by Jack Hodgins
The MASTER of HAPPY ENDINGS
ALSO BY JACK HODGINS
Spit Delaney’s Island (stories)
The Invention of the World (novel)
The Resurrection of Joseph Bourne (novel)
The Barclay Family Theatre (stories)
Left Behind in Squabble Bay (for children)
The Honorary Patron (novel)
Over Forty in Broken Hill (travel)
Innocent Cities (novel)
A Passion for Narrative (a guide for writing fiction)
The Macken Charm (novel)
Broken Ground (novel)
Distance (novel)
Damage Done by the Storm (stories)
The
MASTER
of HAPPY ENDINGS
Jack
HODGINS
A NOVEL
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2010 Jack Hodgins
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Hodgins, Jack, 1938–
The master of happy endings : a novel / Jack Hodgins.
ISBN 978-0-88762-523-7
I. Title.
PS8565.O3M37 2010 C2009-907210-6
Editor: Patrick Crean
Jacket design: Black Eye Design
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
145 Front Street East, Suite 209,
Toronto, Ontario M5A 1E3 Canada
www.thomas-allen.com
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of The Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP) for our publishing activities.
10 11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1
Printed and bound in Canada
for the family, with love
and in memory of our friend
Ian Smith
Contents
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10
11
12
13
14
15
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21
Acknowledgements
The MASTER of HAPPY ENDINGS
1
Axel Thorstad was not yet so old that he might at any moment forget where he was or why he still lived on this small island. Whole weeks went by in which seventy-seven was not as ancient as he’d been led to expect. Though he’d been long retired, he saw himself as a man of sound mind and healthy curiosity, a reader still of poetry and novels and, in order to keep himself informed, his monthly Teacher magazine.
He was a physically active man as well, taller than everyone else and fiercely unbent, a daily swimmer and frequent rescuer of flotsam off the salty beach, where his size 13 soles left water-filled depressions in the sand. Often those footprints were all that anyone might see of him for days on end—which was fine with him. He had chosen to make a solitary figure of himself, but with a decent man’s habit of keeping a hermit’s wariness in check, masked by a public courtesy.
In the privacy of his cedar-shaded cabin overlooking the beach, Thorstad was a widower still in mourning after seven years, a retired teacher dreaming up lessons he would never teach. He prepared his meals and scrubbed the floor and took the water pump apart for repairs. Sometimes in afternoons he stretched out, with his long feet propped on the rusted bedstead, to reread a little Joseph Conrad or a few lines from Troilus and Cressida. If he dozed off now and then, it was never for long. He wakened to the crash and spray of an incoming tide, the scream of circling gulls in the wind, or a blurred exchange of conversation off a passing fish boat. Until today he had usually wakened with renewed energy for cutting firewood or setting out along the beach in search of treasures washed in from the sea. Until today he had never wakened in a state of panic.
With heart pounding, he leapt to his feet and snatched his shotgun down off the wall. After rushing out through the doorway and around the side of his shack, he steadied the barrel against the building’s corner to keep the intruder centred in his sights. The heavyset young woman came thumping down the trail through the woods with her head lowered, her gaze alert for surface roots, apparently unaware of him or his gun until they were fewer than twenty metres apart. She stopped abruptly in mid-stride, with one foot barely touching earth.
“Mr. Thorstad? It’s only me.” The postmistress threw out her arms as though she were casting a disguise from her shoulders.
But she’d worn no disguise. It was he who was not himself.
Even so, his arms refused to lower the gun, his mouth failed to find the right words in the confusion that overwhelmed his brain. How was he to explain that he’d dozed off and wakened from a dream of invading barbarians? He hadn’t imagined that the footsteps might be the postmistress bringing him the mail he had not picked up in more than a month. He’d expected—he did not know what he’d expected: a cataclysmic assault? Panic still fluttered in his throat.
Lisa Svetic stiffened her broad shoulders and retreated a few cautious steps, placing one large gumboot carefully behind the other. “Is there something wrong?”
There must be, there had to be something wrong, but he could do nothing but stand like an absurd lanky statue incapable of speech, his gun barrel tight to the corner post, its sighting notch a steady V at the toe of the woman’s boot. The deep chilled silence of the forest was underlined by the murmurs of the retreating tide at his back.
“It’s mostly junk mail,” she said, holding out the colourful papers as though to display their innocence, “which may justify shooting someone, but it doesn’t have to be me!”
“I’m sorry!” he said. “I was asleep. Your heavy footsteps . . .”
“My footsteps?” she said.
But she did not wait for an explanation. “If my footsteps are too heavy you can damn well remember to collect your stupid mail yourself!” She tossed flyers and envelopes out amongst the Oregon grape and giant sprays of sword fern, then turned her back on him and strode off.
