by Rachel Wyatt
Contents
Title Page
Book & Copyright Information
Dedication
Opening Quotation
The Hope Hat
Go, Dad, Go!
Dinosaurs
Woman at the Bar
Salvage
Aquarium
Street Symphony
Ash
Pandora's Egg
Falling Woman
The Healing Touch
It's Christmas, Eve
The Companion's Tale
If a Tree Falls
Shelter
Caffè Italia
Cinq à Sept
Acknowledgements
About the Author
© Rachel Wyatt, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.
This story collection is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Edited by Edna Alford
Book designed by Tania Craan
Typeset by Susan Buck
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Wyatt, Rachel, 1929-, author
Street symphony / Rachel Wyatt.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-55050-618-1 (pbk.).--ISBN 978-1-55050-619-8 (pdf).--
ISBN 978-1-55050-825-3 (epub).--ISBN 978-1-55050-826-0 (mobi)
I. Title.
PS8595.Y3S77 2015 C813'.54 C2014-908236-3
C2014-908237-1
Available from:
Coteau Books
2517 Victoria Avenue, Regina, Saskatchewan Canada S4P 0T2
www.coteaubooks.com
Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: the Saskatchewan Arts Board, The Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund, the City of Regina and the Government of Saskatchewan through Creative Saskatchewan.
To my family with love always.
“Hope” is the thing with feathers —
That perches in the soul —
– Emily Dickinson
The Hope Hat
“So about dying,” Ransom said. “At least people seem to have stopped saying, ‘succumb’, ‘she succumbed’, ‘is succumbing’. It’s a very ugly word. And it’s no use pretending we’re immortal. We are all going to die. I’ve been thinking about the haecceity of death.”
“Hack what!”
“Haecceity. It’s from Latin, haec, this. That’s what it means, this-ness. The kind of absoluteness of something. What it is.”
“Will you please shut up,” Berta whispered.
A nurse came in and set a vase of flowers on the bedside table. The white daffodils had a subtle scent, but their pallor was deathly and death needed no reinforcement here in this room now. Jill stretched her hand over the bed as if to bless Lucy as she lay there leaving the world and causing disruption as she went.
Gerald said, “Anyone else want coffee? Tea? I think they close the counter at four.”
But at that moment an aide wheeled in a small trolley bearing a teapot and cups and cookies. “Our volunteers supply this for these times,” she said, and went out on soft feet. Gerald followed her and closed the door behind him.
“He can’t face it,” Berta said. “Not surprising.”
“I don’t know why he’s here at all,” Ransom said. “She wouldn’t want him.”
“There can be forgiveness,” Jill snapped.
Lucy breathed. She breathed. Sweet smell. They said. Try to speak. Tell. Words would come. Will come. Welcome. Two days. Must tell. Message. Important. Pictures. Wall water. Animal faces.
“She’s struggling to say something.”
“Fighting all the way.”
“She particularly asked that there be no fuss, a simple coffin.”
“We’ve only your word for that.”
“I’m telling you, and Ranse was with me at the time, weren’t you?”
“Let’s be quiet.” Ransom knelt down beside the bed and rested his head beside Lucy’s on the pillow.
Jill began to cry. Berta pulled at Ransom and he fell to the floor.
“She was about to speak,’’ he said.
Near. Light. Love. To say. To be said. Oh yes. White breath. Out. Breath.
It was just a hint of a whisper, but they all heard it. Berta was startled. She looked at the other two.
“She said, ‘I owe you’.”
“Who did she say that to? Who was she talking to?”
“To me,” Ransom said. “She saw my face and said, ‘I know you’.”
“Oh, very likely,” Jill replied. “It sounded to me like ‘I own you’.”
“Why in God’s name would she say ‘I own you’?”
“She damn well did owe me.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Berta.”
Jill poured out four cups of tea. “We should drink this. It’s a nice gesture.”
“Wait. Look. She’s making an effort. Speak to us again, love.”
Lucy was smiling as she sank into the fond white embrace of the water and the sheet and the light.
~ • ~
“It was too small.”
“They are. Green ones are bigger than ruby-throated.”
“If you say so.”
Ransom’s right hand rested on the wheel. His fingernails weren’t clean. His hands were rough. He’d want to impress on the others at the funeral that he was a worker dragged away from his saw and chisel to mourn his dead sister. His red shirt, he said, was a tribute to Lucy’s left-of-centre politics. Jill picked several leaves off his dark grey jacket.
Shock and loss affect people in different ways. Her own mother had baked continuously for two weeks after her second husband died, and the smell of banana bread still made Jill nauseous. Last night, to her surprise and disappointment, Ransom had gone out drinking with his friends, Zelig and Jay. Woken at three in the morning by their laughter and scuffling, she’d looked out the window and seen them fooling around with a tree branch.
