“Let’s get the papers on the sale moving, first. I really am in a rush.”
Barry put his people on the forms and then brought me coffee. “So what can you tell me about this car?” I said.
“Take your time getting to know her. Listen to what she wants.”
“If it doesn’t work out for you in sales,” I said, “you ought to try marriage counseling.”
Chapter 5
MY FATHER THINKS THAT IT’S ALL RIGHT for a woman to live off a man’s income. But let a man, or worse, a son of his, stoop to such depths, and see what Dad says.
On the drive to Oakville in my newly acquired Jetta, I thought about what Dad had said eighteen months ago, the last time I had gone out to the house. I thought about the bit of conversation I had overheard as I’d let myself in the back door. Of course, if I had been leading the life that he wanted for me, such a conversation would never have taken place. If I had been leading the life he wanted, I would have been visiting his house with children, and I would have brought my wife, and I would have been settled in a profession, and I would have owned a car that would have sounded like a giant rolling pin on their driveway of white stones and would have alerted them to my arrival.
But eighteen months ago, I was not traveling with my wife, for she would soon leave me, and I had no car, and I alerted nobody as I walked over the stone pebbles and let myself in the back door as I had always done as a child — and, in doing so, I overheard the words that have kept me away all this time.
“I don’t know what Ellen sees in him,” my old man had said.
“For one thing, she sees that Langston loves her,” Mother had answered. “He’s still affectionate. She told me he still hugs her the way he used to do, years ago.”
“Humph! I’d hug, too, for free rent.”
The Jetta worked just fine, and got me to Oakville in half an hour. I needed to breathe deeply before entering my parents’ home, so I parked on Sumner, walked over to Trafalgar, and headed south. Fog blurred the street lamps as I got closer to the lake. I stopped on the sidewalk to admire the imposing, unpredictable shapes of the houses. They were like masked faces in the dark. Each one hinted of movement, personality, family history. There’s nothing more humbling than family history. A Great Dane rose up to eye me from inside a living room window. I crossed Lakeshore Boulevard and continued toward the water. It frothed and spat and splintered the moon’s reflection. A cold wind slapped at me. The faintly sour odor of the lake rose up to greet me. It made me think back to the last time I had lived in Oakville, twenty years ago, when I was eighteen and assumed I could do nothing but rise in the world.
Oakville’s so boring, I had complained to my father when I was a teenager. Why did you move here? He said, I wade into chaos every day, but I like to sleep outside it. Also, I like to put my head down at night knowing the lake is there. What do I like about water? It offers itself up like a bridge for people to move between countries and continents. Water, my son, was an escape hatch for some of your own ancestors. I said, I think it stinks of dead fish. And I heard that rats get into the big houses closest to the lake. Is that true? He said, Son, you’ve got a way of plugging your ears like no Cane who came before you.
I walked back up to my parents’ house and stood on the stones of their driveway. They were small, rounded stones, like miniature golf balls, which seemed in keeping with Oakville’s image as the golfing capital of Canada. My brother Sean and I used to joke about the town’s reputation.
“It’s not even safe to walk the streets any more.”
“That’s for sure. Our neighborhoods are declining.”
“You never know when you might get hit by a golf ball.”
The stones rubbed and clicked under my shoes, and I looked up, through the branches of the oak tree in the front yard, and I saw shimmering blue in my father’s window, hanging, vibrating. Within seconds, the blue collapsed into pink, then purple, then blue, then green.
The old man was watching TV, no doubt. I recalled one time years ago, watching it with him when my mother stepped into the room and asked how his work had gone that day. He complained that Oakville attracted second-rate specialists, and said the town needed a new breed of medical men. Men, my mother sniffed. Men is not a catch-all noun, dear husband. Some of those “men” are women, you know. And he said, You and I both know some of them are women, and you and I both know what we’re talking about. And she said, You only care about things that affect you personally. When anyone makes a dumb remark about black people, you’re on their back before the words are out of their mouth. But women? Gays? The disabled? That’s not really serious. He cut her off: I’m a bad, dirty-dog husband who’s been doing you wrong since the day we married. Now, how about a kiss? Mom said, Don’t patronize me. Dad said, I’m not patronizing anybody. I just want a kiss. But she didn’t feel like giving him a kiss at that moment.
