“Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think,” I said.
She studied me then, face full of questions, so I changed the subject.
“Willie seems to be taking to the city,” I said.
“He’s a pet.”
“How old is he, anyway?”
“He isn’t much older than we are. But he grew up in a kind of a bubble. Kind of like us.” She smiled. “It wasn’t exactly . . . normal, was it? The way we were.”
“What’s normal? Who knew what normal was back then? Before television.”
“That’s true,” she said.
“Normal. What a word.” I was longing for a drink.
“Do you think of them often?” she asked suddenly.
“Who?”
“Daddy. Sandy. Poor Jack.”
“I find it odd, the way you call him Daddy. When did that start?”
“But isn’t that . . . normal? To call your father Daddy?”
“When you’re nine.”
She turned away and the silence fell in the way it always does. After about a minute she walked slowly to a cupboard and poured some more liquor into her glass.
“Maybe that explains your fascination with Willie,” I said.
She frowned.
“He reminds you of . . . ‘Daddy.’”
“For the love of God.”
“Think about it,” I said.
She stared at me for a while, glass in hand, eyes searching. “Christ,” she said at last. “I hope this isn’t what that Braecrest place does to people.”
“I get the sense that he doesn’t like me,” I said.
She laughed. “Listen to him!”
“I think he’s a weirdo.”
“I’m going to bed,” she said.
Saturday morning, Willie was gone before I was up. Effie drove him to the airport. When she returned, she told me he said he was disappointed not to have spent more time with me but was itching to get back home. I said I was sorry to have missed him; there were things we might have talked about.
“Oh,” she said, relieved.
“The MacKay boy. Young Danny. You remember him from the Christmas before last. Willie would have known him well. They’d be related.”
She frowned. “I think I heard something. Didn’t he die?”
“Yes. Last fall. He killed himself.”
“Oh? How awful.”
“The last time I saw your William, actually, was at the wake. He was there with his mother. The old lady you’ve been talking to, Peggy.”
“He never mentioned it in all the time that he was here.”
Saturday afternoon, I started calling all the B. Bells in the book. By the sixth I realized it was an impossible task. Three were women. One sounded too young in the flippant message on his answering machine. The other two denied any connection with Newfoundland.
That night Effie took Cassie and me to dinner in a dimly lit, noisy restaurant downtown. There was casual chat. Mostly about Cassie’s work.
“By the way,” she said, “somebody will be calling you.”
Effie was surprised. Calling me about what?
“Nothing important,” I said. “Somebody I wanted to look up while I was here. Cassie was helping.”
“Oh. Somebody I know?”
“I doubt it.”
“Now I’m intrigued.”
“Just an ex-priest.”
“Aha.”
The dinner was pleasant and the city lights were intoxicating, but I couldn’t absorb much of the stimulation. I was insulated from the pleasure by a dense layer of dread.
We went to Mass together on Sunday, to a large, cathedral-like church with an energetic choir and four boys on the altar for the two priests. Large occasions at the university were like this. And holy days in the larger parishes. Theatrical, I thought.
“How does anybody live here?” I asked her afterwards.
Effie just laughed.
“I’m looking forward to going back,” I said. “I think I know how Willie felt.”
At about mid-morning on the Monday, I answered a ringing telephone and the man asked if I was Father MacAskill. I said I was and he said he heard that I’d been inquiring about Brendan Bell. He said he was a business reporter who worked with Cassie. I told him I had some dealings with Bell but had lost touch with him.
“You and a lot of people.” He explained that Bell spent his winters outside the country. He had a home in the Caribbean, where he also did a lot of business these days.
The Caribbean?
“You’re Cassie’s uncle?”
“Yes.”
“Because you’re Cassie’s uncle, I’ll give you a name and number. Just don’t say where you got it, okay?”
“Sure.”
“I’d be interested in anything you find out. Call this number and ask for Eddie Sudac. He’s one of the top people at HREU.”
“Where?”
“HREU. It’s a union.”
“A union?”
“People who work in hotels and restaurants. Sudac will fill you in.” He then gave me a Toronto telephone number.
Eddie Sudac had a friendly face and a firm handshake. We met in a sports bar on Front Street, just west of Union Station.
“I’m a Catholic myself,” he explained. “Croatian heritage. But I haven’t been too faithful to my obligations for a while.”
