Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  I think of the strangest things at the strangest times. Because now I feel all sad and Garfunkly and I know you hate it when these silly mushy wimpy sad sentimental feelings take me over bud how can I hep it? I can say I never felt so lucky-overjoyed-surprised as when you met me out of the blue at the train station. It was like I missed you but didn’t know it and was never so happy to see someone

  And I was thinking before I’d kissed all your friends but not you because I was always afraid you’d think I was a whatever and you never show things because I know who wants to be like a boyfriend-girlfriend and do all that boyfriend-girlfriend crap? But I remember what you say! Do you think I don’t listen to you? Yes and yes and a thousand times geesh.

  Because I know yer always understanding what everybody’s thinking like the time you lent me your enchanted plum or when you took out my splinter & warmed my nude feet at Babba’s bonfire on the beach and the spooning and the kisses and the hoojamaflip. I much prefer your calm talk to when you go bonkers and suffer from a spastic brain fever and maybe I don’t always know what you’re meaning but sometimes when you touch me I feel like I’m going to fall off a cliff

  So now I miss you so much I burp all the time on account of it and I have a red spot on the inside of my nose because of it and I git all tingly innermost when I think of it and I miss you Cyrus Mair perfectly darling boy and bien sur I want to go to Europa Parigi, Firenza, Alpen, Muesli. And I will swim like a Turk in the land of Egypt. That is a promise and a promessa und der vogel ist das wort.

  I have to get a new pair of trousers.

  Please wear a hat.

  But most important—don’t you dare kiss Brigid Benninger!

  And super apologies everything screwed-up tonight I am truly sorry about such predicaments but I am in love with you Cyrus Mair once upon a midnight.

  Til soon!

  Best love from

  Karin

  ps I love love love those poems esp the line where the world lives and dies with each person all you need now is a rhyme for person!

  Aubrey McKee

  For many years it would be the biggest event in my life. Maybe things in Halifax do not change so swiftly but things for me had changed forever. It was a grief that filled me. I could not control it. The confusion and damage I felt from this winter would last ten years or more and I would act it out in any number of personal relationships—this the accurate contention of my adult girlfriends—and certainly in the days and nights immediately following I was a mess, lurching from one bar to another, falling down, picking fights, slutting after strangers. There I am, plastered and getting bounced out of the Palace, and there I am again, driving drunk down Coburg Road to the closed-for-the-season Waegwoltic Club, speeding by the icicled gatehouse and swerving into the club’s empty parking lot where I sit on the car’s front bumper, in the wind and whipping sleet, downing what’s left of a bottle of wine, drunk in my aloneness, watching the tennis courts fill up with snow.

  ~

  When Saint Mary’s Cathedral Basilica re-opened in January, Karin Friday would marry Boyden Burr on a Saturday afternoon. I was invited, did not attend, but chose to visit the church later that day, slinking hungover into the rearmost pew for the third wedding service of that afternoon. This was a couple from Hantsport, a woman named Publicover, and I remained in my pew some minutes after the service was done and the hall was emptied. I wandered toward a white gladioli arrangement on a table fitted with a pressed white tablecloth. Somewhat inexplicably, someone had written on this tablecloth in red ballpoint pen the word “mood” with a line through the m. Why anyone would write on a newly-pressed tablecloth was beyond me. The action seemed repulsive in the extreme. Whichever—earlier that day Karin Catherine Friday took her husband’s name and became Karin Catherine Burr. She would become known afterwards as K.C. Burr and then simply Casey Burr. We are, at the time of this writing, probably three phone calls away—I call my sister Carolyn who calls Trish Burr who calls her sister-in-law—but Casey Burr is pretty squarely gone from my experience. I don’t know much about her present life. I imagine her as one of those women—perfect blonde highlights, year-round tan—you see springing out of a Porsche Cayenne with a cellphone to her ear and a tightening in her eyes. She lives now within the ten thousand families of Halifax, her life full of children’s hockey and ballet lessons, March Breaks in Whistler, a bungalow in Bermuda—a signature cast member of The Real Housewives of the South End. I have been chastised by my sisters for my partiality to this rather petulant interpretation but in Casey Burr I have sensed a very stark, even slightly sociopathic, self-involvement so, who knows, maybe I am simply following her example. “Blondes don’t always age well,” was my mother’s somewhat cryptic assessment.

