pressures I could feel were in my heart and groin. Even now, when I remember those days, she always appears as a golden glow on a dark, cloudy day. Her smile stopped traffic and sent my poor heart into flips.

  We were sitting in the cafeteria one busy lunch day when a jarring voice startled me.

  “Felix!” I looked up and saw Victoria Spaulding and Gib Martin looking down at me. “I think it’s terrible the way you’re treating poor Tammy!” Victoria said none too quietly.

  Ellen ignored her.

  “What?” I almost said, “Who?”

  “To break off a relationship is one thing, but what you did was shameful.”

  “But I . . .”

  She continued, “And sneaking around behind her back for weeks before you even told her the truth! Shame on you! You give all men a bad name!”

  Gib stood silently beside her.

  “I wanted to tell her,” I said.

  “See this tray of lunch?” Victoria demanded. “It’s for Tammy! She’s been crying in her room for three days! You both fill me with contempt.”

  Ellen finally spoke.

  “He just didn’t want to be with her! Too bad!”

  Victoria said, “This can’t come to any good.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “A relationship started with this kind of pain and deceit can only end in pain and deceit.”

  Ellen said, “You look to your own relationship.”

  Victoria swept from the room and left the words hanging in the air. Then people went back to their lunch, and the noises of plates, cutlery, glasses, cups, and saucers came in like a tide to redeem the situation.

  “Wow, that was awkward,” Ellen said, glancing to see my reaction.

  “Too bad it had to happen. Any of it,” I said.

  That night, I sat alone in my room. I didn’t know where Malacat was, and in the square outside, a cold rain was falling into a world of wet snow. I opened my window and felt the chill. Across the square I could see Burke House in the distance, where lived my former girlfriend, Tammy Fagan. But I felt little regret for my sin against her even in that chill wind. No tears came to my eyes, just a heavy sensation around my heart.

  I took off my clothes and looked around for my pyjamas. I turned and saw my reflection in the mirror. I walked toward it and saw a new human being, myself. I was taller than I remembered, and my neck, shoulders, and chest had started to fill out. Once, not long ago, I had been the height of one of Dick’s dolls and had lived in a world of childhood. That doll was gone, replaced by what? I had become a university student, had broken my first heart, had knocked down John Malacat, had fallen in love. This new me lived in a new world of pain inflicted and pain received. Ah, life!

  I unlocked my top desk drawer and took out an envelope I had put there when I first moved into 407 Doyle House. I took out a wrinkled hundred-dollar bill, looked at it for a moment, then put it back in the envelope and sealed it with a quick lick and a press. I printed three words on the front of the envelope: Miss Tammy Fagan. Next day, I surreptitiously dropped it in her mailbox. Blood money.

  But the golden dream continued: breakfasts together, tunnels to class, lunches together, tunnels again, and evening meals together. Ah, the evenings! Only poetry can capture it. Perhaps Hopkins:

  Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

  Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  Oh, me! I sighed through the livelong day and did not wake up until the following year. I was in thrall like the knight in Keats’s La Belle Dame sans Merci.

  Malacat and everyone in my life at that time appeared slightly out of focus, as if they were moving through a fog, their bodies walking in slow motion. Reality and correct speed occurred only with Ellen Monteau.

  She and I soon tired of the study hall sessions and repaired to her room or mine to be together undisturbed. Library studies progressed to fleeting kisses, and kisses were soon promoted to ecstatic necking. I longed for the sexual graduation. When it came, it was a little anticlimactic, however. I had anticipated bells ringing from the seventh heaven, angels, archangels, and assorted heavenly hosts transforming 407 Doyle House into the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. I had anticipated the “Ode to Joy,” complete with cannons firing in the (my) closing movements.

  It was good, as all sex is good, but there was a peremptory manner in Ellen that troubled me. She made love as if she were on her way to an appointment. There was the act, a bit of puffing and moaning, then the finish and the cleanup. But no cigarette. No glazed-eyed reflection. No smiling ecstasy.

  I happily consoled myself that I was lucky to be in bed with her at all. My friends would have lined up to tell me it was more than I deserved.

  One rare evening when she and I were not together, Malacat lay on his bed reading Playboy, and I lay on mine reading the Bible. The big overhead light was off, and we read by our desk lamps, which were pivoted around to the beds. “For where ever your treasure is, there your heart is, too,” I read aloud from the Book of Matthew.

  “What?”

  “Oh, just this part I’m reading about a fellow who finds a treasure in a field.”

  “Yeah, what happened?”

  “He sells everything he has to buy the field.”

  “Good thinking, so he can own the treasure. Read a bit of it to me. Not too long, is it?”

  I read it again, finishing with, “For where ever your treasure is, there you heart is, too.”

  “Jeez, that’s good,” said Malacat. “Let me see that for a minute.” He reached over.

  “Let me see your Playboy.”

  “Sure. Great article on the Kennedy assassination. Oswald didn’t act alone. There were three shooters.”

  “No!”

  So we exchanged, and I lay reading Playboy, and Malacat read the Bible under our separate lights as the night swirled in wind eddies in the little square below.

