The Lost Highway

by David Adams Richards

  Over time, sitting in the dark living room with the drapes drawn to the outside and the noises ebbing to nothing on the streets, they spoke of revolution and change as the coffee was passed around. Sometimes Alex did not leave that little house, sheltered by university buildings, until dawn, feeling the cold early dawn air on his skin for the first time since he had served mass. He would feel elation as he walked.

  This was the great world, the world he was entitled to. He believed in their fair-mindedness and nurturing love of humanity until one day he approached them across the common, to ask them awkwardly enough about a specific child.

  Doug and Fiona themselves had no children, and he believed he would perform a service. However, they said flatly that they wouldn’t adopt when he approached them about Minnie’s child, or about any of the children he was now concerned about.

  He was surprised that day how, to prove various points, they likened other children not only as a burden but as a political problem that could be elevated and adjusted if certain men and women were forbidden to have them. The idea that they could decide who should and should not be allowed to have children was transforming to him.

  They had their cat, and it seemed to be worth its weight in gold. The suggestion that he must love this cat as much as they, show tolerance toward their obsessive coddling of it, was always at the fore. And so he did, realizing how his uncle would be disgusted by them.

  Still, Alex decided what they said was right for them, and what was right for them was also right for him. For who was he to judge them? (Except, of course, he had judged others closer to him.)

  Many more evenings passed in their company, many more times he left at dawn.

  And because he had been an orphan, he believed that he could now speak against orphans and be justified, if not for himself then for those two people he so admired. And so he did.

  There were a few students in their inner circle, but he was the most favored, the one who could go into the house without knocking at any time.

  But once, after supper in late April, he showed up in a rainfall, and heard them bitterly savage with each other. He backed away and went home. There was talk of some impropriety at the university that she did not know about.

  The world moved on, and later that spring the couple moved away and Alex grew older. He wrote to them for a while, telling them of his plans, cynical and ironic, but after a while they no longer answered his letters. But he was becoming part of the new order that they had helped create, and that he himself believed he did. And after a few years, his tall, lanky body could be seen day in and day out amid the waning brick buildings of long ago, crossing the commons with frost in the soil.

  Walking home one clear cold night in February, staring up at the great clock as it struck seven, he realized he had found his calling, and his home, and was secure. A great meaning now filled his life, and he was ecstatic.

  By the end of seven years at university he was, he believed, his own man, and had given up any semblance of the man he had been formerly. He refused to talk about his past, that cold dark area of his life, which left people thinking he had been deeply betrayed. People whispered that he was brilliant and more so because there was nothing he believed in, but everything was questioned.

  After he completed his master’s he began to teach a course on modern ethics. This attracted the young to him, and by the time he was given his first appointment he had protégés and devotees among the young women who came to his class. The young women mightn’t always agree with him, but they knew, in this age, he felt safer if he agreed with them.

  Then he realized something. And because he was bright he realized it somewhat quicker than most. In this new age, people were actually expressing something they might not realize. It was this: at least among the people he admired, forgiveness was no longer an essential part of man’s hope. What so many people had, as borne out by these privileged and radicalized young men and women, was one of two possible states. These two possible states were simply approval or disapproval. That is all that was required.

  This new unspoken proclamation went on in all departments and in all circumstances. That is, approval or disapproval had replaced justice and humanity, while posturing as the exact same laws. He himself would not debate the discrepancy, for he felt it was a moot point. What was fascinating about it was that to the clever, like himself, it could be manipulated as seeming to be one and the same, and to the naive, like himself, what was determined in university was supposedly more impartial than anywhere else.

  Yet many sophomores at university, along with the university professors, mistakenly denoted one for the other, and approved or disapproved at whim. Like any social worker who came into a family might do, or a professor correcting an essay. This is what Alex started to do as well, at first tenuously but by the time he was twenty-six it was a part of his nature, almost a definitive one.

  At times, especially during the first snow falling on bare streets, he would remember another time and be sad. But that time, no matter what he wished for, could not come again.

  He disapproved greatly and he sought one thing only: the approval of others. Though approval and disapproval were never spoken about as a replacement for anything, the eyes of certain people immediately told you that they had replaced forgiveness. And the more aggressive and certain his students were, the more they relied on disapproval.

  So, after a certain time, by his logic and the logic of many of his radicalized friends, there was no wrong action, only action approved or disapproved. For any action he sought approval. And in this approval, he pandered to what was in vogue and disapproved of what was not.

  His articles in the paper were many, and he became locally notorious. He still wrote about Chapman Island in his weekly column, and was certain to mention the anniversary of the Chapman Island takeover every year, and have the picture of he and Peggy Paul published.

  He began over time to embellish his role in it, and the adverse toll taken on the First Nations by others, especially his uncle. Of course he was true in speaking of the terrible things the First Nations people had to endure by our hand. But he made the most of it by implicating those he disliked, and inflating the assistance he was giving, even by writing a column.

