by Jack Hodgins
“Get you in her clutches,” Lisa had said. To be in someone’s clutches suggested strong fingers around your neck. His mother had used the phrase when she’d warned him against the excessive interest displayed by one of his students, a young woman determined to be a poet and embarrassingly grateful for every drop of encouragement. It had got so that it was impossible not to see what was between her lines, requiring him to respond as though he were too stupid to understand. “Watch out, my dear,” his mother had warned. “You’re so naive, that girl will have you in her clutches before you know what hit you.”
Would a father have taught him how to handle the situation? Thorstad didn’t know. He’d never had a father, except in a few frames of a Hollywood film and the photo he’d lifted from the celluloid to hang on his wall. His father had died after a leap from the roof of a four-storey building at Centurion Pictures, though only the first few seconds of his jump would appear in the film. His face could not be seen as he hurtled himself from the edge, and of course he’d been dressed to look like the actor Derek Morris, who was playing the role of a policeman attempting to apprehend the man who’d killed the woman he loved. The rest of the cop’s dangerous feats were performed by a second double, who brought the original jump to a happier conclusion by landing safely on a lower roof to continue the chase. Why they hadn’t re-shot the beginning of the jump with the replacement was a mystery, but Axel Thorstad was grateful the possibility had been overlooked.
The accident had occurred two weeks before Thorstad was born, which was the sort of thing he might expect in a Dickens novel but not in his own real life. He had never seen his father’s face, he had never heard his father’s voice, but he had watched his copy of that black-and-white film starring Derek Morris and the beautiful Marisa Gale, and so had witnessed those final seconds of his father’s life, anguished at his inability to alter the outcome. Anyone who looked closely enough could see that the policeman who lands on the lower roof is not the policeman who leapt from the top of the four-storey building. His mother had pointed this out when he was a boy.
His mother had explained that as a stunt double his father had known his face would never be captured by the camera. Having failed as an actor himself, he’d chosen to devote his life to the same dangerous career as the famous Cliff Lyons so that artists with real talent could be free to do their work without fear of harm. But he had lost the opportunity to live out this noble purpose when he fell from that roof on his first day before an actual rolling camera.
Derek Morris may have been grateful for the sacrifice. For thirty years Thorstad’s mother had received an annual Christmas card from the actor, though of course he might have been sending cards to any number of widows whose husbands had made it possible for him to live on, unscarred, to old age and international fame. If it had been guilt that inspired those cards, Thorstad would never know.
Rather than remain in Los Angeles after his father’s death, his mother had moved north to the place of her childhood, a midsize harbour town, a coal-mining centre in those years before it was rescued from decline by the construction of a pulp mill whose smokestacks pumped foul billows into the sky. Here the new mother lived with her parents in the family home and did not remarry.
No doubt his mother’s account of his father’s accident explained his early fascination with movies. He’d been the only boy at Saturday matinees who sat silent and unmoving, hypnotized by the activity on the screen—the movies somehow implying a link between his world and his father’s, a direct connection between his town and the mysterious place of his father’s death, a city as magical as it was dangerous.
As a young man, Axel Thorstad had aspired to something like his father’s dedication to the lives of others, though not in any aspect of the movie business. It was in the classroom that he’d eventually pursued his goals, exploring with adolescents the power of Mark Twain’s humour, the glories of Shakespeare’s dramas, and the heartbreaking beauty of Synge’s Riders to the Sea. Of course the great works of literature needed little assistance from him, but they could sometimes supply the key that would open the doors to those mysterious teenage lives.
And what had he ever been but a servant of love? For more than thirty years he’d explored with teens not only the wise compassionate powers of the masters but also the more recent wonders and insights of contemporary writers. He had supervised dances, and organized weekend conferences with living poets. He could think of former students whose love of poetry had led them to take up the teaching of Literature themselves; he knew of computer programmers who were writing plays in their evenings. And of course there were young people in the world today who would not be in the world at all if he hadn’t encouraged their shy-and-awkward fathers to invite their pretty-but-overlooked mothers to the graduation dance.
In later years he had needed to do far less of this gentle sort of matchmaking, since somewhere along the way young women seemed to have taken matters into their own hands. Such gestures—even where needed—were far less welcome than they had been. Perhaps this was due to the widening gap between his age and their own. Year after year students continued to be seventeen, while he’d advanced steadily through birthdays towards his inevitable exit into the dark obscurity of retirement. Amongst the latest students were the youngest children of those shy boys and girls—middle-aged couples who’d turned out on parents’ night to make sure he knew their gratitude had not worn thin. Grey hairs had begun to show up on their heads, while they could not help but notice the deepening lines in his face, the spots on his hands.
By the time he’d emerged from the woods behind his shack, a dark cloud had moved in above the strait, obscuring most of the sky and all of the facing island’s mountains. Insects flew past. An owl hooted somewhere in the woods, perhaps thinking night had fallen. The waves slapped weakly onto the beach and then hissed and gurgled while sliding back through the gravel.
