A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  Everything was sad for several weeks that summer. Frank said the fish weren’t biting, and Arch kept having motor trouble. When Marie returned to Mercury Row, the other women, especially Gladys, felt sorry for her. There were extra offerings of noon-time martinis poured for Marie who lingered over them because she was not, by nature, a drinker and even less of a smoker. She didn’t mind cleaning the catch of the day, and she was the first into the kitchen and usually the last one out when the gang gathered.

  Arch convinced the girls that they should come along on the fishing expeditions, and though the lake was not large enough to go too far from the cottages, Gladys and Doris joined Arch and Bob in the boat for the early morning spin. Marie, who said she was very much in mourning for George, begged off. She had just returned to the cottage after dealing with her husband’s estate in the city. She wasn’t fond of boats. Frank also decided to stay behind to oversee the men from the main road who were coming to fix a problem with his cottage’s roof. That was when it happened.

  Frank stuck his head in Marie and George’s place to see if she needed any handy work done, and that is when he saw her coming naked out the bedroom, confronting him with only a smile on in the middle of the living room. For a moment they looked at each other, embarrassed. Then Marie said: “Certainly you’ve seen a woman naked before.” To which Frank replied that he had but he hadn’t realized she was that good looking. Marie moved toward him and put her head on his shoulder and began to cry. At first, Frank didn’t know what to do as her sobs deepened and she explained that George had been “distant” for many years and had probably been carrying on with a young man who lived just beyond the dump on the main road. “They met by moonlight,” she whimpered.

  An hour later, Frank got up and dressed. He heard the gang coming back down the lake and the laughter from the boat. He rummaged around in one of the lower kitchen drawers, found George’s hammer, and emerged from the cottage carrying the ballpeen in case any of the gang saw him leaving. By the next summer, as the cottages on Mercury Row were re-opened for the season and the noon-time scent of cigarettes and martinis mixed with the natural scent of pine and the sturdy base aroma of stone, lake water, and outboard exhaust, Marie had a new child, a boy.

  Gladys and Doris sat together on Doris’ screened porch and discussed the math. The child was how old? Hadn’t George been dead how long? And hadn’t Marie confessed to them, one afternoon shortly after George’s passing, that he’d been distant? The kid had to be a bastard. Gladys had seen George with the Willows boy who lived on the main drag. Who could the father be, they wondered? And just as they remembered that Frank and Marie had been left alone that day when Arch and Bob took them off to a special fishing spot they’d discovered at the far end of the lake, the sound of a child crying, hungry after its morning nap, broke the stillness of Mercury Row.

  “Damned kids,” Doris said. “I thought we were all past that long ago. She’s too old to be having a new one, and by God-knows-who.”

  “You don’t need to ask God,” Gladys replied. “I’m sure the kid has Frank’s eyes.”

  “Are you going to do anything?” Doris said, leaning forward so her voice was hushed in almost a whisper.

  “Damn right, I am. I’m buying that kid a canoe as soon as it can stand on two legs. I’ll teach it to paddle. Someone else, whoever else, can teach it to swim if it has a mind to learn.”

  “And if it doesn’t?”

  “Let’s hope it doesn’t.”

  ii) The Lure

  Dave Willows wanted to see Paris but the closest he got was a postcard tacked to the cigarette rack behind the counter at the Lure Shop that Lois had sent him. It was of the Eiffel Tower.

  Lures were his primary business, but over the years, because the general store owned by his uncle had shut down prematurely in the late Forties just before the boom came along in the Fifties and Sixties, Dave had gone into tackle. His uncle had explained, sadly, that there wasn’t much happening half the year except to sit there in the silence and wind thread around hooks and feathers to make Woolly Buggers for the tourists. Once Dave got his hands on the ramshackle store, he expanded the Lure into a trading post. He carried most of the daily essentials — milk (when it was fresh and the fridge worked), bread (when the truck came in), canned goods (lots of canned goods), and, of course, smokes.

