A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2)

by Terence M. Green

  "Yes."

  "It can't be too bad then."

  He drops his eyes.

  I watch his face. He is in a pain of some kind. "Let me see it," I say.

  Gently, he lifts it, holds it out. I take it carefully, unbutton the cuff, roll up the sleeve. There is some swelling. I touch it.

  Jack winces, tries not to pull away.

  I do not know what to do. Maggie would have cradled it, kissed it, held him, stroked his hair, soothed his woe. I know this. I have seen her do it.

  But I cannot do it. I have never done it.

  "Can you move your fingers?"

  He wiggles them.

  "There. It can't be too bad then, can it?"

  I look closely at his face. It is streaked with dirt. It is possible that he has been crying. He looks up at me.

  Margaret comes into the room, stands, watches.

  I meet her eyes. She smiles.

  "Jack hurt his arm," she says.

  "Yes. He told me." I let his arm drop, put my hand on his shoulder. "You'll be all right. It's just a bruise. Go and wash up. Your face and hands." I glance at Margaret. "How's dinner coming?"

  "Baked potatoes and sausages. It's almost ready."

  "Good." I take off my jacket, hang it on the wall hook, unfold the newspaper I have been carrying, eye my reading chair.

  Jack is still looking at me.

  "Jack."

  "Yes sir." He turns and leaves, heading for the bathroom.

  Margaret goes back into the kitchen.

  I stand alone, watching them disappear.

  The next evening for dinner Margaret cooks bacon and boiled potatoes. I watch Jack favoring his right arm as he eats. We have plums for dessert.

  "How's your arm?"

  "Sore." He does not meet my eyes.

  I am quiet, thinking, wondering what to do. Wondering what Maggie would do.

  Jack is eating his plums with his left hand.

  "Maybe we should soak it in warm water after dinner. What do you think?"

  He looks up.

  "We could do it in the sink," says Margaret. "I'll help."

  I am grateful for her offer.

  "Would you like that, Jack?"

  He shrugs. "Yes," he says.

  After dinner, I fill the sink with warm water, but I step aside and let Margaret handle the bathing. Her touch is soft, gentle, feminine. Exactly what Jack needs, I think. Exactly what I need.

  On Thursday I smell the bacon and fried potatoes Margaret is cooking for dinner when I come in the door.

  "Where's Jack?" I ask as I head for my reading chair.

  "In his room."

  Before I can ask how he is, Margaret approaches me.

  "He's in his room. He's been crying."

  I look up at her from my chair, surprised.

  "He came home from school early."

  After a day at work, I have to orient myself to their world, try to remember what has been happening in his life that may have caused this, but can come up with nothing.

  "I think there's something badly wrong with his arm, Father. He was sent home because he couldn't write with it today. He hasn't been writing anything at all for three days. He's been pretending in classes, but his English teacher finally discovered what he'd been up to when he asked him to write on the board and he couldn't."

  I get up from my chair, go to Jack's room, open the door. He is lying on his back on the bed with his eyes closed, His right arm is across his chest. There is a sheen of sweat on his brow. His mouth is open.

  At St. Michael's Hospital, they place the arm in a cast. Broken, they tell me. The forearm. We had to break it again to set it. Should have had him in here right away, they tell me. Three days? Why so long?

  He didn't tell me, I say.

  They look at me quietly.

  Did he tell his mothers?

  She's dead, I tell them.

  They are quiet.

  I didn't know what to do. I didn't understand.

  More silence.

  I didn't know what to do.

  They say no more.

  At dinner on Monday, Jack shows Margaret the signatures of his classmates that adorn his cast. She signs it and he smiles. Then they laugh.

  I do not know if I am supposed to sign it or not, but neither of them ask me, so I content myself with smiling. But I know they would have asked Maggie. They would have. And she would have laughed and written something witty. I know it.

  My brother, Mike, at age sixty, is diagnosed with cancer of the jaw. He spends two days in St. Michael's Hospital while they do tests, see how bad it is, whether it can be cut out.

