by Jack Hodgins
“But he was no longer in jail when I stopped in at the police station,” Thorstad reported to the Montanas. “No one had any idea where he might be.”
“So what would you have said to Walker if you’d found him?” Carl said.
He had to admit that he didn’t know, he knew only that it seemed important they exchange more than the words he’d fled from yesterday.
Mrs. Montana returned her glass to the coffee table and frowned. She sat beneath a wide fabric hanging that suggested the contorted arbutus trunks that framed the view beyond the windows. “Is that the jacket you were wearing when you left this morning?” Perhaps she feared he’d stolen it off a sleeping pauper.
“I found it in the Thrift Shop. I was asking for Angus amongst some folks milling around outside and it occurred to me I’d need something lighter for the cool evenings if I decide to go to L.A.”
“Oh.” She looked at Carl. “And this morning’s jacket?”
“Left it behind for someone else. It was already second-hand when I got it from the Free Exchange.”
There was pleasure in saying this. She may not have been aware that she often spoke as though to an irritating child. He did not tell her that he had stopped at a men’s clothing store as well, in order to purchase new dress pants and shirts and shoes suitable for life in a city, just in case. All stored in a guest-house drawer.
She closed her eyes. “The Thrift Shop is not really intended for us.” After a few moments of awkward silence, she again suggested he phone to have his passport sent down. “I’d hoped you would do it this morning, but of course . . .”
There was probably no point in mentioning, now, that on the bus ride home he had wondered about staying on to take Travis’s place at the drop-in centre while keeping an eye open for Angus Walker. Once he was back in the guest house, he dialed the number for Svetic’s Store.
“Yeah?” The familiar voice was on guard.
Thorstad took the portable phone to the chair by the window where he could look out at the familiar sea. “Is this a bad time?”
“What’s the matter? They tossed you out on your ear?”
“Not yet. You sound like someone too busy to take a call.”
“I am too busy to take a call. I’m trying to make the money in my till match the receipts. Unless you snuck back on the island without me knowing, I guess I can’t accuse you of theft.”
“Do you think you could ask Normie to go into my shack and find my passport, have it couriered down? I’m sure I kept it in the cupboard above the sink, with my receipts.” He should have put the passport in his bank deposit box, of course, but had tossed it into the cupboard and hadn’t thought of it again.
“Why would you need a passport all of a sudden?” There was suspicion in her voice. Indignation as well.
“They want to send me to Los Angeles. If I decide to go I’ll call again to have my trunks sent down as we planned—for when we’re back. In the meantime I should have that passport, just to make sure I’ve got it with me if I need it.”
A small sailboat glided past not far from shore, its mast and bright red sail tilting it sharply to starboard, a young woman leaning in the opposite direction in order to keep it in balance. The man sprawled against the stern appeared to be laughing.
His news had clearly offended Lisa Svetic. “Well, haven’t you just plunked your skinny butt on a velvet cushion! They taking you down for a wine-tasting tour or what?”
“If I go I’ll be doing the same in L.A. as I’d be doing here— preparing the boy for exams.”
“That’s what they want you to think. They’ll put you to work in the fields with them illegals. While you’re down on your knees weeding their crunchy white-in-the-middle strawberries, think about Normie Fenton brooding around up here like a kitten thrown from a car. He goes down to your shack every day.”
“Just checking his retaining wall, I imagine.”
“They’ve bullied you into this, haven’t they? They’ve got you down there where you don’t know nobody and put the pressure on.” The sailboat was upright now, the woman more relaxed. The laughing man stood against the stern as though threatening to throw himself backwards into the water. “Why didn’t you tell us you were knocked flying the minute you stepped off the ferry? Everybody heard about it but you never sent a word to say you lived.” She paused, possibly to let him consider his oversight. “I suppose you’ll be flying first class.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. One way or the other this could be a shock to my system.”
“It’s a shock to my system just thinking about you lying around on the beaches amongst the movie stars. I never heard of nobody—anybody—keeping their wits about them once they get down in that place. Keep in mind, you’re a little old to hope they’ll make you a star. Paul Newman got discovered young!”
