Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  Now take Sonja … He extracts the soaking handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabs his hairline as he studies her. In her face, ever since she quit school anyway, he hasn’t witnessed anything other than contentment. He’d love to be able to believe that look. He used to believe it, not any more. Partly it’s her shooting up from plump to fat. He can’t believe that, simple though she is, she doesn’t care. He can’t believe that you can be a twenty-four-year-old woman who has never gone out on a date (okay, you’ve gone out on one date) and not be suffering. He can’t believe that a contented person has only one friend and that friend is a snarky, go-go-booted doughnut glazer with a laugh like a pneumatic drill. He stands in the doorway of Sonja’s bedroom, and that almost everything in there is something she made herself—the poodle-patterned bedspread and matching curtains, the shellacked and framed jigsaw puzzles of the Royal family, the pompom trim around the vanity, the fake fur cover that turns the jewellery box into a poodle, the container of glued-together acorn caps from which burgeons a bouquet of reconstituted china dolls’ heads on candy-apple sticks—this, to him, is the really depressing part. When you consider that she dreamed these things up and poured time and effort into them! Maybe it’s just bad taste. There’s a possibility that what we have here is purely low I.Q. married to craft, but what he sees when he looks around is purely misery. The livid scabbing over of secret mayhem, another configuration of which is her good cheer.

  What is the mayhem? Getting pregnant at fifteen springs to mind, usually. Now, today, he wonders if it isn’t him. He doesn’t mean her knowing that she has a strange father, what he’s suddenly wondering is, if a queer father, by unconsciously failing to emit certain normal masculine impulses, plays havoc with his daughter’s temperamental development. Her intellectual development! Jesus, what if she’s slow because he’s queer? No, that’s nuts. He lifts his glasses and wipes his face with the handkerchief. Just let her be genuinely happy is all he asks. If blowing his brains out would guarantee her happiness, if his torso on a spit were Yahweh’s price … Let him tell you, those cut-and-dried Old Testament deals, more than the miracles they’re what he regrets you never hear about nowadays.

  “Dig in.”

  Her voice startles him. He puts his glasses back down and sees that the elastic neckline of her flowered muumuu has slipped, revealing one sweat-spangled shoulder as sloped and fleshy as a breast.

  “You need to eat plenty of salt when you’re perspiring,” she says. She yanks the neckline up before helping herself to a fistful of nuts.

  “That’s right,” he says, overly impressed, as always, when she knows anything. He fishes out a single nut, pops it in his mouth. “Wow, is it a scorcher,” he says boisterously. Like an ordinary father in a lawn chair he leans back with his fingers laced behind his neck and looks up at the sky. To the east it is marbled by dense grey-mauve clouds. Straight overhead the aspen leaves shiver, effervescent. He hopes another thunderstorm is on the way. Some water on this fire. It’s too hot to even breathe but people are out doing things. The amplified purr of a manual lawnmower. A screen door banging. Screams of little girls. Or of seagulls.

  His own little girl, the one who has never screamed, is playing “Take the A Train” now.

  Not for the first time he wonders if Joan was drawn to the piano because you can get ten notes out of it at once. He himself doesn’t play an instrument, but if he did it would be the piano for how it is capable of simultaneously reproducing the pitches of an entire orchestra and as such is the instrument that comes closest to resembling the life of the mind, the only life that allows you to live so many other lives. He listens to her. He thinks of how Doris is always saying to people, “You can be a genius in one part of your brain and still be brain-damaged in another part.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t say brain-damaged,” he tells her.

  “What do you want me to say?” she asks.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “Nothing, preferably. Not braindamaged.”

  “But she is brain-damaged.”

  “According to the neurologists certain functions appear to have suffered some degree of injury, yes. But whether or not these injuries are permanent has yet to be established.”

  “That’s what I said. Brain-damaged in a part of her brain. Sweetie, let’s call a spade a spade.”

  They’ve had this conversation, verbatim, a hundred times.

  He drains his glass of lemonade and glances at the bedroom window. The poor kid must be sweltering in there. She’s got the electric fan, but an air-conditioner is what she could do with. He sighs, and Sonja says, “A penny for your thoughts.”

