The Company We Keep

by Frances Itani

  NOW SHE SHIFTED her backpack over her shoulder. The arugula container knocked against her scapula. Film, she thought. Bette Davis, she thought. Bette as Charlotte in Now, Voyager. Charlotte had been locked inside a pattern of bending to the will of a controlling mother. Claude Rains had also starred in that film. Rains had a way of frowning with intensity, the implication being that his thoughts were superior, intelligence reaching into him from some far-off source. Paul Henreid was Charlotte’s love interest. Paul had a high forehead and carved profile that expressed sorrow even if all he did was turn his head to the side. It didn’t matter that Bette Davis shared the space with men who were cast in roles that portrayed them as having chiselled profiles and superior knowledge. She ate up the screen, and there was nothing her co-stars could do about it.

  Chiyo found it easy to identify with Charlotte. Five months after her mother’s death, she did not feel kindness, compassion, love each time she thought of her.

  I can face that, Chiyo told herself. I can face that shortcoming in myself, now that she’s gone. I can face the fact that I was a disappointment, that I did not produce grandchildren. My mother worked hard to raise me after Father died. She provided for the two of us in this house. She fought like a tiger to support, clothe and feed us both. She spent her entire childhood in a mountain shack. She never forgot the chill that drilled into her bones in the camp in winter. The experience affected her outlook for the rest of her life. For her, the world remained as it had always been: an unforgiving place. But I did not live in the camps. I have to be free of my mother’s experience. For once. For the first time. Even though I loved her.

  Chiyo felt tears welling. She remembered how her mother’s body had shrunk during illness, her limbs so thin they curled to her torso, leaving not so much as a dent in the mattress. She’d become weightless; Chiyo had no trouble lifting her into the tub to bathe her during her final days. Her mother had looked at her from the soothing water and cried. She had looked at Chiyo with love.

  Carry tiger to mountain.

  Chiyo reached into her pocket for a Kleenex and dabbed at her eyes. Her attention was caught by a sheet of paper newly posted on Marvin’s noticeboard:

  GRIEF DISCUSSION GROUP

  Meetings were Tuesdays at seven. Chiyo had no classes Tuesday evenings and was free to attend. She tore a strip from the bottom of the notice and shoved it into the pocket of her windbreaker. She checked her watch and headed for the store exit. A teacher should not be late for her own class. She stuffed her damp Kleenex into a garbage container on her way out, and lowered her head to the wind.

  An Act of Love

  TOM

  Tom dropped his son at departures and headed home, a two-hour drive. Will had told him not to bother coming inside and then stood at the curb, luggage in hand, until his father drove away. What was different about today? Tom had always gone into the airport and stayed until Will was ready to go through security. Maybe his son was concerned about putting him to extra trouble—having to drop him off, park the Jeep in the lot, find him in a crowded lineup at a check-in counter. Maybe Will thought his father was getting old. Or maybe he wanted to work on his laptop while filling in the time before boarding. Simple as that.

  Tom switched on the radio and scanned channels until he found music he liked. Joe Cocker was singing “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Will had stayed four days this time, tacking the visit on to the end of a business trip in eastern Canada. Now he was on his way home to his own family in Edmonton. Will worked in IT, a troubleshooter, on the road half the year. Tom wondered what that sort of job did to—or for—Will’s home life, marriage, health. The job brought in plenty of income, that was certain. Probably more than Tom earned buying and selling antiques for Rigmarole, the shop he’d owned for half a century in Wilna Creek’s south end. At Rigmarole, some years had been better than others. Sales depended on what he could find to buy and sell. Collectors’ items slipped in and out of fashion, the swing of the pendulum ever a consideration. Even so, loyal customers showed up at his door when they wanted to sell, or called when they had an estate to get rid of or were searching for a special item.

