All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  “And Philomena listens…”

  “Philomena never just listens – she sits behind me and smiles.”

  He reached across the table to Elise and took her hand, lifting it to his lips. “Serious is as serious does, girl. What I do is sing the song.” And he tasted the soft flesh between her fingers, tonguing the little web of flesh, holding her eye with his, and then he said, almost growling at her, “You don’t know…you can’t know nothing about me, nothing about what I be doing when I play, when I sing the song, ’cause when I sing about all the ghosts I got in me… I am one fucking Lazarus…”

  He picked up his knife and fork to finish eating his steak. She had not touched hers. She had a feeling that came at her from out of nowhere, a feeling that she could taste death in the onions, on her lips. She took a lipstick from her pocket and while T-bone cut up his meat she half-turned away from him and reddened her mouth. She took a deep breath and licked her lips. She liked the taste of lip gloss, and also the taste of damp from the garden. She said she was going to get herself dressed and go out and take a little air again on the porch, with Philomena. “Looks like there’s a break in the rain.”

  She had intended to saunter out of the kitchen but instead hurried to the bedroom, and with her back to the mirror she got dressed quickly. Philomena, lying on the bed, said, “He’s singing that fucking consumption song again…”

  She put on her coat in the kitchen, hugging it close around her hips. She picked up the puppet and her car keys.

  “That’s a good-looking T-bone you leaving there,” he said.

  Elise said that maybe she would come back another night but not to eat. He gave her a humming laugh of approval. “Yes, yes,” he said. She started down the dark hallway, Philomena hanging head-down as she went. “So long, big guy,” Philomena said. “It was real.”

  T-bone, who was working hard with his knife around the bone of his steak, listening to the click click of her high heels, called out, “Don’t forget. Sweet meat’s closest to the bone,” and he wagged his knife at the door to the hallway that she’d left open. “I got to get me a light in that hall, man.” He took a sip of whisky, picked up the bone and chewed on it, sucking the bone clean.

  “An’ I don’t need no loose shoes.”

  He was in his bare feet.

  INTRUSIONS

  1

  Dusk, and once again Mildred Downs, dressed in a black blouse and a long black skirt, sat in a rocking chair on the front verandah of her stone house. She clutched a blanket around her shoulders and settled her Siamese cat in her lap. The dark green blinds in the windows of the big house were drawn. When she wanted to close herself off completely from the street, she unrolled a canvas awning down to the old wisteria that grew along the verandah railing, clusters of pale mauve flowers hanging from the vines.

  Her husband had drowned in the spring in Lake Scugog, and since then she had taken to sipping sherry in the afternoon and green chartreuse at night. Sometimes on hot nights she put a cube of ice in the chartreuse. She slept fitfully at night, afraid that if she fell soundly asleep she might forget to wake up. She believed that several light sleeps during the day were good for her. She liked to sit as still as she could in the rocking chair, holding the cat in her lap. “I can keep my body so breathless,” she whispered to the cat, “that I don’t even hear the beating of my own heart.” When she slept, she moaned and rocked in the chair.

  As soon as she fell asleep, the cat leapt to the floor, went down the flagstone stairs and crossed the lawn and climbed into the tall sugar maple tree. Her son, Henry, was standing in the shadow of the awning. He was lean and angular and in his early thirties and he had his mother’s pale, almost colourless blue eyes. He didn’t like the cat. “Let it fend for itself,” he told her when she woke up and wondered where the cat was. “It kills birds.” As he said this, she touched the hollow of her cheek and sighed. “There are hard truths,” she said. “Hard truths you’ve never had to deal with, thank your lucky stars.” He stepped back into the shadow of the lowered awning, tying the cord into little loops. He offered to make tea. “No,” she said, “I’ll have a glass of sherry. There’s a time for everything.”

  “So there is, Mother. So there is. Go back to sleep.”

