The Master of Happy Endings

by Jack Hodgins

  Would he have met with Oonagh Farrell and Topolski by the time he returned from California? He could not recall seeing Topolski mentioned in the magazines. If Andrzej Topolski was there with Oonagh he would take control of their itinerary, perhaps arrange for a camping trip into the southern California mountains. Of course, Topolski would have to be into his eighties by now, and probably no longer up for strenuous hikes.

  It was Topolski who’d taken command of their weekends during the early spring, before the play rehearsals took over their after-school lives. He’d driven them out of town to canoe around Cameron Lake, to climb partway up Mount Arrowsmith, and to walk the beaches south of Port Renfrew. Oonagh, Barry Foster, and Thorstad. He had a way of making even a hike in an old-growth forest as civilized as an excursion of aristocrats in pastoral Europe. He brought silver cutlery, a set of china dishes, and wine, as well as a tablecloth to lay out on the ground once it had been swept clear of fir cones and fallen branches. There was no “roughing it” with him, who gave the impression he had been sent into this rugged world to teach the locals how to live a life of “quality.”

  But when their duke-in-waiting began to spend his weekends with a wealthy widow in Vancouver and Barry Foster started working Saturdays for a car sales company, Oonagh and Thorstad had been left to spend their days off on their own. They dined at Nicolino’s and sometimes went to a movie afterwards. They drove to the Cowichan Valley to buy fresh vegetables for a meal in either Oonagh’s kitchen or his mother’s. They fell into the habit of holding hands while exploring the markets, possibly to keep from losing one another in the crowds.

  He’d spent so much of his growing-up years in the local pool that he’d had little experience with romance. During high school he’d had crushes on certain girls, and had later dated Lorraine Wooldridge from White Rock for much of his fourth year at university, but nothing had prepared him for either the frightening attentions of Cindy Miller or the extraordinary magnetism of Oonagh Farrell.

  He remembered her now as clever, beautiful, unpredictable, and of course loud. He had never before met anyone so confident of her charms and at the same time so casual about them. When she’d sashayed down that Hollywood street waving to the strangers who believed she was Yvonne De Carlo, he’d known that he was in danger of falling in love with someone who would belong in a foreign world.

  He wondered now, as he’d wondered then, how it was that he had her company so often to himself. Why would such a vivacious beauty not be surrounded by men competing for her attention? Possibly, there was something about her that conveyed a sense of the extraordinary future she would eventually achieve in a world that would not include any man she might meet in this one.

  During the Easter break, the two of them set off with tents and ice chests and sleeping bags in the trunk of his Pontiac, to zigzag on dusty switchbacks up the side of one mountain after another and then to descend several hours later upon the long sandy beaches of the central west coast. For several days they would have an entire world of ocean, tide pools, driftwood, and wilderness to themselves.

  Before going down onto the sand to set up their tents, Oonagh was distracted by the row of summer cabins overlooking the beach, separated from one another by stands of stunted spruce. She was especially intrigued by a birdcage sort of structure painted red, with a wraparound veranda and a glassed-in second storey with a look-out gallery cut into the veranda roof. “Test the lock, Thorstad. Let’s have a look inside.”

  He had never knowingly done anything illegal in his life. Still, when the door would not give way, he found an unlocked window and pried it open, then crawled through to open the door from the inside. They held hands as they might if they’d been children exploring the home of a dangerous witch. They climbed the staircase to the second floor to admire the ocean view, and peered through a powerful telescope set up to observe whatever ships might pass on the endless sea, or, he supposed, to admire summer visitors out on this wide expanse of sand.

  When they’d returned to the main floor they’d visited the bedrooms—one and then the other—both with unpainted walls, thumb-tacked marine maps, chests of drawers, and tattered mattresses stripped of sheets and blankets. “It would be a helluva lot more comfortable in here than out in our tents,” she said. “There’s a cold wind in off that sea.”

  Of course he’d believed she was joking.

  “Well, why not?” she said. “Live dangerously for once!”

  She could not have imagined the danger there was in this for him.

  Because she had not moved away when he’d inadvertently pressed closer than he’d intended, it seemed natural to put a hand to her chin, turn her towards him, and, since she had still not stepped away, to lean down and kiss her. A tentative kiss, he supposed it was now, and a little timid. But apparently it was not unwelcome.

  “Axel Thorstad,” she said, stepping back and taking hold of both his hands. “A man of surprises.” She beamed up at him, all her perfect teeth displayed.

  He bent to kiss her again, much longer this time, while she murmured something amused against his mouth but did not pull away. He was aware of the mysterious scent she always wore, the strawberry taste of her mouth, the sleek shine of her dark Irish hair, and his own body responding in its involuntary way. Raising a hand to either side of her face, he walked her backward to the couch where she stumbled and pulled him down with her so that they both collapsed along its length, the rough upholstery emitting a gust of musty-smelling air. But the couch could not accommodate his long body, and he found himself with one leg wedged in beside her and the other kneeling on the linoleum floor. When his attempt to straighten himself out caused her to bump her head on the wooden arm of the couch, she yelped, and struggled out from beneath him. Laughing. “My God! Where has this wild man been?”

