Eddie's Bastard

by William Kowalski

  I sat in there for a long time, not thinking.

  Suddenly I noticed the picture of Jack Simpson again: a black-and-white portrait, thirty years old perhaps. I took it off the wall without looking at it too closely. Then I went to the south window, opened it, and tossed the picture like a Frisbee into the yard. It sailed away gracefully into the trees. I listened for the sound of breaking glass, for the parting of branches before it, but I heard nothing. It was as if it had disappeared.

  I leaned on the windowsill and stared out the window for a while. To my surprise, I could see the entire town from Annie’s bedroom, the rooftops of the homes and businesses of Mannville poking peacefully above the trees. I could even see my house. I went to the north window. From there I could see across the Lake, which today glimmered turquoise and green. I hadn’t realized Annie’s perspective on things before, how much of our little world she was able to see. Did she stand here at night and dream of a normal life, of escaping across the Lake to Canada? I wondered. Did she watch the rest of us going about our daily affairs, like Rapunzel in her tower, waiting to be rescued?

  No—not Annie. She’d rescued herself. I’d only helped her along a little. Life was not a fairy tale, and Annie wasn’t a helpless princess. She was even braver and tougher than I was, and that was part of the reason I loved her.

  Abruptly I put the lighter back in my pocket and went downstairs and out the front door.

  I still don’t know why I didn’t burn the Simpson house down that day. I guess my anger was spent. I guess I figured enough violence had taken place there. It was time for quiet to seep in now. Eventually the house would decay into nothingness. Better to let it happen that way. Better to let nature take its course, as it was already doing.

  I meandered back home. When I came into the living room, Grandpa and Mildred were sitting in their rocking chairs. Mildred got up upon seeing me and went into the kitchen.

  “Grandpa,” I said, getting right to the point. “I just have to go see her.”

  “I know,” said Grandpa. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling. “Hell, don’t I know it? Haven’t I spent most of my life sitting here with a broken heart? If there was anywhere I could have gone to make it whole again, believe me, I would have.”

  “If there’s a reason you know of why I shouldn’t go,” I said, “I’d sure appreciate it if you’d tell me what it is.”

  “Someday you’ll know,” he said. “Until then, forget about it. Live your life the way you need to live it, boy. I can’t stop you. I don’t even want to stop you. You’re a good boy. You’ll be a better man than I ever was.”

  I could say nothing to that, but I knew he was right.

  “I’m sorry I said what I said,” I told him. “I shouldn’t have said it.”

  “You had every right.” He was looking at the floor. “I wasn’t any kind of father to you. And now it’s too late.”

  “You did a good job,” I said. “I guess I’m gonna turn out all right.”

  Grandpa got up from his chair and put his bony arms around me. I had to stoop nowadays to hug him. I had risen to the height of five feet eleven and a half inches, and had every reason to believe I would attain my long-sought-after goal of six feet. I was, Grandpa said, the tallest Irishman he’d ever known, and certainly the tallest Mann in history.

  That week I sent a letter to Annie, telling her I wanted to come see her and asking if it was still all right. I didn’t tell her I’d gone into her old house, or that I’d flung the picture of her father out the window, that it had vanished into thin air, and I was afraid that was what would happen to my love for her if I didn’t see her soon. I mentioned nothing about anything. She replied:

  Yes. No. I don’t know. You have my address. No promises. I have to warn you, I’m not the same person I was before. Come around Christmas if you want to. You might not want to.

  Of course I want to, I thought. How could I not?

  I bought a bus ticket to Montreal. I planned on going in mid-December, after school was out for the holidays.

  About a week before I was to leave, I collected all the stories I’d written using the noun formula, put them in a box, and took them to Doctor Connor, whom I hadn’t visited in a long while.

  “Where have you been?” he asked me. Connor never shook my hand—instead he grabbed my head and looked into my nose. This, I’d come to believe, was how all doctors greeted people. He produced his little doctor flashlight and stuck it into my nostrils. “You’ve been smoking!” he said, disgusted.

  “I’ve been writing,” I said.

  “Of course you have,” he said. “Looks like you’ve been hard at it, too. Quite a lot of work here, isn’t there?”

  “I’m not sure if they’re any good, though.”

  “Well, don’t be too hard on yourself.”

  “Can you take a look at them?”

  “I’d be glad to,” he said. He picked a story out of the box and peered at the title. “‘Mr. Woodcock and the Green Porpoise’? What the hell does that mean?”

  “It’s a new style,” I said. “I invented it myself. It has to do with nouns.”

  “Nouns. I see,” he said dubiously.

  “I’ve been getting stuck a lot. After that first one they didn’t seem to come so easy.”

  “And so you use nouns?”

  “I write from the middle out,” I said.

  “Hmm. Interesting. A middlist, you are?”

  “More or less. A middlist. Yeah.” I had never thought of the word middlist before, but I liked the way it sounded: important and original.

  “And so the school of Middlism is founded, right here in Mannville,” mused Connor. He put one hand over his mouth for a moment and pretended to cough, but I could see he was hiding a smile. “Well, come back tomorrow morning. I should be able to look at a couple of them by then.”