  When she woke, the sun had gone down. Though it was a moonless night, the sky was blue. She heard the shrill cries of children chasing each other in the dark at the back of the house. They sound like seagulls, she thought. She was angry. She had heard sea-gulls crying when they’d brought her husband’s body ashore, broken by rocks in the cold lake. Bloated lamprey eels were fastened to his legs and stomach. “This is unfair, this is unfair,” she had cried over and over, beating her fists on the sand. “Goddamn unfair.” She had boarded up the windows of their summer cottage, nailed the doors shut, then suddenly, with an air of vengeful disdain, she had sold it at a loss. “Let some other fool get the blood sucked out of him.”

  The screeching children were at the side of the house, hooting and crying. Mildred picked up a small mallet. There was an oak end table by the verandah railing and, on the table, a brass bell from the bridge of a small yacht. Henry had bought the bell years ago in a pawnshop and had given it to his father as a birthday present. His father, who had been a ham radio operator and built small-scale model schooners as a hobby, had laughed and said, “Whenever there’s trouble, bang the bell. Lord knows, no one will come, but bang the bell anyway.”

  Mildred banged the bell. She listened to the echo clang down the lane. Then there was silence. Her heart was pounding. “You stupid children,” she called out, “get away from here. You’re a menace. I won’t have it.” She held her breath, listening. When she was certain the children had crept back through the trees, she went into the house and called upstairs to Henry, opened the liquor cabinet that was inlaid with copper and tortoiseshell, and poured two glasses of sherry. She always had Hunter’s sherry before supper.

  Henry stood in the centre of the living room, facing the drawn blinds in the bay windows. He had long arms and large hands and a loping stride that made him seem boyish. Mildred adjusted the hour hand in the brass boulle clock on the marble mantelpiece and then lit a match. “It’s bad luck,” he said, “to chase young children away. They’ll come back to haunt you.” She lit the six candles of a candelabra that was standing on a side table. Like his mother, he had high cheekbones and hollows in his cheeks and something mournful in the way he stood with his head cocked to one side. “I’ve come home for good,” he said. “I’m home to stay for good.”

  “Have another sherry,” she said. “And whose good do you have in mind?”

  “I need a whisky,” he told her. “I need something strong.”

  “Well, water it down,” she said. “Your face flushes all red when you drink whisky. Your father couldn’t drink either, he was always flush-faced.”

  Since her husband’s death she had held off loneliness and the panic of loneliness with a stern composure, a composure that gave her a severe but attractive dignity. Some mornings when she woke and lay in bed with her eyes closed, she was sensually aware of her own stillness, her repose, and in repose, she thought she could actually feel the comforting weight of silence, a weight like the spent body of her husband after he’d made love to her. That was when she had felt closest to him, when he’d lain exhausted and thankful on her body. She regretted that she had not learned this composure earlier because her husband, Tom, so bluff and good-natured and full of yearning and rash bursts of generosity, had always embarrassed her, suddenly giving her gifts and wanting to know her thoughts. “If I talk to the whole world on my radio at night, why can’t I talk to you?” he’d said, sitting beside her on the bed. “So tell me what you’re thinking.” This had left her feeling sheepish and guilty. Twisting the silk straps to her nightdress, she hadn’t known what to say, what he wanted to hear. “I love you,” she’d said at last, but he’d said, “No, no, not that. What are you really thinking?” She had hugged the pillow and
said, “Nothing,” and he had yelled, “Don’t lie to me. Not in our own bed.” Now, she wished that instead of telling him the truth and weeping, she had been able to confront him with the stern composure she’d shown on the day that they had buried him. Even the winds had been still on that day on the high cemetery hill, so that the sun had felt closer and stronger and, shielding her eyes with her hand through the prayers, she had felt suddenly in touch with her own strength. The very earnest priest had said, trying to console her, “Well, he’s in the embrace of God.” She had startled him, saying, “He wanted to know me and I don’t think he ever did, because he didn’t know he knew all there was to know, and that’s a fact.”

  “A fact?” he said.

  “That’s right. And facts hurt.”

  She turned away from Henry and put her glass of sherry on the side table and laid her hand on a small hunched dark bronze figure standing to the side of the candelabra. “Your father was a generous man,” she said. “I remember when we were in Paris and we went into a gallery somewhere around rue du Bac and I had always loved Rodin, and there it was, this very maquette of the big Balzac statue that’s up by La Coupole, and so he bought it for me. Oh, that was years ago when no one wanted Rodin and you could get him for a song. He was a very kind and generous man.”