I shrugged and returned his smile. He ordered a beer. I had Coke.
“I have to say that it’s people like Bell who turned a lot of Catholics like me into heathens. This here is a fella that really makes you wonder. How do you know him?”
When he was active in the priesthood, I said, I knew him briefly. Had some dealings of a religious nature. Wanted to follow up on a few loose ends.
He made a face. “I hear you loud and clear.”
“I understand you know how to find him.”
“Oh, yeah. I could write a book on Brendan.”
We talked for an hour. I left the bar in a state of utter confusion, attempting to remember a jumble of detail about politicians and unions, union money and hotels, jurisdictional disputes, raiding, lawsuits, intimidation, accusations about stolen funds and money laundering. Somehow Brendan Bell was in the middle of it all. And it all went back to something sleazy in Newfoundland when he was a priest.
“He was one of the diddlers, I understand,” Eddie offered in a quiet voice. “At least according to some of our contacts on the Rock.”
I told him that I wasn’t at liberty to talk about what I knew and that I was sure he’d understand.
He understood completely, he said.
The way he saw it, Bell was connected with important people in Newfoundland and they helped him disappear when he got in trouble. The reason they helped him was that he was in a position to implicate some of them, union people and politicians, in some fairly heavy sleaze of their own.
“It’s all kind of sick if you know the specifics.” He had a mildly disgusted look. I told him I didn’t need the gory details.
He explained that when Bell decided to get out of the priesthood, he had only to contact some of his old cronies who had become big shots in politics and the international union establishment. They had control over millions in pension funds, and overnight Bell turned into a “businessman.”
“Must be nice, eh? Having drag like that?” He almost spat. “A front man would be more accurate, for a bunch of, excuse me, fucking crooks and hypocrites. They buy up hotels, using union money. Then the first thing they do is invent ways to replace our union with a pussy outfit that’s nothin’ more than a front for scabs. Suddenly the hotels are profitable, at the expense of you-know-who.”
“I understand he lives somewhere in the Caribbean,” I said eventually.
“In the winter. He slithers back when the weather warms up.”
And he told me that Bell owned a condominium apartment just two blocks from where we sat. The reality of my unexpected nearness to Brendan Bell was disturbing. W
hat was I doing?
Effie’s house backs onto a ravine, so I walked into the urban wilderness to think about my next move. It had rained the night before and there was a menacing fog hanging close to the damp ground. I must know and I dare not know. The whispering voice in the confessional returns. An unfamiliar voice, distorted by outrage or hatred or both. Utterly certain in its condemnation. Ask that Brenton Bell. I must extract from Bell the admission of his guilt. I must hear him acknowledge his responsibility as I acknowledge mine. The MacKays must hear us both. We will go together, in joint contrition. I’m as bad as he is. We will beg for absolution.
Bell’s smiling face and relaxed manner hover before me. A man untroubled. And I remember all the troubled men I’ve known, men slowly being crushed by the burden of their obligations or their guilt.
As usual, Effie understands everything and nothing simultaneously. “You had a minor breakdown. It was way overdue.”
Really.
“You need someone,” she said. “You’ve been alone too much. What does Stella think of all this?”
I felt a sudden wave of weariness approaching irritation. Enough. “What about yourself?” I asked.
“What about me?”
“You never called him Daddy, even as a little girl. You wouldn’t even go to his funeral.”
“Oh, that,” she said, and sighed. The frown was replaced by a sad smile. She stood, walked to the kitchen counter and stood there. “People do bad things for complex reasons. But nobody is bad, essentially. Right? Evil is rare. We have to believe that. Otherwise memory becomes a toxic pool.”
“Perhaps you should have been the priest.”
She laughed and threw her hands up.
“That’ll be the day.”
The woman’s voice sounded pleasant when she told me the apartment number and to turn left when I got out of the elevator. She knew my name, she said. Brendan had mentioned me. He wasn’t in, but she invited me to come up anyway.
She was in the hallway waiting. The smile was warm. She had rich brown hair and serious grey eyes, a slender body. She asked me to come in, sit. Offered coffee.
She looks like a pretty boy, I thought.
I explained that I just happened to be in the city, that I’d seen him briefly the summer before and decided to look him up.
“I was expecting you,” she said.
“Oh?”