By the time she had disappeared into the forest shadows, a trembling had travelled up his legs and torso and into his arms. He’d broken out in such a sweat that his shirt was clinging to his back.
He carried the shotgun inside and returned it to its rack of antlers above the window. He should have got rid of it long ago but had allowed it to remain on the wall where the previous owner had left it—its presence, like the beach-stone fireplace and the floor’s oiled planks, giving his cabin a comfortable rustic touch. Now he would have to go after the young woman and explain. Try to explain. Try to prevent her from feeding the island’s appetite for gossip.
He could imagine some of the residents up at the Store and down around the pier and the Free Exchange claiming to have seen warn
ing signs: tall old Axel Thorstad, a figure descended from gaunt Norwegian giants, muttering to himself as he examined the shelves in Lisa Svetic’s Store, or carrying home the door off an abandoned Ford for his root-cellar entrance, or becoming so lost in a book that he almost missed the ferry for a visit to the dentist across the strait. No doubt these local experts on human nature would see today’s behaviour as a sign that he was cracking up, just as they’d expected of an old man living alone for years.
Well, he had never cared much for what they thought. And he certainly wasn’t ready yet to apologize. What he needed now was time to collect himself, to allow his racing heart to calm and this chill to drain from his bones—time to think how he might go about handling this calamity.
To begin with, he needed a mug of good strong coffee. While standing over the sink to spoon the fragrant grains of Kicking Horse into his dented percolator, he avoided the little shaving mirror for fear of what it might tell him. While he waited for the coffee to perk and its smell to improve the world, he stripped off his grey wool socks—bristly now with fir needles, moss, and tiny twigs—then brought his cello over to the wooden chair in the centre of the room, planted his bare feet apart, cradled the instrument between his long thighs, and then instructed his hands to stop trembling so he could soothe his nerves with music—the one thing he could do on late-winter days when dark clouds rested their bellies on the tips of the Douglas firs. He drew the bow out long and slow across a deep rich lower D, inviting the Sinfonica to a gentle awakening. And now, E flat, with a tremor for the morning’s disaster. And, after a pause, the opening phrase to the saddest movement of Dvok’s Cello Concerto in B Minor, Opus 104.
Faces observed from every side. Over the years he’d found these knee-high stumps and log ends washed in to shore and painted red circle eyes and a variety of mouths according to the shapes of knot-holes and the peculiarities of the grain. With levers, wedges, and a makeshift block-and-tackle, he’d wrestled each of these up the slope and inside to set it on end amongst the others, where they might have been an audience listening to the homesick anguish of Antonin Dvok. Of course they might also have been a class awaiting instruction or a silent army of children standing guard. In any case they added the clean salty smell of sand and beach stones to the crowded room.
The black-and-white photos on the shiplap wall were as indifferent to the sounds from his cello as they were to everything else. In a framed lobby card for the movie Desperate Trails, the great Cliff Lyons, doubling for Johnny Mack Brown, rode beside the driver of a U.S. Mail coach, no doubt expecting to be ambushed any moment. In the second, Lyons appeared with John Wayne and Susan Hayward, both on horseback for a scene in Genghis Khan. And in the third—a blown-up reproduction from a single frame of a 35-millimetre movie film—a man in a police uniform chased a shadowy figure across the rooftop of a square brick building. These long-dead Hollywood figures were too intent on their duties to be irritated by Axel Thorstad’s recital.
He knew that Elena would have been surprised to see how little he’d needed for life without her in their holiday shack—its mismatched windows, rough walls, and driftwood corner posts making it look as old as the forest itself, an ancient playhouse beneath the towering firs. Inside, it could all be seen at once: his fireplace wall of books, his high plank desk at the window, the wooden chairs she’d painted red, the sharply angled rafters above the ceiling joists, and their bed in the lean-to with his poster of Chaucer’s pilgrims on the wall above it, faded from its years in his classroom.
Ordinarily, he made an effort to limit the number of times he played the one brief melody his cello would still agree to, so sad that sometimes even he could barely stand to hear it. Last fall, a hunter in a red mackinaw had stepped out of the woods to accuse him of driving the deer population into hiding. “You’re jeopardizing my winter supply of venison!” she’d shouted. “Play something else for a change!”
But it was too late to play something else. The instrument that had often accompanied Elena’s piano had, since her death, gone into an extended mourning period of its own, refusing every piece of music but this one. Elena had claimed that music was a way God had of speaking to us, but if this was the case it seemed He’d had little to say to her widower for some time.
Lisa Svetic was bound to see his behaviour this morning as a form of betrayal—confronting her with his shotgun like some crazed hillbilly guarding his moonshine still. She was easily offended at the best of times, often complaining that the number of customers at her general store had declined, as though from some conspiracy. Old people had been dying off, young people were moving away, and there were all those suicides he’d been told about, Lisa’s young husband amongst them. She had been born here, the granddaughter of pioneering farmers who’d arrived when several families were moving to this island to start a new life. “But they grew old and died, and most of the next generation moved away—including my parents, who send me stupid postcards from Arizona. If I didn’t have this store to run I wouldn’t see nobody from one end of the year to the next. Wouldn’t see anybody.”
