by Alex Pugsley
I told him I was leaving.
“But Aubrey,” he said, in an odd tone of voice, at once impatient and casual. “Aubrey, you can’t leave. Mrs. Benninger will be heartbroken if you go without dancing with her. Please. Dance with my wife. Come follow me.”
Admittedly it was a daydream I’d had for nine years (a long time in boy years), to share a romantic moment with Sophie Benninger—a moment when I would be taken as a proper, full-grown dance partner and not a kid on a school trip. So we danced. With one hand on my shoulder, the other steadying her wig, she and I waltzed about the Persian carpets. But as I looked evenly into her eyes, I saw that she was far more weakened and frail from the radiation therapy than anyone was saying. Her face was grey, there were spooky blotches on her neck and thin colourless lines tracing away from her eyes. Whether she recovered or not, I could tell she would never be as abundantly lovely as she once was. I could also tell this didn’t matter to her. When the song ended, she saw me to the front door and searched for my duffel coat in the hall closet. And then I began a sequence of doofy, clownish actions which makes me blush to recall even now, many years later. Flustered by so many incidents—that I’d danced with Mrs. Benninger, that I’d found Dr. Benninger and Mrs. Burr together, that Gail had decided not to come, that I was drunk—and seeing that Mrs. Benninger had sorted past my duffel coat three times already, I reached over her shoulder and grabbed my coat off its wooden hanger, bumping her off one of her high heels. Covering for this, I threaded my arm over-efficiently into my coat sleeve and spun myself sideways to better pull on my coat. As I was rotating, my shoulder knocked the porcelain figure of a dancing woman off the shelf in the front porch. It fell and broke into three chunks on the floor. I despised that I could be so clumsy as to break something the Benningers valued, especially something from Dresden, something that might have belonged to Dr. Benninger’s lost family. I blurted that I would pay for it, that she must let me pay for it. Holding the pieces in her hand, Mrs. Benninger was very calm. She checked the stability of the surviving figurines on the shelf, then kindly smiled at me, her pompadour wig askew, sagging a little. “Aubrey, it doesn’t matter. Don’t even think about it. I’m glad you could come to our party. Take care of your parents for me, won’t you? And thank you for being so kind to my daughter. Happy Harmonica.”
“But I’ll pay for that. I want to—”
“Aubrey, dear—” And she finished the thought with a little spin of her fingers that made me understand I shouldn’t talk about it again.
“Okay, Mrs. Benninger,” I said. “Happy Harmonica to you, too. And see you next year. You take care of yourself, too.”
“I’ll be fine.” And then, in one of the movie-moments of my late childhood, Mrs. Benninger kissed me on the lips, a loose moist kiss, redolent of red wine, swoony perfume, and a deeper, unhealthy organic under-smell that I did not allow myself to register. “Good bye, dear.”
I stepped outside into a snowstorm. She closed the door. Inside, someone turned up the stereo and “Night Fever” by the Bee Gees burst again from the living room, shaking the front windows. Standing on the top step, trying not to cry, snowflakes stinging my eyes, I watched a ginger cat tear across Robie Street toward Gorsebrook Hill. Then I slipped on the wet steps and fell to the sidewalk, breaking the pint bottle of bourbon in my back pocket.
~
Mrs. Benninger went back into the hospital for treatment the day after New Year’s. There was good news. A second course of radiation therapy was going well. Then it wasn’t. She got pneumonia. Then kidney failure. My mother was in Tampa visiting Nan when my father called her. While my mother was in the air, Sophie Benninger, born Sofya Anna Schwartz in New Waterford, Cape Breton, in 1944, expired on the seventh floor of the Victoria General Hospital in Halifax. She was thirty-eight. My sunburned mother sat up all night in the breakfast nook, her head in her hands, sobbing, her voice breaking with grief. “She was such a loving mother and loving wife,” she said. “Oh what a cruddy business. That such a woman could perish.” Thinking of her in later life, my mother would fall silent, then say softly, “That was the last time I was ever young, the day Sophie died.”