  I came back the next morning, bright and early. Doctor Connor was just turning around the sign on his door from THE DOCTOR IS OUT to THE DOCTOR IS IN.

  “Come in,” he said. He didn’t bother to look into my nose this time. I followed him into the examination room and sat on the table. Connor sat in his chair opposite me. He was holding “Mr. Woodcock and the Green Porpoise” but holding it daintily, by one corner, pinched between his thumb and forefinger as one might hold a dead rat. My heart, for so long flush with confidence in my literary future, was suddenly in free fall.

  “You know I love you like my own grandson,” he began.

  “Oh no,” I groaned, because with that kind of introduction, I knew that whatever was coming next was bad.

  “And you know I would never say anything to hurt you,” he went on, ignoring me. “Not unless I thought it would help you. You know that. Right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know that.”

  “Let me tell you a little story of my own, and I want you to listen carefully. Once I had to break a kid’s arm,” said Doctor Connor. “He’d already broken it once, and he didn’t want to tell his mother, because he’d broken it roller-skating in the street and he wasn’t supposed to be roller-skating. So he hid it from her—how, I have no idea—and it healed crookedly. You could see it right through the skin, where the two ends had come together all out of whack. This was in the old days, when I was still young. Just after the war. There was only one thing to do back then. Surgery was out of the question—people couldn’t afford it then like they can today. So I grabbed his wrist with one hand and his elbow with the other and I snapped his arm in half on the edge of a table.”

  “Jesus!” I cried, involuntarily.

  “It hurt him like hell, of course,” said Connor. “He screamed and cried to beat the band. But that didn’t bother me a bit because I knew I would be able to reset his arm properly. Otherwise he would have gone through life with only one good arm. That was before anesthesia was used like it is now, too. If it had been a grown man I would have filled him up with whiskey first. But the poor kid had to have his arm broken stone cold so
ber.”

  He took a deep breath.

  “This,” he said, holding up the story, “is horrible. And telling you that is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  I said nothing. I could feel my face growing hot with shame.

  “It’s like breaking that kid’s arm,” he said. “Except I have no guarantee you’re going to get better, like he did. It’s up to you. Bones heal themselves automatically, but people don’t automatically hear criticism and become better writers.”

  I still couldn’t speak.

  “I’ve had to tell people their loved ones were dying of incurable diseases,” he went on. “That was fun compared to this. I wouldn’t be telling you this if I didn’t think you were capable of doing better. You’re very talented, Billy. But…well…”

  He dropped the story back in the box. I knew without asking that he hadn’t had the strength to read the others. The noun formula winked out of existence. Middlism was a failure. It died right there in the examining room of Doctor Connor’s office.

  “What are you doing?” he whispered, in the same tone one might use with a small boy who was eating wallpaper paste. “What happened? Your first story was so good!”

  “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I said. “That’s the problem. I don’t know what to do.” Secretly, in the deepest and most honest corners of my mind, I’d known the stories weren’t any good. But I’d forced myself to write them anyway. I didn’t know what else to do. “I was just trying whatever worked. I just don’t know. I don’t know how to do this.”

  “You’re trying too hard,” he said. “You’re full of stories. All Manns are. And I know you. I knew you before you were even born, practically. You just have to let them flow out of you. Just say what happens, Billy. Forget this fancy formula stuff. Just tell the story.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “But I’ll tell you something good about your stories.”

  I brightened. “What?”

  “You’ll never make the same mistake twice,” he said. My face fell again, but he ignored me. “You’re too smart for that. Consider this all water under the bridge. It’s practice. Like money in the bank. You’ve written this much, and now you have that much more experience. Make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “It will, if it doesn’t yet. Go back to your original method, Billy. Write down the story of your family. There’s plenty more besides the one about the treasure. When you run out of material, write down your own story. It will be good reading. Things will come to you if you just let them. And remember—just let it flow. Do you want these back?” He indicated the box of stories with his foot.

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Don’t be discouraged, boy,” he said warmly. “You’ll make it. I know you will.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome. Stop smoking.”

  “Yessir.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Yessir.”

  “See you later.”

  I took the box of stories home, dug a deep pit in the yard, and buried them. My face still burned as I shoveled dark and rocky Mannville dirt over my literary efforts, my life’s work. What the hell had I been thinking? I would never be the kind of writer who could just make things up out of thin air. I was doomed to write about true events, maybe just adding a little twist here and there to make it more interesting. I was not a Hemingway, a Faulkner, a Dorothy Parker. I was a family historian, nothing more.

  Maybe, I thought, I should be something else. Being a writer is just too damn hard.

  Later that week, Grandpa and Mildred drove me to the bus station. I carried a basket full of Mildred’s cooking, three packs of cigarettes, a blank notebook, and a copy of Jack Simpson’s obituary.

  “You know, I just realized something,” said Grandpa. “That’s the basket you were delivered in.”

  “What? Jesus!” I said. “I hope you at least washed it!”

