by Dolly Dennis
But here she was wearing an engagement ring. Perhaps she could postpone the wedding; perhaps, perhaps not. This ambivalence of the heart kept her awake some nights. Unlike Alma, Fury’s mother thrilled at the idea of a new daughter in the family, and his father reminded them how smart they were to end the year as a couple and, therefore, reduce their income tax. But for Loddy and Fury, it was just a perfect way to end one year and begin another.
If she had known Fury would be so late, she would have arranged to meet him in the cafeteria but, at this point, she didn’t want to risk missing him. So she pulled out her transistor radio for company, found a station spinning Ball and Chain and cranked up the volume. She closed her eyes as she sang along, a duet of souls on an empty plaza, the lyrics evaporating into the chill. And when the song was over, the disc jockey in a cheerless baritone announced: Janis Lyn Joplin, dead at 27 from an overdose of heroin, possibly combined with alcohol. She was found in her hotel room by her road manager ... and in the background Janis was singing Cry Baby.
“No, Janis, you didn’t. You didn’t. You were supposed to wait for me.”
Just then Fury appeared at the edge of the plaza, grinning wide and shouting: “They bought it. They bought it.” His jubilant expression changed to concern as they faced each other, noses touching like a reflection in a mirror, she pulling away and he asking: “What’s the matter, love?”
Still clutching the transistor, she held it to his ear and, as Cry Baby faded into the airwaves, the disc jockey repeated the news of Janis’ death.
“Ah, that’s so sad.” He rested his arm around her shoulder like they were just about to go for a stroll in the park.
“Janis is dead,” she said in a monotone.
“Never mind, love, you still have Mama Cass.”
xxx
On October 6, the FLQ kidnapped James Richard Cross, the British Trade Commissioner. Six days later, Pierre Laporte, Vice-Premier and Minister of Labour, was abducted. Montreal vibrated with terror at the unfolding events, especially when Laporte’s body was discovered in the trunk of a car. Trudeau deployed the army to Montreal. Suspected terrorists, outspoken separatists, poets, journalists, teachers were rounded up. Fury heard from Big Gilles that Marcel was among the apprehended, but was released after a couple of days.
Fury received a frantic call from his sister, Maria.
“I was here all alone,” she said all out of breath, “when the bastards barged in, pushed me aside, me, seven months pregnant, and searched the entire house. Not a word, not a bloody word from the bastards, and the two little ones hanging onto my skirt. They turned the house upside down and just left. Didn’t even put anything back. Do we look like terrorists? We’re moving out of this province right now!” Maria had the bad luck of living in the area where Laporte’s body was found.
Notwithstanding their relationship, Loddy grew concerned about Alma and Bettina. She called them, but the line was dead. The telephone company said someone had perhaps unplugged the cord, so she and Fury drove over.
The city had the air of a war zone: soldiers on patrol, snipers on rooftops, and the army everywhere. The majority were stationed to guard English establishments like McGill, or the Westmount armory. A tank manoeuvred its way around the Atwater Market parking lot and pulled out in front of them as they headed into Verdun.
“Tell me that wasn’t a tank,” Loddy said.
It was dusk by the time they reached Alma’s flat. They barged through the exterior door, the one with the soundless doorbell, and found the interior door unlocked. Bettina met them.
Alma’s helpless moan could be heard from the living room: “Go way. Go way.”
“She thinks we’re at war, Loddy. I don’t know what to do any more. I’m scared.”
“When we hear siren, we run,” Alma’s muffled voice.
“You should have called me, Bettina.”
“I thought I could handle it.”
Alma cowered in her bunker, a nest of blankets behind her armchair and knitting basket, a broom for a weapon. She waited for the siren that never came.
“Oh, Maw.” Loddy reached out to her, but Alma grabbed the broomstick and jabbed at her as though she were fighting off the enemy. Fury snatched the broom away before any harm was done and Alma collapsed in an unbearable wailing, a lament for a war she survived three decades earlier.
