by Howard Engel
I came out of the auction house and into the daylight, blinking from light reflected from the automotive showroom windows across the street. I brushed more plaster out of my hair and off my clothes. People passed me on the street without looking back. A woman with a child tugged the little girl closer as the tot tried to turn and stare at me. I was just beginning to collect my thoughts. They ran in two directions and I had difficulty getting a firm hold on either one of them. Mary and Hump had made off, but I couldn’t see which way they went. They most likely took to the cars out back. That led me to the second thought. I was in front and my car was in back. When I think of it now, it doesn’t throw me, but it did then. Suddenly the world was too much with me and I was headed for a crack-up sooner than later.
I tried to get back into the auction house by the door I’d just come through: it was locked from the inside by one of those pressure bars. I was going to have to walk around to the nearest alley to collect the Olds. I was in the midst of trying to remember the Grantham street plan well enough to catch the nearest way when a car pulled up in front of me. It was a Lincoln of dark aspect and impressively long. I heard a door slam on the driver’s side. In a moment I was looking into the angry face of Alex Favell.
“Cooperman! What are you doing here?”
“I’ve just had a tussle with Minerva. Maybe it was Athena. I couldn’t tell which. You wouldn’t have an aspirin on you, would you, Mr. Favell?”
“Goddamn you and your bloody aspirin! Get out of my way!”
“They’re gone. If you’re looking for Mary and Hump Slaughter.”
“How many times do you have to be told to keep your nose out of my affairs? Just stay clear of me.” He tried the door and found it as locked as I had a second or two earlier. He was taken short. His plans hadn’t allowed for running into either a locked door or a private investigator with a sore head. He paused.
“I do my best to stay out of everybody’s affairs, Mr. Favell. Divorce work is a hard living. Nowadays it’s not even a living. So, you can have your affair and welcome to it. Are you ever going to give back those pictures to Paddy Miles? You got them from Tallon, Tallon died, so, now they’re wanted by the estate. But you know all that, don’t you?”
Favell looked up the street and then down, just as I had done. His luck was no better than mine. “Look, Cooperman,” he said, pulling me close to him by the scruff of my neck. “If I gave Paddy anything I’d be taken for a bloody fool. I’ve got Lambs and Milnes, three by Harris and a fine late Thomson. Why should I part with them?” He thrust me away from him. I think “thrust” is the word. His action was so dramatic, I couldn’t get over it happening on Ontario Street in front of the old bowling alley. He went on talking, obviously very rattled too: “No power on earth will take them off my walls until it’s time to settle my estate. Arthur should have listened to me. He should have paid attention to what all of his friends were telling him through the years. Cro-Magnon man kept better books than he did.” He stepped off the sidewalk to get back in his car. He continued yelling at me over the shiny top of his Lincoln.
“My pictures are my pictures, Cooperman. They are mine! If you think I’m a liar, show me chapter and verse on paper. Where does it say that I have any of his pictures on loan? Show me that! In the meantime, just get off my back.” Alex Favell unlocked the car, a badly timed gesture, got in and drove away. He tried to make the tires squeak to add the right note of contempt, but they were too good to play that sort of game. Class is class, Mr. Favell.
Whenever I come up bruised in any way, I find myself driving to my mother’s town house off Ontario Street. I have no theories about this, I simply point it out as a fact that came to mind as I parked my recovered Olds beside Pa’s oil stain in front of the house. I knew at the very least where Ma kept the aspirin. I got rid of the last of the plaster as soon as I was free of the driver’s seat.
The town house wasn’t really a house, it was a unit. It was attached on one side to all of the rest of these houses that weren’t houses. These attached places shared the same street address. So, what looked like a house was a unit on a street that wasn’t a street. I’ll never get the hang of modern living. I let myself in with my key and found my mother seated in front of the television where I’d seen her last about four or five days ago.
“Is that you, Benny?”
“It’s just me,”
“I didn’t think it was your father. He went to the club.”