  “Don’t move,” he eventually said, and ran back through the woods to his car and brought the ice chest and their camp stove to the cabin while she laughed at his frantic industry. He went out again and came back with their sleeping bags and tossed his own rolled-up bag onto the bare mattress of the front bedroom. Then, light-headed at his own daring, he unrolled her bag and prepared to toss it onto the bed as well, but stood holding his breath instead—probably the clumsiest invitation in the history of the sexes.

  Had he been, at twenty-two, as mindlessly ravenous as the adolescents reeking of hormones in the back-row desks? Was this how she had seen him? If she had, she was kind enough not to show it. “Oh hell.” She stood up from the couch and put a hand on his arm. “Axel Axel Axel! Shoot! I can be so thick! I wouldn’t have suggested breaking in if I’d imagined—”

  He was quick to prevent an end to that sentence. “That’s okay.” Though of course it hadn’t been okay at all.

  Still, she’d put her face against his chest and wrapped her arms around his ribs and held him tight. “Ummmmm,” she said. “A good man smell. Come back to the couch. We don’t have to go whole hog just because of a little smooching! I was rather enjoying myself till you tried to give me a concussion on that stupid arm!” The little beach house threw back echoes of her wonderful laugh.

  Amazingly, they had not been caught by the owners during their six days in the house. When the weather was fine they’d spent hours exploring the beach, and occasionally ran into the water for a difficult swim in the giant waves. They’d built bonfires and cooked their meals over the flames, and then had returned to their bedrooms with the marine maps on the unpainted walls, where he lay awake imagining that she was waiting beyond the wall for him to get up and go to her, and yet knew that she was not.

  He could still recall Andrzej Topolski’s reaction when he learned of their holiday. The Polish Prince became the disapproving older brother. Thorstad ought to have known better, he said, than to behave like a teenager sneaking off for a dirty weekend. He should not have exposed Oonagh to the kind of gossip she would be subjected to if certain people found out. In this small town, they could both be stripped of their jobs. He knew
this had happened to others.

  Oonagh made certain that Topolski knew she needed no protection from an arrogant Polack who didn’t see anything wrong in him spending weekends with his moneybags widow. She would do whatever the hell she wanted.

  Whatever she wanted did not include more overnight excursions with Axel Thorstad. “You of all people should know what it’s like around here. You grew up in this town! We want to keep our jobs. Especially you. No more overnight trips. And we don’t want Opening Night to be ruined, do we, with good citizens walking out when the scarlet woman makes her entrance—the shameless Jezebel suspected of leading their swimming champ and favourite English teacher astray!”

  Would his students in 1954 have been shocked if they’d known about this? Cindy Miller certainly would have been shocked. There’d been something about Cindy Miller and her poems that filled him with alarm, aware that he must watch his step—must tread the fine line between professional compassion and dangerous sympathy. Of course, later he could see that his tiptoeing through the minefield of Cindy’s poems served as basic training for treating carefully all the fragile too-needy Cindy Millers he would meet in the decades ahead. He’d have preferred that she have nothing to do with their spring production of Returning to Troy but did not refuse her request to be prompter once she understood that she was not, during rehearsals, to ask anyone to read her poems.

  Though Oonagh had come to the second rehearsal in his mother’s living room with her lines already learned, most of the others needed to keep their scripts in hand or to rely on Cindy’s prompting for much longer than he’d hoped. Yet despite forgotten lines and occasional outbursts of hostility amongst old rivals, by the time they’d moved to the school auditorium he’d begun to believe they might pull off something fine.

  At rehearsals Oonagh had been even more vividly present than at her energetic best in real life. Yet somehow she’d also been able to transform herself into that modest small-town woman who was not at all like Oonagh Farrell. Standing beside the coffee urn she’d been the familiar Oonagh, laughing large, acting out with wide gestures the movements and facial expressions needed in all sides of her anecdotes, placing the palm of her hand on the top of her head as if trying in vain to keep a lid on her personality. Yet the second she’d stepped onstage she seemed to have shed a good deal of her physical presence and become a rather dainty, shy, and genteel young woman. You were tempted to check the coffee urn, to see whether Gillian Tripp had left Oonagh Farrell standing off to one side of the room.

  Barry Foster complained. “She’ll make the rest of us look like amateurs.”

  “We are amateurs,” Thorstad reminded him. “Be grateful. If they can’t take their eyes off her this makes things easier for you.”

  Of course he would not have been able to take his eyes off her himself if he hadn’t been obliged to pay attention to the other cast members as well. Even so, he was never for a moment unaware of the subtle energy in her every move and every spoken line as genteel Gillian Tripp, of the radiant beauty and unreserved femaleness that issued from her whether she was her exuberant self on the sidelines or the dainty central character on stage. He was never for a moment without an almost sickening sense of both desire and defeat.

  When Topolski said “You’re not bad at this directing business!” Thorstad had not been able to compliment him in return. Even now, he could recall how awkward he’d felt about this. The sophisticated duke-in-waiting seemed incapable of slipping into the skin of a violent small-town convict. He’d been saying Henry Tripp’s lines without much help from the prompter, yet his eyes, you could see, kept returning to Oonagh, offstage or on, as though he hoped to see her raise a placard with a news bulletin setting something right.

