I can report to you now that the piece of music that filled the room was the “Vocalise” by Rachmaninoff. I didn’t know that at the time, having never heard it before. All I knew was that never had music messed around with my innards so violently. I felt like an instrument (an old and out-of-tune one, like a cigar-box banjo) and I was plucked. All the world became beautiful and miserable. Through the window I could see almost nothing but the sky, ink-black, studded with stars. I imagined that I could discern the constellations, that the night was filled with hunters and heavenly creatures. The music seemed to say that there was room in the sky for Elspeth and I, that we could remain forever up there, naked and lonely and tragic in our own small way. I was soon weeping in a very general manner.
I pulled back from the window, having wept, and was caught by my own reflection.
Through the old glass of the window, through my tears, my face looked monstrous. Everything about it was misshapen, the eyes oddly matched and randomly set, the nose squashed and inches away from where a nose should be, the mouth long, twisted and drooling. I wiped some tears away, but nothing changed about my other face.
It came to me suddenly that my reflection hadn’t bothered to wipe any tears away. I stepped back quickly then, but it remained glued to the other side of the window. I saw that this being was stark naked, which I was not, and fabulously obese. It had bent down in order that our faces should be level, and now that I had broken contact, the creature decided to stand up. It did so, rising to a height of seven or eight feet. And then this monster began to dance, or at least it began to do a lurid and alien burlesque of dancing, touching fingertips to the crown of its head and sashaying back and forth. This man (a term I apply only in the loosest sense, although he was assuredly male, if only by virtue of a tiny pink penis) was absolutely hairless, even to the extent of lacking eyebrows and lashes.
His dance became more energetic, and the fat began to bounce obscenely—he had fat everywhere, even on the tops of his feet. His arms and legs were clearly segmented by rings of lard, his elbows and knees padded with the stuff, places where only a baby should have it. The music ended, and after a few moments of silence (the creature continued to dance throughout this silence, a silence so profound that I guessed the frogs and crickets were likewise struck dumb by the performance) another piece of music issued forth. This one was quick, almost violent. The monster stopped his dance immediately, cocked his head sideways to listen, and then abruptly turned away. He waddled off into the darkness then, his gait splayfooted and plodding. He had to lift his arms high for balance, his hands bouncing merrily in the air. Soon he was gone.
I decided it was time for bed.
A Beautiful Clown
Hope, Ontario, 1983
Wherein our young Biographer reveals much about His Self to Everyone, except Himself.
The next morning I managed to complete another paragraph of my novel-in-progress. I was very pleased with this paragraph, so pleased that I became profoundly dissatisfied with the previous day’s paragraph and deleted it from my thin manuscript. Then, having done my work for the day, I jumped on the moped and took me into Hope.
As I rode by Updike International a loud horn blew, and the workers drifted out on to the front lawn to eat their brown-bagged lunches. There were hundreds of them, it seemed, and I found myself wondering what Updike International manufactured.
My first stop in town was Edgar’s Bait, Tackle and Taxidermy, where I purchased another Hoper. This one was slightly bigger and cost thirty-five cents less. Edgar was in a very good mood and insisted on telling me some filthy jokes. I laughed heartily at them all, trying to hurt Elspeth in some cosmic way. These jokes all had to do with the way certain parts of the female body smelled, and Ellie would have gone berserk if she’d heard them. After a while, Edgar’s repertoire was exhausted.
I asked, “So anyway, what gives with this ‘Keep your dick in your pants’ business, Eddie?”
Edgar shrugged, lifting his mountainous shoulders up and down quickly. “They say that around here,” he informed me needlessly.
“There must be some story behind it. Like, a guy was taking a whiz by the side of the water and all of a sudden Ol’ Mossback jumped up and bit his pecker off.”
Edgar chuckled a bit, nothing even resembling the guffaws he’d awarded to his own jokes, and then asked, “How’d you lose your first Hoper?”
“Something bit it off,” I lied dramatically. “I was reeling in and then—bang!—just like that, something bit it off clean as a whistle.”
Edgar nodded. “So, you want me to show you how to tie an improved double clinch-knot or what?”
