After You've Gone

by Lori Hahnel

  So when it came time for the wedding, he insisted Sarah have whatever she wanted. All I had to do was organize it. Oh, sure. Gowns, bridesmaids’ dresses, dinner menus, rehearsals, musicians, receptions. Invitations, seating plans, receiving lines. Rob Taggart, her red-headed fiancé, was an Anglican, so they were married in St. Paul’s on McIntyre Street. The reception was at our hotel. None of this was my kind of thing at all, and I felt I was in over my head.

  After it was all over, I could have used a three-week vacation in Bermuda, but a day at Regina Beach had to do since Jake was too busy to get away. I don’t know if it was the wedding or what, but I found afterwards I had a sudden longing for change. Watching Sarah and Rob embark on their lives together, all the newness and discovery that goes with it, I couldn’t help but feel my own life was stagnant.

  Django Reinhardt, my hero, had died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage in 1953. He was only forty-three years old. I regretted more than ever that I hadn’t been able to see him during the US tour he did with the Duke Ellington Orchestra in the late 40s. At the time, Sarah was little and I figured I could catch his show another time. His death shook me more than I thought it might and I think it was partly that he had died at the end of an era. The music I’d played in the 30s — traditional jazz, swing — had become passé, uncool, and Django’s death kind of underscored that. When I heard Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker shake things up with be-bop the late 40s, I already had the feeling that life was passing me by, that music was changing and I was being left way behind. At the time Django died, the cutting edge stuff was Miles Davis playing hard bop, cool jazz. And now, by the early 60s, with people like Ornette Coleman, Charles Mingus and John Coltrane playing free jazz, I felt like I didn’t even know what jazz was anymore. And I think that I was not alone. A lot of people were alienated by the intellectualization of jazz music. So it was only natural to explore other forms.

  A friend of Jacob’s worked at CKCK TV and he remembered me from the Syncopation Five days. In 1957, when Sarah was twenty, I started to do a little piecework for them, played with the station’s other studio musicians for commercials, local programs and so on. I really enjoyed working with other musicians again after so many years. The format suited me, too. While I loved my guitar and spending time with other musicians, I still disliked being onstage, unless it was my music. Working in the TV studio was perfect for me.

  I hadn’t been away from performing altogether. Earlier in the fifties I’d played a little at some of the better-attended Gypsy Lore Society functions. The maximum audience at these things was about fifteen, so it wasn’t a really high-pressure performing situation or anything like that. And then, before long, Ochi Chornya started up. One night after I’d played at one of the Gypsy Lore meetings, a husky, dark-haired man with a moustache approached me as I was packing up my guitar.

  He offered his hand. “Lita? I’m Bela Antonescu.”

  “Nice to meet you, Bela.”

  “I really enjoyed your playing tonight. You remind me of Django.”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  “I play violin myself. And I heard about you from a friend who comes to these meetings, that’s what brought me out here tonight. I wonder if you’d want to join me and some other musicians I’ve got together. Come and jam sometime.”

  “What kind of music do you play?”

  “Traditional Gypsy music. There’s me, a singer, a stand-up bass, and a drummer, but we need a guitarist. You’d be perfect.”

  I went to check them out at a practice they had in the back of Bela’s grocery store and I loved them. And it wasn’t long before I fell in love with playing in a group again. Ochi Chornya played at folk music events in and around Regina. Around that time folk music of all kinds was catching people’s interest, and sometimes we found ourselves on the bill with acts very different from ours — vocal groups, Ukrainian folk acts, even groups who played Scottish folk music with pipes and violins. But the interest from young people of all backgrounds was good.

  Mixing with people of different ages and backgrounds was good, too. By Sarah’s wedding I had drifted away from the world of jazz and was gravitating towards the worlds of folk and blues music.

  Folk music for me was the Gypsy material that Ochi Chornya performed, and my longstanding interest in blues, starting with Memphis Minnie in the 30s, suddenly deepened at that time. Listening to T-Bone Walker, Howlin’ Wolf, Elmore James, and Willie Dixon gave my playing new textures and dimensions and I felt the stagnation start to lift. I felt excited about music again.

  Jake and Sarah seemed to have different reactions to my actively becoming involved in the music scene again. Sarah was with fine with my playing as a studio musician, but thought my band Ochi Chornya was old fashioned and ridiculous.

  “What’s wrong with your mother playing in her group?” Jake wanted to know when Sarah made a remark about her mother the Gypsy musician at breakfast one morning. I’d played a late show with the band the night before and was a little slow getting started that day. I figured Sarah was in university, she could make her own breakfast. And she did, but complained bitterly about it.

  “Don’t you think at her age she should really forget about things like this?”

  I cringed as I poured myself some of the coffee Jake had made. What is it with kids? They have the uncanny ability to zero in on your most vulnerable points and attack them. That was the one concern I’d been having then. “I’m forty,” I’d said to Jacob. “Who I am trying to kid? That’s far too old to be onstage.” Jake had reassured me, pointed out that although our dark-eyed, dark-haired singer, Sofia Torok, was in her early thirties, Sergei Macek, the drummer, was close to my age, and Vlatko Dragomir, the bassist, and Bela were in their late fifties.

