A Witness to Life (Ashland, 2)

by Terence M. Green

  Jock looks surprised, mulls this over. Finally, he says, "There's talk of closing down the Victoria Park and Danforth plant."

  I turn and look at him. He is talking about where he works, the place he must travel to every morning, halfway across the city. This is the first I have heard of it. "What do you mean?"

  "Just talk."

  "Anything to it?"

  He shrugs. "Don't know. I hear the talk, though. Hear that it'll be phased out. Replaced as a Nash assembly plant."

  I am quiet.

  "You seen the pictures in the papers of them Bennett buggies—cars hitched up to teams of horses, 'cause folks can't afford to put gas in 'em?"

  I nod. "I've seen them."

  "We laughed at first." A beat. "Nobody's laughin' now."

  "You heard of Hoover blankets? Hoover flags?" I ask.

  Jock waits, a wry smile.

  "The blankets are old newspapers to cover yourself up with on the park bench. The flags are empty pockets turned inside out."

  We share a dry chuckle.

  "Bennett, Hoover, Roosevelt. None of them can get the job done. None of them know what to do," I say.

  "Hoover was a Quaker. Pacifist. Didn't know how to fight. Didn't know what he was up against. Bennett'll be out on his ass here next election. He only got in because Mackenzie King was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Wheat prices were a disaster, and there he is, sittin' in Ottawa, and everybody looks at him. King'll be back, you wait and see. Roosevelt? Well, he talks a good game. They all talk a good game."

  We stand in the half-filled flat, collect our breath, think about the boxes and chairs and disassembled beds and lamps and even the washing machine still outside on the front lawn. Joan's old wicker pram is in the comer, filled with small dresses, blouses, shoes, and the Shirley Temple doll Margaret bought for her after she took Joan and Anne to see her in Stand Up and Cheer. I take two cigars from my vest pocket and hand one to Jock. We light them, smoke them in silence, enjoying the moment, unable to see the future, as always.

  "Why do I have to go to school?" asks Joan.

  "So you can learn to read." Gert is clearing the table, filling the sink with water.

  Joan, lying on her stomach on the floor, has the funny pages of the newspaper spread open in front of her. "I can already read." She points to a bubble of dialogue near her elbow. "What does 'Leapin' Lizards!' mean?"

  Gert turns to me. It is Friday, August 31.

  I place my cigar in the ashtray, lean forward, look at Joan's tiny finger pressed against the black and white of the comic strip. "Where is it?" I ask.

  "It's what Little Orphan Annie says all the time."

  "It's just an expression."

  "Why do they have no eyes?"

  "It's just the way they draw them."

  Her feet are in the air, moving back and forth.

  "You'll make new friends at school. Tell her, Mother." I turn to Gert.

  But Gert is pale, clutching her stomach.

  "Gert."

  She turns, looks at me. Her face is ashen. "Martin," she says. "There's something wrong." There is a sheen of perspiration on her forehead and upper lip. Her eyes are distant, pleading.

  No, I think. I rise up out of my chair, go to her, hold her by the shoulders. Not Gert. I have seen this all before, somewhere. This is impossible. "What is it?"

  Joan looks up, her face a mask.

  "I don't know. Something's wrong. Stomach cramps. Pain."

  "Lie down. I'll finish cleaning up." I hold her by the shoulders, afraid to let her see my fear, my desperation. Afraid to let her go. Not Gert, I am still thinking. Please God. Not Gert.

  Joan watches in silence. Her feet have stopped moving.

  I am waiting in the kitchen as the doctor comes out of the bedroom. Joan is down the hall, in bed.

  He sets his bag down on the table, looks at me. "I'm going to put her in the hospital," he says.

  "Why? What's the matter?"

  "How old is your wife?"

  "Thirty-five," I say. "Why?"

  "I think she's pregnant, Mr. Radey. And I'm afraid something's wrong."

  "Pregnant?" It is like a wind rushing over me. Another baby, I think. The wind is hot, then cold. My right hand clutches and rubs my left shoulder, kneading a muscle that has cramped. "I didn't know she was pregnant," I manage, finally, foolishly.

  "I don't think she knew either."