Normie Fenton’s little wooden rowboat had been pulled up onto the rocks, and Normie himself was at work doing what Thorstad had once done for himself every year—rebuilding the retaining wall damaged by the winter tides, its logs and buttresses washed away or left in disarray along the beach. Normie raised a hand in greeting but continued hauling solid lengths of driftwood up the beach, seldom looking up long enough to notice anything outside the world immediately around his boots. If he needed help he would holler for it, but otherwise he worked alone to shore up the crib so the sea would not steal more than it already had of Axel Thorstad’s soil.
Normie was as awkward and shy as a thirteen-year-old boy, but as strong as a labouring man in his thirties. When the commune disbanded he’d been left behind by his parents, who had handcrafted the willow-twig cradle they’d left him in. Since they hadn’t bothered or remembered or perhaps cared enough to come back for him, he’d been watched over by the few who’d remained in the commune’s sprawling log house. Though he was considered “simple” by some of those who employed him for odd jobs, he had acquired a practical knowledge that allowed him to know the secret of discouraging moss from overwhelming a roof, the proper dates for planting vegetables, and the best angle for stacking a bank of mismatched logs so that neither rain nor waves could seriously undermine them, at least for another year.
Thorstad had tried to do more for Normie than just hiring him for the occasional labouring job. Since the young man was afraid to leave the island, Thorstad had offered to help with correspondence courses, but courses and help had both been refused. He had tried to get Normie interested in books, but had failed at this as well. It seemed there was nothing he could do except insist on paying him for physical work he was willing to do without pay for the man who’d saved him from drowning. Nothing further was asked except that Thorstad listen occasionally to the plot of the latest Star Wars movie that Normie had seen on the commune’s television set.
While Normie hammered spikes into logs, Thorstad brought the Sinfonica over to the chair and encouraged it through the first few tentative ba
rs of the Adagio finale to Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat, almost unbearably beautiful. But the instrument refused to go beyond the moment where Elena’s piano accompaniment was intended to take dominance over cello and violin. When several more attempts led him no further into the piece, he put the cello back in its case—a child sent to its bedroom for refusing to behave—and sat on his doorstep to read one of today’s letters, a single typed page signed by an “Alan Doyle.”
He had known an Alan Doyle—a Math teacher down the hall, beginning somewhere back in the seventies, or maybe the early eighties. He’d been an affable man whose bald head and long body were so exceptionally narrow that he appeared to have been squeezed in a full-length vise. He’d retired a few years before Thorstad, and would—if this were the same man—be eighty years old by now, or more. Perhaps a grandson was in need of a tutor.
Axel Thorstad!
Apparently when Alan Doyle began a letter he saw himself leaping from behind a curtain.
I was so sure it was you the minute I saw your anonymous ad (and address) in the paper that I won’t even bother with “If you are not Axel Thorstad please ignore the following.”
I suspected you would go downhill when they deprived you of a classroom full of adolescents you could charm and inspire and make ambitious with your antics. Maybe you should have stayed and volunteered as a teacher’s aide. I take that back. You would drive the teacher crazy with your enthusiasm.
But I think I have to warn you that your ad campaign is bound to fail. Nobody is going to want an old geezer for a tutor, not when the world is full of over-educated and unemployed teachers right out of university and waiting for the old ones to die off and make room.
Travel, why don’t you? You and Elena used to take off for exotic parts, if I remember. New Zealand. Spain. Argentina! Why not retrace your steps? When old men fall off their rockers they’re expected to do outrageous things. Why not rob a bank? Why not kidnap an heiress if it’s excitement you want? If all you want is an excuse to get off Estevan Island—and I can imagine any number of reasons to get off it fast—why not sign up to spend a winter on a Greenland ice floe, or take up deep-sea diving? Better still, find yourself a lonely widow (as I did) and move to Florida (which I didn’t—this letter is being written in North Vancouver).
Good for you, for making the effort to get back into life with that advertisement, but you shouldn’t put all your hope in that alone. Minna and I are planning a trip to Iceland this summer. You could be doing something like it yourself.
Yours,
Alan Doyle
“I suppose that is one of your famous letters—hah?”
He hadn’t noticed von Schiller-Holst approaching along the beach. He came up the slope, planting his long staff in the grass and leaning into it just a little at each step, his stomach straining the buttons on his shirt.
Instantly annoyed, as he was whenever the maestro intruded, Thorstad also felt a sudden need to defend himself. It was ridiculous, of course, but he held up the sheet of paper and hoped he did not look sheepish. “A former colleague, suggesting I find myself a widow and move to Florida.”
“Don’t ask me in for coffee,” the maestro said, though Thorstad had never invited him inside in the three years the man had lived here. “I’ll sit just long enough to catch my breath.” He lowered himself with a grunt to the step beside Thorstad and held his staff in both hands between his spread knees. It was an almost perfectly straight pole, ocean washed nearly white, with the suggestion of a sea serpent carved into the top. Like most men here, the maestro wore a ponytail at his neck though he was completely bald on top. “I decided to circle the island in the opposite direction for a change and it’s taken me nearly an hour longer then usual. I suppose there is some explanation for that, but I don’t know what it is. I just thank Gott-in-himmel you’re not torturing that poor cello at this moment. The world needs fewer musicians and many more good listeners.”
