The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Elena would not have permitted his shotgun behaviour to go as far as it had. Her laughter or her alarm would have stopped him in his tracks before he’d got outside. But of course the beautiful Elena was no longer here, or anywhere.

  So aungellyk was hir natyf beautee.

  That lyk a thing immortal semed she,

  As doth an hevenish parfit creature,

  That doun were sent in scorning of nature.

  His parfit creature had deserted him by dying without any warning while he was changing the oil in their ancient Mazda, violating their agreement to expire in one another’s arms well beyond his ninetieth birthday. He had reacted like a man robbed of a reason for living, left with nothing but his own despised involuntary breathing. He couldn’t eat, refused to leave the house, locked the doors against friends who came to offer comfort, and lay for days in his bed, their bed, until the sheets had begun to stink. Firemen smashed their way in through a door on a Friday morning, to drag him off to a hospital bed and an intravenous drip.

  What followed was a noisy life of too many people burdening him with advice, all of it interfering with his inconsolable grief at the loss of the woman who had been the essential centre of his life. He’d endured that clamorous hell of living without her for several months before selling their house and moving up here to tiny Estevan Island and their getaway cabin, dwarfed by the forest at its back, its windows facing the water and the sometimes visible mountains of the larger island that had been home for most of his life. On days like today, the sky sent down a window blind of grey-blue cotton, obscuring the rest of the world.

  “It’s all very well to hide out in that place in order to recover from the cruellest blow of a lifetime, my darling, but a man like you—used to many years of the classroom’s lively flights of discovery and the staff room’s essential gossip, accustomed to the stimulation of good movies and the pleasure of symphony concerts featuring cellos that remember how to play the most exquisite music, and addicted to the laughter of beautiful women and reckless young people as well—it’s clear that this unnatural life of a hermit will eventually propel you into something rash like the suicides they’ve told you about. Pointing a shotgun at Lisa is just the beginning, and surely you can see that this means it’s time you did something about those plans that have invaded your sleep night after night. Seven years in exile is quite enough.”

  He had no doubt that this was Elena’s voice because he had never met anyone else who could speak in such long sentences. Still, he resisted the painful memories that would elbow their way into his head at a time like this—the young dark-eyed beauty flirting on the dance floor, the graceful white-haired woman striding like a confident duchess into a room—because it took only one or two moments of recalling the mysterious coquette just arrived from Europe, or the regal hostess in their own home, or the serious musician dedicated to mastering a difficult passage on the piano, to bring his day’s activity to a sudden halt and fill his head with the tumult of too many memories all at once.

  Of course he knew what she meant. Why had he always assumed that those who’d become “bushed” from excessive isolation were unaware of their state? The question was not whether you were aware but whether you’d seen it coming and had done something about it in time. He had no excuse because he had the poet’s words for it—

  But the moon carved unknown totems

  Out of the lakeshore

  Owls in the beardusky woods derided him

  Long decades ago he’d brought the Earle Birney poem into the classroom as a project, so that a reluctant all-boys class might use his small movie camera to make a three-minute film based on a poem they might choose for themselves. He’d known it would not necessarily create a love of poetry, but it would require them to read more closely than usual. They might even learn how to work together without using shouted obscenities, threats, and their fists in order to express an opinion. He’d chosen this poem to demonstrate what the students were to do with those they would choose for themselves: moving pictures to accompany the words.

  He may have selected this poem about a hermit because he had noticed, beside the gravel road to the town’s landfill dump, a plywood shack and an elderly man on the doorstep—looking, it seemed, at nothing but the woods that had him surrounded. He would ask the man’s permission to film him doing his chores, so that he might later match the footage to a taped reading of the poem, a model for his students.

  On a Saturday morning, he and their nine-year-old foster child had driven up that road to the old man’s property. Stuart remained in the car outside the sagging barbed-wire fence while Axel Thorstad went up the trail through the dense salal and knocked on the slab-wood door. The old man threw open the door and came out swinging a double-bitted axe that he brought down too close to Thorstad’s right foot. There’d been no temptation to explain. He’d run for the car. By the time he’d got through the gate the car door was open and the boy was running down the road—convinced, he’d later explained, that once the hermit had chopped Thorstad to pieces he would then do the same to him. The wide-eyed terrified look in Stuart’s face was something he’d not forgotten. It was probably much like his own.

  And now he could only

  bar himself in and wait

  for the great flint to come singing into his heart

  This was a thought too chilling to ignore. He must not let this sort of thing happen to him. Hammond had advised that he wait till Lisa had had the time to cool down, but Hammond wasn’t the guilty one here. Surely, if she was to be prevented from thinking he’d begun to lose it altogether, he must walk out to the Store as soon as possible, to face the postmistress and put this morning’s whole unpleasant business behind them both.

  After passing through a stand of stunted hemlock, the trail returned to the coastline beyond Sogawa Point and became a path of pebbles and crushed shells where he could keep an eye open for anything worth rescuing from the clutter of washed-in tree roots and golden heaps of uprooted kelp wedged between the logs. Along the bay of volcanic rock with its ancient embedded oyster shells, he had once found a Michelin tire for Alvin White, and a wicker doll carriage for Gwendolyn Something’s girls, as well as any number of golf balls, plastic ropes, and colourful Lego blocks he’d taken to the Free Exchange.

