A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  A man snapped a picture of Mervin sitting inside a blue Toronto Star newspaper box, the kind he’d seen at each corner next to the red Toronto Telegram box and the orange and black Globe and Mail box.

  Everything in the world had a name because it belonged to a company. His mother had said so. Gas stations, milk, eggs, groceries, dry cleaning, and newspapers such as the one his father sat behind each evening shaking his head “no” when Mervin asked him to play with him, all had names because they belonged to a company. When his mother announced that company was coming over, Mervin was disappointed that they did not have names on the front of their clothes. His father held up a company name on his copy of the Globe and Mail every night and said very little.

  By mid-afternoon of the day they went to the Ex, Mervin’s mother had pushed his stroller through the crowds of people around the “Grand Stand,” with its name “Stoodleigh” written on the wall.

  “We’re coming back here this evening so you can see the Musical Ride,” his mother said as she bent down to wipe the piece of candy cotton off his hands. “You will love the Mounties.” The Grand Stand cast a shadow over them, and Mervin grew tired and fell asleep. His mother woke him with her hand on his shoulder.

  “Mervin! Mervin! You need to see this. You need to see Elsie!”

  Mervin opened his eyes. Behind a wooden yellow fence, a golden brown and white cow lay on a bed of straw.

  “Do you see? She is chewing her cud! Isn’t that wonderful? That’s Elsie!”

  Mervin was confused. Where was her bell? Where was the ring of flowers? That was not Elsie. Elsie always smiled. A few minutes later his mother had wheeled him in front of a likeness of two men.

  “That’s Dwight Eisenhower and John Diefenbaker shaking hands. That one is the President of the United States, and the other is the Prime Minister of Canada where you live. They are the men who run the world,” she marvelled and pointed to the figures. Mervin did not understand. The men were made of butter. Then he realized that butter, as well as milk, came to the door each day with the Borden man. The Borden man made the men who ran the world.

  At the Grand Stand, Mervin fell asleep during a song sung by Milton Berle about what a problem kids were. He did not laugh at the jokes. He did not know what was funny about Milton Berle. Everyone else thought he was funny. Mervin felt confused and tired and closed his eyes.

  Just for a moment much later, he opened his eyes. His mother was calling out to him: “See you haven’t missed the Mounties!” as a man in a red jacket and a Smokey the Bear hat rode past slowly on a shiny black horse. The horse’s haunches were glistening in the lights of the midway. Fireworks were exploding over the tower where a big yellow scallop shell, lit against the night, fanned out like flowers high above him.

  He wasn’t sure who was carrying him. The arms around him were strong yet gentle at the same time. His mother was walking behind, pushing his empty stroller, and he closed his eyes and went back to sleep.

  Whenever Mervin thought about his life, it seemed a dream, even when he was a child. It was a boat floating merrily down the stream just like in the song.

  There was one dream he had dreamed when he was sick. The doctor sat beside his bed. His mother was trying to hold back tears. The Borden man was there, too. The Borden man knelt beside Mervin’s bed and said: “I’m so sorry buddy, I really am. In a way this is my fault.” Mervin shut his eyes and went back to sleep. After that the Borden man never came to the house.

  The Sealtest and Neilson trucks stopped coming to the neighbours. The last time Mervin saw a milk truck was one day when he was late heading back to school after lunch to his grade three class. The red, white, and blue Caulfield truck, a brand of milk few people used, rounded the corner at high speed and almost tipped over. The milk bottles inside clanged. That was the day the milk trucks disappeared. The truck must have been late for its own demise.

  Mervin’s father continued to pay little or no attention to him, and when he was home, Mervin seldom saw his father’s face emerge from behind his daily news. At gatherings of his father’s larger family, the boy stood out. He was different. His father’s brothers and sisters and their children were all short and tanned. Their hair was stringy. Mervin was growing tall very fast, and his thick red hair made him different from the cousins.

  “You look like the milkman,” one of the girl cousins said in a taunt. His aunt hit her over the head with the flat of her palm. The girl turned on her mother. “Well, its true, you said so!” and got another slap.

  Towering above one’s family in height, being the only one to have a lean build, red hair, and glasses, bothered Mervin, though even into his teens he could not explain why. He and his father had grown even more distant and distrustful of each other. A prairie of silence fell between them and made dinners into icy affairs where questions were answered with either a “yes,” but more often a grunting “no.”

  His mother said: “You should get to know your father.” But Mervin always shrugged and said: “I don’t know how.”

  The dreams Mervin had been having were puzzling to him. The more he dreamed, the more life bothered him. He dreamed that the old black and white television in his parents’ first house was on fire. The Borden man rushed in to haul the burning television set out of the living room and onto the front lawn. Mervin was watching from his play pen. The Borden man bent down with a screwdriver and took the back off the set, and swooshed away the smoke with his hand. The milkman reached inside the television and pulled out a stack of photographs. Elsie was standing beside the Borden man in her garland of yellow flowers. She was dancing with delight. There was nothing good on the television after nine a.m. when Captain Kangaroo signed off. The Captain joined the dance with Elsie. The boys next door came after them with sticks, and chased the cow and the Captain away. They turned on Mervin. The Borden man intervened, and took a giant crayon, and coloured them orange until they disappeared. Then the Borden man coloured himself orange, and cried, and disappeared, and Mervin woke up.