“Yes, please.”
This kept us occupied for half an hour or so. Edgar’s hands were so enormous that I actually had to move around, peeking through the occasional gap between his fingers to see what he was doing. Then I practiced while Edgar retold some of his filthy jokes. In time I became proficient at tying an improved double clinch-knot (actually I didn’t, I became bored with it) so I stopped and wondered aloud what to do next. “Maybe,” I said, “I’ll go get a beer.”
“Go quaff a frosty,” Edgar agreed. “That’s a good thing to do.”
“Wherever should I go?” I mused.
“You got three choices.” Edgar lifted the appropriate number of fingers and counted them off. “One, Duffy’s. Two, Moe’s. Three, The Willing Mind.”
“Which one do you prefer?” I asked.
“You go on over to The Willing Mind,” Edgar responded, more an order than anything else. “That’s a good place to quaff a frosty.”
“Yeah, okay.” I decided to confide in Edgar. “But, I’ll tell you, Ed. There’s this guy there, Jonathon his name is, who kind of gives me the creeps.”
“Whitecrow?” asked Edgar. “He’s a good guy. A little strange, maybe, but a good guy.”
“His name’s Jonathon Whitecrow?”
“Indian?”
“Yeah.”
“Yeah, his name’s Jonathon Whitecrow.”
I only knew that the name was somehow familiar. Anything I’d learned from Fishing for Ol’ Mossback was state-induced, so I had to be drunk again to recall it.
“You want to go quaff a frosty with me?” I asked. Edgar would be wonderful protection against Jonathon Whitecrow and his crazy “Visions.”
Edgar shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t go quaff a frosty with you.” He stabbed his chest with his thumb. “A.A.”
“Oh.” This news saddened me deeply.
“I’m an alcoholic,” he elaborated.
“Yeah, right,” I almost snapped, hoping to silence him. “Hey, Edgar,” I asked, “what’s the difference between an alcoholic and a drunkard?”
Edgar actually thought about this, rubbing his jaw for half a minute before throwing up his arms in wonderment. “I dunno. What is?”
“Us drunkards don’t have to go to all those damn meetings.”
Edgar didn’t seem to realize that this was a joke.
Maybe it wasn’t.
“See you later,” I said to Edgar.
“Bye-bye, Big Guy.”
The day was a scorcher. The Willing Mind lay down the road, shimmering and distorted in the haze. I didn’t want to go there, but my alternatives were swallowing a pickled egg whole and eating (not to mention paying for) a steak. “I’ll just go quaff a frosty,” I announced to the world at large. The taste of Mona’s beer came back, reminding me of bogs in medieval England. “Or a little Scotch,” I decided. “A little Irish whiskey.” This clarity of purpose gave me the wherewithal to begin walking toward the humpbacked tavern. “Pop back a whiskey, that’s all I’m gonna do.” Maybe the Indian wouldn’t even be there, I reasoned, although I knew he would. He’d be standing in exactly the same place, smoking a cigarette, his long fingers touching a half-full shot glass. Jonathon would nod at me as if he’d been waiting.
I was right.
The Bernies and the Kims were there as well, and Mona was behind the
bar. They all smiled, but only Li’l Bernie seemed happy to see me.
“Hey, hey!” the stomach shouted. “It’s the Hemingway of Hope! Hey, listen, kiddo, I been thinking. Maybe we should collaborate on this book of mine. I even thought of a title: Straight From the Gut. What do you think?”
I was in no mood to talk to tummies, so I ignored him.
Mona was dressed in exactly the same clothes, although they were now wrinkled and close to filthy. “Beer?” she asked, very businesslike.
“No, thanks. Maybe some Jameson.” I nodded in the direction of the bottle of Irish whiskey.
Jonathon was infuriating in his gentleness. “Hello, Paul.”
“Hi.”
Then he was silent. I turned away.
The boy Kim had his hand firmly fastened on to his girlfriend Kim’s breast, caressing it through her T-shirt. Her nipples were boldly erect.
Mona presented me with my shot glass. “Run a tab?”
I nodded and sipped at my drink.