  Up the wooded slope to his right, a half-dozen of the island’s feral goats and sheep nibbled at weeds and lower branches amongst the boulders. These descendants of domestic animals abandoned when the commune dispersed in a hurry were without pen or shed for a home, or any master to answer to. They wandered the island for food and entertainment, respecting neither the fences, the ditches, nor the sentimental boundaries of humans. You never knew when a belligerent goat might burst from the woods with lowered head, in order to remind you of this. It was one of the miracles of Axel Thorstad’s life that they showed no interest in Elena’s flowers. He believed she must have had a word with them, and thanked her now as he passed.

  Eventually he came to the tiny cedar-shake cabin that had been the summer home of Herb and Esther Townsend before they’d got too old for such primitive holidays and began to sign up for ocean cruises instead. One of the giant firs had rested its lowest boughs on the sagging roof as though it understood there was no one below to complain. Important as it was that he apologize to the storekeeper, he would surely benefit from spending a few moments in the silence of the Townsends’ screened-in porch.

  The door squealed on rusty hinges. The floorboards groaned beneath his step. But the nearest of the four unpainted Adirondack chairs did not complain when Thorstad lowered himself into the deeply angled seat. Perhaps it recognized his bony rear end, his long back and pointed elbows, recalling the hundreds of times he had sat here—as they had all four sat every time in the same chairs, facing out to the water with cold drinks on the wooden arms, catching up on the details of their lives and exchanging opinions before going inside to play a hand of bridge, or to solve, noisily and with much invention, a crossword that
had been driving Esther Townsend crazy.

  Elena had always been the first to become restless towards the end of August, missing her piano, beginning to fear that her fingers may have seized up during the summer, starting to anticipate a concert booked for the fall, which she was convinced she would not be ready for. “I’ll be hissed off the stage!” she’d say, and then laugh. “But I will punish them, I will play something by one of those German composers who’re never played any more, something that goes on and on until all of them are soaked in sweat and suffering from a psychosomatic deafness that won’t go away for a week.”

  Elena might have been Esther’s exotic cousin, eager to shock with tales of her childhood in Madrid during the Franco regime, holidays in mercurial Barcelona, her early piano lessons down a narrow back street past beggars and thieves and snarling dogs, and her brief disastrous romances with concert pianists from Czechoslovakia and France. “It was because of those horrid men I decided to cross the Atlantic and never go back.”

  Esther Townsend knew better. “Come now! You crossed the Atlantic for a cousin’s wedding, then stayed because of a certain person you’d met at the reception.”

  “A certain person yes!” Elena had taken Thorstad’s hand in hers. “My darling giant—what did I know of his depths? Who was this man with his too-long legs and arms, all he wants to do is teach—nothing else! Can he play Chopin, has he ever confronted a Spanish bull, does he deserve the love of a beautiful woman from Madrid—of course not! But still, I could see that he needed me, that he could possibly learn to play something one day, though clumsily, and that he had eyes nearly as beautiful as my own, and such long powerful hands. So I stayed!”

  This was not exactly the truth. After the marriage of her cousin, Thorstad’s friend and colleague Andrzej Topolski, she had gone home to Europe for several months before deciding to return. Perhaps she intended to break up the marriage and have her handsome cousin for herself. Perhaps she wanted to find out whether this Axel Thorstad, who’d danced three times with her while she flirted with everyone else but him, deserved the most sought-after woman in Europe.

  “So I stayed!” she told Esther Townsend, “and you see how crazy he is for me still, that he has practised the cello through excruciating periods of failure until he became just barely good enough to be my rehearsal partner, and brings me every summer to this nowhere little island, which I love, and where I can visit every day with the most wonderful friends in the world!” At this she leapt from her chair and kissed Esther Townsend on both cheeks, and then Herbert Townsend as well, and finally drew Thorstad up from his chair so they could dance a few turns before kissing him, too, on the lips.

  Amongst the confusion of marks in the raw floorboards he believed there must be some that suggested Elena’s dancing feet, but no other sign indicated that she had ever been here. He’d occasionally visited the two bare rooms inside, smelling of wood rot and mice, before deciding again that neither Elena nor the Townsends could be found in the peeling wallpaper or the waterstained ceilings, just as they could no longer be found anywhere else on the island. No doubt the same would be true of others as well, if he were to visit all the island’s forsaken buildings—cedar cottages, tarpaper shacks, rusted trailer-homes, and tall farmhouses, few of them visible from the main road and most nearly unreachable within a jungle of alder and brambles grown up around them since their owners had left.

  Obviously it had been a mistake to stop at the Townsends’ cottage if all it could do was remind him of the vanished past. None of the bramble-hidden shacks or trailer-homes was any more forsaken than he felt today himself. He brought his large hands to his face and breathed deeply into the dark while he tried to think of what to do next. An apology was necessary, but would an apology be enough?

