The Perfect Order of Things

by David Gilmour

  We returned to the city at the end of that summer for school, and the rifle was left behind in a cupboard along with my father’s top hat, spare golf shoes, a box of tie pins, and an exotic pair of red dice he’d picked up in Cuba as a single man.

  I grew explosively that year, almost six inches (I looked like a prehistoric bird), so by the time the family car rolled down the driveway in a plume of dust and scattered stones the following June, the gun was too little for me. It made me look as though I were playing with a toy. So it stayed in the cupboard.

  A few years later, while attending a new boarding school, this one tucked into the countryside, I was caught smoking hashish with a priest, who, as bad luck would have it, lived in a Jesuit retreat just down the road. I was suspended for a week and sent home to our summer cottage, where my father was living alone, my mother having temporarily left him.

  But I didn’t go straight home. I was afraid to confront him (I’d run away from boarding school the year before), so instead I went to see a dirty, sexy, hair-under-her-arms girl who lived in a rooming house in the student ghetto in Toronto. She came to the door dressed all in black. A stick of strawberry incense glowed in the dark behind her. She said, “Come in.”

  Sometime that afternoon, my roommate, having guessed where I’d gone, phoned me at the girl’s house. “You better do something. They’re going to call the police,” he said.

  I got to the house in Grassmere near midnight. A taxi drove me in from town. The driver, a friendly guy, double-chinned in a red hunter’s hat, dropped me off at the side of the road. Too much snow, he said, didn’t want to get stuck. I started down the driveway just like I used to after a summer dance, the moon sinister between the tree branches. There was no sound, only my boots in the snow and the river rushing in the darkness to my left.

  I came around the bend in the driveway, and below me, a hundred yards from where I stood, I could see our house and behind it the frozen lake, which looked grey in the moonlight. A small lamp glowed in the living room window; the rest of the house was cast in darkness.

  I went through the garage with its smell of cold, ignored things and in through the side door. I took off my boots; I peeked in the living room. My father was asleep in an armchair in the corner, a James Bond novel on the table beside him. Sean Connery in From Russia with Love.

  Hearing me come in, he stirred and woke up. A cleft of grey hair stood straight up on his head; he must have run his fingers through his hair before he fell asleep and it stayed there.

  “I didn’t think you were coming,” he said, and in the mildness of his response, its aura of almost gratitude, our roles changed forever. Or what was left of forever.

  Nobody saw his final violent moments, but I have thought about them for many years now. Over and over again, like a movie, each “take” slightly different from the previous one. But all ending in the same place.

  This much I know. I stayed with him in that country house for three days. Just the two of us. No sound except the ice falling in the forest, the crows cawing across the field. A lonesome sound. The dark trees in the ravine, tufts of grass poking through the snow, all of it like a black and white painting.

  The subject of my suspension never came up; I suppose he didn’t want to know the details. Perhaps none of it mattered by then. I asked him if he’d heard from Mother. He said no, which wasn’t true because later the police found a letter from her, from Florida, on the mantelpiece. She was staying in a pink hotel by the sea, the water was warm this time of year, but she was having second thoughts. It was hard, she wrote, to find a “gent” like him. “You are a rare find.” She was going to come back after all. Things could be different . . .

  But to me, he said no, he hadn’t heard from her, and lapsed into silence. I think it was the first time I ever noticed that silence was something you could hear. And then you’d hear the crows again.

  What did we do in that rambling house? We played cribbage; we put logs on the fire; we had a bacon sandwich for lunch; I played him that strange Beatles instrumental “Flying.” But the electric shock treatment had made him unsure of himself, and while it played, you could see him thinking how he should seem.

  “Do you like it?” I said.

  He nodded. But the song with its dreamy rhythms was assuming a presence in the room and that presence stood between us. As if, along with my suspension, my not coming straight home in its wake, my skeletal, unathletic body, my Beatle haircut, my expulsion the year before, I was presenting him with a numbing checklist of the miles and miles I had moved away from being the son he had always imagined, had wanted me to be. But it was also, he knew, too late and too tiring to complain.