  And during all of this time he was writing Minnie and telling her of his new life, and his new views, and in a certain way ridiculing her for hers. That is, he disapproved of her now, and wanted her to approve of him.

  —

  IF HE ADMITTED IT, HE HAD BEEN FRIGHTENED OF HIS former mentor and the mentor’s high-strung wife, herself a former nun—for they believed that everything they believed was correct, and that the slightest deviation from it was incorrect, and he had tried to maintain their approval by saying exactly what would please them, even though at times he went against his better nature and the natural instinct he had to protect the memory of his mother.

  That is, his former mentors saw his mother as being a simplistic product of her time who believed she needed a child to fulfill her. It was the first time he had ever witnessed the negation of the sanctity of life for a woman whose memory he treasured. This stung him deeply but he had said nothing. Therefore, when they said they were living for themselves and their careers and could not envision taking over the responsibility of someone else’s child, someone else’s mistake, he could not see it as being affected if they themselves did not. After they moved away and their apparent dissatisfaction with each other and with their lives became apparent, he told others that they shouldn’t make too, too much of it.

  Strangely enough, on occasion Leo Bourque would send him a note, saying: “I read you in the papers, you give it to the rednecks good,” or “I heard you on the radio—someday I’d like to say a few things on the radio too. I will see you sometime for sure!”

  It was wonderful that he was considered accomplished. So, too, was the comfortable fact that he himself would never have to leave university to be looked upon as a man.

  �
�

  THEN IN HIS NINTH YEAR AT UNIVERSITY HE WAS ASSURED of a tenured position. He knew this, and felt safe in assuming it. The debates within the halls of university were important and non-threatening to a person such as himself. And he believed that his own life was set.

  Yet in all of this there was one salient point he did not admit to. He was, like most men who have never really stood on their own, frightened of being disapproved of, while pretending radical theory that was really the standard theory of a coddled academia. As long as they were the theories of many who never worked a day with their hands, he was in tune and safe, and being secure he could say he was radical.

  But that year, one incident happened to change his life forever, and looking back on it he had no need to have ever been involved.

  A woman came one late September day to the university, blocked in fog upon the old hill, with lamplights on wooden poles gleaming on the wet streets and blank-looking windows of those lace-curtain Irish so many of us are from. Walking the walkway was a woman who seemed to be the personification of this new idea that had taken him away from the stubble of his uncle’s farm and construction company. This idea of how the world must change, in all ways, from the very surface of the lakes to the mountain of spruce across dark and forlorn barrens, so that the very singing of the birds no longer brought forth the sun but the great egalitarian and proletarian design that whirred like a fan in his skull would be realized.

  She was the one, or came to be the one he was waiting for. She walked in with a funny hat and a sharp look, a rather official and predatory look, and was granted entrance as a mature student.

  At first, it was true, he or no one paid much attention to her. She looked dowdy and common. In fact, he later remembered meeting her at two or three townhouses the students had, in those blocks of ambivalent and sour buildings, with cement walkways cracked and littered, and thinking nothing at all about her. But then it became apparent to people at the university, and to him especially, that she fit the criteria of those who believed in a certain kind of independence for women. (That is, as an independent woman some believed you could only be one kind—and Alex had forcefully come to this point of view.)

  At first she was shy, as she sipped wine at those townhouses, digesting all she heard with the wine she drank, but as she became more aware of her younger and less experienced peers, she realized there was nothing at all to fear from them. At times her eyes would give a certain flare, as if recognizing not the greatness of a person, a professor or student, but their common smallness.

  Men were frightened of her tongue, of her crudeness, and tried to pacify her, not by forgiving what she had done but by approving what she had done, and would do. Soon it was evident that past faults, whatever they were, were considered her attributes.

  The dark fall came on. The trees emptied of leaves and bitter cold hung in a yellowish sky. She was seen each day at 8:30 in the morning, walking to class with her bundle of books, leotards and knee warmers, and a woolen coat. Soon Alex discovered two things: he feared her, and he wanted more than anyone else to impress her, and have her like and approve of him more than she approved of others.

  Alex discovered when dealing with her that she could look wise or sad at any moment when she spoke of her life. And her life is what caught the attention of everyone she spoke to. Most of what she spoke about was her life on the Gum Road, and how she was a victim of abuse. And her stare, if anything else, told you so.

  She had been beaten at an early age, forced to do housework, and what seemed worst of all, to this egalitarian group lead by Alex Chapman, forced to go to Catholic mass.

  She rebelled against all this, she said, and began going with a man down the highway, who made her drunk and ambivalent to her own welfare, in those places of comfort long destroyed.

  Then a moment came one winter night that year when she revealed to people that she had left her bastard child in the snow and ran away, covered still in the hot and tumultuous blood of birth, her legs shaking like a newborn moose, she scrambled to the river and fled, first in a canoe across the frozen water and then in a boxcar.