~
Three weeks after the funeral, Dr. Benninger moved into an apartment in Summer Gardens with Tiggy Burr, astounding the city not least because she was still married to Mr. Burr. It was a development that strained and ended diplomatic relations between our families. My father did not talk about it. My mother tried out a number of explanations. “Stan always had to be liked. And he was. He really was. Mostly. All the doors of Halifax would open for Stan and Sophie. ‘It’s Stan and Sophie, Sophie and Stan. Come on in. Have a drink. How’ve you been?’ But he misjudged everybody. When he took up with Tiggy. It was too soon. We were at a party at the Ottways, Stan and Tiggy walk in and everybody got their coats and left. Just left. Well, Hal and Issie won’t have them in the house anymore. Neither will the Fingards. I don’t think the Goodmans will. Even the Jacobsens.” All the families that my mother swore Dr. Benninger wished to impress and befriend—the Ingrams, the Lordlys, the Buckles, the Ottways—they cut him and Tiggy. The invitations to the summer houses in Chester stopped. The phone calls ceased.
Perversely, Gregor Burr, the careless alcoholic and careless womanizer, never seemed in danger of losing social position. Maybe he had too much money. Or his affairs had gone on so long people were used to them. Or maybe his dalliances were tolerated because they never jeopardized his marriage to Tiggy. Dr. Benninger and Tiggy, however, were not tolerated and, if there is such a thing as Halifax Society, Dr. Benninger fell from it. He was seen as a culprit. Whether this ostracization contributed to Tiggy’s decision, after four months with Dr. Benninger, to return to Mr. Burr, I don’t know. Maybe it would have happened anyway. Tiggy Burr is a strange woman guided by criteria I will never understand. But gradually, over a year of community correction, during which time even Mr. Burr made a show of understanding, or, at least, a show of trying to appear as if he were capable of understanding, Tiggy was rehabilitated to the community of the South End.
But Dr. Benninger was not. Nor did he wish to be. He returned to the house on Robie Street, lived there by himself, got a spaniel named Boot. I would see him walking this dog around Black Rock Beach in Point Pleasant Park, a park where once he ran cross-country races. He moved with a prominent limp now (the years of jogging ruining one of his knees), and kept to himself, as if he were in exile from a distant kingdom, an outcast among pine trees and sea spray. I was puzzled he stayed in Halifax. Why wouldn’t he escape to Tuscany or Provence—some country of sun-spangled vineyards? Why would he choose to end his life in this isolated saltwater city? Why would he choose at all to end his life? This was, of course, the question on which the whole city wanted a final verdict. Even his suicide became a spin on his mystery. I decided to see it as a convergence of many impulses—a refuge, a surrender, an escape—a final ending to all the contradictions and documentaries. In later years, I could resent his death. I felt that in passing into the next world he was somehow passing on to us his sense of mystery—as if he knew that his death, the question of his death, would become part of our mystery. And I didn’t want it. Once on a crosswalk in Montreal I began furiously talking to him, swearing at him, but of course he wasn’t anywhere except in my memory.
A year after he moved back to his house, I heard through my sisters that Dr. Benninger was remarrying. He’d met a woman, whose name I never learned, who taught at the med school and who had a young daughter from a previous relationship. They purchased one of the new condos at the bottom of Jubilee Road but, as my mother pointed out with a wistful smile, “He should have sold the Robie Street house first.” It was one of those capricious buyer’s markets that occur in Halifax from time to time, when properties stay on the market for years, dissipating spirits and savings. Nevertheless, Dr. Benninger and his fiancée were determined to go through with the move. And this is how I saw him for a last t
ime in front of the Robie Street house. It was one of those sunny April days when weeks of Atlantic fog and sleet are spectacularly expelled by a high-pressure system, clarifying the city, illuminating bare tree branches, making forsythia seem possible again. The sky was high and cloudless, the sun radiant on the front yards of snow, and I could see from as far away as University Avenue that same blue Volvo parked in front of the white house. The back seats were bent forward, the doors open. Dr. B was loading into the car some rolled-up Persian rugs, a few paintings, wine boxes packed with silver—possessions, presumably, he did not trust to the movers. I saw him put down a box in the snowmelt of the sidewalk then re-enter the house. I stood on the sidewalk, beside the For Sale sign, wondering if I should keep walking. I was pretty sure he hadn’t seen me. My parents had no dealings with him, neither of his two daughters spoke to him anymore, I knew he wasn’t really choosing to acknowledge people so much himself. But watching the trickles of snowmelt stream under the cardboard box, and remembering who had given me my first glass of champagne, and Courvoisier and Calvados, who had given me a slice of smoked meat more than twenty years earlier, I picked up the box and waited. It was a Riesling box hastily packed with galoshes, an unpolished menorah, an art book on Matisse. A few seconds later he came out, locking the front door and placing the key in a metal box that hung from the door knob. He turned and saw me, his hand on the wooden railing of the front steps. “Charles, yes, I thought it was you.” He composed a smile and it pained me to see how difficult it was for him to make this smile. All the quips and charms his smiles anticipated, all the little jokes he used to tell himself, they were gone. It is always disquieting to see that people have aged, but Dr. Benninger looked elderly now, his hair gone white, his face loose, shoulders stooped.