He imagined her entire body participating in the laugh. With the phone to her ear, she would be leaning with one elbow on her counter, beside the stack of daily newspapers from across the strait. This week’s coloured comics wouldn’t be far away. The blue-tinged plastic containers of water would be stacked beside the door. “I’ve sent on a couple more of your stupid letters,” she said. “So, keep your options open, eh? From what I’ve heard, Los Angeles sends their oldies out to perish in the desert, to keep them from cluttering up the beach and spoiling the scenery.”
He would not be sent out to perish in the desert with the other “oldies.” He’d been given a job to do. In many ways, Travis was the chance of a lifetime—perhaps his last—though he knew there were certain risks. He liked the boy, but he was also aware that if Travis Montana had decided to win him over it could be only because this suited some purpose of his own.
“Don’t forget to get your hair cut before you go down amongst the stars,” Lisa added. “You were looking a little scruffy when you left here.”
9
After three days of evening study sessions, it seemed that Thorstad may have proved himself worthy of a glimpse into Travis’s other life. Carl led the way up the carpeted stairs and stood just inside the closed door of the “viewing room,” but Thorstad chose to sit in one of the upholstered chairs. Heavy burgundy curtains concealed all four walls except where they’d been drawn to reveal the large wall-mounted television screen. You could easily imagine a red exit light and the smell of popcorn—though it was impossible to believe that Audrey Montana would allow melted butter near her furniture.
When he had dimmed the lights, Travis explained that what they were about to see was an episode from early in this current season. “The main plot is really a soap opera type of thing,” he said. “This rich family with its stupid rivalries and, you know, romances and scandals and stuff. The old lady owns this empty building downtown she doesn’t want to do anything with, but she doesn’t like us homeless guys in it either. So we’re just a sort of subplot now and then. The cops come in to drag us out and throw some of us in jail.”
“Tell him your backstory,” Carl said. “Short version.”
“I’m the son of a real estate developer!” Both father and son laughed. “My old man kicked me out of the house for mocking his lifestyle and, like, refusing to follow in his footsteps. As if!”
Having lived for years without a television set, Axel Thorstad found it necessary to concentrate in order to make sense of the rapidly shifting series of short scenes. Someone stood on a bridge, obviously planning to jump. In fact he did jump, and had begun to float downstream when someone else leapt in to save him, or try to save him. But suddenly the cameras were no longer interested in the rescue effort. A dinner party was in progress in what appeared to be a luxurious mansion, the conversation scornful of someone who’d betrayed the family. Even so, there was a good deal of laughter around the table, and glasses were raised, toasts made to a successful business venture. The voice of the short round matron at the head of the table seemed familiar, but Thorstad did not know the face.
“Dolores Williams,” Carl said.
Of course. Dolores Williams had been a young beauty in long-ago movies. Jean Simmons came to mind. In Tiberius Dolores Williams had been the emperor’s mistress, addicted to blood sports in the Coliseum. You could not have imagined her planning to become this plump elderly woman.
Soon they were back with the bridge-jumper, who had been dragged inside what looked like an empty barn or warehouse, where a number of others in layers of mismatched clothing tried to discover why he had done such a stupid thing. Weren’t they all in this together? Weren’t they really brothers? The nearly drowned one weakly agreed that they were.
He didn’t notice Travis in this crowd until Carl had pointed him out. “On the right, behind the fat guy’s shoulder.” Travis looked out from under a dark uncombed wig.
Though the hostess of the dinner party continued to suffer the petty battles amongst family members determined to destroy one another, the would-be suicide still dominated the subplot. It seemed that Travis had been chosen to befriend him, assuring him he could rely on “the guys” to support him when he despaired. Eventually, after an excursion out into the city to eat at a shelter, the suicide promised that rather than cause his friends any more worry he would never kill himself again—a tentative happy ending to this adventure. The wealthy matron’s battles with her family, however, promised to become even more contentious in the following episode.