  “La Coupole?”

  “Really, Henry. You shouldn’t be coming home, you should be going away, out into the world, out of yourself.”

  “My father didn’t know any more about La Coupole than I do.”

  “That’s no tone to take toward your father.”

  “He didn’t give a damn about Paris. He wanted to go to Vladivostok.”

  “Where?”

  “Vladivostok. With Nikolai.”

  “Oh, that dreary little man. He had one of those dreadful flat faces. Thank God he disappeared. I still wish I could find out what he stole.”

  “He didn’t steal anything. He just took off. And that’s what Dad wanted to do, too, though I guess he did it the only way he knew how.”

  “Oh,” she said and clapped a hand over her eyes. He let her stand there like that, her long bony fingers covering her eyes, and then he said softly, “You’re peeking, that’s not fair,” and he laughed, saying, “I miss old Nikolai.” He had been the gardener around the house and summer cottage, a hunched old handyman who’d been in the Czar’s navy as a boy in Vladivostok, and then he had worked for years in mining camps inside the Arctic Circle. At the cottage he’d crouched on his haunches at the end of the dock and told Henry about men who had got lost in the deep Arctic nights of deep snows, and then when they were found in the spring they were only skeletons hanging by their snowshoes, the shoe-webbing tangled in the top branches of the trees after the snows had melted. He’d seen a government handbill that had said: COME TO SASKATCHEWAN and because he didn’t know where Saskatchewan was, he’d gone, working on a feed-and-fertilizer tanker out of the Black Sea. But he’d never gotten to the prairies. He’d said, “Even men who have two good legs dream they are cripples,” and he’d laughed and tousled Henry’s hair, and Tom had said, “What a terrible hard life you’ve had, Nikolai.”

  “Hard, okay,” Nikolai said. “But no terrible.”

  “No?”

  “No. You’ll see. In one hundred years it could be very beautiful, this life.”

  Then, Nikolai was gone. There was no word, no note, only a pair of canvas work gloves tacked to the garden shed door. For weeks Tom was strangely unsettled. “I think somehow he was my legs,” he told Henry. He talked for hours in the night to towns all over the world on his ham radio, suddenly angry and berating people he didn’t know, people he had never talked to before. Then he wandered into the spare room that his wife had covered from floor to ceiling and wall-to-wall with mirrors, a black steel ballet barre bolted to the wall – and when he’d walked into the room and found her limbering up wearing black leotards, seeing that her image disappeared down reflected tunnels of cold light, he’d said, “Jesus, it’s like being swallowed up inside a Fun House.”

  “This is my room,” she’d said. “I expect to be left alone.” He had gone out onto the verandah and given the bell one good clang and had never spoken of Nikolai again.

  “He had a flat face,” Mildred said. “You cannot trust people with flat faces. Your father had a good nose, what they called an aquiline nose, and a good firm jaw.”

  “And he had a good life,” Henry said softly.

  “Yes,” she said, ignoring the wryness in his tone, “but you’re too morbid about him. It’s morbid the way you ring that bell in the morning and sit scrunched up in his chair in his study with the door closed, suffocating with those model boats. I never understood the hours he gave to those boats.”

  “He sailed the seas in the palm of his hand, Mother.”

  “It was the oddest thing,” she said. “I saw him staring so hard one day at a boat in his hand and he suddenly crushed it, and then smiled at me as if he’d made a mistake, some kind of big mistake that had nothing to do with the boat, like when we were children and did something wrong and we wanted it to be right, but you knew it never could be right.”

  “He had his own reasons. I never understood why he was so generous.”

  “It seemed perfectly straightforward to me,” she said.

  “Maybe it was a kind of despair,” he said. “Maybe he gave things away so he could be sure that there was at least a little generosity somewhere in the world. That’s when I felt close to him.”

  “It’s not how I knew him.”

  “No?”

  “He was never desperate with me.”