  Affectless. I think he felt affectless, which nourished in me cautious stirrings of adulthood. “I’m not afraid of him anymore,” I thought. And he sensed it, he heard it in my voice, he saw it in my quick movements, and it must have made him a little frightened of me. All that youth. That glib, indefatigable, got-an-answer-for-everything youth. How exhausting I must have been that weekend.

  We went to a ski chalet nearby and sat drinking hot chocolate and watched the skiers slalom soundlessly down the hill. He wore a strange hat, I remember, with giant earmuffs on it, a hat that didn’t suit him at all and that, in other times, he would never have worn. He was quite the spiffy dresser, my dad, very old school. Blazers, crisp shirts, cufflinks, club tie, the whole business. But not that weekend. That weekend he gave up.

  So three days passed; and early on a grey afternoon he drove me to the train station in town. We waited in the car, the tracks in front of us, the little station house off to the left, and behind it the lake, white and frozen all the way to the opposite shore, a dirty line on the horizon. I asked about Dean, if he’d been up to visit. No. He started to explain, university, a new girlfriend, but ran out of steam before he got to the end of it.

  “What are you going to do now?” I said.

  He said, “I have to go to the city. I wish I didn’t.” He touched his fingers to a small cancer scab on his forehead, benign, but it needed removing. No big deal: into the car, an easy drive, stay in the Royal York Hotel, see the doctor in the morning; a drop or two of local anaesthetic, then back to the white house in the country. Done.

  But everything frightened him. Even going to the city.

  My train pulled away. I headed down the line and didn’t give him another thought, not for days. I was seventeen, I thought of nothing for very long except what I wanted. The girl with the hair under her arms. I wanted another night with her and the incense and the Buddha candles.

  Later that afternoon, the train a hundred miles away, my mother having a martini in the bar of her Florida hotel, thinking about coming back, how hard it was to find a “gent” like him, my father, John Patterson Monday, packed a small suitcase. A hairbrush, a couple of Oxford shirts, subdued tie, socks, shaving kit. He must have packed it just after he dropped me off at the station. It was getting winter-dark already, the gloom settling around the big house. He put on his raincoat and his hat; he poured himself a belt of Scotch. He was, I guess, just on the verge of calling a taxi from the town when he changed his mind. He rose to his feet, raincoat still on, went into his bedroom and pushed aside his old military uniform that hung from a hanger and selected my .22-calibre rifle, probably because of its short barrel. He went into the living room and opened the drawer of the Queen Anne desk that sat by his armchair and extracted a single, hornet-sized bullet from a box of shells.

  Then he returned to the kitchen, sat down at the table, opened the breech of the rifle, put the bullet in the chamber, snapped shut the breech, pulled back the hammer with his long fingers, and, still wearing his hat, put the gun to his temple and fired.

  I don’t know how long he lay there in the gathering darkness on that kitchen floor, but I know he didn’t die right away. You can’t, not with a small-calibre gun like that.

  It took people three days to find him. Finally the custodian who lived up the road broke a
window and came in through the kitchen.

  Sometimes I wonder if my father, as he swept the gun up and placed the barrel to his temple, had, in the moment before he squeezed the trigger and the bullet knocked him onto the floor, second thoughts. Did he think it would hurt? Did he think about me? Could he see the ceiling of the kitchen when he hit the floor? Did he know, lying there, that he was dying? Did he regret it? Do you go on dreaming when you die like that, the images moving further and further and further away? Is that what he thought at the very last second: This is the perfect order of things.

  There is a peculiar addendum to this story. A year or so after his death, I started university in Toronto and I used to tell the pretty girls in the coffee shop that my dad killed himself. I told Raissa Shestatsky one fall afternoon and waited for the smile to fall from her face. Which it did. I figured it made me more interesting, more like a real writer than other people’s life stories made them look. I did it for quite a while until one day, while I was telling the story, I saw a picture of my father listening to me, just sitting there, listening; and I was covered in shame. I thought, I have to quit doing this. And I did. And that was that for a long time.

