Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

The Benninger house on Robie Street, like so many in the South End, was a three-storey Victorian. I do not know who occupied the place before them, though my mother remembers. “I used to go with the boy who lived there,” she said. “Before I met your father. His bedroom was in the attic. The whole place was this god-awful olive colour. But Stan and Sophie, I got to hand it to them.” In the Benninger house, the normal paraphernalia of comfortable middle-class life was apparent—the Persian carpets, the recent magazines, brass fire-pokers beside the fireplace, the porcelain figurines posed on a shelf in the front porch—but everything was on display, museum-quality, eerie. Zum Beispiel—if you were to yank open a drawer at our house, you’d find a blue Christmas tree lightbulb, a disembodied Barbie head with the hair hacked off, a baffling postcard from Uncle Lorne, a rusting Double A battery, one of my father’s yellow legal pads, an unrinsed dental retainer, a capless red Flair marker, a school photograph of a kid caught mid-blink, a muffin recipe torn from a cereal box, traces of a broken Pringle’s chip, a shriveled carrot. But slide open a drawer at the Benninger’s and see only a clean stack of mint-condition Architectural Digest magazines. Or a silver cigarette box. Or a single brown dreidel on its side, just now settling to a stop, its rolling prompted by the drawer’s gentle movement.

  ~

  My own family was not Jewish. Our surname was McKee. We ate fish sticks with frozen peas and canned corn. We drank Kool-Aid. Our house smelled like Tide laundry detergent. We were perceptibly Protestant in outlook and sensuality. That Gail and her family were Jewish or Hassidic or Luba­vitcher entranced me. They had challah bread and Bibb lettuce and salmon. They went to Shaar Shalom Synagogue. They went to Hebrew School. I wanted to know about the kabbalah, whether women really couldn’t shake an orthodox rabbi’s hand, about the holes in the bridal sheets. Learning how many tummlers and writers were Jewish, my interests dilated proportionally and I became impulsively pro-­Semitic—which alarmed my parents, especially my father. At first, I thought it was because he felt thinking too much on the differentness of Jewishness would lead inexorably to rampant bigotry and spray-painting swastikas; later I realized it was because he was concerned my faddish interest would be construed as representing the views of my sponsor, i.e. him and Mom. But the Benningers more than abided my naive enthusiasms. They lent me books. They told me jokes. I learned a Catskills accent and did voices. I made side-curls by stapling my oldest sister’s hair into my grandfather’s top hat. One night, over the basement phone, I recited the entire Duddy Kravitz monologue from St. Urbain’s Horseman to Gail, barely able to get the words out, giggling so hard the bones behind my ears hurt.

  There was one book, though, I never read and couldn’t read. In the Benninger house, in the white bookshelf beside the phone on the upstairs landing, was a hardcover copy of My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok. This book used to stare out at me from the middle of a row. I must have glanced at it three hundred times, the title horizontal on the dustjacket spine, the words arranged in an orange Arabic-looking script. I didn’t know why, but the book more than half-­frightened me, belonging as it did (in my mind) to some abstruse world of adultishness that Dr. Benninger conveyed, some Cyrillic or Jewish sense of self he had (and which I would feel whenever I encountered the words mishpocha or tzedakah). I remember turning the corner on these stairs, on a summer weekend when Dr. and Mrs. Benninger were away and Gail and I had sex for the first time, my foot touching bare on the plush throw rug of the landing, and knowing the book was there, but unable to look at it directly, because I felt so starkly blameworthy, as if I were a filthy interloping Gentile, a piggy goy-goy mucking inside a temple.

  ~

  Scene: An evening in June. I arrive at the Benninger house in a lime-green tuxedo, holding a box that contains a purple wrist corsage. I spring up the stairs to the front door. I ring the doorbell three times to let them know it’s me. Dr. Benninger opens the door an inch or two, and leaves it like that, to let me know it’s him. I shove the door open. Dr. Benninger stands six feet back, squinting at me with distress. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Oh dear God. Look who it is.”

  Mrs. Benninger’s voice glides in from the pantry. “Who is it, dear?”

  “It’s Shadrach, Meshak, and Charles.”

  He continued to call me Charles for reasons I don’t remember or never learned. This intentional mistake and the arch tone both belonged to Dr. Benninger’s mock-patrician manner, a kind of overly civilized comedy character—as if he were carrying on for an audience much more sophisticated than either of us. It was very funny to me, when I understood it. Other times it could be wearing.