“Doc!” I said, brightly. “New digs? Onward and upward? Shall I put this box in the Volvo?”
“Yes, Charles. That would be good. Put it next to the Sauvignon Blanc.” And without too much difficulty we had a chat: what was I doing in Toronto, did I see so-and-so. I congratulated him on his marriage. Standing there in front of the house, he had that ephemeral but persistent Frenchness about him and reminded me, in his resigned civility, of a character out of Proust or Turgenev. I wanted to ask about Boot, the piebald spaniel I liked so much, but was worried that, like so many other things, Boot didn’t figure in the story anymore. So I didn’t. And neither of us mentioned Gail. I don’t remember our last words. As I had twenty years earlier, I watched him get in his car and drive away. Three months later, on July 12, the day that would have marked his and Sophie’s thirtieth wedding anniversary, Dr. Benninger went back to the empty, unsold house on Robie Street and hanged himself with a rope on the upstairs landing. Rumours were that he was in financial trouble, that he had sunk into another depression, that he was ill with a terminal disease. His body hung there overnight until Marni McCafferty, the Century 21 real estate agent, opened the door to show the house to a young couple from Calgary. By six o’clock that afternoon, everyone in the city knew what had happened. My family called me in Toronto as I was going out the door to a play. “Survivor guilt,” said my mother.
A Day with Cyrus Mair
All my life I’ve been thinking about Halifax—generally as it is expressed by its families, somewhat specifically by the Mair family of Tower Road, and super-specifically by Cyrus Mair, a friend and rival whom I met one afternoon when I was exactly five years and two days old. Of course the old Mair house on Tower Road is no longer there. The remains were demolished long ago to make way for two apartment buildings. But the final ruination of the family was set in motion years before, on the day I met Cyrus Mair, when his father’s body was found floating in Halifax Harbour, on this side of McNabs Island, the first in a series of bizarre events that would conclude with a house fire on the snowiest night in a century. But what of Cyrus Mair—whiz kid, scamp, mutant, contrarian pipsqueak, philosopher prince, pretender fink, boy vertiginous—where was his matter and how was he formed? Cyrus Mair came into my life on the afternoon of my sister’s ninth birthday, on a day of gifts and escapes and inventions, the drama beginning with me ringing and ringing at my own front door, waiting to be let in, idly probing with my tongue a front tooth newly loosened. Inside, my sister Bonnie came to the door in her sparkle dress—I could see her distorted through the stained glass of the door’s windowpanes—to ask what I wanted.