  The cat leapt into her lap. “It’s strange, Henry, that you should feel so close to him and not to me because I was the one who always made sure you were sent away to the best boarding schools. Let me tell you, your father’s generosity was just his way of hiding away from all of us. He hid who he was, and he turned whatever he gave us into a kind of blackmail. We were always in his debt. Sometimes, when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I mean his silence, and I was just about to scream at him, he’d suddenly give me something so beautiful I wouldn’t know what to say. So I wouldn’t say anything, and he’d get really mad at me. And sour and sullen. All those gifts of his became like little deaths, hoarded little deaths. And, certainly something died in me when he died but now I don’t owe him anything. And,” she said, reaching out to Henry, “you come home from one of the finest teaching positions in the country, with no woman and no ambition. It’s preposterous. Your father became a rich man by making men believe they owed him something, and now you come home as if you owe no one anything, not even an explanation. It’s unfair.”

  “Of course, it’s unfair,” he said.

  “What do you mean, of course? You had everything, everything I could give, and now that you’re home you insist on sleeping in the attic room, as if somehow you’re in the wrong house, trying to hurt me.”

  “Why would I want to hurt you, Mother?”

  “I just feel it,” she said with a little coquettish whine. She lifted the cat out of her lap and pulled a quilted comforter around her legs. A window was open and there was the tang of early snow in the air. “I don’t know,” she said. “I honestly don’t know why you’d want to hurt your mother.”

  “Well, if you don’t know,” he said, touching her shoulder and then her cheek, “who does?”

  He poured himself another whisky.

  “You know what Nikolai used to tell me?” he said. “It was some kind of old proverb… If you meet a Bulgarian, beat him. He will know the reason why.” He laughed so hard he got a stitch in his side and had to hold his breath until he could straighten up. He stood in front of her, stirring the ice cubes in his glass with his finger.

  “What a terrible habit, Henry,” she said with a little curl of disdain in her lip. “Where in the world did you pick that up?”

  “Out in the wide, wide world,” he said. “At school. You pick up all kinds of bad habits from children.
They attach themselves to you, they cling to you.” He tugged the cord to one of the green blinds in the front bay window and it clattered up into a tight roll, but there was no sudden burst of light. It was the dead of night outside. “Don’t you think,” he said, “that this is all a little too deliberate, I mean keeping the blinds down all the time?”

  “This is the room where I sat after he died.”

  “In the living room,” he said and laughed quietly.

  “I swear I don’t know what’s going on in your mind. I don’t know why you say the things you do or what you think about anything.”

  “I may not know either,” he said.

  “Well, it’s not necessary to mock me,” she said, brushing a wisp of hair away from her face. “It’s not necessary to come home and mock whatever contentment and control I’ve been able to find.”

  “Are you content, Mother?”

  “At least I know how to show some composure. Now take your finger out of your drink.”

  “You love to talk to me like I’m a child,” he said, watching the cat lick its forepaws.

  “Well, you are my child.”

  “I am indeed,” he said.

  “Well, don’t forget it,” she said.

  “I won’t. I can’t.”

  She sipped her glass of sherry and settled into a heavy wingback chair, her eyes closed. With her head to the side, she was soon asleep. He began to hum, a dirging sound, and then to sing quietly, staring down at his mother:

  My eyes are dim,

  I cannot see,

  I have not brought my specs

  With me,

  But there are rats, rats,

  Big as alley cats,

  At the door, at the door…

  2

  He stood in front of the large bathroom mirror, drawing silver-handled brushes that his father had given him through his hair, and then buffed his nails and went downstairs to the dining room where his mother, with a silk shawl around her shoulders, sat at the long oak table. She’d recently taken to ordering in meals from a local French restaurant, Le Paradis, who’d delivered soup and duck confit to the back door by bicycle courier. He was late, having changed his shirt and trousers after playing games with children in among the trees behind the house. She was reading a slender book and seemed in a state of such repose that he hesitated on the last stair, unsure if he should enter the room and disturb her silence. She looked surprisingly frail and shrunken, as if she had never been young, and as he rubbed his big hands together he found it hard to believe that he’d ever come out of her womb, come out from between those thin thighs, but then she stirred and snapped her book shut. He strode to the table, saying with loud heartiness, “And what are you reading tonight, Mother?”