“Television may never look the same after you’ve been down there,” Carl said, when Travis had turned up the lights. Then he added, “If you decide to go, that is.”
“I’m not likely to see any television afterwards,” Thorstad said. “I gave my set to the Goodwill before moving up to Estevan.”
“Well, the set in the guest house will still be there when you get back.” When Thorstad did not respond to this, Carl narrowed his eyes. “We’d rather you didn’t wait till the last minute to make your decision.”
But Thorstad, unwilling to commit himself, turned to Travis. “Have you always wanted to act, or is this just a big adventure for you?”
“He was acting from the time he could walk,” Carl said. “We thought there was something odd about him. He’d get up in front of the TV and mimic the people on the screen when he was no more than two years old. And you?” He followed Thorstad out into the hall. “You never acted yourself? Never got involved in one of those local theatre groups they have up there?”
“Just once. But not as an actor.” This was before Carl’s time, of course—his first year of teaching. “One of my friends decided she’d missed her calling and dragged us all into a drama club for the rest of the term. Not wanting to act myself, I agreed to direct.”
Carl stopped in the foyer at the foot of the stairs, perhaps to suggest it was time the family had the house to themselves. “And the friend who missed her calling—is she the one you mentioned to Audrey?”
It was Oonagh who’d insisted on seeing Returning to Troy a second time. It was Oonagh who’d later convinced the others to form a drama club once they’d returned home. “I haven’t seen her for years.”
“Oonagh Farrell,” Carl explained to Travis, who did not appear to recognize the name.
Instead of returning immediately to the guest house, Thorstad followed the gravel pathway past a row of blooming rhododendrons to the latticed gazebo above the stairway to the beach, and sat on the slatted bench to look out at the darkening islands. A white yacht cut a line in the water, heading south. He wondered if Oonagh mentioned Returning to Troy when interviewers asked how she’d got her start. Did she explain that her success could be traced all the way back to that Christmas holiday and the play they had produced in the spring?
Oonagh Farrell. Elizabeth Currie. Allison Beech. Andrzej Topolski. Their little theatre troupe, he remembered, had included a number of fellow teachers, a few students, and several survivors of an earlier club that had dissolved after a set designer’s near-fatal attack on a director. The disbanded club had a long tradition of performing British comedies involving mistaken identities, cross-dressing, and bathroom jokes, but Oonagh suggested they tackle something meatier for their first production, something like Saint Joan perhaps, or The House of Bernarda Alba, plays with a strong woman in a principal role. But as a novice director, Thorstad believed it would be wise to have someone else’s production fresh in memory, for inspiration if not for outright imitation. They would mount the play they’d seen during their winter holiday, a story in which, as he’d drawn to Oonagh’s attention, the principal character was a woman, with men in the two supporting roles.
Even now, the story remained vivid in his memory. In Returning to Troy, a young woman arrives in town with her little girl to join her husband, who’d been released from prison after serving a sentence for knifing a friend in a brawl. Because one of the town’s firemen does all he can to bring about the reunion, by the time the hot-headed husband blows his chance to save his marriage, it is obvious the fireman’s kindness has earned him the gratitude and possibly even the love of the young woman.
He’d suggested the simple plot might have been inspired by the story of the abandoned Lena Grove in a William Faulkner novel, though the three main roles could have been modelled on characters in Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida. The title encouraged this, though the story was set in modern-day Nebraska. It was as though Cressida had returned to Troy after the end of the poem and discovered that Troilus was not dead after all, as he was in the Chaucer, but was no longer interested in the woman who’d betrayed him. Naturally, Pandarus, who had assisted the love affair in spite of his own interest in Cressida, would be willing to act on her behalf again, though with better hopes this time for himself.
To take on the role of the jailbird husband, Topolski was willing to put aside his daily role as the expensively dressed future duke temporarily teaching high school French. But he was critical of Thorstad’s casting of the minor characters—convinced he’d assigned the role of Clarissa Alvarez to the school secretary, for instance, simply because he felt sorry for her after the breakup with a boyfriend. He accused Thorstad of trying to make everyone happy. “This will drive you crazy. It isn’t in your power to make everyone’s life turn out the way they want.”