Now Bonnie was smart. She knew how many seconds there were in a year, that blue and yellow made green, and she could count up to forty in French. Once we’d been happy allies, the two of us venturing nude and hatless into our parents’ cocktail parties, but in the past months a coolness had prevailed between us, and now that she was nine she assumed an officious attitude toward younger kids, acting as their de facto guardian, and in these moments she became the Big Sister who wiped your nose and reminded you to use the basement door—which is what she was doing now, her eyes scolding, her finger circling. By parental decree, children were supposed to use the back or basement door unless there were special circumstances but I was special circumstances. I understood we could use the front door on our birthdays, and a mere two days earlier, when it had been my birthday, I’d proposed the idea of moving my front door privileges from my birthday to any other day in the year—and I was choosing today. Bonnie, I saw, had conveniently forgotten this amendment. But I was used to being misunderstood. I was something of an exceptional child, to tell the truth, and from the age of four and a half on I had the uncanny and somewhat underappreciated ability to repeat the “Witch Doctor” song for hours at a time without stopping. My performances didn’t win over all my audiences, true, but nonetheless I persevered—just as I persevered now in ringing the front doorbell. Bonnie appeared again, this time with my oldest sister, Carolyn, both tying off helium birthday balloons, and in a burst of tandem head-shaking and hand-waving, they conveyed the instruction to go around to the basement door.
I stood on the porch, furious, knowing that many of the world’s mysteries eluded me, but starting to understand better and better that my older sisters wanted to destroy everything I held to be important. Slamming my fist against the glass of the door, and perhaps not really knowing exactly what I wanted, I left off ringing the doorbell and ran in madness to the end of the block, where, contrary to family rules, I ran across Victoria Road. Farther up the street, past the crazy Pigeon Lady’s house, and safely distant from all birthday festivities, my shoulders relaxed and I shifted into another of my personas, which was Aubrey McKee—Boy Detective. I started memorizing passing license plates for possible future reference and attempted what was known in my trade as a forward tail. This was a sidewalk surveillance technique that involved tracking a subject who was actually behind the operative. I’d noticed, for example, on the other side of the street an unknown, fair-haired kid, and as he went about his way, following a single sheet of coloured paper down Tower Road, absorbed in the little world a child has, I was giving him enough time to draw alongside me. But looking across the street now, the boy in question was gone, the sidewalk empty save for a few rain puddles, so I simply crossed South Street and made for the Halifax School for the Blind. This was an enormous stone building, a remnant from another century, and setting foot in this territory was always iffy because it meant one might encounter, as my sister Bonnie described them, “a bunch of blind albino kids from P.E.I.” I’d sometimes seen sightless children waiting on the school’s front steps, and one winter afternoon I’d heard floating out of open windows the sound of piano lessons, but I’d never seen a blind albino kid, not even from any province. All the same, as I snuck toward the school’s playground, I was mindful of Bonnie’s cautions and, panicked that I would be randomly chased by creatures with pink gogs of bloodied flesh where their eyes should be, I slunk under the black wrought-iron fence and into the green and sun of the playground. Once inside, I resumed my maneuvers. Some weeks before, I’d lost a Hot Wheels Batmobile in this playground, and since then I t
ended to line-search under the swings, kick at dirt-clumps in the sandbox, and scowl at the happy kids playing on the teeter-totter. The playground’s perimeter I investigated in Boy Detective fashion, planning to work my way into the centre as I went, but this idea I abandoned in favour of the monkey bars, from the top of which I was soon hanging by my knees—my head low-drooping—and noting the traces of sun on the nearby Victoria General Hospital, the wrinkle pattern of the crumbling black asphalt at the edge of its parking lot, and a deep puddle directly below the monkey bars superb in its facility to reflect the upside-down sky. Turning the other way, I noticed a green seed pod, from a maple tree, tumbling in the wind, and I was staring at it some moments before I saw, out of focus in the background, the fair-haired kid I’d seen earlier. He was waving from a softly rotating merry-go-round. I’d not seen him come into the playground so it was as if he had teleported from coordinates elsewhere in the galaxy. He looked about five years old. His hair was corn-silk blond and he was costumed miscellaneously. He wore a silk pajama top, pale blue with navy trim on the collar and cuffs. Over this was an adult’s black dress belt, so big it went round him three times, cinched very tight, causing the pajama top to flare out like a skirt below the waist. Completing the ensemble were grey jodhpurs and Oxford shoes, untied with no socks. All this he sported without a trace of self-consciousness, not for a moment considering that his clothes were anything but regulation. He was shy, forward, joyously alert, and within his blue eyes shimmered a quick originality. I’d never seen the kid before—and I knew a lot of people from nursery school, the bookmobile library, and even the Public Gardens—and asked where he was from.