“It looks ridiculous. It’s not a pot.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s not a flowerbed.”
“It’s a deathbed,” she said firmly.
They divided the morning newspaper. He took the editorial section, she the sports pages.
“The Leafs lost,” she said.
“Oh yeah.”
“In sudden death,” she said.
He put his page down. “We’ve never talked very much, have we?”
“You mean talking talk, or real talk? We’ve always talked talk, if we had to.”
“Real talk,” he said.
“Well, I wouldn’t know what to say.”
“No.”
“Or why.”
“No.”
“Mother and Dad never seemed to need to talk very much.”
“Yes. I always thought that that’s what was so sane about them,” he said. “I mean, they seemed, I don’t know…”
“Together.”
“I suppose it’s because of them I’ve always known it was okay to have nothing to say.”
“We’re kind of accomplices,” she said.
“You mean the shop?”
“No. In solitude. We are accomplices in solitude.”
He looked into her eyes, at her painted tears, and said, “You know,” laughing, an unguarded laugh that she had almost never heard from him, “sometimes I think you are right out of your mind.”
She laughed, too, her sprightly laugh, and said, as if she needed to somehow reassure him, “If I’m out of my mind, it’s all right with me.”
On Sundays, after the taking of Communion, when the congregants turned to each other in their pews to shake hands, to embrace, she didn’t notice – as she eagerly clasped hand after hand – that some parishioners, confronted by her relentless goodwill, shied away from her.
Father Dowd noticed, and he wondered – the next time she came to confession, and she was now coming once a week though she had little or nothing to confess – if he shouldn’t try to speak to her about how dangerous candour is, how it does not bring out the best in most people but makes them feel inadequate, and he thought he should suggest that she be less effusive, less delighted by her own enthusiasms.
After Mass, however, out on the porch steps, when she took Father Dowd in a two-handed clasp, exuding all her open generosity of spirit, her seemingly guileless goodwill, he couldn’t resist: he held her with two hands himself.
“More and more there is a gladness in my heart,” she said as she backed down the stairs, calling out, “and don’t forget to pray for my son. He’s not in limbo. I don’t believe in limbo.”
One of the other priests, Father McClure, after lunch, as if he were having an idle thought between pitches as they watched a baseball game on television, said, “You know, Father Dowd, I’m not sure we should encourage that woman, all that ridiculous gushing good feeling… And those painted tears. Please…”
Father Dowd didn’t answer. Someone hit a home run for the Blue Jays and Father McClure stood up, clapping, enthusiastic.
For the annual Field Day held in the gym at the parish school, Alice sent, by the Kopff & Kopff delivery van, eight large icing-lathered cakes to the grade school homerooms – each of the cakes seeded with nickels, dimes, quarters, and one silver dollar. Lyle, as he banged his fists together in exasperation, told her, “This is not good. Not for you. Not for me. The expense, the expense to us out of pocket, and all the hours you take to make those cakes…”
Seated at her work table, she was building a tall cone of chocolate profiteroles, each pastry ball filled with cream – “wiring” the balls together with spun caramel. “For a person like me, who is a pastry chef,” she said, looking up at Lyle through filaments of caramel, gold in the light, “making a cake is as easy as falling down. Besides, I’m sure you’ve noticed that our business has probably tripled… The wives of the Knights of Columbus have done us no harm…”
“For Christ’s sake, they call you the Cake Lady.”
“That’s better than calling me a whore, which some did.”
“And you think gladness of heart is a defence…?”
“I don’t think like you do, not at all. I don’t need to defend myself. I’m guilty of nothing.”
He sighed, opened the ovens, and went back to ladling mounds of dough into the fire, singing over and over a gay little ditty that was trapped in his mind: I got plenty of nothing and nothing’s got plenty for me…
He tried to find in his head another song to sing.
He couldn’t.
None of this is fair, he thought, unsure of what was unfair as he stood among pleased customers who were lined up in front of the pastry showcases.
“Dessert is such a pleasure,” he said to a woman, startling her as she waited by the cash register. “Isn’t it?”
“Yes. Yes, it is,” she said defensively.
“Have a chocolate mousse tart,” he blurted out, “on the house.”
“Why, thank you, thank you. What an unexpected surprise.”
“Yes,” he said and gave her a big smile, pleased with himself.
Several teachers at the parish school, however, were not pleased with Alice’s cakes. They had not anticipated that several students, with more cake than they could eat, would start cake fights in the halls, lobbing gobs of icing against the walls, smearing cream across the chalkboards, fighting over the prize monies. And one irate mother complained that bigger boys had bullied all the quarters and silver dollars out of other children and had offered the money to her daughter if they could touch her bare breasts and she had let them touch her. She had come home sick from too much cake and icing, her jeans’ pockets heavy with coins and her training bra lost behind the playground chain-link fencing.
No one told Alice about these children.
Many parents did not want her told. They said it was terrible, given her generosity, that she – who had asked for nothing in return – should be blamed for the evil inclinations of some unruly children. “It is unbelievable that a guileless spirit should be told to stop,” one parent said at a meeting in the principal’s office, “and told to stop with all the meanness we can muster.”