  “No, not birthed,” he said. “Just dropped off in.”

  “It doesn’t look very old,” I said. “It looks brand new.”

  “You’re right,” said Grandpa. It was a curious property of things in our house: they gathered dust, but they never seemed to age. It was as if all Grandpa’s efforts to stop time, to keep alive only those days when life was good for us Manns, had succeeded, but only as far as physical objects were concerned. To me he’d said once or twice that he thought it had something to do with all the whiskey he’d breathed into the air when he was still drinking. It had soaked into all the wood and clothing fibers and pickled them, he said. On the surface, it looked as if he was right. Furniture and clothing that should by all rights have fallen into disrepair decades earlier were still as good as new. But we both knew that explanation was ridiculous. It was instead some new, subtler kind of haunting, perpetuated by the ghosts who still couldn’t bring themselves to leave us alone.

  I shook hands with Grandpa—being older now, I had forbidden him to hug me in public—received a kiss on the cheek from Mildred, and I was off. Ten hours later the bus pulled into the Montreal bus station.

  Annie met me at the terminal. I barely recognized her—she’d cut all her hair off. She hadn’t just cut it—she’d shaved it. It had grown back some, but the sight of her skull under only a thin layer of hair was unnerving. I went to hug her, but she fended me off with one hand against my chest.

  “First things first,” she said. “Don’t touch me.”

  I stopped, my arms outstretched gracelessly in midair.

  “All right,” I said. My arms fell to my sides.

  “Second. I knew the whole time about that awful woman you were seeing.”

  “You did?”

  “Yes. And may I say you suffer from a lack of taste?”

  “Jealous?” I was trying to tease her, but it fell flat.

  “Why on earth would I be jealous?” She stood with her arms crossed, a stony glint in her eye.

  “Never mind,” I said. I looked aimlessly around the bus station. For the first time, I was at a loss for words with Annie.

  “Why in hell did you ever want to get mixed up with her?”

  “It’s hard to explain.”

  “I don’t think it’s really all that complicated,” said Annie. “You have a penis, don’t you?”

  “Now wait a minute,” I said. “That’s not fair.”

  “Nothing,” Annie sniffed, “is fair. That’s what I’ve learned.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You were just using her for sex!”

  “And what was she using me for?” I thought Annie ought to get together with Mrs. Gruber. Between the two of them they would sentence me to life in prison without parole. “You don’t know the whole story, anyway.”

  “It’s just a point I’m trying to make,” she said angrily. “If I’d been fifteen years old going out with a man who was thirty-two, what would people have said about me?”

  “Hi, Annie,” I said. “Nice to see you too.”

  “You just don’t get it,” she said. “There’s a big double standard out there. Girls have to be goody-goody, and boys get to do whatever they want.”

  “Maybe you just don’t get it,” I said. “Why are you angry at me?”

  “I told you,” she said. “I told you I wasn’t the same as I was before.”

  You were very right, I thought.

  I picked up my bag and followed her out of the bus station and down the street. We walked for perhaps half a mile, she in front, silent and walking fast, I struggling to keep up behind her. It was unspeakably cold. Mannville got cold, but it was never anything like this. This was the kind of cold that felt almost red-hot. I was wearing a light jacket and jeans, and within moments I began to wonder if my life wasn’t in danger.

  “This hurts,” I said.

  Annie said nothing.

  “I’m not wearing the right clothes,” I said.

  Nothing.

  “You could have told me how cold it
was up here,” I said.

  She turned and looked at me. For a moment I thought her eyes softened, but then they glazed over again, and there was the same steel there.

  “Deal with it,” she said shortly.

  We kept walking until we arrived at her place. I didn’t say another word.

  Annie lived in a second-floor apartment on Sherbrooke Street. Directly beneath her place was a Middle Eastern restaurant run by a couple of Palestinian women. Annie worked there twelve hours a day. The Palestinian women were short and stocky and hairy; one of them had a large black-tufted mole on her upper lip. When Annie introduced me to them they regarded me cautiously, as one might look at an emissary from an opposing army.

  “Hello,” I said. They stared at me, their eyes slitted and wary.

  “Not hello,” said Annie. “Bonjour. They don’t speak English.”

  “Bon jer,” I said. It was my first French word and I could tell by the smirks of the women that I was mispronouncing it.

  “Bonjour,” said one.

  “Comment ça va,” said the other.

  Annie spoke to them in French. She was explaining something, speaking rapidly; her hands flew like birds, and occasionally she pointed at me. The women continued to stare at me, their expressions unchanging. I couldn’t understand a word of what she was saying. I wondered if she was telling them about Elsie Orfenbacher too. Then she finished, turned, and said, “Come on.” I followed her out of the kitchen.

  “What did you say to them?”

  “I was explaining who you were,” she said.

  “How did you learn to talk like that?”

  “Practice,” she said. “Necessity.”

  “You mean nobody around here speaks English?”

  “Some do,” she said.

  “What’s with those two? They didn’t seem awfully glad to see me.”