  ~

  The house of course is gone. The address of 1121 Tower Road no longer exists. The Mair property, like the Moir’s chocolate factory, like the Halifax Herald building, is no longer extant, its libraries, ballrooms, attics, rose gardens—and all the meanings they once implied—completely gone. Two days after the storm, I went to view the hurricane and fire wreckage. The street was a mess, the clogging street snow a cookie dough colour, trees blown sideways, heaved-up roots glazed with ice, sidewalk squares turned over. The property itself was a cindered shambles, a smell of burnt planking and blackened plaster, drifts of ash and snow crisscrossed with bicycle tracks where kids had ridden in soot and grime. Soon after, the ruins of the Mair house were razed and demolished, the entire acreage bulldozed. What stands in that location now, should you be walking down Tower Road, is a concrete apartment building, a shabby low-rise already deteriorating, iron fittings rusting, cement showing a crumbly, weathered aspect. “The times changed and they didn’t,” said my mother. “That family, they couldn’t let go of the past. All of them. I mean it’s a sin what happened. When you think of the darling little boy who came to Bonnie’s birthday party. But who sends a four-year-old to live with a woman in her sixties? I swear that family has no sense! For all their brilliance, they have no sense. I found him one day out in the driveway. Where was the babysitter? And what in the name of God was she thinking? You never leave a four-year-old on their own. The poor child. Playing in the slush. Improperly dressed. It’s a wonder he wasn’t run over by a truck. And how they end up? With all those books and pigeons? It is a sin. A travesty. The whole thing’s beyond belief.”

  ~

  The Mairs, the Mairs—what was their substance and how on earth? Maybe they were merely everyday transposable folk, as worn-out and done-to-death as those in any how town. Or maybe they were unique to Halifax. To think a last time on Wallace Stevens, and how he placed his jar in Tennessee to make the wilderness surround a hill, so, too, the Mairs seemed placed on Tower Road to make the city’s history surround a house and street. In memory, the family seems a fantasia on Maritime themes—brilliancy, loss, nostalgia, decay—and the Mairs a medium through which the mystery and tragedy of Nova Scotia expressed itself. Note the past participle. The family is mostly gone. Although they’d long been important to Halifax’s imagination of itself, and, for a few years following, the family would be recalled with baffled amazement—they that perished in seas and fire—but it wasn’t long before the surname would drop from the news cycles of the city. I have a niece who claims she once saw a Mair, a gay, estranged, and renegade cousin named Augustus, whom Emma maintains she saw tumble down the ski slopes at Martock, but rumour is he moved away years ago. To be honest, even alive the Mairs seemed to be living in—to borrow the title of a book—a Vanishing Halifax. For each in their way wished to return to something that was already gone.

  Howland Mair sought to create in Halifax a metropolis based on defunct ideals. Emlyn Mair—who would die in hospital a few weeks into January at the age of ninety-two—she was concocting for Cyrus a life from obsolescent glory. I think, in the way she felt accountable for her brother’s death, she felt responsible for her nephew’s life. So she made a st
ately project of the boy, sending him to boarding school, to Cambridge, planning to bestow upon the world a Cyrus. But her efforts were mostly a means to recover what she herself had lost. Seen this way, Cyrus seems to me an innocent scion, a kid flung forward into present-day confusions like a message in a bottle from the Edwardian past, expected to continue in a line of figures who have about them something of imperial exploit—Cyrus Mair, the living end-effect of the schemes and strivings of the Emlyn Mair Expeditionary Force—but I’m not sure this allowed for a boy to find his own way in the world. And, for Cyrus, how was the waning past repeated? I’m not sure it was. I feel he wished to return to the rush of First Love and all the possibilities that rush might mean. For him, Karin was perfect and peerless and he sought to identify himself with her in her best moments of sustained joy and self-possession—before the meanings of the adult world would really involve her and before her own self-involvement would really absorb her—and perhaps he pursued her a second time because he’d become infatuated with this very same self-involvement. I don’t know. Maybe he just wished to be returned to the first time he heard the song. If I could identify the contradictions in the man, it would be the conflict between wanting to give to someone the open-ended freedom to infinitely develop as well as wanting to impose a structure of meaning on that someone as a way to organize his own understanding of the world. With most citizens, he was sufficiently isolated to be safe in such procedures but with Karin Friday I think he was suspended somewhere between Love and Reckoning and these variant feelings became for him a source of personal confusion. That’s my pass at it. You have to believe in something. He certainly believed in Karin Friday. She was his context and system, his story and history, his exquisite truth and fiction.