Big Bernie muttered, “Somebody’s cranky.”
“The thing about it is,” I said suddenly, “my wife is a clown.”
“Mine, too,” said Big Bernie.
Of course, if I had a nickel for every time that exchange had taken place I’d be a rich man. “No, I mean she’s a clown. A professional clown.”
Jonathon Whitecrow was enlightened. “Aha! That’s why there was a painted face! I should have figured it out myself.”
“That’s pretty inneresting,” said Mona genuinely. “With a circus like?”
“She’s not with a circus now, but she was. Now she teaches clowning and puts on a few shows at fairs and things.” I gestured for another drink. “She’s a very good clown,” I added. “A beautiful clown.”
“It had me worried,” Jonathon mentioned. “I thought I was losing it.”
“Does she live out there, too?” asked Mona. “At the old Quinton place, I mean.”
“No. She lives in Toronto.”
“Oh.”
Big Bernie asked, “Know any good jokes?” I deemed this a pretty jerky thing to say, given my obvious heaviness of heart. But I think, in retrospect, that Big Bernie was trying to be kind. A chilly silence had entered The Willing Mind, trailing along behind me, and Big Bernie only meant to chase it away. At any rate, no one knew any jokes, good or bad.
The curious thing about Elspeth is that, despite being a clown, she’s not a particularly humorous person. She can make people laugh, certainly, can make children hysterical, but in her own heart of hearts she doesn’t seem to find anything at all funny. The state of the world alarms her, and in a certain mood I can see that it should alarm everyone, what with the threat of nuclear war and all that shittiness hanging over our heads.
“The way I figure it,” said Big Bernie, “there’s nothing you can do. If they drop it, they drop it.”
“You just bend over and kiss me goodbye,” mumbled Little Bernie.
For a while Elspeth fought back, marching in anti-nuke demonstrations, writing letters to the government, that sort of thing, but in the past couple of years she’d abandoned all of it and assumed a position of resolute hopelessness.
“Can’t say as I blame her,” commented Mona. “It’s a no-win kind of thing.”
I missed her—not, so much, the grim Elspeth who ejected me into Hope (although I did miss that Elspeth, too) but the one who, when we were younger, made silly, grotesque faces and generally thumbed her nose at the world. The one who used to announce, for no real reason, “Peoples is good folks!” The one who …
Jonathon laid his hand on my shoulder. I was on my fourth Irish whiskey, rendering me intoxicated enough to make the connection. “Hey! Jonathon Whitecrow!” I said happily, brushing away tears. “How does it feel to be a hundred and seventy years old?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Talked to Ol’ Mossback lately?” I demanded, waving my hand in the air to indicate to Mona that I required yet another shot of booze.
“Why, um, yes. Just the other day as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, really? What did he have to say?”
“Well, not much. The water’s been hot as soup lately. And, of course, people keep peeing into it.”
“I see.”
“Sounds pretty fishy to me,” chortled Big Bernie.
Little Bernie said, “Geez, what a jerk.”
Jonathon Whitecrow lit one of his cigarettes reflectively. “Now that I think about it, he did say something interesting. As you know, Mossback and I share an interest in the human heart. His interest is purely scholastic, of course, mine being more, shall we say, professional. And I was saying that I often long for a purity of heart.”
“Me too, me too,” I put in eagerly.
“Well, Ol’ Mossback had this to say.” Jonathon Whitecrow changed the timbre of his voice, as if imitating the fish. It was a completely foreign sound. “Take this lake. It’s got weeds in it, and rocks in it, and dead fish in it, and live fish shitting in it, and kingfishers and herons diving into it to kill fish, and people pissing in it, and everybody in it is either eating each other or screwing each other, right? It’s just a normal lake. A good old-fashioned lake. But it ain’t pure. The only pure lakes I ever heard about are the ones that have been killed by that acid rain.” Whitecrow returned to his normal voice. “Pretty smart, for a fish.”
Somehow I’d managed to cheer up. It was, I believe, the combination of a) Irish whiskey in quantity, b) Jonathon’s fish impersonation and c) Mona’s leaning on the bar to listen to b), affording me an excellent view of her breasts. At the end of the story they jiggled merrily.