  From down the trail of oyster shells came the sound of energetic humming—Beethoven’s Ninth—Eugen von Schiller-Holst imitating an entire orchestra while conducting his weekly “circumnavigation” of the island on his stumpy legs. Keeping time to the music with the thrusts of his hiking staff, he had almost passed by the Townsend cabin before stopping to peer through the rusty screen: “Who’s there?”

  This annoying man had a knack for showing up when he was most unwelcome. A former conductor of symphony orchestras in Vancouver, Graz, and Cincinnati, he preferred to be addressed as Maestro, since few on the island could remember von Schiller-Holst and fewer still could pronounce Eugen to his satisfaction. Though his short round figure passed by Axel Thorstad’s cabin every week on his way around the island’s perimeter, he had made it clear he would terminate his walks altogether rather than subject himself to the frustrating sounds from the reluctant cello.

  “That’s you, Thorstad? Mein Gott!” He shook his large head, disgusted or perhaps amused, the short grey ponytail slapping at his neck. “If you’re wondering why your house is empty it’s because that isn’t your house! Yours is farther up the beach!”

  Thorstad stayed behind the screen. “Don’t jump to conclusions. I still know where I am.”

  “Trying to get away from yourself—that, I can understand. Up at the Store there is talk of a shooting!” The maestro spread his short thick legs and spent a moment observing Thorstad in silence. He prided himself in speaking what he called “hard truths,” however unwelcome they might be. “So you made a fool of yourself. So what? You make a fool of yourself every time you pick up your bow. I told that woman to blame your behaviour on your height—the blood takes too long to reach your head.” He wore the usual costume of younger men here—plaid shirt and wide suspenders to keep the waistband of his baggy jeans just below his considerable belly. Beside him, a wild-rose bush shifted gently in the breeze.

  He put his head down and started away, but turned back after a few steps. “There are mutterings at the Free Exchange as well,” he added. “Some have suggested the time has come to find you an old-folks home where someone can keep an eye on you.”

  Old-folks home was ice water poured on Axel Thorstad’s flesh, the sound of doors clanging shut, a sudden rush of panic through his every cell. He could imagine the rules: no wandering, no chopping firewood, no Kicking Horse coffee, no scavenging parts for old machines. “I’d rather walk into the sea and trust my life to the killer whales.”

  The maestro laughed—derisively, it seemed—then gave the wild-rose bush a whack with his staff and strode on.

  Old-folks home!

  Lisa Svetic could wait for her apology. It was high time he put into effect the plan he had considered for this sort of situation but had delayed for too long, hoping it might be unnecessary—a strategy to save himself from the sort of arrangements other people might plan for him.

  Once he’d returned to his shack he pulled a chair up to his plank desk beneath the window and opened his box of writing paper with his initials in gold at the top of each page, a retirement gift from a student whose parents owned a stationery shop. He removed his wire-rimmed reading glasses from his pocket and put them on, then uncapped a uni-ball pen, deluxe FINE, removed the top sheet of paper from the box, and set it down where his hands had long ago worn the raw wood smooth. His driftwood honour guard waited on every side to see what might come of this.

  Editor,

  Dear Sir or Madam:

  Please run the enclosed advertisement in your Classified section, weekends only, for as many weekends as the accompanying cheque will cover.

  It was almost disappointing to discover that this was all that was needed in a covering letter. The page might have looked more impressive if he’d arranged to have his ancient computer repaired, but of course it was the words themselves that mattered.

  An Adoption Request

  He could not recall seeing an Adoption category in the papers, so the word would have to be mentioned within his advertisement, to attract attention. The editors could then decide the appropriate place for it amongst the Classifieds. This would be somewhere in the Personals, he supposed, amongst the appeals for romance and the desperate plea
s for runaway teens to come home.

  Widowed gentleman in his late seventies, a former high school teacher of English—healthy, responsible, and easy to please— wishes to be “adopted” by a family in exchange for tutoring.

  How pleasant it was to imagine a family reading this and recognizing that he was offering precisely what they’d been looking for—a youngster worried about exams perhaps, parents concerned for their child’s future, a large house with bedrooms left empty by older children who’d gone on to university. Possibly a family of musicians, one of them fond of the cello.

  Yet, how uninteresting his life would seem to those who read this advertisement, most people having little idea of the challenges and rewards of the classroom. Why not let it be known that he’d developed additional skills during school holidays?

  Widowed gentleman in his seventies, a former high school teacher of English (with some experience as carpenter, newspaper reporter, cellist, and tour operator) wishes to be “adopted” by a family in exchange for tutoring.

  Unfortunately, this might suggest he was a man who hadn’t been able to keep a job, and yet it was hardly appropriate to explain the details in an advertisement of this sort. Since it was impossible to know what other people might think, the safest thing was to stick to the point as he had in the first version.

  And that was it. That was all the advertisement required. It was important not to sound desperate, like those pleading for the return of their lost children. But now that he saw it on the page, it seemed too little. Additional matters could be discussed once an interested party had contacted him, of course, a correspondence taking place before anything was decided, their letters crossing the strait in a mailbag guarded by Chief Danny Joseph, the captain of the little passenger ferry.