“It’s over, Maw. No more war. It’s over. Peace.” On their knees now, Loddy held her mother, stroked the back of her head like a wounded child.
“Yah, yah, war over?” Alma wailed, with imploring eyes.
“Yes, Maw, you don’t have to be afraid.”
Loddy and Fury stayed the night, ensured she took her medication and hoped she would stabilize. But in the morning, when Loddy drew the drapes back from the living room window, Alma dived for the floor.
“No!” she screamed, covering her head “Close! They shoot in.”
“The war is over, Maw, remember? It’s okay now.”
At one point, Loddy wondered if this was just another game of manipulation on Alma’s part to make her feel guilty; to control this defiant daughter so there would be no wedding. Loddy and Fury babysat another night and the next day Alma was back in her element, baking and cooking from a Lithuanian menu. Bettina gave assurances she would notify Loddy if anything changed and, with that knowledge, Loddy and Fury departed with a shopping bag stuffed with Alma’s usual delicacies.
xxx
Fury and Dewey delivered the finished canvases to Dormer on the afternoon of October 29. Both made a stopover at the Bank of Montreal to withdraw money for a night of celebration. Loddy, in the meantime, had made dinner reservations for four at the Crêpe Bretonne on Mountain Street. Fury had a habit of running late so she wasn’t worried until Dewey and Ulu showed up at her door with two police officers.
“What’s the matter, Dewey? Ulu?” Her eyes flitted from one to the other.
She knew it was grave when the policemen removed their caps, lowered their heads and assumed the posture of hockey fans at the Forum just before the singing of O Canada. Ulu and Dewey’s face wore the mask of tragedy, a drama played out, and here was the final act.
“Where’s Fury?” She checked over their shoulders as though he was about to amble up the steps and demand why the cops were at his door. “Where is he?”
Ulu cradled her with hugs. “Oh, Loddy, let’s go inside.”
They seated themselves in the living room — Ulu and Dewey on either side of Loddy on the couch, the two officers across them in armchairs. Dewey clasped his hands as though he were about to pray.
“They crashed into us as they were running out and we were going into the bank,” he said as if reciting a monologue. “Fury tried to stop them but one of them panicked and his gun went off. Fury was down on the sidewalk and I couldn’t do anything. Loddy, I couldn’t do anything. He was ... he was ... dead.” Dewey choked on the word ‘dead’. “Loddy, the guy who shot Fury looked back as he was running and I swear it was Marcel. They wore kerchiefs over their mouths but the eyes, the hair, it was Marcel. I could swear.”
Everyone waited for Loddy to react: scream, moan, wail. Nothing.
“You okay, hon?” Dewey’s arm encircled her shoulders.
She nodded, stoic, catatonic.
For someone who had always wept easily, it seemed she had forgotten how to cry. She kept repeating: “Fury dead? Fury dead?”
“We are sorry, Madam,” one of the police officers said. “But we will get the person who did this. Rest assured.”
Newspapers reported the incident and alluded that the robbers were members of the FLQ. Once again, Montreal was on the world stage, but with bad lighting. History would remember this month as the October Crisis. Loddy would remember it as the month her life changed. Fury died on her birthday.
One day collapsed into the next. She lingered in bed wearing his p
aint-stained flannel work shirt with the scent of turpentine, oil and him. Ulu and Dewey monitored her progress, brought her care packages, which she ignored. She subsisted on Janis Joplin records, vodka, the real stuff, and air. A robot on remote control, batteries dying, she forgot to shower, change her underwear, or wash her hair. In the middle of the night, she would cry out: “Put me in a body bag. Like Ulu. But let me die. Let me die.”
Loddy didn’t attend either the funeral or the burial. To do so, would be an acknowledgement of Fury’s death, a flame snuffed out, gone. She couldn’t bear the thought of the only man she had ever loved lying in a box. She wanted to remember him alive, the man who loved her without conditions. She kept on thinking that perhaps this was one of Fury’s terrible jokes. That he would ring the doorbell, surprise her with flowers. Got you, Love! She checked the stoop daily, expecting a bouquet.
