A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  During the day, large mahogany launches — artefacts of the Twenties and Thirties when the north was opening and lodges were booming — would take the young people out fishing together or for group picnics to a private island on the lake. There were hiking expeditions, horses for riding, and talks on various subjects of interest that were delivered by experts from Toronto. But the highlight of each day was the dance in the hall on the pier, and the highlight of the highlight was the Paul Jones.

  The Paul Jones dance was a magical wheel of fortune. It was the roulette wheel of introductions. The women would join hands and form a circle that revolved clockwise when the music started. The men, on the outside, also formed a circle by joining hands, their arms spread farther apart. Their circle moved counter clockwise. When the music stopped, the man would dance with the woman directly in front of him, and if the couple clicked, they would spend the remainder of the evening dancing together, perhaps exchanging phone numbers, before going back to their gender’s quarters, wish each other well, and meet the next morning over breakfast to get to see each other in the honest light of day.

  There Was a Beautiful Young Woman …

  On the night of the dance the secretary did her make-up and her hair, put on her favourite skirt, blouse, and a set of pearls her father had given her as a graduation present for her BA, and went to the dance hall with her roommate. At first both genders were stand-offish, the men clustering in their circles of fishing buddies and pals, and casting glances over at the women in their gatherings. When the master of ceremonies announced, “Paul Jones everyone!” the mood in the room changed. This was the moment that would break the ice for the evening. The women formed their circle and the men formed their outer ring. This was the moment at which chance would enter into the polite social structures of the resort and where chance would dictate who would meet whom and who would dance with whom.

  When the music suddenly stopped, the secretary noticed that a dapper though shortish young man hip checked the chap beside him so he could dance with her. He had gleaming blue eyes and he smiled at her. She had the impression he had been watching her earlier in the evening, especially when she left her group and went up to the punch bowl on her own. She also had the strange feeling she had known him all her life and that could be true because Toronto was a place where one passed the same faces every day in the street without asking a person’s name.

  “May I have this dance with you?” he asked. She smiled and nodded, and he took her left in his right hand and put his left hand around her upper waist. She noted that he wasn’t a bad dancer as the “Tennessee Waltz” began and they moved together beneath the big round chandelier. They danced the next dance, and then the next, pausing only to catch their breath on the small lakeside deck off the hall. The lake was alive with stars, and a full moon was just rising over the far shore. They introduced themselves and exchanged telephone numbers, and by the time the evening was almost over they were looking deeply into each other’s eyes and exchanging smiles and the promise to breakfast with each other in the morning.

  The clock struck midnight, and the dance was over. He walked her back to the women’s rooms on the far side of the lodge. Something had happened during their dance. She had the feeling deep inside that she might have found her prince. They said goodnight and went in their opposite directions leaving the rest to chance and the heart. He paused on the walkway and looked down at the ground. It had rained earlier in the evening before the stars came out. There was a footprint in the earth where the stone walk angled away from a flower bed, and he stared at it. Maybe it was her footprint, the image of the shoe she had left behind.

  In the morning she was one of the first in the breakfast hall. She looked around anxiously and kept an empty place beside her in the hope that he would show up. He did not. Noon time came and she made inquiries at the front desk about him. “I’m sorry,” said the clerk. “He checked out this morning very early. Wait a minute. Yes, he did leave something. He forgot a leather sandal in his room. If you know him or will be seeing him, perhaps you can make sure he gets it back.” She was handed a brown paper bag with a single leather sandal inside, its buckle rattling like a tiny bell when she shook it.

  Who Met a Handsome Prince …

  Crestfallen, she spent the remainder of the week alone, walking along the lakeside trails, listening to the quiet chatter of women who had found their princes in the wheel of fortune and feeling as if something had almost started and had been cut short. Her roommate who worked in another office at the Conservatory had met a tall, dark-haired man who occupied her entire time during the week. As for her prince, he had left no message for her, and all she had was the telephone number and the sandal in the brown paper bag. She called her mother in Toronto to ask if the man had telephoned but he had not, and she left instructions as to what her mother was to say to him if he did call.

  She returned to the city with nothing to show for her vacation other than a week away and a piece of useless footwear. Her father teased her. “Perhaps you will meet a man with one leg and he will love you for the shoe the other guy lost.”