“Whitecrow,” Mona said, “sometimes I think you are full of shit.”
“Too true,” said Jonathon Whitecrow.
“Speaking of that,” I asked, “where’s the John?”
Mona pointed toward one of the room’s many dark corners. “Over there, Paulie.”
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told all of them—they nodded back, except for the Kims who were locked in a soul-kiss. Then I stumbled off for the head.
The bathroom of The Willing Mind was ancient, made from green wood and yellow porcelain. It contained two sit-down toilets, side by side with no partition between them, and a huge stand-up urinal. It was this latter convenience that I used (perhaps I’d originally had other business to conduct, but one look at the loo convinced me against it—spiders, ants and other crawlers roamed about the enamel in hordes) and as I pissed I read the words carved into the rotting wood. Some of the inscriptions were new, a year or two old: “S.M. from the Soo was here,” one said; another, “Hope sucks.” Far more interesting were the older ones, faded to near-illegibility:
ISAIAH IS A FAIRY
THE McDIARMIDS SUCK DEAD BEARS
DRINKWATER NEVER DOES
TO A QUINTON, EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE
Owing to my usual drunkenness, and to my even more usual dullheadedness, it was only then, standing at the pisser, that I noticed the frequency with which certain names cropped up in the town of Hope, Ontario.
Then I turned around.
The Willing Mind’s interior decorator had decided against putting a real mirror in the washroom, probably because glass and drunkards don’t get along too well together, and instead had mounted a piece of sheet metal above the sink. The metal was scratched and bent, and when I turned around I saw my own distorted reflection, floating in a silver cloud. I began to tremble. The image of the naked monster in the night came back full force, an image that my mind had managed to lock away for the day. Even though the memory was vivid (so vivid that I could almost hear the music that accompanied it, the heart-twisting “Vocalise”) I was uncertain as to whether it had actually happened or whether it was some fabrication of the booze. “Oh, fuck,” I moaned aloud. Our little blue world was flying through space, and I felt as if I’d found the cockpit, there in The Willing Mind’s John.
I began to search for the radio, muttering over and over again,
“Mayday. Mayday.”
Part Two
The Veiled Lady
Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1846
Regarding the career of Hope, we know the following: that he received his Licence to Preach when he was twenty-two years of age; that at least one of his Instructors had been reluctant to award it; that his thinking was generally thought to be A Tad Maverick.
Joseph Benton Hope had a way of scurrying about—furtive, hunched-over and almost panicky—as if a giant rock had been lifted, and a beetle disturbed. One autumn’s day in 1843 he scurried down Brattle Street, took a corner (keeping his frail body very close to the stonework) and entered a small private auditorium. This was the eighth occasion in the past two weeks that Benton Hope had entered this establishment, shoved some coins at the old woman in the booth, and taken a seat in the twenty-fifth, and last, row.
Joseph Benton Hope was very early, forty-five minutes, and all alone in the theater. He opened up his gilt-edged Bible (a huge thing with four generations of Hopes listed inside the cover) and read a line. Truth to be told, he only read two or three words. Then he tilted his head backward, shooting his Adam’s apple outward and shutting his tiny eyes (he still had two at the age of nineteen), and allowed the passage to sound somewhere within.
Joseph Benton Hope was the prize student at the Harvard Theological Seminary—at least, he had been up until a year or so back. Scholastically speaking, he was still, excelling in such disciplines as eschatology and hermeneutics, possessing an unprecedented knowledge of the Bible, but his thoughts had lately taken a turn that most of his instructors found unsettling. When Benton Hope had first entered the school at age fifteen, he had been heralded as a prodigy, a young boy perhaps blessed with the gift of prophecy. He had lectured to his fellow students passionately and convincingly—convincingly, for in those days his thoughts were of an immediate Second Coming. “Look about,” Joseph Benton Hope had screamed, his voice hoarse, his blond hair slick and matted, “and know that His time is nigh!” His listeners, students and instructors alike, had nodded.
The Life of Hope Page 5