  “What do you think she should do at her age?”

  “I don’t know. Something a little more dignified.”

  “Your mother is still a young woman. And there’s no more dignified work than sharing what you’ve been given. Don’t you forget that.”

  While Sarah never actually mentioned it to me again, her disapproval was always plain. I tried to tell myself that young people were bound to disapprove of their parents. Still, it hurt in a way Sarah could not know. Or worse, I thought, perhaps she did know.

  The odd thing was that what Jake said to her made me think that he was behind me all the way. But one cold day, I got home a little later than usual from a session at CKCK. And I really don’t know what he was put out about, exactly. Maybe the fact that I’d gotten a ride home with Frank, one of the musicians I’d worked with many times before. Or the fact that his dinner was a little late. Maybe it wasn’t even anything that happened that day particularly, I don’t know. Sarah was out with friends that evening. I warmed some lentil soup while I made sandwiches. He flipped through the Leader-Post at the kitchen table, said nothing. I brought the soup to the table.

  “Something on your mind, Jake?”

  “Well, yes. You don’t really need to be out working, do you?”

  I just looked at him for a minute. The session that afternoon had been long. I was tired. “What are you talking about? After all those things you told Sarah about sharing my gift and all that?”

  “I don’t mean you shouldn’t play music at all. I just mean you don’t need to do the studio work. We don’t need the money.”

  “Well, no. We don’t need the money. But I enjoy doing it.”

  He put his spoon down. “You have Ochi Chornya. And if you’re out working, it makes people think we need the money.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Nobody who knows us would think I’m doing this because we need the money.”

  “Maybe I would rather not have my wife out working. You never asked me, you just went ahead and took this job.”

  I rubbed my forehead, started to feel a pounding headache come on. “Asked you? Jake. I’ve been doing this more than two years and you’ve never said a word about it bothering you before. I had no idea.”

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sp; “Well, I’m telling you now that it does. It’s one thing playing music as a hobby. It’s another thing having you working when I make perfectly good money.”

  We finished the rest of the meal in silence. I was seething inside but didn’t have the energy to argue with him right then. I thought of when he’d said that he’d take care of the money, when we were on our honeymoon. Did he find the idea of me making money threatening in some way?

  When we were done I cleared the dishes away and put the kettle on for some tea. Jake put his coat on at the front door.

  “I’m going back to my office. There’s some stuff I need to finish before tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  “I might be late.”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Think about what I said.”

  “Oh, I am,” I said. I watched him get into his Lincoln and pull away. “Believe me, I am.”

  Twenty-Three

  Lita

  August 1965

  I HAD BECOME GOOD FRIENDS WITH Sofia, Ochi Chornya’s dark and statuesque singer. I often gave her a ride home, after our practices, in the aquamarine Buick sedan Jake got me for my fortieth birthday. It was a lovely gift. I’d never had my own car before. Only I would have rather spent a weekend with him. Or even a whole evening and have him pay attention to me, have a real conversation with me. As I had suspected when he first bought the Hotel Regina, he made a success of it almost right from the start, and by 1965 it was doing very well. But I also knew there would be a personal cost, for both of us. If he’d been a hard-working manager for CP Hotels, as a business owner he was obsessive. He worked seven days a week most weeks. It was very difficult to convince him to take any time off. And even in those rare times he did take off, he was talking about the hotel, thinking about it, almost all the time. And with Sarah gone, it became his sole focus.

  Sadly, this was where we were by this point in our marriage. It had taken me a long time to realize that the very qualities about Jake that I’d admired so much in the early days — his stability, his seriousness, his strong work ethic — were the things that now antagonized me. As the years went by he became more and more conservative, more and more concerned with appearances and what people thought. And the older I got, the less any of that meant to me.

  “This is such a nice car. I always mean to tell you that,” Sofia said one night. “You’re lucky to have studio work.”

  “Jake gave it to me. I never would have made enough to buy a car like this doing studio gigs. And anyway, he made me quit a few years ago.”

  She looked at me blankly. “Your husband wanted you to quit working? And you don’t like that?”

  “Yes. I mean, I know you think it’s strange. But my working bothers him. He seems to take it as an affront to his masculinity or something.”

  “I wish I had that kind of problem to worry about.” Sofia had left her husband shortly after I joined the band, when her daughter Charlotte was a toddler. She never said much about Manny, but I got the feeling he drank a lot.

  “I know. It can’t be easy for you to look after Charlie on your own. My life isn’t so bad. But still — I just don’t understand Jake.”

  Sofia shrugged. “Who can tell what men are thinking?”

  I was never the type to have a lot of friends, and besides Sarah most of the people in my life were men, a result of working in the music business. I hadn’t really had a close female friend since Darlene, and look how that turned out. But Sofia and I just hit it off. She and Charlie lived on Queen Street, not far from where Bill and I had lived. She had a job cleaning office buildings, mostly provincial government buildings downtown; some of the work was after hours, late at night sometimes, and I’d take care of Charlie. Charlie came to all our shows, and if Sofia had to work after a show, Charlie came home with me. We got along well, better than Sarah and I ever did, I hate to admit. She was dark like her mama, slight, had almond-shaped grey eyes. Her looks reminded me of my sister Maria as a child. She loved my guitar, loved to hear me play, and was getting me to show her how to play. Sarah, on the other hand, had always been uninterested in music, and was later embarrassed by me playing it.