  “We should never have done this,” Topolski said. “She’s loving it!”

  He was afraid. But he was more than just afraid. Whether he was offstage waiting his turn to go on, or onstage playing the role of her self-destructive husband, he behaved as though Oonagh had cast some sort of spell over him. At first this appeared, to Thorstad, to be simply the overacting of a first-timer. But of course it was more than that. Based on nothing more than what he was seeing in Topolski’s face, it appeared that a separate story had been unfolding somewhere, and that whether this “somewhere” were solely in Topolski’s head or in his outward life it had obviously not included Axel Thorstad. Something had shifted just beyond his field of vision.

  He’d called an early halt to that evening’s rehearsal and driven down to the nearest beach to walk along the gravel in the weak moonlight, trying to understand what was happening. Of course there was something he had to face immediately, as the director of this play. Who would believe that Andrzej Topolski was a husband so terrified of being reunited with his wife that he would deliberately undermine the opportunity even though it meant going back to jail? Anyone could see at a glance that Topolski would do almost anything—threaten, kidnap, kill the fireman if necessary—rather than give this woman up. This was not something he could teach the man to disguise.

  Looking back on this now, Thorstad could see that he’d been saturated still with his university literature courses where protagonists were inclined towards large gestures and personal sacrifices. Topolski had been the first to offer friendship when Thorstad arrived on the scene, had pledged his support in the presence of his first students, had invited him to join Oonagh and Barry Foster and himself for Friday-afternoon drinks. There was no way of measuring—then or now—how responsible Topolski had been for the successful start to Axel Thorstad’s career. A sacrifice of some sort had become a necessity.

  The production of Returning to Troy had been only one of Thorstad’s successes recalled in speeches during his retirement dinner forty-three years later, but it was given special attention for being the first public indication of two successful careers that lay ahead, his own as a teacher and Oonagh Farrell’s as an actor. He knew that no one speaking at the retirement banquet could have been aware that while he’d been staring out across the water after that crucial rehearsal it had occurred to him that the thing to do was to have Topolski and Foster exchange roles, even this close to the opening performance. If Topolski was having to camouflage the effect Oonagh had upon him, he should be playing the role of the shy firefighter doing everything he could to help Gillian reunite with her husband while trying to keep his own growing infatuation out of sight. Let Topolski be the man struggling to hide his feelings, as he was struggling to do in real life. Of course no one at the retirement dinner could have known that he’d spent the next morning on the phone cancelling that evening’s rehearsal and instructing Topolski to meet with Oonagh somewhere alone, to get accustomed to their new onstage relationship.

  To ease his own real pain, he’d told himself that like the humble firefighter in the play he could possibly be rewarded one day for this—a romantic delusion that even half a century later could make an old man cringe.

  Timid knocking startled Thorstad into the present world. He padded across the carpet and opened the door to Travis Montana, who hadn’t been to the guest house since delivering Thorstad’s luggage the day he’d arrived—looking awkward now, perhaps embarrassed, even ready to flee if he discovered he wasn’t welcome. He removed the plug from his ear and let it dangle. “I saw the light so I figured you hadn’t gone to bed.”

  Thorstad glanced at his watch. “It’s only nine-thirty,” he said. “I probably won’t go to bed until I’ve drifted off a few more times on the couch.”

  Travis came in only far enough for Thorstad to close the door behind him. He held up both hands as though he was contemplating surrender. “So?”

  Thorstad turned an ear towards an expected explanation. “Yes? So . . . ?”

  Travis’s hand pushed back through his hair. “Well.” He looked about the room as though searching for some clue to what he’d hoped to hear. “Are you coming with me willingly, or under protest, or has seeing the show decided you against coming with me at all? You wal
ked off and didn’t say.”

  It hadn’t occurred to Thorstad that the special showing of Forgotten River might have been a sales pitch, rather like the vacuum cleaner salesman dragging his demonstrator model across your carpet.

  Travis seemed to think he was waiting for more. “Nobody’s gonna, like, put it on a university course for great moments in television or stuff, but I love being in it. And I want to keep on being in it!”

  “You’re still wondering if I’ve made up my mind?”

  “Well, you haven’t said! I thought maybe you’re planning to, you know, wait till the last minute and then go back to your island, to hell with me and exams.”

  “You’d better come in, then.” He waited until Travis had perched on one arm of the couch. He perched on the other arm himself. Both, it seemed, were prepared for sudden flight. “It appears I’ve got a little out of practice at reporting what I think. And you’re probably too young to be good at reading minds.”

  His passport arrived a day before their flight. In the same courier package Lisa Svetic had included three more envelopes addressed to him. It was unlikely that any of these could make an offer that would tempt him to change his mind at this late date. He could not imagine letting Travis down. He put the envelopes in a pocket of his new second-hand lightweight jacket, in case he was curious enough to read them later—on the plane perhaps, or when Travis was before the cameras.