  Pregnant, I think. A child. I am fifty-four. "What do you mean something's wrong? What's wrong?"

  "She might be miscarrying. She's hemorrhaging. Do you have a phone?"

  The questions dizzy me, come at me from an echo chamber: how old is she? do you have a phone? I have heard them before, in another life.

  I point to the phone, speechless.

  RADEY—At St. Michael's Hospital, on Sunday, September 2nd, Gertrude McNulty, dearly beloved wife of Martin Radey.

  Funeral from her sister's home, Mrs. J. Mahoney, 75 Fairview Avenue, on Tuesday to St. Cecilia's Church for Mass at 10 a.m.

  Interment in Mount Hope Cemetery.

  The Globe and Mail

  Tuesday, September 4, 1934

  * * *

  What do you mean dead? I shout. How could she be dead? You don't die from a miscarriage. This is impossible.

  I knock the glasses off my face as I stumble about, thrashing at the hospital curtains surrounding her bed.

  Where is her doctor? My voice is loud, too loud, but I cannot control it. I cannot control anything. The muscles in my bladder have had a momentary spasm and my leg is wet. The room is blurred. Gert is here, in this room, but dead.

  I want to see her doctor.

  He's not on duty this weekend. The nurse is red faced.

  What do you mean, not on duty? I sputter. What are you telling me? Are you telling me he was off golfing somewhere while my wife was dying? Is that what you're telling me? He's fishing somewhere?

  Mr. Radey. Mr. Radey. Please. We understand. Please.

  Understand? How could you understand? I don't understand. You bring that goddamn doctor to me, you hear me? I want to talk to him now.

  People gather in the hall, looking into the room, quiet, trying to see what is going on. Someone inside closes the door.

  This can't be happening, I shout. It can't.

  Mr. Radey. Please.

  I want to see the doctor. Bring that fucking doctor to me. Now! How did she die? Tell me how she died.

  Septicemia, someone says. I hear the word, then it flutters in the air like a moth, heads for the flame.

  I don't know what that is. What the hell is septicemia? What are you telling me?

  Septic poisoning. Blood poisoning.

  Why wasn't she helped? Why wasn't she given something? There are things she could have been given. Where was her doctor all weekend?

  Someone touches my shoulder. It's the Labor Day weekend, Mr. Radey. People are away. We're a bit short staffed.

  My wife died because it's a holiday weekend? Is that what you're fucking telling me? Is that it?

  No, Mr. Radey. Please. We understand.

  The room spins. I clutch at an intern's sleeve. Somebody holds me from behind. My eyes are wet and I still do not have my glasses on. Don't Mr. Radey me! I shout, spittle flying from my lips. Who's in charge here? I want to talk to whoever's in charge. Get me somebody in here right now. Get me fucking somebody who will explain this to me for Christ's sake!

  On the day that Joan is to start school she attends her mother's funeral instead. I lift her in my arms and carry her with me as we get out of our cars in the cemetery and I do not put her down but hold her tightly, her arms about my neck, keeping her close, not letting her go, because, incredibly, suddenly, she is all that I have.

  My life with Jack and Margaret is over. Gone. I can never get it back. I can never undo my neglect, my selfishness. I was unwilling to pay the price of parenting.

  It will not happen again. I will not let it.

  TWENTY

  The v
alley is dark and beautifully wet. You can almost see the grass growing and the leaves pushing out of the poplars. There are small flowers on my redbuds and the dogwood buds are beginning to swell.

  —Thomas Merton

  A Vow of Conversation: Journals 1964-1965

  Death was like life: a series of surprises that in hindsight were not surprises. The simplest things happened over and over again, forever catching me off guard. Death occurred daily, here, in the past, below in life, everywhere.

  Since morning, three starlings have toppled off branches into the tall grasses below. Yesterday, four were killed on the railway tracks that skirt the lake. The sky was filled with birds, singly and in flocks, tunneling through the air in every direction, destinations inbred or random.

  And the hawk, always above us, always circling just beyond sight, dropped among us on a daily basis, a sleek bolt exploding in a small burst of feathers, then silence.