  Tom had made a pretty good living picking, unearthing, swapping, selling a wide range of curiosities. He’d also begun to tell himself that he would sell the business someday soon. There were two other antique stores in town now. One was more of a junk shop, but both were competition. He’d also heard that a consignment shop might be opening. Even more competition. Still, he loved the hunt and the interaction with collectors. Every piece he acquired had its own provenance; his job was to track the information, set a value. He was challenged by the work and didn’t want to quit while his knowledge was ever-expanding. The thought of retiring, of separating from his business, was not a simple matter. Even though the reality was that young couples were not much interested in antiques. They wanted dishes that could be put through a dishwasher. They were not attracted to heavy claw legs, bone china or early pine. But for the time being, there was enough business to keep the shop going. He wasn’t being forced to make a decision to find a buyer. Not yet.

  As he drove, Tom hummed along with the music and allowed his mind to drift over memories of airport arrivals and departures of the past decades. He and Ida used to enjoy travelling together. Every few years, Ida had taken an extra trip on her own to visit her sister in Medicine Hat. In the early nineties, at the end of one of Ida’s visits west, Tom closed his shop and arrived early at the airport to pick her up. She’d been away for two weeks and he missed her. He’d vacuumed the house, and bought yellow freesias for the dining-room table and arranged them in a Satsuma porcelain vase shaped like a lantern—an exciting find he’d come across while she was away. At the airport, he checked the arrivals board and drank coffee and still had a half hour to wait. He stood idly and watched people crowd around one of the luggage belts. Two flight numbers lit up the signboard, and the belt creaked and wheezed and began to circle. A group of eight or nine welcomers—until then, they’d been off to the side—came close and began to chant. From their hoots of laughter, Tom could tell that they were practising so they could sing out when the person they were greeting appeared. Because of their numbers, they were brazen and gleeful and raucous. When the inner door finally opened and the arrivals streamed toward the moving belt, one recognizable passenger strode ahead of all others. He carried a worn leather briefcase, had no luggage to pick up and headed directly for the taxi exit. The man was no other than Peter Gzowski, the popular host of the CBC Radio show Morningside.

  The welcoming group was taken by surprise to see this well-known figure, and to their credit, they rallied quickly. As their own expected traveller had not yet appeared, they began a loud, laughing chant and substituted Peter’s name:

  Yay, Peter! Yay, Gzowski!

  Yay, yay, Peter Gzowski!

  Peter, with a grin, kept his stride. He gave a wave to the group of strangers and carried on, knowing that the welcoming party wasn’t for him. Nonetheless, there had been a feeling of cheer in the place because of Peter’s response.

  At the time, Tom had laughed good-naturedly along with the others. Now, in the car, he was wondering what it would be like to experience an impromptu reception like that. Out of the blue, a surprise, his name called out with affection. Tomas Ollery wouldn’t exactly fit into a rhyme, but his schoolboy nickname could be used and sung unabashedly:

  Yay, Tom! Yay, Olley!

  Yay, yay, Tom Olley!

  What nonsense. Why would any group be at an airport to greet him? There was no fame attached to being Tom Ollery. There would be no one to chant if he arrived from some unknown place. A place he couldn’t imagine going without Ida. But Ida had died. She’d been dead for eleven months.

  THE YEAR HE AND IDA MET and decided to marry, 1963, they were twenty-four years old and had nothing but each other. Ida had moved to Ontario from the West. She’d earned a science degree, but the only work she could find in Wilna Creek was a job as typist
and desk clerk for an independent laboratory. Tom had a brand-new degree in history and English and was employed by what was, at the time, the town’s only bookstore. He wanted to set up some sort of business of his own, but he hadn’t figured out what that might be. His job at the bookstore began in April; the wedding was planned for June. He and Ida found a partially furnished apartment in an old three-storey house that had been divided into units, one per floor. Their unit was the least desirable because they had last choice, the others having been rented out. After the wedding, Tom and Ida moved in, sandwiched for almost three years between upper and lower. The couple below thumped their ceiling any time he and Ida played a record on their turntable after nine thirty in the evening. The couple above had twins who tramped like a pair of perpetually roaming bison, up and down the outside stairs that led to the top apartment.