  In later years, he would strike it rich when he got a license from the LCBO to be a purveyor of spirits, and, after earning his certificate to provide scuba gear, he would give lessons and rent out tanks to the summer folks. There wasn’t much to see at the bottom of the lake, and along the Evenrude shore a person could stand up to his knees on the muddy bottom. Dave put the story out that a prospector had lost his pouch of gold nuggets, and that made the teenagers shell out their money for gear rental. But Dave gave up any claim to being a scuba diver after he assisted the police in their search. He had been the one who made the discovery everyone feared would be made, and he said after that he wouldn’t go back in the lake. He would never explain why to anyone, except when he wrote a letter to Lois — a letter he never sent — that he had seen something at the bottom of the lake and could not get the image out of his mind. As he aged along with his trading post and went from standing behind the counter to sitting out front in a battered station chair, the corners of his mouth turned down, and everyone who suspected what he might have known or thought, passed on or passed away. What he had seen was a secret he relegated to a footnote in a life he regretted living.

  Dave saw it all pass by along the highway. The lake went from a derelict area to a reborn area as city types scrambled to snatch up waterfront property. They’d heard someone say that it wasn’t being made anymore. That sent the values through the roof. The old cottagers of Mercury Row moved on, or died, or let their places fall to wrack and ruin, and the new cottagers had come in, torn down the old clapboard structures with their screened verandas and knotty pine panelling to build more sumptuous vacation homes on the shadows of the old ones. The lure business went on making less and less money. The bread and milk business did okay. Lois stopped writing, and the postcards’ blues faded to a parchment colour until there was little left to see except a defiantly white border around an emptiness.

  The postcard of Paris appeared several months after Lois had left him for her French adventure. Her first card arrived on a spring afternoon, just as things were returning to life on the main road and the ice had vanished from the shoreline. Lois had declared, as the first snow was falling the previous October, that she couldn’t take another winter of silence with the only break in the soundlessness being between gasps of the wind howling around the corners of the trading post and the sound that trees make when they can’t hold up the weight of snow on their boughs any more — a kind of cracking nature makes at its wit’s end. She couldn’t watch him sitting there winding, and gluing, and making Woolly Buggers night after night, especially when there weren’t fish in the lake anymore that anyone had seen or caught. She asked him why he wasn’t coming with her, why he was throwing away his God-given talent as a painter when he could go with her to Paris.

  Dave had replied that he couldn’t afford just to pick up stakes and leave, and besides when the cottagers returned there’d be plenty to do. She went to the side wall where he sold his paintings of rocks and trees, and of rocks, trees, lakes, and the odd motor boat with a Mercury strapped to the back — the Evenrude people never purchased paintings of their boats and Dave had learned not to paint what he didn’t have a market for — and flung the one of Gladys and Frank’s cottage at his head. The painting had been a commission, but after it was dry and Dave had even varnished it for posterity, they said it wasn’t up to snuff and wouldn’t even hang it in their guest bedroom. That hurt. If he’d painted Montmartre they might have bought it, she said.

  “I just can’t pick up and leave,” he said, so she left.

  She said she’d got a job working as a dancer, but didn’t say where. He stopped himself from i
magining her in a place like the Crazy Horse or the Folies Bergère, though he had a hunch she’d landed somewhere in Pigalle along with so many other girls from the north who had declared their love of Paris and gone off to find it. She could have become an au pair, but that would have unsettled her. She never liked children.

  What unsettled Dave was the fact that he knew he had talent if only he could learn more. He’d started off as a kid with paint-by-numbers, but the damned kits never came with enough paint, at least not the way he liked to put it on. Some of the other kids did paint-by-numbers during the winters, but they never filled in all the spaces completely. One guy had the nerve to come in one day and ask Dave if he’d like to sell his old paint-by-numbers along with the fresh, freehand paintings, but Dave had said no and the guy refused to come back and did his shopping twenty miles away at another trading post on the main highway.