  Picture us sitting in a grand maple tree, a hundred, two hundred, the incessant squealing, squawking. Then, as before, as always, we rose up in a cloud of shimmering ink blots, without sound, the world, patchwork, spread out below us.

  Again, in the wind: into the soft spots, the loops, the silky linings of time, where everything existed, equal.

  Southwest, across the years, across the miles, sifting through the millions that would die amidst rubble, mud, on water, interred and disposed of and bulldozed over in ways beyond imagining, I saw the denouement, the path to the monk's cell down which we all wind.

  TWENTY-ONE

  1934-1950

  1

  Joan and I move into 238 Gilmour Avenue with Gert's sister, Evelyn, and Mrs. McNulty. It is, I vow, my last move.

  I refuse to pay Gert's doctor bill and am slowly dunned with notices, finally threatened with legal action. But when the doctor himself phones one evening to discuss the matter, the rage rises inside me like a volcano and I spew a lava of vitriol that causes my hands to shake and my vision to blur.

  I never hear from him again.

  On Christmas Day, 1935, Gert's mother, Mrs. McNulty, dies.

  Joan is learning how people disappear, how plans slip away, how things spin off into chaos. But she is learning it much too young—as I did—and I feel helpless to protect her.

  The house has been left to Evelyn, with the understanding that Joan and I live here too.

  I will not move. I can never move again. Moving, I now believe, must have been part of the bad luck that has stalked me through the years.

  We stay at 238 Gilmour. Evelyn helps with Joan, with meals, and in this modest house where three women—two of whom are now gone—made me welcome nine years ago, I try to hold onto the thread of my life.

  Evelyn suggests moving Joan's bed to Mrs. McNulty's empty room, but I ignore her, keep it in the corner of my room.

  I keep it there because I must. I must know where she is. I cannot lose her. I think that just knowing that she is nearby, in the darkness, is enough. But I wake her with my nightmares on a regular basis, and I know that for this reason, and so many others, Evelyn is right, she must have her own space, soon.

  In the evening of April 3, 1936, at the Trenton State Prison death house, which measures eleven feet by twenty-three feet, fifty-seven people witness the execution of Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the electric chair, for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., four years earlier. To the end, Hauptmann proclaims his innocence.

  After one last nightmare, Evelyn helps me move Joan down the hall, into her own room, finally.

  It is 1938 and Roosevelt becomes the first U.S. president to visit Canada while in office, meeting with Mackenzie King in Kingston, Ontario. Jock and I, the Orangeman and the Catholic, discuss this knowledgeably in chairs beneath the chestnut tree in his backyard. His daughter, Gail, twenty-one married, with a daughter of her own, is visiting.

  Joan is almost ten. She is by my side. She is always by my side.

  On June 7, 1939, married almost ten years, Margaret and Tommy have a third child, a daughter, Judith Rita. My second granddaughter.

  Late July, cabbage and potatoes boiling on the stove, Evelyn slumps to the floor of our kitchen and, hands shaking, I call an ambulance. A stroke. I cannot believe it. Maggie, Gert, Mrs. McNulty, now Evelyn. All the women I try to live with.

  In August, when she returns from the hospital, Evelyn, suddenly old, now needing the help that she has given me, walks with a chair and is confined to the main floor.

  September 3, 1939, Britain and France declare war on Germany. A week later, Canada joins them.

  It is a gray, wintry Saturday afternoon in December, a light snow beginning to fall, a damp cold pervading, when the RCMP come to the door looking for Jack Radey. He has not answered a draft notice of some kind. I tell them that I do not know where he is. I tell them that no one knows where he is.

  I am sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, going on sixty-three.

  In 1940 I stand at the same graveside twice: January 27, my sister Kate dies. Six months later, her husband, Jim Bedford, follows her.

  December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor. The United States declares war. My sister Teresa's boy, Ed, is missing in action somewhere in the Pacific theater.

  Tuesday, September 1, 1942, Joan starts high school at Western Commerce, just south of Annette Street. I have made our dinner tonight: what Joan calls my famous chicken casserole. It will be her turn to cook tomorrow.

  "Should I take science or music?"

  I am placing the cutlery on the table when she asks, and I look up. "You have a choice?"

  "If you join the band you don't have to take science. Music class is at the same time."

