by Glen Huser
“Tell me about him,” I said.
She did. And years later, when I had begun to tape her stories so that I would never lose them, I had her tell me again.
“Per?” Her voice emerges from the slowly moving wheels of the tape recorder. “I think Per was one of those people who always wanted things to be better than they were but who could never quite manage to figure out how to do it—or, if he did figure it out, would as quickly sabotage the effort. I suppose it’s what, today, they call a feature of the classic alcoholic—someone who is adept at not succeeding. I did love him, though, Curtis. It was a tough corner of the world—the waterfront back in those days before and during the war. I remember heading off to school and there would be men, a line that seemed to stretch forever, assembled along the street in front of the Auxiliary Hall and often Papa would be in the lineup and he’d wave or I’d hear him call out, ‘Farvel, skjaere! Bye bye little magpie.’ I always thought the men looked exhausted—I guess, in a way, it was wearying to their souls to line up day after day, never certain you’d be picked and make the money you’d need to get through the week or a month.
“There would be times when Per would get in with one of the gangs—often they were looking for experienced longshoremen to unload and load the Empress boats or the Australian line. I think if a foreman got to know you and saw you as a good worker, you would have regular work. I remember for a while he was part of the sugar gang and he hated that, loading two-hundred-and-forty-pound sacks of sugar. In the lower holds, the sacks would get stuck together and it took almost superhuman strength to get them apart and stacked just the way a foreman wanted them.”
There is a pause and the sound of a brandy glass being replenished.
In my mind’s eye, I can see Aunt Harriet raising the snifter and taking a small sip.
“Per was strong. He’d been working on boats or on the docks all his life. But he’d never kept a regular job for long. I think he often felt he knew better than the foreman how to load a ship’s hold and then there’d be a scrap and he’d be back standing in the drizzle outside the hall. If he’d been drinking, the scraps would get physical and there’d be months when it was hard for him to get any work at all. Those were lean times, let me tell you. I was lucky if I had a couple of slices of bread with a bit of syrup sticking them together for lunch.
“Sometimes he’d work a boat which would load up at the docks and then he’d go with it for the unloading. I’d be on my own for a few days—which I never minded, even when I was twelve or thirteen. I remember once—oh my!—he got into such a state. He loaded a ship with rails for Squamish and I think it was going up to Ocean Falls too and the longshoremen were asked to go along to unload. I guess the only accommodation they had for them was the straw on the poop deck and there were three pigs corralled there. They had to bed down with the pigs for several days.
“‘Gris. Svinepels!’ he would be roaring when he had a few under his belt. ‘We might as well be pigs!’”
I recall a smile flickering across Aunt Harriet’s lips.
“Poor Papa. He was such a mixture of things. Angry so much of the time. And always drinking too much. But he played the violin as if the music were part of his blood. Nothing classical. He’d pretty well taught himself although I think his own father was supposed to have been a pretty good fiddler.
“Your mother? Was she with you?”
“Mama.” The word was as soft as a whisper on Aunt Harriet’s lips. “She died when I was nine. In Seattle. That was when Papa and I came up to Vancouver. I think he couldn’t bear living in a place so filled with memories.”
The words spill into a stretch of silence.
But that autumn evening in 1959 there was the sound of Aunt Harriet’s parlour clock chiming midnight.
“Heavenly days,” she laughed, “where has the evening flown!”
I remember returning the journal to its nest of paper fragments, resisting for the moment the urge to pull them out and scrutinize them more closely. There would be other evenings, I knew.
IN THE COMING MONTHS IT WAS A ROUTINE I GREW TO love, reading Phillip Pariston’s diary aloud to Aunt Harriet in the evenings after we had been to a concert or supper.
Often I thought of my mother’s disclosure that Harriet had been—what?—mentally unstable?—surely not insane. I was reluctant to ask about the horrors of that distant time. But one December evening, after we’d been for dinner and the symphony, I saw a side that was new.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t have gone.”
I had filled her brandy glass, generously, from the decanter on the sideboard. Jean was out for the evening and she had left a plate of fruitcake pieces, covered with a Christmas napkin.
“You’re tired?” I pressed the plate toward her. “Fruitcake.”
“No.” She batted it away. “I hate fruitcake. I’m surprised Jean can’t remember.” A few of the pieces fell into my lap. As I retrieved them, she took a swallow of brandy that made her choke.
“Some music … the Rubenstein …” She gasped and some of the brandy spilled from her snifter. “It is in my mind like a piece of glass that has never been picked out.”
“Was it…?”
“I thought I might want to hear it again.” She took another swallow and closed her eyes as if the constant darkness needed another curtain. “But some things can never fit … back … the way they should.”
I had no idea what to say.
Suddenly she laughed.
“Paste it all together. Sound and shatter … what we want to be … what is.” She tipped the brandy glass to her lips. “Oh look, I must have spilled some.” Laughing, she held it out.
As I was refilling it, Jean returned, coming in the front door with a gust of wind.
“The cold is settling,” she said, divesting herself of coat and boots. It was an expression that was uniquely hers, as if weather came like a surge of immigrants.