  To increase his income, Dave had taken a correspondence course in small motor mechanics. He would use his spare cash to pick up old outboards, especially the discarded Johnsons, Deeres, and Evenrudes. The Mercury parts were harder to come by. He had to call a guy in North Bay for those, but eventually, as something better came out each year, the folks on Mercury Row would trade up for newer, faster models, and rather than have them lying around their domains in the undergrowth, they’d take them to Dave and he’d give them a few bucks for them for scrap.

  By the time Lois left, there was a handsome pile of rusting Mercurys forty feet back of his shop in the pine scrub. Some had their covers missing and looked like pianos with the lids raised, while others just seemed to age during the winter, a little rust here and there until the paint wore off and the chrome spotted like a leopard. He’d found a spare part for Frank’s motor one day and was delivering it when he heard the conversation that stayed with him and unnerved him for years.

  Frank had managed to avoid oiling his motor and burned out a bearing one day in the middle of the lake. He had drifted until he could wave down one of the Evenruders who was attempting to teach his kid water-skiing, though everyone knew there wasn’t enough power in the lower cottager’s cheap hitch to get the kid up on his feet, let alone trail behind an aluminum dingy. The kid, still in his life jacket, grabbed Frank’s tow rope and brought them back to shore. When Frank tied up at his dock, Dave looked at the motor as its tail rose out of the water and the cowling was off. “It kind of looks sad with its innards all hanging out,” Dave had commented.

  “Just fix the damn thing and let me know how much it will be. I don’t want to sit around here all summer watching the grass needing to be cut.”

  When Dave returned with the right part it was noon-time a week later, and he found that Frank had gone somewhere with Bob, and the girls were all over at Marie’s waiting for her to cook them lunch. He could smell Gladys and Doris’ cigarettes and caught the scent of the day’s first martinis being poured.

  Gladys was talking to Marie’s kid, the one who had appeared after George’s death as a late-life afterthought. The boy was about seven, Dave reckoned. Gladys, by this time, had grown raspy from the smokes, and her voice reminded him of stones in a cement mixer, and the effect of the smokes on her throat had made her speak loudly to compensate for what she was losing in sound. Before knocking, Dave hung by the screen door at the forest side of the cottage.

  “What do you call those knights, Pierre?”

  “They aren’t knights. They are cuirassiers.”

  Marie said: “I bought him several kits of Waterloo soldiers to paint while he was up here because there aren’t any kids to play with his age.”

  “Did you know the French lost the Battle of Waterloo?” Doris, also in the living room while watching Marie cook, said.

  Pierre must have looked up. “They were cavalry.”

  Dave heard a crunch as if someone had just stepped on something small and breakable, and then the boy cried and shouted for his mother.

  “I’m sorry,” Gladys said. “I didn’t see your toy. Just get some glue. Besides, you shouldn’t be playing with French soldiers. They’re no good.”

  There was a silence and then Dave heard Marie say: “Get out.” And Gladys and Doris left by the lakeside door off the screened veranda, the frame slapping shut behind them on its spring. The boy sobbed.

  Dave decided he would catch up with Frank later. He never forgot the sound of that toy soldier snapping under what was probably Gladys’ foot.

  iii) The Toast

  On a jut of land down the way from the newest place on Mercury Row sits a large building — a boathouse or a cottage. But it is the view from the picture window of a post and beam lodge that Rich recalls every time he has the dream. He is with two, perhaps three ladies. They are raising their glasses. Beyond the picture window, a stand of trees lines the far shore and, through the trees they are looking into, the setting sun seems to stop momentarily. That is when time stands still and the dream ends.

  The dream has been coming to Rich since before the snow began to fall. It is March now. He thinks he slept through winter like a bear. He wonders where the lake is and who the women are. He gave up drinking several years ago when he started to dream the lives of people he had never known. In those dreams, he could not find a way out of a red and yellow basement with no windows or doors. This dream, the one he is having now, waking and sleeping — it never wants to go away — is different. There is a way out, but he has forgotten the way in.