  "But then you'd have to take it next year."

  "I guess."

  "Postponing the inevitable."

  She is silent.

  "Do you want to join the band?"

  "Not really."

  "Then why the question?"

  "You'd want to join the band too if you'd met my science teacher today like I did. He's weird. He made us sit there for twenty minutes without saying a word after lecturing us for the first half of the period. He never smiled. Not once. He's scary."

  I pull my chair out, sit down. "What's his name?"

  "Mr. Zoltan. Even his name is weird. He's got black greasy hair. Yuk."

  "What instrument would you play if you joined the band? I can't picture you with a tuba."

  She thinks. "Maybe the clarinet. Or the flute."

  I nod. "It seems like a strange choice."

  "The clarinet?"

  "No. Science or joining the band."

  She is staring at me, listening intently.

  "Maybe you should give it another week, then see how you feel about it."

  She looks doubtful, picks up her fork, pokes at her food.

  "Then, if you still want to switch, I'll go in with you and help you get it done."

  She looks at me hopefully.

  "I'll take the morning off."

  "You will? Promise?"

  "Promise."

  She smiles.

  "I forgot to get us something to drink," I say, realizing that our glasses are empty.

  "I'll get it," she says, rising suddenly, animated, going to the refrigerator.

  She pours the milk into her glass and opens the bottle of cold beer with a snap. After she pours it for me, she gives me a quick peck on the forehead. "Maybe the flute," she says. Her smile, given freely, is what I want, what I need. I know now, I think, where the thermometer is, where the spare blankets are. I know her birthday.

  We listen to Jack Benny on the radio in the evening as a respite from news of the war in Europe and the Pacific.

  By November, Mr. Zoltan is one of Joan's favorite teachers. She has an A in science.

  In 1945, what happened to Kate and Jim happens to my sister Margaret and her husband. January 19, age eighty, Margaret, always in my corner, dies. On May 13, John Dickinson joins her.

  Then Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Aug
ust 1945. I do not understand what has happened, what kind of weapon they have devised, but it is over, at last.

  Joan, sixteen, going on seventeen, is with her friends downtown. They are dancing in the streets, riding up Yonge Street on hoods of cars, horns honking.

  Ed, Teresa's son, comes home. It is a miracle. A big man who once weighed close to two hundred pounds, he now weighs eighty. The war for him was years in a Japanese camp on an island whose name he says he cannot remember. He tells us stories—how they once were so hungry that they coaxed a stray dog close to the wire fence that was the edge of their world, how they killed it, cooked it, made soup, how it kept them alive.

  It has been almost fifteen years since I have seen Jack, since I have seen my son, since that night in November of 1930 when the door closed and he disappeared down the stairs, out of my life. Margaret has shown me the last letter he wrote to her. It was from the Scott Hotel, Ashland, Kentucky, postmarked July 1, 1934.

  Then, silence. It haunts me. The world has waged a war to end all wars, and now must rebuild entire cities, entire countries. Maybe I can dredge through the rubble. Maybe it is not too late. I did not know that he could sing. I never heard him.

  2

  Margaret has lent me the correspondence that she received from Jack—faded envelopes with green, red, and purple Washington stamps, and addresses that failed even Edwards Investigation Services. They are all from 1934.

  The contents are spread out on the table in front of me. Four letters: the first from the Vermont Hotel, 138 W. Columbia, Detroit; another from 117 Seventeenth Street, Toledo, Ohio; a third from a place called the Highway, Bucyrus, Ohio; and the final one from the Scott Hotel, Ashland, Kentucky.

  I arrange the sheets of yellowed hotel stationery into neat piles, runes, an archaeological dig, reading and rereading them, searching for something overlooked, a starting place. They are lengthy: four sheets, double sided, from Detroit ("Phone Cherry 4421, Rates $1.00 and up"); two sheets, double sided, from Toledo; three sheets, single sided this time ("Modem, Fireproof, In the Heart of Bucyrus on the Lincoln Highway"); then a final torn sheet from Ashland, Kentucky ("Fire Proof, Moderate Price, Tub and Shower Baths"). But what I see, what jumps out at me, what leaves me dry mouthed and trembling is a threefold repetition.