I expected her to go on about her evening at a church dinner but whatever she was poised to say turned to silence. She was looking at Harriet with concern. Maybe because Harriet had continued laughing, a quiet laugh but one that scattered around the room as she twisted in her chair. She hurried over and laid her hands on Harriet’s shoulders.
“No.” The laugh turned into an almost inaudible moan. Then louder and sustained. “No.”
Jean looked at me. “You’ll be wanting to get home before it gets any colder.” She was rubbing her hands soothingly along Aunt Harriet’s arms now in what struck me as something she might have done often even though I had never seen her do it before.
I nodded and retrieved my own winter gear.
“Goodnight,” I said.
Her answer was barely a whisper.
“Goodnight, Phillip.”
CHAPTER 5
EVEN WITH AUNT HARRIET’S FRIENDSHIP, MOST OF that first year at university, I was lonely. I think I had hopes that the shyness that had wrapped me like some kind of invisible cloak in Yarrow would fall away in this new setting, in the big city. I had a little money from a bursary I had accepted and not told my mother about since it entailed teaching for two years for Edmonton Public Schools and I knew she wanted me to settle back home. With the bursary augmenting my allowance, I had funds enough to consider going out on dates. But I had never dated in Yarrow—never really dated. I’d gone to the local dances with friends and the girls I knew enjoyed dancing with me—I was a good dancer—but I was always just the guy pal, a designation I wore with the same comfort as my dancing shoes.
That fall I worked up the courage to ask out a girl who often set up her easel beside me in our drawing lab. During breaks we slipped out for coffees together. I enjoyed her wicked sense of humour. She could describe our regular, flabby female model, Mrs. Hyde-Bennett, in terms that left me weak with laughter. But when I finally got the nerve to ask her to go to a movie with me, she gave me a quick smile and said sure but I should know she was dating one of her professors. She couldn’t say who that was but
she was sure he wouldn’t mind if she went out with me. It was the kind of “me” that translated as “brother” or “good friend.” I felt that wave of embarrassment I always got when I sensed any kind of rejection. “Sure, let’s do that,” I said with practiced nonchalance. But we never did.
I did take time out from my studies to catch a movie or grab a bite at one of the South Side diners. Quite often by myself, but other times Walter Mandriuk would catch up with me and come along. I knew he watched for me when he was in the Tuck Shop. We ran into each other too in Sociology, a huge, massed class hosted in the Agriculture Building auditorium since the Education Building was bursting at its seams with baby boomers determined to become teachers.
First-year Education students were obliged to take phys. ed. and Walter and I ended up taking the course in the same time slot. He was a phys. ed. major, though, while I was someone who dragged myself reluctantly to the soccer field and the gym. Aware of how unathletic, pale, and skinny I appeared in the buff, I quickly changed into regulation gym shorts and jerseys but, when we were finished, avoided the shower room adjacent to our lockers. Walter and most of the others in my class bounded back and forth in unabashed displays of nudity. There were times when the mixture of steam and testosterone brought me close to dizziness. I tried to convince myself that I was viewing it all with the eyes of an artist making notes about male anatomy. My glances were quick and furtive. Usually my getaways from the locker room were executed with the speed of lightning.
Walter would catch me hurrying into my clothes, grabbing my books, ready to sprint to my next class.
“Not showering today, Curt?”
“Naw. No time to get dry. I just have ten minutes to get to English all the way across campus.”
“Dinner tonight at the cafeteria?”
“Uh … sure.”
“Meet you there at six.”
There was an ease to Walter that I admired. He seemed comfortable within his skin, always a ready smile on his lips, strong straight teeth, large farm-boy hands that every once in a while strayed to my arm as we sat and ate, emphasizing the punchline of a joke or reinforcing some bit of irony he discovered in campus life. In some ways, he was fearless in what he said.
“Cocks.” One of those first dinners we shared, the word dangled like the piece of spaghetti that had escaped onto his chin, making him laugh.
“What!”
“Cocks. I think all of those cocks in the locker room scare you away.” He winked at me. It was something else he could do effortlessly, and I had never been able to do at all. Wink. “You never even get out of your underwear.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Penises,” he said. “And all the equipment that goes with them. If you happen to be sitting on a locker room bench, you practically get hit in the eye. You never stick around though.”
I could feel red creeping up my face to my hairline and I looked around to see if anyone was sitting close enough to be listening in.
“There, I made you blush.” Walter showed all of his front teeth when he laughed.
“I don’t know how you got started on this,” I sputtered. “I told you, I have to run like Pheidippides to get to class after phys. ed. Whereas you can spend ten minutes in a hot shower.”
“Right.” Walter tried to look contrite, but I could see a smile still playing along his lips.
We were both coffee addicts so we met quite often at the Tuck Shop and sometimes at my basement apartment where I’d lined the walls with paintings and sketches from the art course I was taking. He liked checking out what he called my “gallery” and he knew I could always rustle up a snack. While there was no stove in my apartment, there was a cupboard and a sink and enough counter space for an electric hot plate. The rest of the furnishings were from my father’s second-hand store, trucked into Edmonton by a friend of his—a small wooden table and a couple of mismatched chairs he’d sanded and stained with a honey-coloured varnish, and a Winnipeg couch that I could use as a sofa during the day and unfold into a bed at night.