He’d expressed this opinion over a dinner prepared by Thorstad’s mother, who explained that her son was like his father in this regard. “A happy man himself, he had a compulsion to make others happy as well.” According to her, he would stop for every flat tire or car-in-trouble, and wouldn’t give up until he’d helped to make things right. Once, when he was about to fly east to visit his folks, he’d given up his seat to a young man who would otherwise miss his girlfriend’s birthday.
“Your son,” Topolski said, flashing his on-off smile, “confuses teaching with sainthood. What he needs is a dose of Barry Foster’s cynicism to keep him in balance. Like an inoculation, before it’s too late.” It had probably not occurred to his mother to wonder what Topolski meant by “too late.”
He could remember Oonagh raising her glass and showing every tooth to the world. “It’s neither too late nor too early to toast ourselves, my darlings.” She was wearing a black silk dress with a low neck, a white rose tucked into the left side of her gleaming dark hair. And large silver earrings. Half a century had gone by since then and yet he could still hear her voice. “Here’s to a production that makes stars of us all! Either that, or scandalizes the population so profoundly that we’re run out of town!”
Directly below, at the foot of these wooden steps, was the little cove where he set out each morning for his swim. Shallow waves raced shoreward into the narrowing wedge of bay until they were confused into a turmoil by earlier waves thrown back by impact with the worn-smooth embankment of stone. Ropes of seaweed swirled in winking foam. At this time of year you had to be grateful for the lengthening daylight. No doubt the longer days and improved weather would be welcomed by the people sleeping in parks and alleys and down on the rocky beach as well— a small, temporary mercy in lives of discomfort and hunger.
You had to wonder how tutoring a wealthy family’s son in Los Angeles measured up against staying to volunteer in Travis’s stead, helping to bring a little comfort and companionship to some of those difficult lives. An ordinary heart could possibly break from the effort. How many of those desperate souls could expect or even hope to be rescued one day from their need for that shelter? Of course you had to wonder, too, how many had, like Angus Walker, fled from jobs that would at least have kept a roof over their heads.
The world had destroyed any number of young teachers before they’d managed to find their feet. Yet, miraculously, it seemed, young Axel Thorstad had known by January of that first year that he would be one of those who survived. Parents had begun to stop him in shops and on the streets of town to tell him how pleased they were with what they were hearing at home. Students, too, were friendly outside of school, some of them offering assistance if he should need it—“I work at my dad’s service station, so any time you want a cheap oil change!”
Though Oonagh seemed capable of walking into a classroom without a moment’s preparation and pulling off a raucous but unforgettable lesson, at one of their earliest play readings she’d expressed her admiration for what she was hearing about Axel Thorstad’s classes: the city mayor involved in a rehearsal for a student-written scene; a school board member participating in a debate on dress codes (“Should jeans be allowed in school?”); the newspaper editor listening while a bunch of sixteen-year-olds told him how to improve his paper. “Good lord, Thorstad! If you insist on being so innovative you may find yourself promoted to administration and forbidden to do anything innovative at all!”
How eagerly he’d absorbed her praise! In the company of Topolski and Oonagh Farrell he had almost believed he might become, one day, as unique and amusing and perhaps even as attractive as they.
Once the air had begun to cool he returned to the guest house where he kicked off his shoes and went about in his long blue socks to turn on some lights. Because of the tall firs and arbutus trees, the lowering evening sun barely entered these rooms. He boiled water in the electric kettle and poured it over a tea bag dropped into a mug. He found a classical music station on the little radio and, sitting sideways on the thickly upholstered couch, stretched out his legs and crossed his feet on the armrest, and sipped his tea while a British orchestra played Sibelius’s lively Karelia Suite. His cello, no doubt glaring at him from within its case, wondered when he intended to replace those strings. Travis’s history text was within reach though not a serious temptation.