She resurfaced weeks later and stared out the living room window surprised to find a dusting of snow on the ground. Across the street Ulu and Dewey had already decorated their front door with a Christmas wreath and lights braided the black wrought-iron balcony. She managed to call Ulu: “No need to come over. I’ll be okay. Just have to do something.”
Loddy unlocked Fury’s studio, let the door spring open. The doorknob bounced against the nearby wall, leaving its mark. It was the stink of turpentine and paints after months of confinement within four walls that assaulted her first. She circled the room, fondling the brushes, the unfinished canvases, the sketches for a mural the city had commissioned, sketch pads, books and a portfolio. This loss. This loss. This loss.
Out of respect, Dormer had held a vernissage, a private showing, after the burial. He was also very much aware the death of an artist increased the value of his work. Dewey and Ulu attended on Loddy’s behalf. The canvases — landscapes of St. Emile, the log cabin, the lake, Loddy posing in the row of red seats in the back yard, hidden in a field of tall delphiniums and goldenrod, a collage of her face and body veering towards expressionism — all sold with the speed of his death except for the one canvas draped with a black scarf.
“This one,” Dormer said, “is for Loddy. Fury didn’t want it sold. It’s her birthday present from him.”
Dewey and Ulu, without fanfare, had stored it in Fury’s studio. Now Loddy let the silk cloth drop to reveal a realistic representation of their love, a portrait of the two so real that her hand trembled as her fingers fanned over his cheek, and on the lip of the easel, a card with a note:
You are my life and heart,
Every breath is you.
Happy Birthday.
— Fury
A whimper first, then slow wracking sobs, she gasped as though she were chasing air; her cry, a lament for the dead. She grieved and grieved, let her despair play out until there was nothing left, not a drop.
Loddy stepped back, away from the canvas, and noticed how the portrait seemed to fade into the achromatic white wall behind it. She rummaged through a nearby cupboard until she found what she was looking for, climbed atop a high folding stool and, with an artist’s compass, sketched a perfect ring, the length of the ceiling to the floor. She dipped a broad-stroked brush into black paint and filled in the circle, then stepped back again to inspect her work. She removed the stool and repositioned the easel with the portrait against the frame of blackness.
“Loddy.” Someone touched her shoulder. She whirled around to find Dewey standing behind her.
“Why is it so hard to be happy?” Her swollen eyes flushed the question.
“I don’t know,” Dewey said.
They stared at the black shining ball on the wall.
“It’s called the eclipse of the sun,” she finally said, her voice bouncing off the walls of the almost empty room.
SCENE 30:
Ball and Chain
Winter 1970
She wore only black now, black slacks and tops that became her signature.
Come and get me, she dared drivers as she sprinted across Montreal’s busiest intersections. Come hit me. I don’t care. But she always made it safely to the other side.
Alma and Bettina tried to persuade her to move back home.
“The extra rent would help Maw,” Bettina said.
Three stooges in a two-bedroom flat, Loddy thought. No, thank you.
“See what I tell you,” Alma charged. “God kill him. He no good for you.”
Loddy aimed to slap her face but stopped herself.
“Tikras Tievas. Like you father. Hit me. Hit. I die soon enough. Everything shit.”
Without fanfare, The Garage Coffee House had shut down on the Labour Day weekend and gone into receivership. Loddy, now fuelled on vodka and Janis Joplin, accompanied Jacob on his circuit of lounges and clubs. No town was too tiny, no venue was too naughty. She sang Ball and Chain with such guttural power even the strippers wept and forgot their entrances. She now aspired to a daring, nebulous lifestyle and taunted death at every turn. Ulu and Dewey couldn’t rein her in. She graduated from hash brownies and now tasted stronger medicine (as she called it). Mescaline and LSD became her escape mechanism and she added bourbon to the mix.
One night, it came to a head when she and Jacob had attended an after-show party in a high rise on Durocher. The host, a renowned classical pianist, rented the apartment for his frequent Montreal appearances at Place des Arts.