“What’s new in the gallery?” Walter would ask, inspecting whatever new pieces I’d tacked up onto the beaver-board walls. “Do they ever hire good-looking models?”
“No,” I laughed. “I think it’s a requirement that the women are overweight and have varicose veins and stretch marks. Men have to be at least over fifty, generally as skinny as the women are fat.”
“And they wear jockstraps?”
“Some anatomical secrets need to be kept when it comes to males.”
“No secrets in the phys. ed. building locker room,” Walter noted.
I gave him a look. We were not going to get into that conversation again.
“Were you pathologically shy as a child?” Walter asked me one time when he’d followed me home. I’d promised to grill us a cheese sandwich and brew some coffee.
“Not pathologically,” I said.
“But shy.”
“I come from a family where we kept our clothes on. Well, of course, Bradley and I …”
“Bradley?”
“My brother.”
“Ah.”
He shook his head and smiled at me. When he reached over and put his hand on mine, though, I jerked away, more of a reflex than anything else. I thought I saw a flicker of fear—or was it anger?—in his eyes, but then he laughed.
“You are your own funny self,” he said. “But don’t change.”
We still got together for the odd meal and once, when Aunt Harriet was fighting a cold and didn’t feel like going, Walter went with me to a concert at the Jubilee Auditorium. Mendelssohn at his most mellow.
After the performance, we found a coffee shop on 109th Street.
“So this is part of that other world of yours,” he said, checking out the couples and small groups at tables dimly lit with candles caught in coloured glass and fish netting.
“The music, yes,” I said. “The smoke-filled restaurant, no.”
“I’m glad,” he chuckled. “I think I could get to like the music.”
CHAPTER 6
THE SUMMERS BETWEEN UNIVERSITY TERMS I returned to Yarrow to help in my father’s secondhand shop. It was a slow business at the best of times, so my presence at the counter served more to give him time during the day to catch a few hours of fishing or have a drink with his cronies in the beer parlour of the small stucco-covered hotel which anchored the other end of Main Street. Because the bank manager at the Treasury Branch was on the United Church Board, Bradley, for July and August both years, managed to escape town to work as a counselor and lifeguard at the church camp on Garrett Lake.
“You could get on as a crafts teacher and take the Bible study,” my mother had urged.
“I may not be of legal age yet,” I told her, “but if you force me to work at the camp, I’ll run away and join a circus … or take up drug-running.”
“Think of the good you’d be doing. I know they’re short …”
I recalled my summer internments at Garrett Lake throughout my teens, and shuddered. “Besides,” I said, “I’ve become an agnostic.”
“When did you join them?” She looked sharply at me. “I don’t think Mr. Burcock would mind. He had that Cherkowski girl working there last summer and her parents are Greek Orthodox.”
I shot my father a pleading look.
“Let him work at the shop, Violet,” he said. “He’s good at tidying things.”
So I tidied for a couple of hours each day, sorting through boxes of odds and ends that lined the rear of the shop, giving it a strange, bunkered appearance—a wall of cardboard, out of which poked bits of clothing and footwear, edges of magazines, kitchenware and discarded machinery. My mission was to get the contents of the boxes into their appropriate plywood bins and containers that my father had attached to the other walls. From the woodworking corner of the shop there was a nest of shavings which I swept up each day. Sawdust settled like fine sandy ash over everything when he wor
ked with the saws, so keeping that at bay was another ongoing task, one that he happily relinquished to me.
In actuality, sorting, sweeping, dusting, and waiting on customers took only a chunk of each day and I filled my free time reading novels from the shelves of used paperbacks by the front door, sketching from my Anatomy for Artists textbook, and writing letters to Aunt Harriet. I could imagine Jean reading them to her in the parlour with the drapes drawn for coolness. In my mind, I could see her lips, on the verge of breaking into a smile, perhaps even laughter. In turn, she would dictate brief notes—Jean was not a patient scribe—outlining her own sparse summer activities, the books she was reading, her thoughts about the music she listened to on records or the radio.
Conspiratorially, I collected the mail each day from the post office two doors down from the second-hand shop. Why I didn’t want my mother to know that Aunt Harriet and I exchanged letters I am uncertain. I suspect it was because the small rebelliousness and paranoia of my adolescence was not far behind me and I had grown into habits of furtiveness.
I never thought about it at the time but I think my inability to throw anything away was the one salient trait of my father’s that I inherited. Aunt Harriet’s letters to me in Yarrow remain among my possessions, tucked in with concert programs, university notes, and other bits and pieces of paper pertaining to the Paristons that I acquired as time went on and I actively began to seek information about them.
All told, there are seventeen or eighteen letters from those summers, to which, in time, I added those she dictated during the year I attended the Vancouver School of Art. Flipping open the envelopes, their messages seem spare and dry, but chewy—like dehydrated fruit.