  When I go to see him, he is scared, but does not cry, although you can see that he is holding back, that it is what he will probably do as soon as I leave. Carcinoma, he tells me. Carcinoma, they call it.

  A month goes by. The carcinoma gets worse, spreads slowly, a laborer toiling for daily wages.

  SIXTEEN

  June-August 1926

  1

  I cannot believe what is happening to Mike. I have never seen anything like this. It is eating away his jaw, his mouth, his face, and he just sits there and looks at me when I visit— can barely talk. He could not afford to stay in the hospital and since there was little they could do for him there at any rate, he has returned home where all he does is lie in his bed. The doctors fear the worst: that secondary cancers will occur in the neck glands.

  When they can afford it, his children, Kathleen, Ann, and Carmen, buy a supply of steaks, and Mike keeps them on his face so that the cancer will eat them instead of him.

  Lockwood Avenue is at the other end of the city. I have to take the streetcar out to the east end, then back across the city to where we live in the west end, a distance of about ten miles. Simpson's is midway between the two, so a trip after work becomes more like fifteen miles, and I cannot get home until nine or ten o'clock at night.

  Margaret is a gem. She says that she understands, and I think that she does. She has assumed the role of housekeeper and family cook. I would be lost without her. Jack resents my absence. I can see it in his eyes. He misses his mother in a way that makes me feel responsible, and he seldom talks to me.

  "I don't feel well, Father." Jack lies in bed instead of rising for school. It is almost June. The cast is off his arm. I am on the verge of ignoring his complaint as a childish attempt to stay home from school, but I remember dismissing his sore arm and am careful.

  "What's the matter?"

  "I feel sick to my stomach."

  I feel his brow, which seems warm. Perhaps he has a fever. I am not sure. I do not even know if we have a thermometer.

  "Might be the flu." The flu is nothing to toy with. It killed millions at the end of the war. Everybody knows this.

  "Stay in bed," I say suddenly. "Maybe Margaret can stay home with you."

  "She has a French test today. She studied for it all last evening." Jack looks at me, eyes widened, glistening.

  I did not know this. I did not get home until past ten last night. Dinner was in the oven, Jack and Margaret in bed.

  I touch his brow again. "You're fourteen years old," I say. "Can you take care of yourself if I leave you alone today?"

  "I'm—" Then he stops, does not finish. His eyes glaze. He nods. His hair is stuck to his scalp with sweat.

  "I'll ask Margaret to come straight home from school." I pause. "I'll come straight home too tonight."

  He looks at me, hopeful.

  "All right?"

  "Yes."

  "You'll managed"

  He nods again.

  "Is there something you can eat?"

  "I can make a sandwich."

  "Good boy."

  Like his mother, I think. Sickly. I've never really noticed if he has always been this sickly.

  I am afraid. There is illness everywhere, yet somehow I escape it.

  But something else gnaws at me as I leave the house that morning. Jack started to say something, stopped. There was
a quiet withdrawal in his eyes. Then it hits me: Jack is not fourteen. He is fifteen. I have forgotten his birthday. April 30. His arm was still in the cast. No one reminded me.

  Maggie would have remembered.

  I think of my father, coming home past nine o'clock, exhausted, covered in mud and cement, not knowing it was my birthday, ever. I think of the straight-edged razor that was my great-grandfather's, how my father never knew that I had it, how it was my mother who saw to it that these things were passed on, that the little things were remembered and dealt with.

  Only now they don't seem so little anymore. Now I am mother and father.

  They are huge. They are swallowing me.

  That evening Jack throws up in his bed, again and again, before he can get to the bathroom.

  I run the water into the bathtub so that he can clean himself, make it cool so that it will fight the fever. At his age I am unsure if I should help him bathe, cool him down. But I cannot bring myself to do it. I close the door on him and leave him alone in the bathroom.