Ransom hadn’t yet noticed the long, slow decline in their relationship, his and Jill’s, parallel to Lucy’s long, slow decline but quieter. He likely thought they were comfortable together and had no idea that his smug “If you say so,” was a nail in this particular coffin, the coffin that held nine years of living together, working together, sex and arguments. And then Jill felt ashamed, thinking coffin when Lucy was actually inside one, in the hearse ahead of them. She knew that she should be mourning, thinking only of the essential goodness of her sister-in-law, but was saving that till she’d told Ransom it was over, till this day of accepting condolences was done and till she could lift from her mind the trail of meanness that Lucy had left behind.
“Watch out,” she yelled as a truck appeared to be headed straight for them.
“Don’t do that,” he yelled back. “I saw him coming. You’ll get us killed one of these days.”
“One way to go.”
“I’m not ready yet, thank you.”
Jill had seen the smile on Lucy’s face and had felt, for one moment, envious. To her the smile represented “the peace that passeth all understanding”, if she was remembering her father’s favourite text right, as if Lucy had reached the heaven that none of them believed in but still hoped for. She wa
nted to walk into that place right now and leave behind the siblings’ squabbles, the widower’s hangdog guilt, and avoid the uproar that would ensue when she told Ransom she was going to move out of their basement studio and workshop. But after all, well, yes, there were good reasons to live. The biggest reason being six feet tall, dark-haired, slightly stooped, scholarly and sex-starved. His name was Salvatore, Sal for short.
It was suitably raining. The gardens were lush, the grass an emerald green. You must like living here, visitors always said. It’s so beautiful. But Jill longed for the summer heat of Ontario and the real winter of Alberta. This part of British Columbia was an indefinite, moderate place and she was tired of it. She wanted to go back to her profession instead of helping Ransom sell his wooden works of art. There was a demand for teachers in Northern Quebec. She touched her drab raincoat and thought of fur-lined jackets and caribou-hide boots, and heard Lucy’s ghost shouting, “Protect our wildlife.”
~ • ~
Berta decided that the only way to cope with this day was to become a dimly smiling idiot. She wasn’t sorry she’d pushed her brother over. He deserved it both for many things before Tuesday and for things he might do in the future. He’d leant down to Lucy as if he had a right when in fact he’d done nothing for her in these last months except visit occasionally and ask her what it felt like to be dying, as if he were the correspondent for a journal called Happy Endings or some such thing. For the next few hours she would be benign and make sure that the atmosphere back at the house for those thirty or forty people who would come to share grief and neatly cut sandwiches was pleasant though muted. She’d decided not to wear total black; her navy pantsuit and pale blue shirt were sober enough. There was no need to make the day any darker than it was.
Sitting in the limousine with Gerald the faithless widower and Aunt Marie who never wore makeup but had for this occasion put on pink lipstick and blue eye shadow, Berta tried to meditate on her loss. People would use that strange phrase, I’m sorry for your loss. In reality, her bright, energetic, happy and recently rich sister had been gone for months. The shell of her had lain in the back bedroom going over past hurts and wasted hours and the love she’d lost. There’d been some good moments when she’d asked Berta to read to her from the books they’d enjoyed as kids. She thought about the money that might have been hers if her sister had been generous, and about the tall stack of hours they’d dribbled away in idiotic arguments before pain had taken over Lucy’s being.
In that final unsisterly act, Lucy had bequeathed her lottery winnings, nearly the whole $155,400, to the amateur theatre where she’d spent her evenings and weekends directing a group of part-time actors in unusual plays. Even though Gerald, virtually widowed these past few years by his wife’s devotion to drama, had gone to France for three weeks with Kate Fernley a year ago, he still expected that some of the money would come to him. No doubt he longed, as many men must sometimes do, for the old days when a woman and her goods became her husband’s property on marriage. He would anyway get the insurance payout and whatever was in Lucy’s current account as well as her half share of their distressed condo.
“Too young. Too young,” Aunt Marie said for the fiftieth time. “There are so many decrepit old people for whom death would be a blessing, you see them out on the street all the time and instead, well – she had so much ahead of her.”
Berta wondered if her aunt included herself among the decrepit. After her brother had died and then the sister-in-law she’d complained of all her life, Aunt Marie had appeared to shrink inside her mourning clothes and was on the way to becoming a wraith. Berta looked at her now and saw the brave makeup, the jaunty bright scarf, and resolved to visit her frequently, help her with errands and make sure she ate well. Perhaps too it was time to persuade her to move out of her townhouse into a supervised residence.