Lyle got up from the living-room sofa. He heard her moaning, a deep pulsing moan that he could not ignore. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, listening. He felt a chill come over him, something deep, a ground chill. He had cocked a cold eye on her that morning and he had been astonished to see how frail she was, her skin translucent, almost a glazed tint of blue beneath the skin. He realized that she had been eating less and less, looking more and more pleased the less she ate.
He undid the laces of his shoes and in his stocking feet went stealthily up the stairs to her bedroom door that was ajar. She was sitting naked in shadow light in a rocking chair. He could see that she was cradling a bundle of white in her arms, but he couldn’t tell if the bundle was blankets or whether the blankets contained a doll, and for a shuddering moment he thought, What if it’s the child? knowing, since he had seen the boy in its tiny coffin, that it was not the child. She moaned again but she had, at the same time, such a contented look on her face, a look of such stillness and calm that he felt confused and ashamed for having, like a sneak in his own house, looked on her in her nakedness.
My God, he thought, hurrying downstairs, I’ve seen her like she’s never seen herself.
That week, a parent who was a lawyer announced to Father Dowd and the school principal, and then to the press, that his daughter – “a young girl having every expectation of becoming a successful teenage model” – had broken a front tooth on a penny in the Field Day cakes. At a small press conference on the school steps, he announced that he was suing the school and Alice Kopff for twenty-five thousand dollars. “I intended to be a model,” the chubby girl whined, showing a gap in her mouth to a photographer from the Sun.
Confronted at the shop by two newsmen who had been sent by their papers to speak to her, Alice
said simply, “I have done what I’ve done in memory of my own dead child.”
“Is that why the painted tears?” a reporter asked, snickering. “And what was the child’s name?”
“His name is a secret.”
“And the father?”
“He’s a secret, too. He doesn’t matter. That we do good is what matters. That we do good. Any priest will tell you that.”
“What about the lawyer, the twenty-five thousand?”
“I don’t know about any of that.”
The following day in the parish house, Father McClure slammed the Sun down on a table in front of Father Dowd.
“Do good,” he cried, “do good! Any priest will not tell you that…”
He was red in the face.
“Relax. Watch the baseball game.”
“Baseball… Do you realize what’s going on, Father Dowd? There’s upheaval in the classrooms, lawsuits, we’re giving scandal to the church in the press, and we’re here, you and me, yelling at each other…”
“I don’t know,” Father Dowd said. “She only wishes well, she only wants people to be happy.”
“Happy!” Father McClure said, almost sneering. “The message of the Cross is not happiness. Jesus did not die happy.”
It was the week of First Communion for the first-grade students at the parish school. Alice worked late Thursday and Friday, working by herself at the big stainless steel oven. The heat in the kitchen was intense. We could use more air, she thought. There would be almost three hundred parents and children at the Communion reception after Sunday Mass. Alice, going about her work, felt feverish and she knew that her face must be flushed because Lyle, before leaving the shop for home, had taken a long look at her – as if he thought he should caution her – but she had put her finger to her lips.
Then she had blown him a kiss and he had blushed.
On Sunday morning before the eleven o’clock Mass, the Kopff & Kopff van arrived at the side door to the reception hall. The delivery man carried in flat box after flat box stamped COMMUNION CUPCAKES: five hundred little cakes in round fluted paper cups. She enclosed a handwritten note to Father Dowd, explaining that these cakes were not only an original recipe, but just before the mould trays had gone into the oven she had taken a wafer of white chocolate and pressed it in under the cap of each cake so that when the cakes were baked the wafers would melt, would transform completely and become the cake, white and unseen, while still being chocolate, which, as best as she could understand, was what happened at Communion.
She wished him every happiness in Jesus.
The Communion cupcakes were a huge success, not just with the children but with the parents, too.
Father McClure was apoplectic.
“This is outrageous. This diminution, this belittlement of the Blessed Sacrament… She has to stop. An end must be made of it.”
Father Dowd reluctantly agreed and telephoned the Kopff house.
Lyle said that she had had a coffee with him, watered the flowers in the pram, and then had gone to the shop, saying that she wanted to sit alone on that Sunday afternoon in the empty kitchen.
“She looked very happy, almost blissful,” he told Father Dowd, who hurried to the shop and, finding the front door open, went in, hesitated, and then stepped around the cash register and counter into the kitchen.
“Welcome to the inner sanctum,” she said.
She was sitting in front of the big oven.
“I have been so happy all morning,” she said. “I’m so happy I could die. I could die and be happy with my little boy.”
He hesitated, afraid that any admonition or any cautioning word, would seem petty to her. He wanted to say something serious, but only as a warning of what to expect from Father McClure and others like him.
“Have a cupcake,” she said.
“Not just now.”
“Well, some white chocolate then,” and she handed him a tray of white chocolate wafers. “I’d be very hurt if you didn’t have one,” she said.
He took a wafer, bit into it, and swallowed.
She closed her eyes. He licked a leftover sweetness from his lips.
“I call to mind,” he said, almost in a whisper, “two lines of poetry I like very much…”
“Yes… I like poetry, too,” she said, smiling, eyes still closed.