  Margaret and I do not finish washing the bedding and cleaning the mattress until past ten, but the sheets are still not dry so we flip the mattress over. Jack can sleep on it without sheets, but I do not know where the spare blankets are kept until Margaret shows me.

  It is the weekend before Jack is up and about. The fever has passed.

  On Saturday afternoon, I give Margaret money for groceries and lie down on the living room sofa. I am asleep when she calls me for dinner.

  We are having corned beef and cabbage.

  Monday, on my lunch hour, I saunter into the book department of Eaton's for the second time in my life.

  "May I help you?" A bespectacled lady, graying hair.

  "Do you sell cookbooks?"

  "My, yes. Right over here." She leads me down an aisle, scanning shelves. "What did you have in mind?"

  "I don't know."

  She looks back over her shoulder at this.

  "Something basic," I say.

  "For your wife? A gift?"

  "For my daughter." I pause. "And for myself."

  She stops, looks at me, but says nothing.

  "Something basic," I repeat.

  She takes a blue, clothbound volume from a shelf at shoulder height, hands it to me. "This one's in its third printing. Very popular. The author, Nellie Lyle Pattinson, used to teach domestic science at Central Technical School."

  It is heavy. I flip through it. More than four hundred pages.

  "There are chapters on meat, fish, fowl, eggs, salads, sauces, foods cooked in deep fat, fruits—"

  I see a photograph of a table setting, with the correct placement of cutlery.

  "—soups, pastries, desserts . . ." She trails away. Then: "There's even chapters on diabetic foods and on meal planning."

  I am reading a section called "Chicken Leftovers."

  "It's quite modem."

  "And this is the one you would recommend?"

  "Do you—and your daughter—have another cookbook at home already?"

  "No."

  "Then this is the one I would recommend."

  "How much is it?"

  "One ninety-five." Pause. "You can't overemphasize the importance of eating right. Good nutrition equals good health."

  I think of Jack, his illness.

  Then she does a surprising thing. She touches my forearm. "Buy it," she says. And I realize that she knows. I have become transparent.

  On Wednesday I fry three chicken legs in a pan, bake three potatoes. Margaret shucks some corn and boils the cobs.

  When we eat, the potatoes are too hard, the chicken still pink inside. Margaret pretends everything is fine. Jack is quiet.

  The corn is delicious.

  On the streetcar Friday evening, heading home, I see Jack standing on the corner of Bloor and Dufferin in a group of boys his age. They are all smoking cigarettes.

  Seeing this, I am depressed. I did not know. I do not want him to smoke. He is too young. And where is he getting the money?

  When he comes in the house an hour later, I can smell it on him as he passes. How long has it clung to him like this and I haven't noticed? But I do not say anything. I have avoided lighting up my own cigar, confused again as to what I should be doing.

  Maggie. Oh, Maggie. Where are you?

  I cannot think straight. It is more than the summer heat. I do not want to go home at night, even for the children. Everything seems to be amiss. I cannot imagine my future, alone. I am forty-six years old, and cannot decide if I am still young or if I am suddenly old.

  I miss Maggie.

  Too many people are dying all about me. I understand Mike's fear. It is real, palpable. God, I wonder, and close my eyes. What else are you going to do to me, to us?

  2

  Margaret, who will be seventeen on August 21, has a girlfriend, Eleanor Nolan, who goes to St. Joseph's with her, whom she met when we lived east of Yonge, at 198 Berkeley in Cabbagetown. Eleanor and her family live up the street at number 222. Margaret is spending a great deal of time at Eleanor's place, and rather than travel all the way back across the city to our place in the west end, she has taken to staying with my sister Rose and her family on Sherbourne Street. And since Jack would rather be with Margaret than with me, he too spends most of his time in the east end, either with Rose or with Bridget on Sackville, or even at Mike's place, chumming with his cousin Carmen.

  I am empty inside. I need more than Jack and Margaret. The space, dark and deep, has not always been there. This is new.

  I am alone, for the first time ever.