“Loddy,” Jacob said, shaking her, “you were on the back balcony, looking down at the lane, high on mescaline. You kept screaming that the garbage was on fire and you wanted to dive into it because you said it looked warm and pretty. I had to pull you back before you jumped.”
“No, Jacob, that, like, never happened,” she said. “You’re just trying to scare me.”
But the uncertainty and the fact she remembered nothing was enough to put a temporary halt to her drug use. She now found sufficient solace and medicinal value from real vodka, or any other superior alcoholic beverage that sought her company. Wine became a morning mouthwash.
Then in early December, while doing her laundry, she discovered her wallet, forgotten in the back pocket of a pair of slacks. It had run through the wash cycle. She sorted the soggy contents onto the table like a game of solitaire: a couple of fivers, receipts, a credit card, the photo from Alma’s purse, business cards, bus tickets and snapshots of her and Fury taken in one of those booths at La Ronde, the amusement park left over from EXPO 67. Her lips quivered as she flattened out the contact sheet with the four poses: Fury, kissing her on the cheek; Fury, making faces; Fury, sticking out his tongue; Fury, pulling his eyes sideways with his fingers while she held the same dignified pose in anticipation of every flash. Silly guy. She shuffled through the density of business cards and discarded all but one. The lettering had faded from the washing, but she could still decipher the name and the address:
Robert Marks
Creative Talent Management
Loddy taped the card to the fridge door like a magnet, a reminder of her worth.
xxx
Christmas Eve. She resisted the temptation to spend the night Christ was born with her now best friend, bourbon, and instead met Alma and Bettina at Our Lady Gate of Dawn church for midnight Mass. Alma had warned Loddy to arrive early as pews were at a premium, but had added that Bettina would be there to save her a place. Indeed, in the dim church lighting, she could distinguish her sister in her modest apparel, an apparition in a white polyester wrap coat and beret which Loddy had confiscated from wardrobe when The Garage Theatre closed its doors. Bettina waved her towards an aisle seat in the middle row. Loddy wished she had chosen a spot somewhere in the back, some obscure dark corner, out of sight.
She could sense the congregation scrutinizing her as she tottered down the aisle like a runway model, tall and erect, but with a false sense of bravado. She could almost hear the tongues wagging: What a tragedy that fiancé of hers.What was he? A painter? Dead. And did you see th
ose nude paintings he did of her? Such an ugly girl and so fat. What did he see in her? It serves her right. She doesn’t take care of her mother and sister with the crooked foot. God is punishing her and poor Alma losing her mind after that husband of hers married that Polish widow. Such a tragedy that family. And on and on and on. No secrets in this community of saints.
She wanted to stick out her tongue or go into fits of demonic possession. But she held back. As she slipped into the pew, she glanced at the choir loft. There was Alma, in the first row, alto section, fluttering her fingers at Loddy. Another thirty minutes before show time. The monotonous intermittent hum of the organ’s constant refrain of Silent Night drove her into a deep sleep. Her head rocked with a rhythm of its own, back and forth, back and forth as she tried to keep awake, her eyelids drooped, half opening with every punch from Bettina’s elbow. Loddy returned to a comfortable snore, her mouth frozen like an old man dying, drool gathering at the corners of her mouth. The choir launched into a consonance of Silent Night and, as the lights grew brighter and brighter with every note, the singing swelled — louder and louder until it woke Loddy with a snap of her head.
She followed the congregation and fell to her knees, straightened her coat, and contemplated the statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in front, stage right of the main altar, a realistic nativity scene at her shoeless feet. Mary’s supplicant arms extended out to the parishioners as though she had just dumped the crèche like a load of laundry and was pleading: here, you put this away; instead of here, this is my beloved Son.
Loddy had lost her faith in grade eleven during a catechism class on the virtue of charity.
“Love thy neighbour,” Mother St. Mary Theresa had drilled into the girls and Loddy had raised her hand.
“But it says here, page 90, we can’t date non-Catholics. Isn’t that a contradiction? Love thy neighbour but don’t date him?”