  Not being able to remember is a good thing, he has overheard his friends say when they thought he wasn’t listening. He has told his doctor about the dream, and his doctor has also said it is a good thing. When the dream comes, Rich feels happy to relive the first weeks of spring where the dream always wants to begin. Rich knows he will have to understand what happens moments later, after the sun goes down, after the clink of glasses, and the first sips of wine. He knows that, but why interrupt a beautiful moment?

  So, where was the lake? He wants to know. His friends are sitting at his kitchen table. It is as far from a lake as anyone can be in a country of lakes. They are drinking coffee. He has just told them again about the dream. They are silent. They stare into their mugs. Arlene looks up and tries to smile at Rich.

  “You really don’t remember, do you?” He asks her to tell him and she says: “Later.” The friends nod. “There will be many laters,” Arlene says.

  Rich decides that when it comes again he will stay in the dream until the dream ends. The friends are sipping their wine. The sun has finally been pulled into the brown horizon of trees.

  “Let’s go down to the dock and watch the stars come out. There will be meteors tonight,” one of the women says. Rich takes her hand. He feels she is more beautiful than anyone he has known. He cannot see her face and wants to see it more than anything else, but it is dark and the boughs of pines deepen the shadows.

  The limestone slabs are cemented together, but Rich still must watch his footing because the afterglow is burning down like a kerosene lamp and he is carrying his glass of wine. There’s Venus, he thinks. There’s another light in the sky. He knows the name for it but cannot find the word. The dock should have been a better dock, but it shifts under everyone’s feet. Rich lets go of the woman’s hand and stands on the edge where an eye ring droops next to his left foot. He looks up.

  For a moment, he feels he is falling but he holds on to his glass. He does not want to spill his wine. One of the women screams. A sudden blackness slaps at the back of his head.

  When he wakes, he phones Arlene.

  “What was I doing on the dock?”

  Arlene is silent.

  “Please tell me. Please.”

  “You are coming back now. Rich, you fell in the water and struck your head on a boulder.”

  “There was a woman whose hand I was holding. What was her name?”

  “That was your wife. Her name was Martha.”

  “Was?”

  “Rich, she jumped in to rescue you. The water shocked her and she had a hear
t attack and drowned.”

  The realization that Rich had lost Martha, the return of his memory, was hard enough to take. He understood, at last, what the void was that filled his life, the way a person lives with what is familiar and learns to see it and keeps seeing it until it is gone and someone else must point out it is no longer there. He feels he must mourn her. He knows now why the bedroom closet is partially empty. He knows why there were oil marks on the floor of the two-car garage and only one car, waiting to be driven again when he is well enough. His friends had done a thorough job removing traces of Martha. Maybe it was from kindness, but Rich feels a rage at what is missing. And he keeps having the dream.

  He is falling off the dock in the twilight. The feeling of weightlessness catches hold of him and shakes him awake but he fights it until, in the dream, he is certain he is in the water. That is where he had seen something that truly frightened him, something more than the touch of his wife’s hand on his wrist and the sudden, almost spasmodic tightening of her grasp. He can feel those things in his dream. But it is what he sees.

  He is in the water, looking up at a dock, an old plank one with a worn tire tied to the side as a bumper for a motor boat. The sun is glistening and twisting everything out of shape. His eyes sting as he looks at the spattering of rays on the footings and the green bottom where the rocks nest in their water moss. Two women are talking, but he can’t make out their words — not on the first hearing. The sun goes dark. A canoe is lowered on top of him. He wakes.

  He tells Arlene during one of their late-night phone conversations that were more frequent as Rich grappled with the realization of Martha’s loss: “There was something else in the lake, something that frightened me and I can’t understand what it was.”

  “Try not to fixate on it, honey. You’ve lost the one person who meant more to you than anyone else, and that’s enough of a blow. Maybe, deep down, something inside you is trying to explain what it was to have Martha beside you, fighting for you, while at the same time unable to fight for herself.”