She was probably the largest young woman he had ever known, broad of forehead and wide across the shoulders, with a great roll of flesh between her chin and imposing bosom. She kept her thin, nearly colourless hair twisted into a knot on the top of her head, with escaped or overlooked strands floating messily around it. He had made a practice of staying in her store no longer than he had to, since knowing he’d been a teacher made her a little defensive about the gaps in her education. And now, in his state of confusion and panic, he had offended her today in a way that could only make things worse. For all he knew, charges could soon be laid. She might have broken with island policy and telephoned the police.
For a moment he thought the sound of a boat scraping onto the gravel beach might be the Mounties materializing out of his imagination. But when he’d leaned the cello against the wall and went out onto his step, the stocky figure of Bo Hammond was stepping out of his small wooden skiff, followed by that always-smiling friend from Cuba who sometimes visited Hammond at the abandoned commune. Together they dragged the little boat up the slope just far enough to keep it from floating away.
Shouting “Hello this house!” Hammond stepped up onto the winter-ravaged retaining wall. “My friend from Cooba,” he said.
Because he introduced the friend in this manner every time, Thorstad was tempted to wonder which part was untrue—the Cooba or the friendship. This friend from Cuba was chubby, round-shouldered, dark-skinned, barefoot even in the coldest weather. He said nothing, now or ever, but merely nodded, smiling his toothy smile. “My friend from Cooba here, his ears picked up your music way out in the strait. I told him you’re trying to drive us crazy—same notes over and over until we’re so desperate we drown ourselves in the chuck.”
Relieved to see only amusement in Hammond’s face, Axel Thorstad folded down to sit on the rough plank step. “You came ashore just to tell me that?”
Hammond laughed. The Cuban lifted a foot to pry something from between his toes.
“Truth is,” Hammond said, “I’m afraid you’ll upset the fish and they’ll take off for somewhere else.”
“On the other hand,” Thorstad said, thrusting his chin forward, “they may stay and learn to sing.”
Again his visitors laughed, but Hammond quickly sobered. “Move deeper into the bush why don’tcha. Sound travels too far on the water. Anyways, something so sad can’t be good for an old guy like you.”
The friend smelled his fingers and wiped them on his khaki shorts.
“I’ll tell you what’s not good for me,” Thorstad said, leaning forward to cradle his face in his hands. Who better than genial Hammond to confide in? “Being wakened too suddenly from sleep. Turns out, this old fool can be something of a savage when he’s surprised.”
Once Hammond had lowered himself to sit beside him on the step, Thorstad briefly recounted his unfortunate confrontation with Lisa Svetic. “Turned her back
on me and nearly ran. I’m working up my courage to apologize.”
“I’d give ’er a little time to cool down,” Hammond said, placing a callused hand on Thorstad’s shoulder. “There’s no end of things that woman could do to punish you. If she barred you from the Store you’d have to cross the strait for every bottle of milk or pound of coffee.” He cleared his throat and tilted to spit off his side of the step. “Right there’s the reason you won’t catch me in any one place for long. A change of scenery could do you good— especially if you look for scenery that don’t include our Lisa.”
Thorstad felt the fluttery wings of anxiety astir in his chest. This was not what he’d hoped to hear. When he’d come here seven years ago, he’d intended to stay.
Hammond studied him now, as though to judge his mood. “D’you suppose you could hold off your concert while we dig some clams? I’m scared they’ll bury themselves too deep for shovels, escaping your gloomy sound.” He laughed, and stood up, and started away, raising both arms high as though surrendering to the world’s absurdities as he headed down to collect buckets and shovels from his little wooden boat. He would have been welcome company if he’d spent a little less time on his travels and more time here on the island.
While the two men spread out to dig up the exposed ocean floor, Thorstad went inside to rescue the frantic coffee pot from the stove, and brought his steaming mug out to the step. The long blue facing island had completely disappeared today behind a wall of mist or slanted rain, as though its scatter of coastline houses and backbone chain of mountains had drifted into the vast Pacific, leaving him to inhabit another dimension outside the normal world.
Where his land was about to fall away to beach, the upper limbs of a double-trunked arbutus were noisy with small black birds he couldn’t identify, getting drunk and accident-prone on what was left of last fall’s fermented berries. High on a skeletal snag, a bald eagle tilted its head to consider the man at the door, hoping perhaps to make some sense of this elongated figure of sharp angles dressed in a long-sleeved cotton shirt and corduroy pants worn thin and pale at the knees. Beside the step, the snowdrops in Elena’s little patch of garden were in bloom.