  She comes up to me after ten o'clock mass at St. Cecilia's on Annette Street, comer of Pacific Avenue, Sunday, August 15—surprises me, as I am alone, standing on the street at the foot of the stairs. Jack and Margaret have been staying with Rose and her family for the last few days.

  "Mr. Radey."

  "Yes." The sun shines hotly on us. My Homburg, not yet on my head, is in my hands, and I feel the heat on my brow. I squint into the glare.

  "I'm Gertrude McNulty." A strong face, confident, determined, peers out from beneath the feathered Sunday hat. Much younger than me, I think.

  She extends her hand.

  I take it gently—not like I would a man's—still unsure of what I should say, of why she is talking to me. Instead of words, I smile.

  "You were pointed out to me," she says.

  I tilt my head sideways, still holding her hand.

  "I wanted to say how sorry I am for your loss." She hesitates. "I've lost loved ones too."

  I am touched. A stranger, I think. I cover the hand I am holding with my left one as well and squeeze it softly. "Thank you. That's very kind of you."

  She smiles demurely, pleased.

  "I'm surprised that anyone would know enough about me to point me out to anyone. Especially here. I haven't exactly been a regular." I go to churches for funerals now, I think. Then I remember St. Paul's, that night years ago, when I slipped into a back pew, lit a candle, when I sensed things unraveling inside me. When I needed help. And now I am back, trying again. I have nothing to lose.

  "Father Colliton told me. I asked him who you were." She drops her eyes. "Forward of me, I know."

  I shrug. "My daughter was baptized here." Realizing that I am still holding her hand, I let it slide free, collect my thoughts. "That was a long time ago."

  I notice that she is paying attention, listening intently. Then I see her as a woman: dark hair, feminine, attractive, warm, without being pretty, and remember the softness of her hand. A woman's hand. "I've only recently moved back into the area. I've a place on Margueretta Street."

  Her eyes, wide set, crinkle in the sun. She nods sharply, a decision made. "Let me buy you a coffee."

  "Pardon?"

  "There's a place up on Dundas, just up the street, real close. It's open Sundays."

  I shuffle my feet, almost embarrassed, glance over my shoulder as if gauging the distance.

  "Unofficial wel
come back to the parish."

  Then I study her more closely. There is intelligence in the eyes, warmth in the smile, honesty in the face. And what am I going to do today anyway? City ordinance laws let us do virtually nothing on Sundays. She has reached out to me, whatever her motives, and I want to accept, want someone to talk to, perhaps more than I know.

  "Have you had breakfast?"

  "I don't eat much in the morning." I wait until she is seated before sliding into the booth opposite her. The diner is small but clean. I have not been here before.

  "Do you cook?"

  "Not much," I admit.

  She nods, opens the menu in front of her. "You need to eat."

  "No, really." I take my hat off, set it on the bench beside me.

  "Really," she says.

  She orders two fresh farm eggs (scrambled) with toast from the menu—an order for both of us—along with two Blue Ribbon coffees.

  "That's too much. Too expensive." I am adding it up: thirty plus thirty plus ten plus ten. Eighty cents. "I don't need it."

  "Nonsense. I said I'd buy. My treat. Sunday is a day of rest. We've been to church, fed our souls. Now we should treat ourselves, feed our bodies. It's almost noon."

  She has not taken her hat off. The eyes that peer out at me are framed by that strong face, her mouth set firm, smiling. She folds her hands on the table in front of her.

  "Do you know everybody in the parish?" I ask, accepting.

  "Most."

  I nod. "And what did Father Colliton tell you about me?"

  "That your wife passed away just after Christmas. That you have two teenagers." She pauses. "That you seem quite alone."

  I nod again. The coffee is placed on the table in front of us. We tinker with the sugar, the cream, paper napkins, providing breathing space, thinking space. Finally, I lift the cup toward my lips and say, "Thanks for the coffee."

  "You're quite welcome."

  "And the breakfast."

  She smiles broadly.

  "What do you do, Mr. Radey?"