  “Oh, just wondering what mountains I’d have to move to afford an air-conditioner.”

  “I’ll buy you one,” she says. “I’m Miss Moneybags.”

  He sits up straight. Joan’s deliverance might be a lost cause but Sonja’s has just been revealed to him. “Listen,” he says.

  “Hmm?”

  “I want you to use some of that money and go on a trip.”

  “A trip?”

  “To Europe. Or around the world. Around the world! Why not? On a ship, first class. I’ll tell you what, I’ll arrange the whole thing for you, the whole shebang! All you’ll have to do is pack.”

  “Mommy says the money is my nest egg for a rainy day.”

  “Ah, to heck with that. You can build it back up again. You’re young, you don’t have any responsibilities. Now’s the time to see the world.”

  She grabs a bunch of bobby-pins.

  He puts his hand over hers. “Hold on a minute.”

  She swipes her tongue along her upper lip. She smiles, but her hand under his is not still.

  “I’m serious, honey. You could see Buckingham Palace, the Eiffel Tower, Paris, French poodles—“ He thinks of her bedspread and jewellery box—“real French poodles! And you’d meet all sorts of interesting new people. A trip around the world! It could change your life.”

  “Oh, I don’t want to change my life,” she says.

  They blink at each other. “Well,” he says, “think about it, just think about it, okay?” He has lost his steam but he adds, “Monday I’m going to check with a travel agency, get some prices.” He gives her hand a pat and instantly she is back to her pins.

  The sun beats down. He moves his chair a little to the left for more shade. Charred is how he feels, in cinders. That black thicket of bobby-pins, that’s him, in cinders. He picks up his pencil, puts it down. Pours himself more lemonade and stretches and flexes his bum leg. Bellowing “D” words—“Degenerate! Depraved! Deviate! Dystopia!”—he wrapped the convertible around a tree and shattered his femur in three places. His suspicion is that when his leg stops seizing up, on that day so will his heart. “Do you know who I am?” Al said. “Yours,” he said. “Daddy, I’m yours.” If somebody says what you’ve been dying to hear without knowing it, it’s like the countdown on ether, you can’t resist.

  Yours. Daddy, I’m yours.

  Gordon sets the glass on the table as steadily as he can, but his hand is shaking too hard and lemonade splashes out.

  “Oops,” Sonja says, and then, squinting at him, “Are you okay?”

  “Fine.” He can only mouth it.

  “You’re white as a ghost,” she says pleasantly.

  He clears his throat. “Sonja.”

  She drops a completed card of pins into the box beside her chair. He clears his throat again. What he is thinking is so fantastic, so evil, that it should have occurred to him at all has already given it intolerable substance. “Honey,” he says.

  “Hmm?”

  “What—“ He takes a breath and glances around. One last look at the world intact. “What did Joan’s father look like?”

  He has never before asked about Joan’s father, and neither, he is almost certain, has Doris. Right from the beginning the guy was out of the picture—what was the point? So you’d think that Sonja might register surprise at his question. Think again. She chuckles. St
ill clipping pins, not missing a beat with the pins, she chuckles! And because in the marrow of his bum leg Gordon knows what she’s going to answer, her chuckling sounds mad to him, the implacability of her serenity is what strikes him, in the second before she speaks, as the true mad thing.

  “All I ever think of is his nostrils,” she says. “He had the hugest nostrils I’ve ever seen. Like this.” She circles her thumb and forefinger. “That huge. But he was just huge all over, gigantic, way over six feet. In a million years you’d never think he was related to Joanie. Oh, jeepers, I almost forgot! He was a carrot top!” She beams at him. “Honest. He asked me to guess his nickname and I said Red, of course …”

  Her voice fades into the sound of a tennis game, the sound of popping champagne corks. The light dims. There goes the light, all concentrated into a single ray that burns through the pocket of his shirt. “Court-jester shoes,” Sonja says, and it sounds as if the volume is being turned up and down. “Daddy!” she calls from the deck of a ship already out to sea, but the ray has whipped into a flaming lasso that binds his arms and he cannot wave to her.