“No, it’s just me.”
“Well, you’re quite a stranger. I haven’t laid eyes on you since Friday night. Time certainly flies around here. How did your move go?”
“I’m unpacked and I don’t hear the band from downstairs any more. It’s an improvement.”
“Your father can’t see why you’re paying out good money when the boys’ room here is empty. But I know: independence is your middle name. You were always like that.”
“Everybody needs a place of his own.”
“Tell your father. I was reading that Englishwoman, the one who drowned herself. She says that a room of one’s own is the most important thing.”
“So there goes ‘the boys’ room.’”
“Oh, that was before I ran into Virginia … Virginia … Something. She’s opened my eyes. I could become the oldest living feminist. I’ll have to see if she wrote anything else. She was quite the crusader in her day.”
After a battle with herself, Ma turned down the TV sound and got up. She was wearing a dressing gown. “I’ll put on the kettle, if you can stay a few minutes, Benny?”
“I’m not doing anything for dinner, Ma. It might be nice to have dinner, just the three of us.”
“It’s too confusing having you to supper in the middle of the week. I think I’m into the weekend and it’s only Wednesday. I’m too old to change my ways. Besides,” she said as I followed her into the bright kitchen with the little painted plaster heads on the wall grinning at one another, “I‘ve promised myself to make a chicken on Friday. I’ll make a chicken soup with noodles and then roast the chicken. You know, the way you like it, with paprika.”
“I can hardly wait. Ma, I think this place is going to work out okay. I’ll be able to do a little cooking from time to time. Do you have any extra cookbooks around the house?”
“Cookbooks? Who has cookbooks? I’ve got the only cookbook I ever had in that drawer over there. The binding’s gone. You can shuffle the pages like a pack of cards. The Naomi Cookbook. I’ve had it since before Sam was born. Everything else I learned from my mother.”
“Did they have frozen filet steaks in those days?”
“Benny, you always ask too many questions. Maybe that’s why I love you.” She rolled her eyes upwards.
“I remember my mother telling me about her mother’s kitchen in the old country. She said it was a back room with a dirt floor. If you wanted a roast cooked, you took it to the baker.”
“What sort of place was it?” Ma lit a cigarette after she put out two cups on the round kitchen table.
“I guess it was pretty small. The only thing I know about it is the fact that her younger sister fell out an upstairs window. So, there was an upstairs. I guess it wasn’t tiny after all. Isn’t it funny the picture you make in your head about a place from the things people tell you?”
“Yeah, it’s like having to revise the face of an old friend when you run into him again after ten years.”
“Well, you should get marks for keeping her young looking for longer than she could herself.” The water in the kettle had come to a boil. Ma took it off the stove and poured it directly into our cups. She took first privileges with the teabag. I got it next.
“Ma, you’re always hinting that all my friends are women.”
“I’m not hinting, I’m hoping, Benny. That neighbour of yours at the office, that Frank Bushmill. What kind of life is that? I mean I’m a woman and I don’t see all that much in men.”
“Ma, you can relax. There’s nothing funny about your
son. And Frank’s a wonderful fellow. He’s read even more than you have. And, if it will make you feel any better, let me tell you I’m going out tonight with a nice Jewish girl.”
“Benny, I can only take so much.”
“Ma, I’m not kidding. I’ve got a date for ten o’clock with a single unattached girl who is nuts about me. The only trouble is …”
“Ah! Now we come to it!”
“The only trouble is, she’s loaded with money and is the daughter of a client. I don’t think I can allow myself to become involved with a woman who is beautiful, desirable and filthy rich. It would be bad for my character.”
Ma set down her teacup and looked at me. “Let your mother look after your character. What business is it of yours? Who is this bright child who is smart enough to love my Benny?”
“Anna Abraham.”