I glanced up again at the light in my parents’ bedroom window. My father knew all about gunfights. He could tell you how many men Wyatt Earp took down in the O.K. Corral. He groaned with disgust every time some two-bit flick showed a sheriff killing eight men with a six-shooter. I found myself hoping that he had fallen asleep in front of the television.
On display at the front of the house was an Oakville Historical Society plaque that said Robert Wilson, Ship Captain, 1815 — 1869. Wilson was the first owner of my parents’ 180-year-old house. Sean and I heard about him many times in our childhood. Wilson made a good living ferrying timber and grain to New York State and returning with coal and manufactured goods. Clocks. Armoires. Horse carriage parts. But he ferried something else back with him — fugitive slaves. He hid them in his schooner and helped them get started in Oakville.
I took the path beside the house to the back door, which my mother opened. Dark-haired, light-skinned, angular face, snub nose, hazel eyes — everyone said we looked alike. She reached up to kiss me. As her chapped lips pricked my cheek, I heard my old man’s snores float down the stairs.
“I thought you’d still be up,” I said.
“Why not? It’s not even midnight.”
“Some things don’t change. Dad’s sleeping?”
“Yes, but you know him. He’ll probably get up and come downstairs. He was expecting you earlier. And Sean couldn’t make it earlier, but he’s here now.” She hugged my arm, and then slipped hers through it. She was a very short woman. I remembered my surprise at discovering one day, as a teenager, that I was taller than my mother.
“I take it you know what happened today,” I said.
“Just that you aren’t working there any more. I tried calling you at home this evening. I got a message saying your line had been disconnected. So I started to worry.”
“Why?”
“I called your landlord, who said you had paid him to the end of the month and moved out in a hurry. He also said reporters had been coming by and asking for you.”
“You would have been a good reporter,” I said.
“Being a contented little mousewife is far more challenging,” she said, laughing. “And as for being a mother — well, you ought to try that one day.”
Yes, yes, being a mother, being a parent — maybe that would have saved me from self-obsession. I had come close. I loved that little boy who had died in Ellen’s womb. Loved him and loved her.
I draped my jacket on the doorknob. Mom whisked it up and slipped a coat hanger into it and put it away. From the vestibule, she led me up the six wooden steps to the kitchen. For a moment, she held my arm tightly.
Sean stood up from the kitchen table. “Brother,” he said. “Long time, et cetera, et cetera.”
He gave me a hug, too. They were being dispensed my way like pretzels. This family of mine really was worried. And my brother! The man was too generous, too uncomplaining, too good-hearted, and too bloody successful. Just by being good to me after all I’d put him through, he made me feel guilty. Guilt is one of my defining — and most useless — traits.
&
nbsp; Sean sat down and used a knife and fork to slice a piece of his buttered raisin toast. Ever since he had dated a Dutch woman and visited the Netherlands, he wouldn’t eat bread and toast with his hands.
Mom swept a handful of ledger sheets off the table. “I was doing your father’s bookkeeping,” she said. “This is the only time I can get any work done. He never lets me alone during the day. Sometimes, in the middle of the day, I get so fed up with his pestering that I stick a book in my purse and some ledger sheets in a briefcase and go off to the library. But, of course, I couldn’t tell him that. He’d be offended that I was escaping. I have to tell him I’m going shopping. He never questions that. I come back a couple of hours later, having read another fifty pages or finished up another month of his accounts, and he’ll say, ‘So what’d you get, Dottie?’ And I’ll tell him, ‘Just little things. Some things on sale. Women’s things.’ And he’ll pat me on the shoulder with that big brown hand of his and give me a big hug and say, ‘You go right ahead and shop for those little things any time you want.’ Of course, I’ll say right back, ‘Well, thanks for your permission,’ but I’ll be happy to see him like that. How many seventy-year-old men do you know who still light up with pleasure and hug their wives when they come in the door, even if their wives have only been gone for two hours?”