  He is in the hospital two weeks, in a private room paid for by his company’s insurance plan. The saver of his life, through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and a tire-screeching drive to the hospital that flattened his own cat, was his neighbour to the north, Harry Jolley. Harry’s wife, Mabel, bakes a cake for Harry to take to the hospital. It is in the shape of a cat with chocolate-stick whiskers, a tail extending into a halo and with the words, in pink icing on the body: GET WELL SOON! Harry reads the inscription aloud to Gordon, whose glasses shattered when he toppled over in the lawn chair. “She really means it,” Harry says apologetically, setting the cake on the window ledge among the flowers. “She doesn’t blame you.” He smacks his lips. He and Mabel are childless. Harry sells asbestos insulation and every summer makes a new building for the thigh-high turn-of-the-century toy village he is constructing in his back yard. The village is called Tibbytown, after the cat. The signs on the stores are Tibbytown Feed and Grain, Tibbytown Dry Goods and so on.

  “The old girl came down with bladder failure last year,” Harry says. “That was no day at the beach, no siree bob.” Gordon thinks he is speaking of Mabel until he says, “So how I’m looking at it, she’s out of her misery.” He smacks his lips, he keeps smacking his lips. He is the spitting image of Charles Laughton, the bloated head, the blubbery lips. In three years the first male lips to touch Gordon’s turn out to have been Harry Jolley’s. During Harry’s visit this is Gordon’s only thought. He feels neither gratitude nor sympathy nor repulsion. He feels the chill of a perfect irony, compared to which the chill of his near death is nothing.

  When Doris sees the cake she says, “What nitwit gave you this?” Behind his closed eyes Gordon comes close to smiling. “For crying out loud,” she says, “you don’t give chocolate cakes to heart-attack victims!” He hears her tasting the icing, sucking it off a finger. “Well,” she says, “Sonja will make short work of it. I’ll bring it home if it’s all right with you.”

  Gordon goes on pretending to be asleep. Since there is no dissuading her from showing up three times a day and since he has nothing to say to her, he fakes the exhaustion she is so certain he must be suffering anyway. She races around, watering the flowers, dusting, moving the electric fan, searching through the stations on the transistor radio, giving his nails a fast clipping, pumicing the soles of his feet (which overhang the end of the bed), dry-shampooing his hair, opening the window, opening it again when the nurses slam it shut, shaving him, feeding him … her frenzy tracing occult intaglios around his body. Occasionally he yields as if to an incantation and then, even while she’s scraping a razor over his face or shovelling food down his throat, he really does doze off.

  In the evening, when she brings Marcy and Sonja, he keeps his eyes open. He hardly speaks though, and this is no act. Marcy’s thin, scared face, her myopic eyes peering into his, is an occasion he can’t imagine ever having the wherewithal to rise to. Sitting on the edge of the bed she twists his fingers. Her fingers are hot, in the hearth of each nail her chipped red polish a flame. Every night her first order of business is to deliver a message from Joan. “Joanie went outside all by herself last night.” “Joanie says to keep the radio for as long as you like.” One evening she arrives lugging Joan’s tape recorder because she and Joan have recorded, especially for him, Joan playing “Mister Sandman.”

  “Remember you used to have this record?” Marcy says as they’re listening to it. “Remember?” Pulling on his thumb, she sings along—“Please turn on your magic beam …”

  “That sounds great. I wonder why Bunny wants another one,” Sonja says.

  “Another what?” Doris asks.

  “Another thingamee there, another tape recorder,” says Sonja, who bought Joan this one for her seventh birthday. “Last night she handed me a picture of a big expensive kind. She cut it out of the newspaper.”

  Sonja, during these visits, squeezes into the chair in front of the electric fan and does her knitting. The clicking of the needles is louder than at home, or so it seems to Gordon. And her body odour—a chicken gumbo soup smell—is stronger. He wonders if his other senses are overcompensating for his blurred vision. He can’t make out her face. In her muumuus and with her knitting she is a rampage of colour that outdoes the flowers hands down. At the end of her first visit, when she bent to kiss him, he whispered, “Honey, I’m sorry.” Meaning about Al Yothers, not that she’d know that, but meaning also that the heart attack didn’t finish him off. Not that she’d know that either.