  She broached this subject in a class on ethics, where Alex was the underdoctorate assistant professor, and watched the faces of the students go blank and twitch under the light, indecisively wondering how to respond.

  “Yes, and I got myself away and took off to Toronto, got there with the blood still hard upon me crotch. I must have smelled some sweet!”

  One callow boy laughed, then there was simply dead silence. Someone crumpled a paper. Another student stood and went to the washroom.

  No one else wanted to speak.

  “Everyone will think I am wrong,” she said.

  But no one spoke.

  No one blamed her. Not really. That is, most had forgiveness for her, forgiveness forever, for being a child in the snow. Yet forgiveness here at this moment was an outmoded concept to Alex, who suddenly and frankly concluded that they approved of her, as he did. They approved of this act and could therefore sanction it. This great naïveté overcame him.

  “She proves everything,” Alex said later that night to Professor Scone, who almost instantly agreed.

  For Alex, her past suffering became her greatest asset, and suddenly it became his. For some reason he wanted to take this asset and control it. And this is what he set out to do, even if he denied to himself he was doing it. For there was only one professor he wanted to impress and emulate now, and that was Professor David Scone.

  “I will help her—I will write a column about her,” he told his new mentor that day.

  It was as if, though not believing in God, God had sent her to him, to make the most of. So he set about doing that.

  Therefore, Alex invented her over the next few months, and the more he did, the more her action was mythologized and sanctified, so professors would speak of her to him, and on some occasions relate the story he had taken and reinvented.

  “I am staggered by her bravery,” one professor, his white beard offset by shining youthful eyes, said simply because he wanted the attention of having said it. And both Professor Scone and Young Chapman agreed.

  Her dyed hair stuck out under the afternoon lights, her cheeks suffered rouge, her face, strong and opinionated, was soon enough a vague complaint against them all. And Alex became captivated by her. He wanted to show that he understood her suffering more than anyone else. In fact, he claimed her. He kept her captive for himself in his own mind.

  And there was something else. In fact, it was the main thing. Alex, knowing who she was—June Tucker—believed he could hold her worth up against the worth of her younger sister, to show her younger sister up, and he did so by writing Minnie. The letter was simply a note of information, until the last paragraph: “You should look to your sister,” he wrote. “She might just put that Madonna of yours to shame, for she suffered as much—having to carry a child nine long months!” It was in a way a long overdue insult to Minnie’s child, who Minnie had carried. “So she left and you did not, and got away and you did not, and is now at university and you are not!”

  He felt badly sending this letter, in the midst of a snowstorm, on a bleak cold day.

  “Be careful,” Minnie wrote back. Short and to the point. He ignored it. And for a little while, things worked to his favor.

  But then, after a time, Minnie’s warning became more and more credible.

  One day, he hurried to class, his arms filled to overflowing with books, his corduroy jacket flapping behind him. She was sitting at the back near the door and he got the feeling that she suddenly understood he was saying things about her for his own benefit, and what was more, that she could use this against him. This was just a split second in that day, but he realized that his position with her had changed. Later that day she did not sit with him, but with Professor Scone. And seeing this as he entered the cafeteria, he felt a sudden betrayal.

  Afterwards, June slowly and then more convincingly disapproved of and disl
iked him. At first he ignored this. He ignored that she was not his but the property of David Scone and a few others. But after a while, he tried to win her approval any way he could. In some ways he had created her, and wanted to take credit for it. In other ways what he had created was now more powerful than he was. For instance, she never once had to knock on Professor Scone’s door, as he did. And since he had championed her as being truthful, he could not now easily say she was being untruthful about him.

  He had to carry on, because the situation he had produced was his own. So he helped her in the department with research. He even at points agreed with her sudden disrespectful remarks about him. He knew that some of these remarks came from Professor Scone himself. He felt that both she and Scone were ridiculing him. He now, too late, saw many things in her he disliked: a vulgar pride that her sister would be ashamed of, a rapacious ego that she managed to betray without qualms, although he could not say so. Because her sister had warned him and he did not believe it. He saw too late how she had used him, but could not say so either. Especially to Scone, who was now her protector, who had now as department head invaded Alex’s territory. That is, Alex tried to deny what he felt, and champion what he secretly disapproved of in order for her to sanction him. He realized that Scone resented his rise, and had created a pincer movement to stop it, or at least to make more of a case for himself. He could not believe anyone could do anything so obvious. He was enraged at June Tucker for playing her part as well. Why had he not seen it coming?

  So by mid-winter—by the second week back from Christmas break—some people had a different opinion of him because of all this. He secretly resented and hated her, but pretended to himself and others that he did not. He knew this and tried the best he could to ignore it. He began to hope she would go away and not influence those he relied upon against him. But she did not go.