“A friend of his left a message on the machine. A former roommate. Said someone from his past was trying to get in touch. I’m relieved it’s you. Brendan told me all about you.”
“Well,” I said, masking my surprise.
“I gather you helped him through some difficulty once.”
“I didn’t actually do very much.”
“He’s very fond of Cape Breton Island. He actually talks about buying property there. Maybe a summer place. Loves the people, the culture, especially the music. I’ve never been, but it sounds beautiful, the way he tells it.”
I demurred, offering something about familiarity obscuring the qualities in a place.
“Well, Brendan has a real thing about his time there. He’s in Cape Breton now, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. He flew down two days ago. Said he had some unfinished business down there.”
She had no idea what he meant by “unfinished business.” But then, there was a lot about the business side of Brendan’s life that was a mystery to her.
Effie’s kitchen is white and modern and large enough to accommodate a substantial harvest table. On the last night, she was busy at the stove while Cassie and I sat and talked. There was a rice cooker of some kind puffing on the counter and a casserole generating warm, rich aromas in the oven. Through a large patio door I could see into the lush green yard.
Effie asked if it would be okay to open some wine and I said it would be fine with me. She removed a bottle from a cupboard. “Come on,” she said. “Just one. Live dangerously. It’ll be another half-hour before we eat.”
I shook my head. Not now. Not yet.
Cassie asked me to walk with her in the back garden. She held my hand.
Outside, she said: “I hope I’ve been helpful.”
“You have. I found my guy.”
“Ah. Great. And how did it go?”
“He’s away,” I said, laughing. “But now that I know . . . there’ll be another time.”
She turned and faced me then. “Tell me what you think of that William.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t you find him creepy?”
“It depends.”
“I swear that he was lurking outside my bedroom door the last night he was here.”
“I hope you’re wrong.”
“I don’t think so. The night we went to the movie, he didn’t seem interested at all. And afterwards, there was just something. The things he tried to talk about. I don’t know, but I couldn’t wait for him to get on that plane.”
We walked some more in silence.
“I want to ask you something.”
“Sure.”
“It bothers me that I don’t know anything about our side of the family, the MacAskills. It seems to be such a dark hole. Your mom, your dad. There seems to be so much mystery.”
“No big mystery. Our mother was a war bride who died when your mother was only four or five years old. We hardly got to know her. Our father was . . . a very damaged man. It was complicated.”
“That’s what I want to know about. The damage. How damaged?”
I laughed. How do you measure damage?
“Come on,” she said impatiently. “You know what I’m getting at.”
“I don’t, really.”
“Was Mom abused?”
I think I just stared.
“I want to know,” she said. “It would explain things.”
I felt a sudden wave of impatience. Explain things?
“It’s just been the two of us for most of my life. Mom and me. Growing up. I often wondered . . . She’s different from other mothers. And she’s said things about her own upbringing. And about her father being damaged and no women in the house. It’s hard not to wonder.”
“Sometimes there are no easy explanations for the way we are,” I said. “Sometimes we just are. Products of a million little inputs.”
“You’re blowing me off,” she said, and pulled away, folding her arms.
“Okay. Ask me a simple question and I’ll give you a simple answer.”
“Was Mom sexually abused by her father?”
“No.”
Her face was dark with unasked questions, but she just said, “Okay.” And then, “Thank you.”
When dinner was finished and the dishes cleared away, and Cassie off to her computer, I asked Effie what had attracted her to Sextus years ago, when she was still married to John.
She sighed and examined her empty teacup. “He was the one person I knew who was happy being exactly who he was.”
“The only one? Really?”
“The only one,” she said.
“So how come you don’t just settle down with Mr. Happy-being-who-he-is?”
“Because I eventually can’t stand who-he-is-happy-being.”
“You could have fooled me last summer.”
“Well, when you get to be my age, the devil you know . . . et cetera.”
“There are a lot of old devils out there,” I said.
“But some of them are more fun than others.”
At the airport, Effie remarked that the visit had been unusual and, in a way, enriching. She was holding my hand again. Maybe, she said, this is a brave new beginning. The start of the best part of our lives. She said she was going to make a point of seeing more of me, and that she wanted Cassie to get to know me better now that things seemed to be coming together for all of us.
“Talking about our father was strange,” she said.
“A long time ago,” I said, “I thought you hated him.”
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