Mom poured water into the kettle and got out mint tea bags, cups, and saucers. She launched into a description of her latest strategy for dealing with sleeplessness. She didn’t fight it any more. Didn’t force herself to stay in bed, tossing, turning, kicking off sheets, pulling them back up, checking the clock, burying her head in the pillow, sitting up, blowing her nose, lying back down again. She said all that was too enervating. The more she couldn’t sleep but tried to force it, the more of a failure she felt. So now she got up when she couldn’t sleep, and drank warm milk, and stretched, gently, on the living room rug.
Mom sipped her tea, ran a hand through her long, straight hair, and looked at me. Sean smiled. My brother’s face was acorn brown. Unmistakably brown, which meant that he was indisputably black, and didn’t have to worry about it, or think about it, at all.
“So how come you’re up at this hour?” I asked him. “Aren’t you usually in court first thing in the morning?” “I haven’t been sleeping for a month,” Sean said.
“Not at all?”
“I get tired around three in the afternoon. Like Mom.” “This is new, isn’t it?” I asked.
“Damn right, older bro. I’ve finally hit the big leagues.”
“So what do you do, when you finally get tired?”
“I go to the King Edward, next door to my work. I take no papers, no work, accept no phone calls. I sleep there. Actually, I sleep amazingly well. I get in there so tired I can barely walk straight, and I undress and fall into bed and the next thing I know it’s seven-thirty at night. I sleep like a dead man, but I always wake up at seven-thirty.”
“Have you tried sleeping at home?”
“Can’t do it. Can only sleep in the King Edward. They always give me the same room. I’ve never turned on the TV. Never opened the curtains. The only thing I do is undress and sleep and dress and wash my face and get out of there. It’s my sleep sanctuary. So far, I’m feeling okay. I must be getting quality sleep.”
“Don’t delude yourself,” Mother said. “If you’re getting four hours, and it’s in the late afternoon or early evening, the first hour, and the last half hour, you’re probably not getting any rapid eye movement at all, so it’s not deep sleep. If you’re lucky, you’re getting two hours of quality sleep. The rest is filler. But that’s okay. The main thing is to stay calm, and to try to feel okay. You can start worrying about it when you stop feeling okay.”
I nodded at the sound of the old instructions. My head felt as if it was filled with warm water. Sean watched my mother pour mint tea. “So, brother,” he said, “I take it things have been happening today?” “A wee bit.”
Sean lounged in his chair. He made a point of not staring at me, sliced into his toast, kept his tone offhand. He wore corduroy slacks, a blue cashmere sweater, and loafers, but every inch of his face and of his manicured hands broadcast the fact that he was a lawyer. He was doing his best not to look like someone who pulled in six figures annually, and certainly didn’t want to emphasize the fact around me, but Sean couldn’t help it. He couldn’t hide his success at all.
Sean looked at me and smiled. We knew each other too well.
“I got fired and I moved out of my apartment,” I said.
“Oh, Langston.” This was my mother. She was hovering around the antique oak table that had come with the house forty years ago.
“I tried to tell Dad that I’d gone off to see a movie while on the job last week, but he thought I was joking.”
Mother sat opposite me. “But that’s not why you were fired. You were just fired today. It had something to do with your minister giving that weird speech. Your name was mentioned on the radio tonight.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No. Some government official named you as the one who had slipped the minister a trick speech. The same person was quoted as saying you’d been fired.” Mom put her hand on mine. “You must have been wanting this to happen. You must have been looking for a way out.”
“It’s true that I have been wanting for a while to get on with some things, but I can’t say that I set out in a planned way to bring down the minister.”