  “His name’s Aubrey,” says Mrs. Benninger. “Try that on your Steinway. Come in, dear. Don’t mind what’s-his-name.”

  I step in, holding out my hand. “Doktor Professor Benninger, I presume?”

  He does not move, regarding me with confusion, as if unsure of the situation’s possible danger. Finally there is an indignant wifely noise from the pantry, the moment is broken, and he swiftly conducts me into the living room. “Guten Abend, Charles. What’s the good word? Perhaps you would like to see the new Tabriz. Cobalt blue. What does Mr. Cecil Edwards say about this one, hm, Charles? Ah. Here we are. Yes. Have a look at this eight-pointed star in the inner guard border.”

  Tonight it’s antique Persian carpets, which he collected and fetishized, trying them out in different rooms, but it could just as easily have been the Dreyfusards or glass paperweights or Charlemagne. Many of his references I didn’t follow, and felt threatened by the possibility that someone like Kierkegaard mattered in a world outside my own. So I would have to say, “Uh, Dr. Benninger? We haven’t learned that in grade nine biology yet.” And he would stare at me, as if puzzled by such freak gaps in my learning, as if to say, “You don’t know that? But of course you know that. Yet for some reason you’re pretending not to know it—but why? To tease me? Answer me, boy!”

  In other moods, I would emphasize my teenage doltishness, purposefully mispronouncing Yiddish words (chuts-pa) or replying to him in an exaggerated backwoods accent: “Boys oh boys, I don’t know too much about that end of the deal there, Doc, with Mr. Kookaburra there, but sounds good. Real good. Yes sir, I’ll have a little of this, a little of that, thank you very much, no pun intended.”

  My antics made him laugh, he liked escapades, though he often thought me funnier than I was. And that could trouble me. It was as if he needed me to be funny, or as if teenagers were there for his amusement; I was also a little uneasy with the claims of intimacy our joking implied.

  But on this evening, the night of Gail’s prom, he continues in a tone of deadpan seriousness. “No pun taken. But tell me, as my wretched daughter busies herself upstairs with thoughts of insurrection, where are you two planning to go tonight? It’s a local ritual of some sort, this convocation?”

  “That’s it, Doc. Graduation. Make a few bonfires. Sacrifice a few ponies. Maybe a nun.”

  “Maybe Sister Irmgard. But truthfully now, Charles, Mrs. Benninger and I wanted in a small way to congratulate you and Birdy for surviving the last year.” And, after this brief preamble, Dr. Benninger produces a demi-bottle of champagne as a gift. I think he is going to pull it away when I reach for it, but he sets it on the dining room table in front of me. A little card taped to the neck reads Gratuluje!

  ~

  Afterwards, my father had to be told twice. “Was it real wine?” he asked.

  “No, it was a bottle of champagne. With a real cork.”

  “Sparkling wine or champagne?”

  “It had a red label with ‘Mumm’ on it.”

  “He gave you a bottle of Mumm’s? Mumsy? Did you hear this? Stan gave Baby-boy a bottle of Mumm’s for his graduation. I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  “Uh-huh,” said my mother. “Figures.” She was rehearsing for a play at the time and shut up in what used to be my uncle’s bedroom but was now the upstairs den and sewing ro
om—it was the place she went to memorize lines.

  “How old are you, Baby-boy?”

  “I’m forty-five.”

  “You’re fifteen years old and you’re drinking champagne? Mother, did you hear any of this? Come down here and get your son off the bottle.”

  “Go watch your hockey game. I’m trying to do this.”

  But my father, who took note of gestures of magnanimity, began to think Stan was a different sort of person than had been previously understood. He began to see him as a terrifically humorous, somewhat misunderstood gentleman given to unpredictable generosity. He now admired Dr. Benninger’s quizzicality, his off-point sarcasms, his nonchalant patience. He started calling him Stanny. He would say: “Stanny’s wonderful! Fantastic fellow.” Or, if he had to, he might say: “Well, yes, Stanny can be peculiar. Some days he has no sense of humour at all. But most of the time it’s marvelous.”