  But about ten years ago, something surprising and quite repulsive happened. I received a postcard from Vancouver, three thousand miles away. A colour photograph of the city shot from the air, the harbour bristling with sailboats and launches, high-rises along the waterfront gleaming like jewels in the sunset. Generic stuff. On the back, however, were these words.

  Darling, I just finished your latest novel which was okay but what I’m really looking forward to is the autobiography of you, your father and the kitchen table. Blood stains and all! Now that would make a movie even David Cronenberg would be interested in, n’est-ce pas?

  Toodles!

  The card was addressed to my publisher, the signature deliberately illegible.

  For reasons I don’t entirely understand, I have kept this card and am, at this very moment, looking at its neat, printed script. He—I know it’s a man—may be a painter, an illustrator, an artist of some kind. It’s that kind of penmanship. But why have I kept it? Am I waiting to match up the handwriting someday? I am. I have unpleasant plans for the person who sent me that card. And I’m prepared to be patient about it.

  I have a theory, though. It occurred to me out of the blue one morning while I was taking plates out of the dishwasher. I think that the author of the card, this creature in Vancouver, went to university with me, that he was sitting nearby, maybe even at the next table, when I was telling Raissa or some other girl the “sad” story of my father’s death and he overheard it.

  And now this.

  But to get back to my original question: No, I don’t think my father died wondering if he was making a mistake. It changes, but these days, now that I’m the same age he was when he died, I don’t imagine he was thinking about much in those last moments except getting the job done. It was all a sweep from the moment he pulled back the hammer to the moment the barrel touched the skin on his temple. It’s an odd thing, especially for a man who drank a lot, that he didn’t finish his Scotch. I’ve always quietly admired him for that. Courageous, right at the end.

  I always think about it, the glass of Scotch on the kitchen table, when I hear “Flying.”

  Last winter, I was adrift downtown in that dead zone between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. Sometime before dark I found myself standing in front of the bus station to which I had fled from boarding school that night in 1966. I stepped around a dirty snowbank and went into the station and bought a bus ticket to our old country house in Grassmere. I had not been back for many years and I was hungry to see the place.

  It was lucky timing because not half an hour later we pulled out of the station and swung onto University Avenue. How odd to see your own city through the green-tinted glass of a bus: a street corner where you quarrelled with a girlfriend, a parkette where you ate a hot dog with your children, a doughnut shop where you waited for your laundry to dry, the deserted soccer field of your old high school. Like a tourist visiting your own life.

  The bus picked up speed. Malls, giant box stores, warehouses, hydro towers whizzed by. A jet descended in slow motion overhead. Moving beyond the city limits, we gathered speed and rushed along a brown, wet highway. Flat fields on either side. The sun sulking in the clouds. Bulrushes poking through the snow. A farmhouse the colour of dried blood. A straight side road leading nowhere.

  Gradually the terrain roughened into cottage country; snow-covered lakes, giant slabs of rock; roadside restaurants shut up till spring, motels with unshovelled parking lots. More snow now. Trees with drooping branches, like children with tired arms.

  But right after Orillia the sun broke through the clouds and transformed the countryside, as it does in the Caribbean, into a place of almost romantic possibility. A moose appeared at the edge of the forest, steam rose from the highway; the lakes dotted now with ice-fishing huts; a solitary black figure making his way to shore.

  It was nearly four-thirty in the afternoon when the bus pulled off the main highway and drove slowly into town. I got out at the Empire Hotel and, as if sleepwalking, crossed the main street, going up past the movie theatre, then a card shop, till I got to Edwards’ Taxi. I went into the office and said I wanted to go out to Grassmere, “If it’s still called Grassmere,” I added.

  “It sure is,” the dispatcher said. A friendly, small-town face I almost recognized. “Out by Pen Lake?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What’s the address?”