Sean asked how I did it. I told him. He laughed and said it was the sneakiest way he’d ever heard of leaking a confidential document. “Pretty clever, brother. So what was that movie you went out to see last week?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Sure I do. Spit it out.”
“The Bodyguard.”
Sean laughed. “Hey, that wasn’t a bad flick. I kind of liked it.” “Yeah,” I said. “You would.”
“What, you have the patent on good taste, do you?”
Ah, my brother. What a guy. He even tried to get me into a fight to make me forget myself and feel better. “Sean, you’re a great brother and I’ve heard you’re great in court, but you ought to be incarcerated for bad taste. You drive a Corvette — a Corvette, for Christ’s sake, is for grease balls — and you like leather couches and for all I know you’ve got a real estate agent hunting for a house in Oakville.”
Sean removed a spoon from his tea and dropped it on the table. “You and I didn’t do so badly here. It gave us an education. Good sports, too. Outdoor activities. Parks. The lake. Nobody beat us up or dealt heroin in the school yard. So what’s wrong with Oakville?”
“It’s terminally pleasant.”
“You know what your problem is?” Sean said. “You think too much. You’re too goddamn cerebral. If you were a few degrees stupider, you’d be a helluva lot more successful.”
I stared at him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it like that.”
“Sure you did. It’s okay. I guess, somehow, I don’t really want to be successful.”
“Yes, you do. You’re dying for it. You just want to be successful on your own terms.”
I heard my old man coming down the stairs. He made slow progress. His feet were so swollen that he could only wear running shoes. He drummed the tip of his cane down on each step. The cane had been used by his father, before he died, and when my father banged it about, he was announcing to the world, or at least to those parts of it that cared to listen, that he had important ancestors. Langston Canes all of them, and the Langston Canes and their women and children weren’t ordinary people!
Down he came, and reached the bottom, and turned to come our way. He filled the hallway with his bulk. “You folks make enough noise to wake up an army.” He limped forward. “Good to see you, men,” he said, entering the kitchen. His big hand on my shoulder felt kind. It felt sincere. I looked up and tried to smile, but Dad had moved on. “And you, Sean! What are you doing up at this hour? You haven’t become
one of the sleepless, have you?”
“Looks like it, for now at least.”
“Nip it in the bud. See a specialist. Get the right pills. Don’t let it become a habit.” “Yes, Dad,” Sean said.
I felt closer to Sean, hearing his sarcastic obedience. Then Dad turned to me. My shoulders stiffened.
“So, Langston, when did you get out here?”
“I got to Oakville about an hour ago.”
“An hour ago? I was up an hour ago.”
“I walked down to the lake before coming in.”
“That’s the trouble with night owls. They never hurry. They’ve got their own pace, day and night, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it. So what brings you out here, Langston?”
“Stop it, Lang! You invited him.” Mother got up, tapping Dad’s shoulder with her knuckles. “Who wants peach crumble? Sweetened only with fruit juices.”
We all decided to have some, except for Dad, who asked for coffee and took it black.
“What happened when you saw Watson?” I asked. “He wasn’t in.”
“Why did you want to see him?”
“That’s what his receptionist asked. I told her to tell him that Dr. Cane had come calling, and that I would drop by another time.”
“But what did you want?”
“Nothing in particular. What’s wrong with a simple hello?”
Sean jumped in. “Did Wellington say hello to Napoleon? Did Wolfe shake hands with Montcalm?”
“Just like a lawyer to get hyperbolic,” Dad said. “I don’t aim to kill Watson, and he doesn’t aim to kill me.”
“Why are you looking him up after all these years?” I asked.
“As I said, no particular reason. I just felt like it.”
“You always cut stories off like that. It’s the same way you’ve never really told us why you left the States, or why you don’t communicate with Mill.”
“I hear about her from Aberdeen,” Dad said. “In fact, she phoned him today.”
“Everything sure has been happening at once,” I said. “And now you say Mill called. Why did she phone?”
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