  Tom and Ida loved the place because it was their first. The landlord had left in the unit several pieces of furniture original to the house before it was divided: a tall pine cupboard with narrow doors; an oak bookcase that had belonged to a judge; a Duncan Phyfe–style dining-room table, which Ida covered with patterned oilcloth and converted to a kitchen table; a bronze sculpture of a pair of geese about to take flight. The geese, modelled after the Canada goose, were almost life-size and were set on the floor in one corner of the living room. Tom bought a second-hand bed and a new mattress, and Ida’s parents contributed a rug. When Tom and Ida entertained, they sat with their guests on throw pillows scattered about the rug in the living room. On his days off from the bookstore, Tom attended auctions and began to visit second-hand shops in villages and towns surrounding Wilna Creek. He found a sturdy set of Bavarian dishes with a fawn-coloured rim, a chimney cupboard, an Eastlake-style chest of drawers for the bedroom. Before long, he and Ida had all the furnishings they needed and more. Nothing matched, but they didn’t care.

  Ida liked greeting people and didn’t mind typing lab reports. She also liked her colleagues. She stuck with the job for three years, until just before Will was born. By then, she and Tom had scraped together enough money for a down payment on a house. They found one that had been built in 1898 on a corner lot, purchased it without fanfare and decided to take their time fixing it up. Before they moved out of their apartment, Tom negotiated with the landlord to buy the judge’s bookcase and the pine cupboard. The landlord threw in the bronze geese as a housewarming gift.

  Once they were in their own place, Ida made the decision to stay home with the new baby. She and Tom worked at stripping wallpaper. They painted ceilings, patched holes, levelled floors—always some project on the go. Tom resigned from the bookstore and opened his own shop, buying and selling used furniture, pressed glass, Depression glass, uniquely designed tables, bridge lamps and, once in a while, rare books. Ida had an eye for antique jewellery. She suggested the name Rigmarole for the shop because it reminded her of a rag-and-bone man who used to come door to door during her childhood to collect used clothing, cast iron, bits and pieces, odds and ends.

  Tom was able to earn enough from the business to support the family. Ida missed her full-time job, and she and the baby began to accompany him to estate auctions. Some days, Ida looked after the shop while Will slept in his carriage in a quiet corner. On those days, Tom drove up and down country roads, exploring barns and attics. He’d been advised by a lifelong collector, one of the town’s old-timers, that when he was out scouring the countryside, he should keep a lookout for potted geraniums on windowsills. When you see a geranium, knock on the door. Sure enough, whenever Tom approached farmhouses with geraniums on sills, he came away with bevelled mirrors, pressback chairs, vintage rockers and occasionally a piano stool with ornately carved legs or an organ that had been stowed in a back shed for generations.

  Prior to their marriage, Ida, always frugal, became determined to sew her own wedding dress. She was discreet about asking Tom what he planned to wear, and he told her not to worry, everything was in hand. The truth was, he had no plan. Two weeks before the ceremony, he walked into Wilna Creek’s only thrift store—run by the Salvation Army—a place where he’d earlier come upon a pair of brass lamps. He searched through rows of clothing racks and discovered a smart pair of tuxedo trousers, stripe down the side. He draped these over one arm and made his way to the opposite side of the men’s section, where he found a tuxedo shirt and, after that, braces hanging from a hook against the back wall. He found a jacket to match the trousers—differences not detectable. His entire wedding suit cost twenty-two dollars and seventy-five cents. The volunteers discovered a suitable tie in a sagging cardboard box filled to the top with castoffs, and they threw it in for free. They rounded off the total to twenty dollars because they’d entered the mood—and the search—when Tom explained that the clothes were for his wedding day. Everyone in the store was jovial that day, especially Tom, who was always exhilarated by a bargain and a find.

  He did not breathe a word of any of this to Ida. The day of the ceremony, she was so impressed with his appearance, she believed that for her sake he’d been saving secretly for months. He didn’t reveal the origins of his pieced-together outfit, but whenever he thought of it, he had to grin. He knew how snazzy he had looked. Absolutely snazzy. Photographs confirmed this. Ida never did find out.