~ • ~
Ransom was angry to be left off the list of speakers at the service. He’d written a poetic prose piece that included some of his most recent musings about death interspersed with nice moments in their childhood and a couple of lines of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the thing with feathers”, et cetera. He’d abandoned William James as too heavy for this audience. But Berta had invited the rat Gerald and three people from the little theatre, as well as Lucy’s doctor, to share their thoughts. And she, naturally, the bossy eldest, would speak first. He parked the Volvo close to the hall and there, as he opened the car door, in that very moment, he decided. To hell with them all! He would speak. He was the deceased’s brother and he had something important to say. In her very last words, Lucy had recognized him and whispered, “I know you.” It would be easy to get up and walk forward in the gap between the officiating humanist’s sermon and Berta’s false memories. All he had to do was move and move fast. Berta would not create a scene by pushing him back into his seat; she had a decent sense of occasion.
~ • ~
Jill saw him straighten up in a way that meant he had made up his mind to take action. She hoped he wasn’t about to do something clownish. He and his sisters were, had been, a strange trio, and, looking back, she realised she could have been more wary. Their mother, Amber Rose, had drawn her into the house on the first visit, hugged her and said, “Look after my boy. Not everyone understands him.” Lucy, so beautiful, had walked out of the room. Berta, in her role as household drudge, had entered bearing a tray laden with a brightly painted teapot and cups. Ransom had run after Lucy and could be heard arguing with her offstage. Mr. Breen, who came in later and quietly drank cold tea, had the look of a man who’d been taught the cruel lessons of life early.
Jill had only imagined that the parents lived in expectation of grandchildren when she saw the shabby rocking horse in the corner of the living room, the miniature soldiers in their sentry boxes, the crowd of teddy bears on the sofa. On later visits she noticed that the toys had been moved or replaced by others and that Amber Rose wore an old black hat with yellow and green feathers stuck into a red band, even in the house.
~ • ~
Berta wanted to draw a large circle round the absence of Lucy. No one else was to be allowed inside the chalk ring. She would rule the space. No grief could measure up to her grief. Intruders were not welcome. Lucy had rightfully said, “I owe you”, offering gratitude finally for those last few weeks of devotion. She could call it devotion now although there’d been days when she’d gone downstairs and thrown things at the wall. The sandwiches and the wine were set out. Lucy’s friend Gina was in the kitchen making tea. And here they came, friends, relatives, strangers. Were the men and women who came back to the house guests, or mourners or visitants or maybe consolateurs? She watched through the window as they parked their cars on the narrow road. The later ones would have to go around to Merton Street to find a space. And there was Ransom at the door, greeting, thanking, welcoming. “Do come in. So good of you. Please help yourself. Yes, it’s a great loss and so young. Too soon.”
She still couldn’t get over the nerve of him getting up on his hind legs and marching to the podium to spout his thoughts on the necessary beauty of death. It would have been his fault if half the people in the hall had marched out into the heavy traffic like a bunch of lemmings determined to take advantage of this amazing once-in-a-lifetime-only-one-to-a-customer offer in order to get to heaven then and there. That was exactly why, though she loved him and knew he had a right to speak, she’d left him off the program.
His intrusion had left Gerald floundering, reaching for his hanky before he limped forward to speak about Lucy’s artistic nature, her determination and her love of theatre. He choked a bit on that one. After a few moments he’d straightened up and said firmly that she had much left to do in life and “should not have been taken from us so soon”. Sound of lemmings turning back. Berta had felt like applauding.
After the three actors read a brief scene depicting Lucy’s great qualities, the pianist had led them into “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, her favourite song. They
were all born in the Beatles era and their mother, on her best days, had sung the songs, danced round the house, baking, adding bits of hash to the muffins, while wearing the hat she called Hope because the feathers reminded her of a poem she’d read at school. It was surprising really, Berta thought, that the three of them had grown up without becoming dependent on drugs or alcohol.
Gerald took hold of her arm and said, “Who paid for all this? I mean the wine and food.”
It was an accountant’s question, but Berta could see from his shifty look that he was still trying to make amends for his defection. Get over it, she wanted to say to him. Lucy won’t care any more. But it would be good for him to suffer for a while. There was nothing like death for stirring up guilt. The anger would kick in later when he understood that Lucy had left the four of them, himself, Ransom, Jill and Berta, only six thousand dollars each. Then he would query Jill’s share and talk of contesting the will.
“We’ll sort it out later,” she said. “Lucy didn’t want a fuss, but people expect it. Could you go and tell those kids not to touch the toy soldiers? And look after that couple there. I don’t know who they are, but…”
“Friends of mine,” he said, and wandered away.
The sickening scent of lilies had seeped into the drapes, the wallpaper, the food. Many people had sent floral tributes. All would have to be thanked. But at least that smell hid the other odour, the odour of death and age and unspoken bitterness.
~ • ~
Jill had cried while Ransom was speaking in the memorial chapel. Parting is a little death. Yes, all right. She’d made her plan weeks before but couldn’t act on it while his sister was dying. Ransom was not a bad man. He simply required that attention be paid to him. I’m thirty-six and I want a child, a small infant child, not a childish man. She watched him now as he handed round sandwiches, gathering compliments for his speech, driving Berta crazy although she was clearly doing her best to be calm.
~ • ~