  My going out with Gail inaugurated a time when the two grown-up couples were inseparable best friends and some of the slides shown earlier really date from this period. The McKees and Benningers coincided on surprise birthday parties, New Year’s Eve dinners, theatrical premieres, wine, children, trips, and gradually, inescapably, as always happens in Halifax, the lives of the two families interinanimated in a thousand explicit and ambiguous ways. That’s the wear-you-out thing about the place. One’s sexual, familial, and personal and professional lives all complicate with connection, alliance, and shared secrets, so much so that the citizens seem to be participating in some Grand Dysfunction. Lives leak in and flow out of each other like a human version of the water cycle. Apart from fleeing the ecosystem, it is impossible to withstand it, impossible to stay aloof. Everyone who lives in Halifax is absorbed. “Life in the fish bowl,” as my sisters would say. “Halifax, the evil village,” as Gail says. Of course the village had different denizens, some more powerful than others, and it was toward the village elders that Dr. Benninger became drawn.

  “Why Stan is so gaga on Tiggy’s crowd I will never know,” said my mother. “All he wants is to be invited into the best houses. He’s like a court jester. Talking about Salvador Dali to a bunch of orthodontists from Bedford, give me a fucking break.” Tiggy’s crowd was a stratum or two above our own. Although my father was a lawyer, he had no inherited dough and did not own one of the nicest homes in the city or a Dutch Colonial house in Chester’s Back Harbour. In Tiggy’s ionosphere were eight or nine recurring families, including the Ingrams, who ran National Ocean Products, the Ottways, who developed the Halifax downtown, and the Bugdens, who owned the newspaper. Some of these families were very impressive. Many were not. They were just rich. But Dr. Benninger was fascinated by all of them, attracted to all of them, even if, at the same time, he could be contemptuous of what they represented. On the steps of the newly built Park Lane, an upscale mall built on Spring Garden Road, he once took a breath to say, “The bourgeoisie always win, don’t they, Charles? No matter what we do.” By this time I knew enough of Karl Marx to know that Dr. Benninger and I were the bourgeoisie. That mall, with its chichi clothes stores and movie theatres and jewelry shops, was built for people exactly like us. Didn’t he think he was one of them?

  ~

  Tiggy was married to Gregor Burr, a senior partner in the law firm Merton Mair McNab, and a man unimpaired by intellectual complication. The father of three boys—Brecken, Bunker, and Boyden—Mr. Burr was a jumbo preppy boy himself. He called everyone Tiger, wore purple golf shirts and scarlet Bermuda shorts. In my few excursions to the Royal Nova Scotia Yacht Squadron, I saw him there each time, variously tottering along the breakwater, playing the bagpipes, crunching beer cans in his fists, tossing the water taxi girl into the sea. He skippered a thirty-foot C&C sailboat called Sun Dog and made the boat a recreation for his boys and their girlfriends—and anyone else who wanted to show up. One of my sisters was a friend of a girl who went out with Brecken Burr, in the way that girls are friends with people they loathe, and one September she crewed the Labour Day races with the Burrs. “Mr. Burr’s a pig,” she said afterwards. “It’s disgusting. All the sons’ girlfriends are on the sailboat in bikinis and he’s slapping their bums, telling them to take off their tops, and trying to get them to sit on his lap. The man’s a big-time slime.” My mother dismissed Gregor Burr with a one-liner: “A stiff prick hath no conscience—and not a lot of clues either.” An articling clerk at the law firm, a page at the legislature—these were two of Mr. Burr’s liaisons I knew about. I’m sure there were more. Tiggy Burr wore an undaunted, enlightened smile throughout. That is, if she knew. But how could she not? She responded to her husband’s carousing by joining the board of the art gallery and becoming an aerobics instructor at the YMCA. In a few seasons, she was one of those gaunt, over-exercised women who look more sorrowful the more they perspire. She also developed a heart problem. From all her four-more, three-more, two-more work outs, the muscles in the left ventricle of her heart had become enlarged and obstructed her blood flow. It was July, I think, when she had open-heart surgery to remove these ventricular muscle bundles, the insides of her very heart exposed and remedied by Dr. Stanley Benninger, FRCP.