  It would be wrong to say my term marks suffered terribly, but they suffered. I got a few A’s, but no continuation of my pre-law scholarship. I told Malacat I didn’t mind because I was unsure about attending law school. He just shook his head.

  The academic year ended after spring semester, but Ellen and I stayed for summer school. We did a few courses, but it was mainly to be together. In September 1970, I began my third year of the B.A. program.

  Malacat, especially, marvelled at my good fortune with the beautiful Ellen. I earned a modicum of respect from him and his buddies when I walked into the room with “Helen of Troy,” as he called her.

  “It’s Ellen, not Helen,” I said.

  “The face that sank a thousand ships,” he misquoted.

  “Whatever!”

  She came to the room one evening when John and I were reading. She sat on my bed and kissed me. John put down his book and was about to leave us alone.

  “How are you, John? Been home lately?” she asked.

  He turned from the door. “No, I pretty much stick around MUN till the semester is over.”

  “Must be nice to own a business like your family does.”

  “Just Dad running the club now. He and Mom are split.”

  “Oh, so sorry to hear that. Divorce is horrid for everyone.” She sat in my chair, wearing sneakers, jeans, and a loose hockey sweater. But no outfit could detract from the high cheekbones and lips carved by God. Her eyes were big and round, and their green irises shone brilliantly no matter what she was wearing. John and I just looked at her for a long, silent moment.

  “Felix, I’m going ou
t for a few hours,” he announced.

  “See you,” I said.

  “Bye, John.”

  When the door locked, she started to talk about the Yanomami, but I got up and pressed the button on the doorknob. Then I applied the tape.

  As the end of that academic year approached, Ellen decided we should get married. I wanted to wait until one of us could make some money, but I was outvoted. On Easter weekend, I borrowed a friend’s car, and we went home to Curlew to tell our parents. Father was back from Saglek in Labrador. He had lately been working on Canadian Marconi Communication’s towers across the north. I think it was part of NORAD’s early warning system against a Russian attack. He liked the manual work and the pay, although he was getting a bit old for the real strenuous stuff, and a bit tired of it.

  “So, this is the new fiancée,” he says, looking at Ellen.

  “You know Ellen Monteau,” I said.

  “I surely do. Married to poor Dick White and buried him two years ago.” Father was never one to say the right thing.

  “My mother still lives in Petley,” Ellen said.

  “Yes, how is Maud doing these days, she and . . . ?”

  “Gerald. They’re doing well. He works with Eastern Bakery, driving deliveries.”

  In truth, Gerald had lost his licence that summer for drunk driving. I’m sure Father knew this, but for once he held his tongue.

  It was a Sunday, and Shirley had cooked a turkey, an American affectation we embraced in Newfoundland since the last war. Shirley still looked great. Her hair was dark and soft, but a few lines were creeping across her face, lines of worry about Father, perhaps. She was at the sink peeling vegetables. Ellen was sitting with Father and me.

  “Yes, they deliver to all the stores on the Avalon,” Father said. “The bread of life,” he added, senselessly, looking down at his hands on the table.

  “Man does not live by bread alone,” I observed.

  “How true it is!” Father said. “I’ve been reading the Bible lately.”

  “He has, you know,” said Shirley from the sink. “He loves it.” A cigarette burned on the counter beside her.

  “Oh, I had to skip the Old Testament, too boring. But I liked the evangelists, and the stories of the early Church in Acts and the Epistles. Know who my favourite character is?” He looked around the kitchen for an answer.

  “Jesus?” Ellen asked.

  “Good guess, but no. St. Paul. There’s a fellow who stirred things up. There’s a fellow who challenged authority. Had his own vision clear in his head and was prepared to lay it out for people regardless of the cost.”

  “Same as Jesus,” I said.

  “But Jesus had the big payoff, the big reputation. Son of God. Started his own church. He was only at it for three years, and even then He got himself killed. It was up to Paul and the others to sail the seas and do the spadework. Get the thing started. Know what I mean?” He looked at Ellen, who didn’t respond, but just glowed in some collusion with the sunlight from the kitchen window. Father looked away from her to me. “Know what I mean, Felix?”

  “Yes, I think I do.” The correct answer.

  “Reforming the society you live in is an important part of life, Felix. We stood up to Joey Smallwood, and now my mind is turning to the churches.”

  At the sink, Shirley dropped a pan.

  “Yes, the churches,” Father continued. “An outdated crowd of hypocrites who keep us in the eighteenth century.”

  “Surely, Mr. Ryan, the churches do much good with their charities and overseas work,” Ellen said.

  “Not really, dear. They keep those people in holy servitude and offer food at a price to the starving poor. Cultural and spiritual genocide!”

  I’d come home with my girlfriend to announce our marriage, and Father was trying to change the world. A big mistake to give that man a Bible. Like giving an arsonist a can of gasoline.

  “But the churches run education here in Newfoundland,” Ellen said.