  Mervin’s mother was making dinner. Mervin’s father was away again on a business trip, as he had always been when he wasn’t around and Mervin was young. Mervin sat at the kitchen table, and looked up from his books. He was studying philosophy and was ploughing through Plato’s Republic. Plato seemed to have the right idea. A child, almost at birth, was taken away from his parents and raised with the idea that the state was his identity. A person in the republic didn’t have to worry about whether he was different from his family.

  “Was I adopted?” he asked.

  His mother turned to him. “No! What would give you that idea?”

  “I don’t look like any of the others in Dad’s family.”

  “You take after my side.”

  “So your five-foot-six family, and Dad’s five-foot-four family, had the genes to make me six-three? And what about the hair?”

  “Someone somewhere back when looked just like you, I’m sure of it.”

  “I keep having these strange memories. The Borden man.” His mother put down her paring knife, and rolled her eyes.

  “You remember him?”

  “Was I very ill when I was about four?”

  “You almost died. Gastroenteritis. There was a huge outbreak of it all over the city mostly up around where we were living. About eighty children were hospitalized. We took you to the hospital, but they didn’t have a bed so we brought you home. They told us you were going to die. The doctor sat up with you all night. You got better. About twenty children didn’t.”

  “What caused it?”

  “Borden’s milk. A truck that went around the north end where we lived lost its refrigeration, and the driver was in a hurry to get his route done for the day, so he delivered the milk. The papers blamed him, but the truth was that the dairy equipment hadn’t been cleaned properly.”

  “That’s when we stopped home delivery?”

  “That’s when I started doing a weekly shopping in the store. We stopped getting bread
to the house. Your grandmother found a cigarette butt in a loaf, and that was the end of that for her and me.”

  “Mail used to come in red trucks, didn’t it.”

  “You remember the trucks? The streets were a parade of trucks. The Royal Mail, the milkmen, the cleaners, the bakeries, Eaton’s, Simpsons. The lady across the road even had her eggs delivered in a white truck, and her fruit in a yellow truck …”

  “With a cornucopia of grapes and bananas spilling over the writing.”

  “You have some memory.”

  “So, Mom, when I was sick, did the Borden man come to see me in my room?”

  His mother looked at him, and Mervin saw anger in her eyes.

  “At the time we thought he had made you and the other children ill. I wouldn’t have let him across the threshold. Everyone said he was a murderer.”

  “Did the television catch fire?”

  “What’s bringing on this walk down memory lane?”

  “I’m just curious. I’ve been having flash-back dreams, and I’m trying to sort out what happened and what didn’t happen.”

  “Yes. You played postman one day when I wasn’t keeping an eye on you, and you mailed photographs, mostly your early childhood pictures, into the slots on the side of the set. I turned on my soap operas one afternoon when you were having a nap, and the firemen came after the cleaner’s delivery man hauled the set onto the front lawn. I got you up just in time to see the fire reels drive off. You were very disappointed. You loved firemen.”

  “What became of the Borden man?”

  “How should I know? He was a delivery man.”

  “He used to speak to me when he came to the house. I remember that.”

  “You spoke to everyone. The doctors said that you needed to be outside to get fresh air, so when you were a baby I put your carriage on the porch, and later your play pen. You’d sit there for hours and holler at everyone who came and went.”

  “He had red hair, didn’t he? The Borden man.”

  “Your great-grandfathers had red hair. You look like them. You couldn’t miss with it being on both sides of the family. And tall, too.” She went back to chopping her carrots, and life kept pushing Mervin through days and names to the point where he started to forget more than he remembered.

  When Mervin’s son and daughter were born they each bore a striking resemblance to Mervin’s father who, in his declining years in poor health filled out in his face, his head bald, and his cheeks dimpled. Mervin fell asleep with his four-week-old daughter nuzzled on his chest. Her fist curled around a bunching in his sweater, and with the warmth of the baby upon him, his sleep became deeper than anything he had ever known.

  He found himself in the middle of a field of yellow flowers with brown centres, and as he moved through the field, he came upon Elsie who was seated, a garland around her neck, and a silver cow bell dangling over the petals. As the flowers blew in the wind, he thought he heard the jingling of milk bottles rattling against each other. The clouds were milk-white and the sky was bright blue.

  “Nice to see you again,” she said to Mervin. “I didn’t think you’d ever return.”

  “Why have you been in my life?” he asked.

  “I’m your holy cow. Everyone has a holy cow of some sort. They see something surprising and they call out my name so I can help them figure it out.”

  “What do holy cows do other than sit in fields or show up at the Ex?”

  “We answer questions. Fire away. I know you have some.”

  “Okay. I need to know this one. Was the Borden man my father?”

  “Nasty cousins, eh? I warned that little bitch not to say that to you. I even made her choke on her milk one day when she was giggling and started to blow it out her nose.”

  Elsie shook her head and paused for a moment, looking around the field of yellow flowers as if they contained the answer.