“Anna Abraham?” she repeated back at me like she was trying to think which local family might have spawned an Anna Abraham. And then it came to her: “Anna Abraham!” She put the cigarette she had just set alight down in an ashtray and forgot about it until it had burned to the cork tip. “Anna Abraham! Benny, what are you teasing me, your old mother, about? Anna Abraham is the daughter of Jonah Abraham. She’s an Abraham!” I nodded to show her I knew the basic facts myself. “She’s worth at least twenty million,” she said.
“We haven’t set a date yet, Ma. We’re just going to have a drink together.”
“Don’t bring her back here until I get new slipcovers!”
“I promise.”
* * *
In half an hour my father’s car came to rest beside mine, and the front door opened. A funny thing about my father: he never followed the sound of voices and came directly into the kitchen or wherever people were talking. He always did a tour of the dining-room, leaving a coat and jacket draped over the backs of the dining-room chairs. He was like a cat in that he never varied his routine. After he’d walked this domestic trapline and con vinced himself that everything was secure, he would then feel it was safe to join in whatever was going on. He found us still in the kitchen.
“You’re early,” Ma observed.
“They’ve raised the stakes at the club. You can’t get a game for under a dollar a line any more. It’s too rich for my blood. Hello, Benny. What is this, Friday all of a sudden! This was a fast week.” He leaned over and gave me a kiss. He smelled of talcum and the sauna at the club as usual. Funny, we still kiss each other, even the men in our family.
“He’s not staying,” my mother said. “He’s got a heavy date.” I felt like a teenager and Pa just nodded. Ma was relishing our secret. She’d hold on to it for a few minutes of exchanging knowing glances with me before letting Pa into the inner circle. I stayed until Ma began to peel potatoes at the sink and then made my farewells.
As I drove through the neon jungle of Ontario Street past the fast-food outlets where fresh cream is a style and not a commodity, I tried to remember something Ma had said that got my mind working. Was it something about Pambos or lists or my employer, Jonah Abraham? I couldn’t make the connection as I tried to keep my head in rush-hour traffic.
SEVENTEEN
The lot behind the Beaumont Hotel was as crowded as it was the last time I’d given my licence number to the attendant. The old attendant was a snarly little man with missing fingers and blackened teeth. He complained of life in the Soviet Union without a trace of an accent. For my two bucks I got a parking place and an education whether I wanted it or not.
The Snug was the main lounge of the hotel. The trappings were intended to suggest the quaint cosy back room of an Irish pub, but the designer had totally failed at his task. The only authentically Irish thing about the place was a blown-up photograph of a wizened face grinning over a pint of dark stout. The rest of the decor was as Irish as Abie’s Irish Rose or “Does Your Mother Come From Ireland?”
Anna Abraham was grinning at me when I caught sight of her sitting with her back to the wall at a small table towards the rear. It was a good location, about halfway between all of the ceiling-hung speakers, which were now filling the air with electrified guitar chords. I pulled out the chair opposite her and made myself uncomfortable. Anna was an uncomfortable woman, like a good book you hate to finish. She looked just enough like her old man to remind me that she was the boss’s daughter. She was money and class and a million miles away from me and anything that I could ever more than dream of. But she was smiling at me across the table.
“Hi!” she said, and the other stuff didn’t seem to matter.
“Hello. Do you drink Bloody Marys too?” I asked awkwardly.
“I leave those to my father, and I use what influence I have to get him to leave them alone as often as possible. He has turned mixing drinks into a fine art.”
“Like building a picture collection?”
“I guess it taps the same instincts. I suppose to you he seems like a driven kind of compulsive type. Maybe outside the family he is, but from inside, he’s the relaxed, laid-back Abraham. His brothers kid him about it. They carry their competitive edge with them over into private life.”
“They didn’t invent that.”
“No, but in our family competition has been developed to a remarkable degree.”
“Yes, I’ve been reading about you in a library book.”
“Andrew Carnegie has a lot to answer for. What are you going to drink?”
“What are you having?”