  As he recedes with the years, what remains of his too-brief life will linger in the subjectivities of those who knew him. Whether he was a crackpot who amounted to a lot of spilled milk or a poet whose medium was other people, I’m not sure, but he was probably the single-biggest influence on my young life and one of the most brilliantly unpredictable minds I’ve known. Strains and traces of his life and thought have followed me in this, my later life, he was certainly one of the voices in my head—and to think of all the people I would go on to meet and he would not! My emotionality would change, my response to the world would change, who I was would change—all these would distort and morph under the pressure of new realities, for I would enter a world of further spirits—but most of those to whom I would be drawn would have in them reminders of Cyrus Mair.

  “He was so young!” Babba said to me recently, impulsively touching my wrist and squeezing my hand. “He was twenty-­two years old. Do you remember how young that is? That’s practically a baby. Think of it. Think what we were like back then.” She shook her head, in her wince and manner conveying her still-palpable exasperation and sorrow. “There was just something so frantic about him. In such a rush, always. And I don’t know if being smarter than everybody else was such a big advantage. Being super-smart, I’m not sure it’s so helpful. I mean, if you let the universe inside your head like that, it can get pretty disturbing.” I remember Babba gazing down in this moment, somewhat off the portside of her own elbow, before adding, “He’d been alone so much of the time, in boarding school, playing tennis, at university, and I know he read about everything in life. But I’m not sure he felt it. I’m not sure he felt as much as he read. Who could? I don’t know. Sometimes angels come down to earth for a while. That’s what I think.”

  ~

  To reprise: life in Halifax is rich with connection and overlap, with shared lives and shared relationships. It’s almost impossible to be discrete there. Everyone’s life complicates with connection—though complicate doesn’t seem to adequately convey the saturated, interrelated confusion of its lives. My Sisters Talking: “Halifax is a small world.” “Everybody knows everybody.” “Life in the fish bowl.” “Weirdness within weirdness.” “And who’s changing the water?” “I have never seen a place so obsessed with itself as Halifax.” I do think of Halifax vast and big, rich and strange, changeless and changing, this mess of small eternities, and in my mind I’ve counted all the cracks in its sidewalks, seen all the tennis balls on its school rooftops, looked in the eye all its leading lights. But in its complexities of course I have moved only a very small part. These, my efforts, have been subject to my own prejudices, as well as the prejudices of my circumstances, but they are my efforts. And my mistakes. Whatever these recollections have been, they have been mine, for this was Halifax as I knew it, as I lived it and felt it, and this pattern of reminiscences, these feats of recovery, these acts of betrayal, have become my Halifax Book. I have done my best to recover these moments, to display them as best as I could, and to show the mysteries—and people—who were to me the city’s truths.

  ~

  So I would leave Nova Scotia. I remember the mid­winter day Carolyn drove me the twenty-two miles to the airport. The sun was setting in the west, flurries scattering on salt-bleached highways, the colours of the world drained to desolation. As I flew back to university and a city that would claim me for many years, I glanced out the airplane window at the speckling lights of the twin-cities below. For other passengers, the city’s constellations might seem, in Saul Bellow’s phrase, a tremendous Canada of light, but I saw the gloom between the glimmer, the darkness suggestive of obstinacy and misperception, and I decided there was more to the world than what my hometown was interested in. Hometowns for a twentysomething can be like that. I could have just as easily looked down on Rochester or Pittsburgh or Raleigh. I may not have understood all of my thoughts, really, but I knew that in the somersaults of the next generations, no one would really know me or Gail or Cyrus. We’d be absent from the far future, from its conflicts and vocabularies, its further flux of circumstance. Vast and elaborate crimsons separate us from the people of the next few centuries and you wonder how our situations, lived somewhat erratically in their past, might offer any meaning to their lives. How odd to think that everything we know—dominions, virtues, principalities—will one day vanish from this curious adventure. Strange and strange, isn’t it?

  ~

  In my young life, I’d been called many things, Kink and Mickey, Charles and Grub, Tudball and Harold and Max, but in the next few years, when my charms might be more my own, I had an idea to commit to some system of Aubrey McKee. For I knew I still had to make myself up.

  End Book One

  Copyright

  Copyright © Alex Pugsley, 2020

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Aubrey McKee / by Alex Pugsley.

  Names: Pugsley, Alex, 1963– author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2020017813X | Canadiana (ebook) 20200178164 ISBN 9781771963114 (softcover) | ISBN 9781771963121 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS8631.U445 A68 2020 | DDC C813/.6—dc23

  Edited by John Metcalf

  Copy-edited by Martin Llewelyn

  Text and cover designed by Ingrid Paulson

  Much of the material in this novel originally appeared in the following magazines: Brick, The Dalhousie Review, Descant, Eighteen Bridges, The New Quarterly, Prism, This Magazine, and The Walrus.

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an a
gency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and Ontario Creates.