  “I just thank my lucky stars I was there,” she replied. “And that Mr. Jolley was at home. He did artificial respiration on you for, oh, jeepers, ten minutes! To tell the honest truth, I thought you were a goner and so did Mrs. Jolley, but Mr. Jolley, he wouldn’t stop, uh-uh, not him. He puffed up his cheeks”—a display here—“and kept on blowing.” Out came her breath in a peanut-scented gust. “Blowing and blowing and blowing.”

  Gordon has worked out that Al Yothers seduced Sonja while he and Al were lovers. He has gone further: he has worked out an interval of not more than five hours between penetrations—Al’s of her, and his of Al because he is certain that he and Al saw each other that same night. It was the night Al wouldn’t shut up about virgins. “Like taking candy from a baby,” was his threnody. “Candy from a friggin’ baby.”

  “You enjoy taking candy from babies?” Gordon asked.

  “Depends on the baby,” Al said, throwing him a sneaky look that, given Gordon’s assumption they were talking about virgin hoys, pointed to the cherub Gordon had seen him lighting a cigarette for outside the Chinese restaurant where he and Al rendezvoused.

  He has worked out that it isn’t his fault. How could he have guessed the stunning wattage of Al’s vindictiveness when he was so blind he didn’t even know the lights were on? Writing AL WAS HERE on his back was more than a flicker, he can see that now, but by then the affair was over and you could argue that that was only Al’s lame idea of a joke or even Al’s way of ensuring that Gordon wouldn’t want to come back, wouldn’t turn up again and tempt him. As Gordon keeps telling himself, to know that somebody doesn’t love you is not necessarily to know that somebody lies awake nights mentally poking you all over for where the knife will go in.

  No, it isn’t his fault. It isn’t even a tragedy. It’s a blessing. It is how Joan entered the world. Gordon has worked this out. Now all he has to do is buy it. He can’t stop thinking about when he was six or seven, how after his mother had kissed him goodnight he would make her look under his bed and in his closet. “All clear,” she’d say. “No murderers.” He never bought that either, although he believed her. Some nights he didn’t sleep until dawn, and he is still persuaded (irrationally, you don’t have to tell him) that by refusing to fall for her version of “all clear” he saved his own life.

  Saving his life is the last thing he’s interested in these days. Except that he ha
s to plug on to pay the bills. What are the odds anybody will sell him a decent life insurance policy now? One evening, after Doris and the girls left, he felt so bleak he climbed out of bed and stretched his arms heavenward because the doctor had said that one of the most dangerous things he could do during the next few months was to stretch his arms over his head. Why that should be, Gordon couldn’t imagine, but he tried it. He stood there with his shirt riding up and his fingers near enough the overhead lights to feel the heat. Down by his shins the breeze from the fan flapped his pyjama leg, a derelict sensation. With his arms still stretched high he walked over to the window and wondered if this was one of the most dangerous things you could do because the windows are big and easy to open, so once you’re locked into position what’s to stop you from diving into the parking lot?

  Back in bed he wept. And wouldn’t you know that’s when the minister from the Presbyterian church, the one that Marcy used to go to, made his appearance. As if he’d been lurking outside the door all week, waiting for his big break. To make a long story short he ended up jerking Gordon off. Throughout the chitchat and the prayers Gordon put on his exhaustion act, but when the minister said that as a boy he’d spent a year in an iron lung Gordon opened his eyes and said, “Geez, you poor kid.”

  The minister shrugged. His name was Jack Bean. He resembled a child made up to play an older man. Silver hair and lots of it, slight build, caramel freckles saddling a button nose, slender damsel fingers strumming the Bible. A prematurely greying thirty, Gordon put him at. The shrug surprised him. On a platter Gordon had offered him an opportunity to talk about God’s mysterious ways, but instead he appeared bewildered, resentful even. “It was torture,” he said, moving Gordon to pat him on the knee, pure fatherliness.

  At which Jack’s leg shot out and kicked the bed. They both jumped, Gordon lifting his hand. A look passed between them, unmistakeable. Over Jack’s knee Gordon’s hand hovering like a benediction. Letting the hand drift back down was the most natural thing.