“So do I,” he said.
Then he said softly,
A perfect paralyzing bliss
Contented as despair.
Folding her hands, she said, “I don’t know what that means.”
“Well, perhaps neither do I. It’s hard to know the meaning of what we say or do.”
“All I know is that everything means more than we think it does,” she said.
“I suppose,” he said. “I suppose that’s true. Though my friend, Father McClure, likes to say that all of this means less than meets the eye.”
“I spy with my little eye,” she said, opening one eye and giggling.
“Yes,” he said.
“That’s what I’ve always liked about you,” she said.
“What?”
“There are people who say yes and people who say no. You nearly always say yes. Mind you, I said yes once and look where it got me.”
“Where’s that?”
“Pregnant.” She laughed, taking a wafer of white chocolate herself. “And ever since, I’ve learned to live with death being alive in me.”
He lowered his eyes for a moment. Then, he almost whispered when he said, “About the Communion cupcakes…”
“The idea was so simple,” she said.
“Yes, I guess it was.”
“I guess so.”
“Well…” and resenting Father McClure, his sneering tone, he stood up, saying, “I must go…tickets for the baseball game, a 1:30 start. A kind parishioner gave me tickets for the Blue Jays game…”
“That,” she said, standing up to shake his hand, “was my dream, you know.”
“What?”
“That my boy would play second base for the Yankees. Happy Kopff at second base…”
He felt not only a sorrow for her but something harder, the loss of something he’d never had a chance to have.
He stepped out of the shop into the relief of afternoon sunlight.
Father McClure heard the nearby sirens in the parish house. He put his stole around his neck, ready for the worst, and hurried after the fire trucks.
Father Dowd, at the baseball game, was unhappy: the score was 3-2 for the Yankees.
Father McClure gave the Last Rites to dead Alice in the back of an ambulance. Father Dowd came home, pleased because the Blue Jays had beaten the Yankees in extra innings, 4-3.
“Our estimate,” the Fire Chief said to the press, “is that somewhere between 1:30 and 2:00, a fairly rare but known form of spontaneous combustion occurred. The technical name is pyrolysis, the transformation of a compound in dried-out old wood that is caused by heat. It seems the old wood over the big oven just burst into flames. You might recall the same thing happened in Perl’s Kosher Deli on Bathurst Street last year. She didn’t have a chance, the whole place turned incendiary, it went up in flames in no time flat.”
The funeral Mass at Blessed Sacrament was said by Father McClure. It was so crowded, with children especially, that latecomers had to stand on the church steps. In the pulpit, Father Dowd spoke of Alice’s unblemished goodwill and how the goodness of spirit can be infectious just as her mysterious generosity of spirit – born out of great loss but unsoured by loss – had been infectious in the community. Many in the pews wept as he lamented her passing: “She was so much on the side of life.”
Standing by the black limousine that was about to carry her coffin to the burial yard, Lyle thanked Father Dowd and said, “You know, what’s a mystery to me is that my family has been in one firestorm after another. First in Dresden, then my mother and father dying by fire, and now this. Alice up in flames.”
“Well, no, I hadn’t thought
of that,” Father Dowd said. “There seems to be so much I haven’t thought about her. I have the feeling I may have let her down.”
“Maybe.”
Lyle wryly laughed so loudly that Father Dowd looked at him with concern.
“Maybe,” he said, “it’ll be me in the fire next time.”
That evening, Lyle transplanted the impatiens and the dwarf pine out of the black wicker pram to the lawn, kneading the earth around the root. Then he emptied out all of the potting earth and put the pram at the curb for the garbage pick-up in the morning.
He remained inside the house for a week. One night he thought he heard her moaning in her room and he went to stand at the bottom of the stairs, even though he knew that she was not there. A second time, he blew her a kiss. “I owed you one,” he whispered. He saw no one for the week, not until the estate lawyer knocked on the door.
Over coffee and afternoon bitters, the lawyer explained that Alice’s will, though very simple, was complicated.
She had willed all her goods and possessions – a substantial account at the bank, her half-interest in Kopff & Kopff Bakery Shoppe, all her recipes, and her half-interest in the family house – to her dead child, Happy Kopff.
“Happy…”
“Don’t worry,” the lawyer said, “it’s complicated, but we’ll unravel whatever she’s done.”
PIANO PLAY
Al Rosenzweig was called Piano by his friends. He agreed to meet with me to eat a smoked meat sandwich at Switzer’s Deli. Piano was a big man who appeared affable because he was slow- moving and because of his ample pink cheeks and jowls. I knew he was a killer. The police knew he was a killer. They couldn’t prove it but they said they knew that after the Magaddino family from Buffalo had tried to kill Maxie Baker outside the Town Tavern so that the mob could take over the gambling that was controlled in Toronto by the Jews, Al had driven to Niagara Falls and it was believed that he had strangled two of Magaddino’s men with piano wire. But he was not known as Piano because of the wire. It was because he played the piano at a Bathurst Street high-rise social club for survivors of Shoah every Thursday night, where he liked to sing Irving Berlin and Cole Porter songs: Let’s do it / Let’s fall in love…
All the Lonely People Page 5