  I guess Charlie filled a kind of need for me. My granddaughter Elsa was two by that time, a blonde and bubbling little thing, but I only ended up seeing her a couple of times a month. The thing was, I didn’t ever imagine I would end up having only one child, but that was just the way it worked out. I suppose it was possible that either Jake or I had a problem that we could have talked to our doctors about. Of course, since our relations had slowly, gradually, insidiously become almost nonexistent, it would have been pretty difficult for me to become pregnant no matter what else was going on. By the late 50s we had come to that state; by 1965 it had been years. It bothered me. Perhaps it bothered Jake, too, but he wouldn’t talk about it, made me feel ashamed for even bringing it up. I didn’t understand it, but I didn’t know what to do about it, either. I thought about talking to my doctor, but I couldn’t make myself. I was embarrassed, humiliated, felt it was somehow my fault. Had I become old and unattractive? Whatever the problem was, having Charlie around kept me occupied, and I was more than happy to step in and give Sofia a hand when she needed it.

  One night in late August she phoned. “Lita, I hope it’s not too late to call,” she said.

  “No, don’t worry. It’s only 10:00. What’s up?”

  “You know how I told you my sister’s sick with cancer? Rose, the one who lives in Lumsden? She’s really not doing too well.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I wonder if I could ask you a huge favour?”

  “Of course.”

  “She needs someone to stay with her a while, take care of her. I think I can get some time off work. So I was wondering if I could leave Charlie with you for a few weeks?”

  “I’d love to have her around. Anytime.”

  “Thank you, Lita. Thanks so much. I hate to impose on you, but I don’t have anyone else to ask. And Charlie loves to spend time with you.”

  “And I love spending time with her. Don’t worry about it. The place has seemed empty ever since Sarah left. We have a great time together.”

  I took Charlie to school in the mornings and picked her up. I hadn’t been inside a school, except to vote, since Sarah went to Davin School on the corner of College Avenue and Retallack Street, just a couple of blocks from us. Charlie went to Sacred Heart School on Elphinstone Street, which was a little too far to walk, so I drove her there and picked her up in the Buick. Why not? I didn’t have many other places to drive it.

  One Tuesday morning in October on the drive to school, Charlie asked, “Is it okay if we go to the library after school sometimes?”

  I thought for a moment of Steve and how he’d loved the library, how much time he’d spent there. So much so that I wondered sometimes if he wasn’t after a librarian. “Sure, we can do that.”

  “Can we go today?”

  “Umm, I don’t see why not. I could use a new book to read, come to think of it.”

  “How about Saturdays? Can we go to story hour on Saturday?”

  I laughed. “Story hour? Sounds like fun. Let’s go.”

  “Thanks, Lita. Now you can meet Mr. Lair.”

  I smiled. “That sounds good.” Charlie talked about this Mr. Lair at the library all the time; how nice he was, how much fun he was. Of course, with no dad on the scene it was only natural that she’d become attached to some man in her life.

  After school I picked Charlie up and we drove to the Central Library on 12th Avenue. She was amazed at how much faster it was to drive to the library than it was to take the bus. Almost as soon as we made it down the stairs to the Boys and Girls’ Department, she grabbed me by the arm and started to drag me towards the desk.

  “It’s Mr. Lair,” she said in a stage whisper.

  She stopped when we got within a couple of feet of him. To this day I’m still not sure whether I gasped, “Oh, my God,” unde
r my breath or just in my mind when I first laid eyes on him. He was absolutely the most handsome man I had ever seen: tall and lean, deep-set eyes the colour of the sky on a warm day. His auburn hair was a little unruly, maybe a little long for a librarian. His smile was wide and open, and we both couldn’t help laughing at Charlie’s eagerness for us to meet.

  “Hello. I’m John Lair,” he said. He extended a hand, and I shook it.

  “Hello, Mr. Lair. I’m Lita Stone. I take care of Charlie sometimes. We’re good friends. She’s told me a lot about you.”

  “Nice to meet you, Mrs. Stone.”

  “Call me Lita.”

  “Well, she’s told me about you, too, Lita.”

  “Oh, really? Nothing bad, I hope.”

  “Oh, no. She tells me you’re a guitarist.”

  “Um, yes. Yes, I am.”

  “That’s really interesting. What kind of music do you play?”

  “Well, a lot of kinds, I guess. I’ve been playing jazz for a long time, but I play some folk and blues these days.”

  “You’re playing professionally?”

  “I play traditional Gypsy music in a group with Charlie’s mom. I used to play in a jazz combo in the 30s.” I wondered how old he was when I was playing jazz. A little child, maybe.

  “Really?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Here in Regina?”

  “Yeah. We were called the Syncopation Five.”

  “Amazing. I wonder if you’d want to bring your guitar into our story hour sometime?”