  “I don’t know. It didn’t have an address last time I was there.”

  “Well, whose house is it?”

  “I don’t know the name of the people. I haven’t been here for a long time. I’m looking for the old Monday place,” I said.

  “My father used to drive you out there,” the dispatcher said offhandedly. “Earl Edwards, my dad.”

  I recognized him. “Tommy?” I said. He was a plump boy even back then working at the marina, always wiping his hands with a rag and talking like a cowboy. “I remember your dad,” I said. And I did, an older version of Tommy’s face under a red hunting hat. “He drove me out there . . .” I was going to say when, but I didn’t want to start that conversation. “. . . often.”

  “He passed, oh, fifteen years ago now.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “Hang on, I’ll run you out there myself.” Putting on a big winter jacket, Tommy said, “We used to gas up your boat for you, you and your brother. You fellows used to come charging up to the dock and hop out of the boat and say, ‘Charge that to Mr. J.P. Monday.’”

  I searched his face for a tick of malice, but there wasn’t one. “You must have thought we were spoilt little pricks,” I said softly.

  “Well,” he said, glad for me to have said it, “that was a long time ago. Lot of water under the bridge.” I could see the little boy Tommy again, rubbing his hands with a rag.

  “You’ve got an excellent memory, Tommy.”

  “I can’t remember what happened yesterday if my goddamn life depended on it. Ask me what happened twenty years ago, I won’t shut up till supper.”

  It was dark by the time we travelled the five miles out to the house. I wanted to be alone for this part, so I asked him to leave me at the top of the driveway. When I got out of the car, it hit me, that wild, fresh country air.

  “You want me to wait?”

  “No, I’ll be okay.”

  Tommy considered that for a second. “You remember that Sharon Beilhartz girl? Her father owned the shoe store?”

  “Yes.”

  “You used to go with her.”

  “Yes, I did. For a summer.”

  “Well, she’s the mayor now. So you better watch your step.”

  “Nice to see you, Tommy.”

  I started down the driveway, the river crashing in the ravine on my left, louder than I remembered, the trees bare, taller and overgrown; a sc
uttling moon. The weather was changing. I turned the bend. The fence post was still there and it seemed that I could hear the Beatles’ “Flying” start up in my head. There was a light on in my old bedroom on the second floor. A motion-sensor light sprang on. An expensive city car sat in the garage. They had money, whoever they were.

  I knocked on the door. There was no response, and as I knocked again, I could feel my pulse quickening as though I were breaking the law, as though a sour face might yank up the window and say, “You have no business here!”

  I thought of going around the back of the house, but this nagging sensation that I was doing the wrong thing stopped me. I was about to head back up the driveway when the front door opened. The same door I’d crashed out of the night I hitchhiked to see Clarissa Bentley. A small, tanned man in a tweed jacket and tie stood in the doorway.

  Advancing very slowly—I didn’t want to frighten him—I introduced myself.

  “Come in,” Mr. Keveney said.

  And then I went into my old house. It was physically the same place, walls in the same positions, but everything else was different. It danced with colour and freshness, pinks and oranges and bright pastels.

  Motioning for me to do likewise, he sat himself down in a corner armchair, precisely where my father’s had been. The fire crackled and I began to experience a kind of sleepy vertigo, as though my head were full of feathers. I detected the vague dusting of an Irish accent in his introduction. The kind of man who puts on a tie for a stay-at-home Sunday in the country.

  I said, “I have an unusual request, Mr. Keveney.”

  His expression changed, the first hint of suspicion.

  “I used to live here,” I said.

  “When?”

  “I left in 1966.”

  “Who’d you sell it to?”

  “I don’t know, I’m afraid.”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  I told him. He nodded neutrally. I wondered if he knew. Scanning his large, tanned features—he was no stranger to mid-winter vacations—I couldn’t see any indication. “Now tell me,” he said, “what is this unusual request?” “I would like to see my old bedroom.”