  “Mervin, Mervin, you’ve spent your whole life in doubt. You’ve never been able to talk to your father because, deep down inside, you thought that red-haired milkman was your father. I’m sorry to say that he wasn’t. The milkman, that is. Your father is your father. He spent his life either away earning a living so you could have a good life and get a good education, or exhausted behind a newspaper with nothing to say to you because he didn’t have the energy. You were down near the ground. If you’d been standing up when he came home jack tired every night you would have seen the desperation in his eyes. He was as frightened of you as you were of him, and the two of you never really talked because neither of you knew what to say. He was a business man. You’re a philosopher. The two rarely talk to each other except in questionable self-help books. And don’t read those. They’re written by people who didn’t get enough milk as children.”

  Mervin woke with a start. His chest was burning, and the burning was spreading into his arm pits. He thought he was having a heart attack, but it was only his daughter whose diaper had leaked. She was fast asleep, just where he had laid her down upon him. She was smiling and the look on her face reminded him of his father.

  When Mervin buried the man he had never really been able to talk to, he thought about the milkman who everyone said could have been his real father — the jovial delivery guy who brought quarts to the house that were so easily mistaken for the milk of human kindness. His real father, whom he saw so seldom that his face faded into memory even while he was still alive, had eyes he could not remember.

  What colour were his father’s eyes?

  Had his face always been dimpled?

  Had he been a strong man, strong enough to carry a hot, sleeping child through the Exhibition grounds after a long, hard day at work?

  With the funeral proceedings over, the cemetery keepers resumed cutting the grass. A gas mower roared several rows beyond the open grave where his father’s sarcophagus sat perched on three two-by-fours over the open earth. Behind the mower, a tall, hunched man pushed and tugged at the handles of a Toro. His hair was faded to a yellow white, not quite the colour of Elsie’s flowers, but close to it. The man must have had red hair at some point in his life. Maybe that was him — the milkman who had saved him from the neighbourhood bullies, who had carried the burning television set onto the front lawn, who had always winked at Mervin as he sat in his play pen on the porch as he learned to read the names on delivery trucks.

  Mervin waved, but the gardener simply shook his head as if, go away, I have nothing to say, and continued twisting and turning his machine between the headstones. Mervin stared at the open ground before him, and the mat of plastic Astroturf that covered the shovelling that would be returned to the soil.

  The others had left to comfort Mervin’s mother, and to stand around at the stiff afternoon tea and talk about the man Mervin had never really got to know. He picked a yellow flower from one of the wreaths that were to be thrown into the grave, laid it atop the sarcophagus, and continued the wordless conversation he always held with his father.

  Mercury Row

  i) Verandas

  Mercury Row ran along the northern lakeshore as far as the paved road. It was the best part of the lake fifty years ago. A person could idle his outboard engine, even cut it, and drift past the cottages situated atop rock promontories. The smell of martinis and cigarette smoke wafted from the screened verandas as early as noon every day when summer cottagers on the row began to stir. The wealthy, who laid claim to shoreline on the best part of the lake, had names like Bob and Doris, Gladys and Frank — good solid names that meant they’d come by their money the way it should be come by — through inheritance — and that their grandparents, up from Toronto to play pioneer in the bush every summer for the few weeks the Exchange slowed down, had established something lasting and powerful.

  The row got its name in the Sixties because there was a pecking order to the brand of motors a family used on their launch. Mercurys were the most expensive, and had the most horse-power. The housings of the engines glistened in chrome and had a smoother, more musical
, running voice. A person could hear a Mercury coming, and that was the point of having one. Farther down the lake, where the shallows emptied into the river and the waters became murky and reedy, was a run of smaller, less well-kept cottages known as Evenrude with the rude punctuated for good effect when it was spoken. The Evenrudes were louder and fat-sounding, but were far more affordable. Motors on the lake were a matter of social distinction.

  Arch was the main man on Mercury Row. Everyone, except those who lived down the lake in Evenrude, loved Arch for his quips and his financial savvy. To the less well-off, Arch was just one of the rich guys who had a cottage where the water deepened and the mosquitoes were fewer. He had a soft-top electric blue Caddy, and the kids from Mercury Row would drive up and down the logging roads with him at night and let the breeze run through their crew cuts and blond braids. Arch loved to stay out all day in his launch because that motor, that Mercury motor, had enough power to vroom him from one end of the lake to the other in under five minutes. He would take Frank and Bob and George fishing with him early on foggy mornings when the lake was glass, and if they sat with the motor off down in sight of Evenrude they’d usually come home with a catch that Doris or Gladys (but usually Marie) would clean for the evening meal. Life was good on Mercury Row until George complained of fatigue and dropped dead one evening as he sat on Frank’s porch with his third martini in-hand and a Romeo y Julieta torpedo in the other, baked down to its decorative ring.

  Marie, who was George’s wife, was always the odd woman out among the crew because she was French Canadian, and a Catholic, who had permitted her children to attend private school in Toronto with the other boys from the row. By the time George keeled over, the kids on the row were grown, had jobs on the Exchange, and only had a week or two off to get up to the old stomping grounds.