  That same wedding suit was now encased in a plastic garment bag at the far end of the bedroom closet, where it had been shoved along the rack, past the tweed jackets and comfortable trousers he’d worn throughout his working life. What was he to do with a wedding outfit now? He didn’t have the shoulders he’d once had; he knew the jacket would sag. He should donate it back to Sally Ann so someone could claim it as vintage clothing. Some young guy could wear it to his own celebration. So what if fifty-five years had passed since Tom had picked out the items second-hand?

  Although his son frequently urged him to visit the family in Edmonton, Tom had not left town since Ida’s death, except for his volunteer work. The year he turned seventy, he’d begun to close the shop one day a week so he could drive for Wheels of Hope. If some other volunteer driver had to cancel, Tom sometimes took on an extra day in addition to his own. His job was to transport people to and from their appointments at the Greenley Health Centre, an hour’s drive away. Passengers were those who could no longer handle a vehicle, didn’t own one in the first place or were too ill to manage their lives. All required cancer treatments or diagnostic procedures that were not available at the hospital in town. Greenley was a teaching hospital comprising various specialties that the Wilna Creek hospital didn’t have.

  Tom kept up the volunteer work after Ida died because he was used to being around people. The past two weeks, he’d had only one passenger on his list—though he could comfortably manage three in the car, and often did. Depended on who needed what and which days appointments were scheduled. The sole passenger of his recent trips was a man named Dave who lived at the Haven, the local seniors’ residence. During the drives to Greenley, Dave kept up a running commentary about life at the Haven. Dave was built like a barrel and had a short, thick neck and a big voice.

  Tom recalled some of their conversations. “We call ourselves inmates,” Dave had told him. Tom was beginning to feel as if he knew the inmates, though he’d been inside the Haven only a few times. Mostly, he sat in the car in the parking circle by the front door, waiting for his assigned passengers. “A lotta memories bottled up in that place, for a lotta people,” Dave said, though he didn’t say if the memories were good or bad. Tom figured that could mean both.

  Dave had more to tell. “I have to get up early to go downstairs because two copies of the paper are delivered to the main lobby for residents. Can you believe this? People fight over the bleeding paper to get to the obituaries. As for me, I’m up at six, shower, get dressed, wear a tie. I’m not one of those unwashed men who make everyone hold their breath and stare straight ahead in the elevator while waiting for the door to open. When we go to the dining room, we have designated tables—groups of
four, groups of six. If someone has a problem with seating, well, they can request a move, but generally we get along okay. If not, we can take complaints to the management, ha-ha! Every Friday for lunch, we have haddock and fries. A woman at my table—her name is Rose—picks up her fries with her fingers and eats as if she’s going to stab the back of her throat with every chip.” Dave was laughing out loud, and Tom couldn’t help but join in. “She snaps her brassiere straps in the elevator. I don’t think she realizes what she’s doing, but the rest of us notice. Rose plays a helluva hand of bridge, though; I’ll say that for her.”

  Dave liked to read and he’d always liked poetry, even when he was forced to learn whole verses in school when he was a kid. He and Tom had a couple of long conversations about Seamus Heaney; about Patrick Lane and Lorna Crozier; about Percy Bysshe Shelley’s heart, which had been pressed between the covers of a book after his body was cremated on the beach in Italy—true according to Marchand, the biographer Tom had read on quiet days in the shop. Dave wondered about the story of the pressed heart. The two discussed Byron and his great love, Countess Teresa. Tom admitted that he sometimes dabbled at poetry himself, and had been doing so for decades. Especially when he’d needed a change after spending hours at his desk in Rigmarole on days when few customers appeared. Ida had never encouraged Tom any time he’d discussed his poetry with her, but he didn’t mention this to Dave. Nor had he ever sent a poem to a magazine to see if it would be accepted for publication. Still, he’d filled one notebook and kept another, partly filled, in the top drawer of his desk at the shop. Soft and black, its cover was imprinted with an illustration of the planets. The notebook was old enough that Pluto had not yet been relegated to dwarf-planet status.

  Dave’s response, when he’d learned that Tom wrote poetry, was to admit that the poems he was most partial to were “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Joyce Kilmer’s “Trees.”