And fewer bullies as well, Thorstad did not say, but saw no harm in explaining the letter in his hands. “This man has written to suggest I put some adventure into my life.”
The maestro stabbed the ground with his pole. “You were a teacher, for heaven’s sake! He doesn’t think teaching is an adventure? What a fool! It would be easier to climb the Matterhorn! Safer too!”
“He also suggests travel, but he fell short of inviting me to join him in Iceland.”
Von Schiller-Holst spoke to the ground between his feet. “Once in a while—maybe twice a year—some small orchestra invites me to be a guest conductor for a concert or two. That’s enough adventure for me. Enough travel as well. I have my CDs. Music provides me with everything I need.” He stood up, again with a grunt. “Off I go before the light begins to fail. To fall and break my neck is not the sort of adventure that appeals to me. Nor is a helicopter trip to the hospital my favourite form of travel.”
Once the maestro had set off to continue his reversed circumnavigation of the island, Thorstad went inside to spoon coffee into the pot: Kicking Horse brand, Kick Ass quality, certified organic. Just the scent of it could lift his spirits, though Lisa warned him against the habit every time he brought a new package to her counter.
Doyle had suggested travel and adventure. Well, there’d been more than enough adventure travelling with Elena, who had a tendency to make scenes that Thorstad had to smooth over. On their final day in Barcelona a beggar woman had tossed her bundled-up baby at Elena, who instinctively dropped her purse in order to catch the child. Naturally the woman had snatched up the purse and run, which meant they’d had little choice but to carry the woman’s doll to the police station to report the theft. Elena berated herself for her stupidity—she who ought to have known the habits of Barcelona beggars! The police were so incensed by her elaborate criticism of their failure to rid the streets of crime that they’d put her behind bars, though only until she’d calmed down and even, to Thorstad’s astonishment, apologized. At least she claimed it had been an apology. He did not know enough Spanish—either Catalan or Castilian—to be sure.
He could not imagine travelling now without her, just as he could not imagine actually writing, without her encouragement, his planned biography of Jack Jones, the “Pocatella Kid,” whose career as a stunt double ended when he was thrown from his wagon during the filming of The Dawn Ride. To write the biography now would feel like an unhealthy disappearance into daydream, a retreat to a world more dangerously narrow even than his current life.
The return address on today’s second envelope included some sort of embossed logo created from an entanglement of initials, followed by the name of a street in the provincial capital. Inside, the handwriting was steady, and slanted uniformly to the right.
Dear Sir,
I did not see your advertisement myself, but my mother-in-law in Prince Rupert sent it to me as a clipping, along with some sentences praising the kindness she detected in the letter she received in response to her query. I am afraid the dear woman cannot accept the fact that her husband was drowned, along with his friends, when their small charter plane fell into the sea several years ago.
We may be able to help one another, you and I. Of course, I know nothing about you, except for what you’ve said in the newspaper along with the sympathetic nature my mother-in-law detected in your letter, but I wish to encourage you to telephone me at the number below so that we may speak of this “adoption” matter—by which I assume you mean a sort of barter relationship whereby you would apply yourself to helping our son with his high school courses in exchange for comfortable (and private) room and board.
I shall tell you briefly of our situation here. My husband is a dentist. We live in a pleasant neighbourhood of large lots with plenty of trees. There is a small self-contained cottage at the back of our property where you may cook your own meals if you wish. Or, if you prefer, you could cross the yard to eat with us. This is something we can discuss. Our son is a fine soccer player and a keen budding actor whose dedication to bo
th sport and drama has resulted in unsatisfactory grades at school. He has promised to co-operate with a private tutor so long as we don’t require him to quit the soccer team. We seem to have come to a firm agreement on this—that he will not be required to drop soccer so long as his work with a tutor results in improved grades.
I suspect I will be too late, having received your advertisement only now, and that you will already have found a good home and position elsewhere. If this is the situation, I can only hope that it works out well for you, and that you will be happy there.
Sincerely,
Audrey L. Montana
This was precisely the response he had imagined when he sent out his advertisement! Upon reading the letter a second time he saw that it was a real offer, that in its incomprehensible generosity the world out there had sent him a reply he might have invented for himself.
But this happy recognition was joined too quickly by a disquiet that was almost dread, raising cold goosebumps down his arms. Here was an opportunity to do what he needed to do— escape from the dangerous isolation of this place on the very terms he had hoped for—but he knew already that he would not respond to this woman’s offer. He must have been mistaken, he must have been hoping for something he hadn’t identified. Perhaps he shouldn’t have used the word “tutor.” Preparing someone for government exams was not teaching so much as nagging, drilling, anticipating, and of course pretending that the exam had something to do with education. He could think of any number of reasons to stay clear of this Audrey Montana. As he replaced the sheet of paper to its envelope and tapped it gently along with Alan Doyle’s letter into the space between his mother’s Bible and I’m Not Stiller, he told himself that even in his seventies a man could wish for a future that offered more than what he had briefly devised for himself.