  “Child, child,” Father said to her. “We have the worst education system north of the Rio Grande River. It stops at grade eleven, when every sensible system has twelve years of schooling. Many of our students can’t read. When they go to the mainland, they’re put back at least one grade, often two, because they are so poorly educated by the church-run school system here in Newfoundland. They know all about religion and nothing about mathematics. They know all about the Holy Trinity, but nothing about physics.”

  “Turkey’s almost ready,” Shirley said.

  “Good, I’ll help,” Ellen said.

  “Felix, don’t you see it?” He turned to me.

  “Yes, I read the Bible, too.” No lie there.

  “We’ve got to take them on. Challenge them!”

  “Just us?”

  “No, there must be hundreds of clear-thinking people in Newfoundland who are saying the same thing.” Spittle was appearing on his lip. “I bet some of them are just back from church and are saying it to themselves at their kitchen tables right now. Right?”

  “Saying what?”

  “Saying the whole thing is screwed up. The churches are leading us in the wrong direction. The school system is a senseless duplication of three sets of schools, board offices, personnel, and poor little Newfoundland pays for their wasteful hypocrisy. Good line! I must write that one down.” He rushed off to get a pencil.

  When he came back, we were all in the dining room at the table. He stood in the door holding a pencil and a Hilroy exercise book, all ready for the debate. But we had snookered him. He quickly recovered and sat, nodding toward Ellen.

  “Say a nice grace for us, Ellen.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know one,” she said.

  “Felix?” I shook my head.

  He looked at Shirley, then reached out and took her hand in his right and mine in his left. “Join hands,” he said to Ellen and me.

  We all linked hands around the turkey. “Father in Heaven, we are here in Curlew, joined in love. We ask You to bless this meat on our table and the four people who sit here able to eat it. Through Jesus’s name, amen.”

  We all smiled and let go hands. Shirley said, “Amen,” and I saw her looking at him with fondness, like she would at a wayward child.

  The meal was delicious: turkey, dressing, boiled potatoes, carrot, parsnip, turnip, cranberry sauce, and a trifle for dessert. Father even opened a bottle of cheap Niagara wine to celebrate the occasion. He filled our three glasses and lifted his water into the air. “I propose a toast,” he said, and rose to his feet.

  “I drink to the health and fortune of my only son, Felix, and his betrothed, Ellen. May you be happy in your marriage like Shirley and I are in ours.” I looked at Shirley, as she raised her glass and drank, as did we all. What a nice feeling I had! We settled in to finish the meal with cups of tea all round, delighted that Father had neglected his new crusade. Perhaps forgotten it.

  “Well, we have to go tell Ellen’s mom and Gerald our big news before we head back,” I said, getting up.

  “Of course, sure you do. Only right and proper,” he said.

  Shirley came over, put her arms around me, and gave me a kiss on the cheek. She smelled lightly of tobacco. She held me a second before she let go.

  Father shook my hand. “Good luck, Felix, and you always know where we are.”

  They both gave Ellen a hug.

  She was silent in the car as we approached the back road where Maud and Gerald lived in a trailer. Parked in the driveway was Gerald’s truck, and I pulled in beside it. It was three o’clock on Easter Sunday afternoon, but ours were the first tracks in the snow to the door. No one answered our brief knock, so we went in, Ellen first. The place was damp. The smell of fried fish and bacon permeated even the stink of cigarettes and stale beer. There had bee
n little attempt to tidy up for our visit, or even pick up the beer bottles in the small living room. Maud, sitting in front of a black and white TV, waved to us grandly. “Happy Easter,” she said. She was wearing a plaid housecoat over her pink pyjamas.

  “Happy Easter,” I replied.

  “Hi, Felix! Hi, sweetheart,” she said. “Want a beer?”

  Ellen said, “No, thanks. We just finished dinner at the Ryans’.”

  “That’s grand, darling,” she said. “Beer, Felix?”

  “Sure. Why not,” I said.

  She reached down to the floor beside her chair and plucked out a beer from a box just out of view. She popped it with the opener in her lap and handed it to me.

  “Thanks,” I said, and sat on the chesterfield across from her. Ellen joined me, but she was clearly troubled.

  “So, how you been, Felix?” Maud asked.

  “Just fine. Working away at the courses, trying to get ahead.”

  “Oh, you’ll get ahead. Ellen told me all about you and how smart you are. A lawyer, eh?”

  “Ellen sometimes exaggerates.”

  Maud smiled into her beer bottle. “What a pleasant young fellow you are. Isn’t he, darling?”

  “Yes, Mommy, he’s wonderful.”

  “And you’ve got quite a catch there, young man.” She pointed her bottle at Ellen. “The most beautiful girl who ever came out of Petley, or the whole bay.” She took a gulp of beer to drink to that.

  “She’s extraordinary,” I agreed.

  Maud thought about that for a minute, and then said quietly, “Oh, I was beautiful once. You ask your father. Ask Shirley.”

  “I certainly believe you. I’ve heard that myself.”

  “No! Who told you that?”

  “I don’t remember who, exactly.” I saw she was waiting eagerly, so I continued “I think it was . . . Mr. Williams.”

  “George Williams, from Curlew?” She smiled broadly now. “Well, that’s so nice. So very nice. He remembers me, eh?”