“When I drink anything at all, I drink Black Bush. It’s Irish.”
“Sounds good. I’ll try one.” After I attracted the attention of the waiter, who turned out to be Wilfred Prewitt from my grade nine class, I ordered two Black Bush and he brought them without adornment to the table. “L’chayim,” I said.
“Slàinte,” she replied over the top of her lifted glass. We both sipped our Bush: I because I never gulp anything and she because that was the way to drink Bush. “Nice?” she asked.
“Nice,” I replied. “Very nice.”
Anna Abraham was wearing a soft grey turtleneck sweater with a necklace of lumpy glass beads. Her jacket, which was cut like a man’s, was slung on the chair behind her.
“You’re staring,” she said.
“Just admiring the beads,” I said, taking a slightly larger sip of my drink.
“They’re African trade beads,” she explained. “The sort people like Burton and Speke took out with them to Africa to buy the goodwill of the natives. I picked these up a few at a time in junk shops. If you know where to look, there are still quite a lot of them around.”
“But they no longer bring a mandate to explore the interior, I guess.”
“They’re just beads nowadays. Their magic’s all gone,” she said, paused and then asked: “Why are you smiling?”
“I’m trying to reconcile the you sitting here drinking Irish whiskey and the girl who was making a pest of herself in my office this morning. I can’t figure you out.”
“I think I’m a little nuts where my father is concerned. I don’t want anything to happen to him and I had to find out if you were trustworthy.”
“His track record is that bad, eh?”
“Gosh, I could tell you some things, but I won’t. For the most part he is pretty hard-headed, but when he’s taken in, it’s usually very painful for him. He hates to be wrong about judging character. It’s not the money he loses, it’s his self-confidence.”
“Is that why you stick around? Just in case?”
“Oh, I keep busy. I like this town. I grew up here. I have a job. I’m a very responsible person.”
“What is it you do, exactly?”
“I thought you’d researched us?”
“I couldn’t get a line on you. Are you the black sheep?”
“When Mr. Coldham did his research, I was all of seventeen and not very interesting. But I like the idea of being a black sheep. Although as a family we tend to run in that direction. Being the black sheep might make me blend into the background.”
“I doubt if you’d ever do that.”
“Why, thank you. How are you enjoying the drink?”
“It seems to have put me in front of a peat fire. Very mellow. You knew Arthur Tallon very well, called him ‘Uncle Arthur’?”
“Did I miss a few pages or have you just changed the subject?” I had. I thought I’d better get down to work before the Irish whiskey tucked me up so comfortably that I’d lose my job. I had trouble looking into her amazing eyes without forgetting that this was an investigation.
“I just wanted to know more about him. I’m usually more subtle with witnesses. I must be losing my touch. What did he die of?”
“Oh, it was his heart. He had angina, whatever that is. He used to have attacks of it and go on a diet and plan to completely change his way of life. Of course he never did. His schemes only lasted as long as the pain, or maybe a week longer.”
“Was there anything else wrong with him? Was his health generally good?”
“Well, he was a three packs a day man. But he only coughed for social reasons as far as I could see. You know, those polite warning coughs when someone is about to say too much or the wrong thing. He was tall, thin and wiry. Apart from his allergy, I don’t think there was anything seriously wrong with his health.”
“Allergy?”
“Penicillin. He was supposed to have had some very bad reactions and he wore one of those medical alert bracelets. In fact, I gave him one with his name engraved on it for his birthday. Must have been over six years ago. He was very fussy about personal jewellery. He wore a ring on nearly every finger and changed them all the time. It was like his jewellery showed a chink in his very secure personal armour. It was his only personal extravagance. For instance, he didn’t care what brand of cigarettes he smoked so long as they weren’t menthols.”
“And when you’re not being the black sheep of the family, what was it you almost told me you did?”
“I was about to tell you I taught history at Secord University. I’m a sessional lecturer very much in the nontenured stream. It’s my second year. Strike three and out.”