  Are you starting to feel the claustrophobic connectivity of the place? And I haven’t sketched any of the hospital politics themselves, which were often riven with feuds and factions, grievances and power plays. It was, of course, a whole other Theatre of Operations for Dr. B—hundreds of surgeries on Maritimers who needed septal-defect repairs, coronary artery bypass grafting, aortic valve replacements, rib resections. A nurse once brought an action against him for kicking a metal bucket of sponges against the wall of the O.R. (“What does he expect,” said my mother, “operating when he’s too tired?”), but besides this one incident he was said to work himself into long-term weariness, doing as many as four bypasses in one day. From the hospital, he would come home depleted, pass out on the sofa, or collapse into Weltschmerz and take to his bed for days at a stretch, watching war documentaries downstairs, his feet hidden in black-soled slippers, the floor strewn with medical journals and echocardiograms. In these moods he was unreachable by word or gesture, the whole house subject to the glooms of his depression. It was as if he understood too much, saw too much, knew too much. And yet he didn’t really know his own daughters—whose damage and instability were linked, I felt, with their father’s sporadic autisms. These situations would excite an orange-coloured rebelliousness in me that I was at pains to disguise. But what could I do? I had only a limited experience of the guy, saw him mostly from my own or my family’s point of view, and I knew there were angles I would never encompass. I guess my core confusion was this: he was either a preoccupied connoisseur with a true and painful exposure to mystery or an immensely pretentious mugwump who messed his Einstein hair on purpose. But I cannot in good conscience continue such explorations because, let me say here, Dr. Benninger emerged as a child from true Second World War horror. He was born in Poland, as noted, but he and his parents were in Germany when war broke out, when the Panzer divisions rolled across the border. They lived with friends, in hiding, they were in Dresden when the Allies fire-bombed that city and, posing as Germans, helped find bodies in the rubble and shovel buried corpses of German soldiers. His parents died when he was six. A relative got him to England.

  “Mmm-hmm, yes,” said my father, who evidently knew about Dr. Benninger’s childhood, in that way my father seemed to know about everyone. I thought my mother would be good for specifics, but she didn’t have the same energy for the subject anymore. She liked Stan now, was touched by the stories of kindness his patients ascribed to him. No, it was Sophie who occupied her, especially when she learned, through Sophie’s sister, what she’d suspected for six months: that Mrs. Benninger was ill.

  ~

  “Lung cancer,” said my mother. “There’s two types. Big cell and small cell. If it’s small cell, you have a chance. If it’s big cell, she’s had it. She might have a remission, but if i
t comes back, you go pretty fast.”

  I didn’t know what kind it was. Mrs. Benninger was in and out of hospital for the next eighteen months undergoing chemo and radiation therapy. She went from being one of the most visible of citizens to essentially vanishing from the shops and theatres and living rooms of the city. It got so I was afraid to ask Gail how she was doing.

  One day in December, my sister walked into my room. “You going to the Dubonnets?” she asked. “We’re all invited. It’s a Christmas party. Well, Hanukkah.”

  “I thought she had cancer.”

  My sister shrugged. “She’s really healthy now, apparently. She’s starting to get her hair back. But just in case, Mom’s giving her the wig from her play.”

  Gail, for reasons I won’t go into, chose not to attend. But I went. In a show of solidarity, all the female guests wore wigs from Neptune Theatre’s wardrobe department. Except Tiggy Burr, who arrived late and hadn’t heard about the arrangement. But there was Mrs. Ottway in Nora Helmer’s loose upswept bun, Mrs. Ingram in grey Blanche DuBois ringlets, Gail’s Aunt Tova in The Gingerbread Lady’s fright wig, and, in a majestic return to form, Mrs. Benninger in a Marie Antoinette-style pompadour from Congreve’s The Way of the World. The women were transformed by their outfits and the men by their transformations. The gathering had an effervescence and unpredictability I didn’t associate with adult parties. Sophie’s older brother Morrie was there from Montreal. So were her mother and father from Cape Breton. A soprano from the Canadian Opera sang “There Is Beauty” from The Mikado accompanied by Dr. Benninger on piano. Bottles of wine everywhere. Birch logs settling in the fireplace. A cousin fiddling in the kitchen. A nephew step-dancing. My mother in the living room playing side one of the soundtrack from Saturday Night Fever. Everywhere platters of brie, cherry tomatoes, goose liver pâté, fresh baguettes. Adults goofily dancing in the dining room. The Benninger house, which for so long seemed an airless exhibit, was warm with conviviality and release. Years later I would wish I’d stayed longer, but there were three more parties to go to that night, with people my own age, and near midnight I decided to make my exit. I was the last young person there. Searching the house to thank my hosts, I found Dr. Benninger elegantly two-stepping with Mrs. Burr in the pantry. He wore a blue blazer, a white shirt with French cuffs, an orange silk tie bought in Italy.