  Leaves fell from the trees, and a chill filled the streets of Toronto. The tall sugar maple on her mother’s lawn in Lawrence Park suddenly became a gathering of boney hands and empty hopes held up in exasperation to an increasingly grey sky. And as winter gradually settled in and she rode the street car down Yonge each morning, her hopes faded in the silence of another long winter where she would wait and yearn for another week beside the lake in Haliburton, or some other place, where magic might work itself into the plot. And as she rode the street car each day to her desk, she looked at the feet of all the men who got on board and wondered if any of them would fit the errant sandal. There was still no word from the man she had danced with for a single evening and whose charm and grace and deep blue eyes made her feel as if she was floating off the ground and taken up among the stars. But, she tried to tell herself, such things only happen in fairy tales.

  The Prince Searched and Searched for Her …

  She had tried, after the appropriate length of time suggested by her mother, to call him, though it was against her mother’s better judgement.

  “If he is interested in you, let him seek you out. Don’t go chasing after him.”

  “Yes, but I do have his shoe. Well … it is not entirely a shoe. A lot of it is missing.”

  “That’s his loss,” her mother replied.

  “Well, maybe it was left for a reason and I should seek him out. It would be a good excuse to call.” And call she did, only to find that the number had gone out of service.

  “If it was meant to be, it was meant to be,” was the guidance her mother proffered. Her mother, like much of Toronto, had been raised in a Presbyterian household where everything was governed by the doctrine of predestination and things that could not be explained happened for a reason, the Good Lord willing.

  One night as the snow began to fall, the telephone rang. Her mother picked up the receiver from the black, bell-bottomed phone and handed it to her. “You’d better speak to him. It is the polite thing to do.” It was the elusive gentleman she had met at the dance.

  After saying hello, he attempted to explain. “I have been trying to reach you. I had to leave early the morning after we danced because my father passed away in the night. I had your number in my summer jacket, but my sister sent it out to be cleaned and the number vanished from the pocket. Then I phone the lodge to see if they would tell me where to find you, and of course they wouldn’t because they have a privacy policy and they said if she had wanted to be contacted by me she would have given me her telephone number. I told them about the jacket, and about the house being cleaned out and about the disconnection of my father’s number but the whole thing turned into a bramble I couldn’t hack my way through.”

  “So how did you find me?”

  “I saw your friend and her boyfriend at a restaurant late one evening. It was near my work. They had been to a
movie and were having sandwiches afterwards. I begged them to let me know where to find you. I don’t think they remembered me. Well, he remembered me because I pushed him aside to dance with you and all he recalled was that I did something uncharacteristically rude to meet you.”

  “I have your shoe,” she said, “or at least the parts of it you were using last summer.”

  “Really? How did you come by it?”

  “The desk clerk gave it to me. I’ve been waiting for someone to claim it. Would you like to come by and see if it fits? I mean, it could be someone else’s shoe or sandal.”

  “I’d given up finding the lost one. I had the left in my suitcase. I contacted the lodge several months later and they didn’t know what I was talking about so I threw out the left one.”

  “Do you know any one-legged men?” she said, giggling.

  “No, but I do have tickets to the opera for Saturday night and perhaps we can find one there.”

  And as the young lover, aglow with the footlights beaming up at him from the streets of an imaginary Paris, sang to a young woman about her frozen hand, the handsome Prince reached over and took hers in his and together their hands grew warm in the cavern of Massey Hall.

  And After What Seemed Forever, He Found Her …

  She was extremely disappointed that the flu had ruined their plans for Valentine’s Day, but as her fever raged the last thing on her mind was chocolates or a night out. She ached and burned and was not sure whether she was awake or asleep. She dreamed that they were beside the lake again. The stars were glowing and the dancehall was empty except for her and her man and the orchestra who were playing a dance version of “Autumn Leaves.” But in her dreams, the leaves were not falling. They were rising from the ground in their brilliant red and orange and glowing yellow and reattaching themselves to the branches of a maple tree like the one on her parent’s lawn though in the dream it had sprouted and grown up in the middle of the hardwood floor. And she heard him, she heard the words as real as if he were right beside her, and he was telling her that he loved her and would be true to her forever and that he could not go on with his life alone without her and that he would be the proudest, the happiest man in the world if she would do him the honour of being his wife. And as they were swept upwards into the brilliant pearly sky and the sun and the moon came out to dance together in the amazing purple hue of a magical moment, she felt her mother’s hand on her shoulder.

  “So what did you say?”

  “To who?”

  “To him. He was just here with a beautiful red rose and a little box in his other hand.”

  “Here?”

  “Yes. What did you say?”

  “To what?”

  “He said he proposed.”

  “I think I said yes.”

  “You think you said yes? Don’t you know?”

  “Hey, I’ve got the flu. I thought I was dreaming, and I think I said yes.”

  “Well dear,” her mother said, “it is times like these when the heart speaks what it really feels.”

  And the young woman looked at her night-table and a sterling silver box lay beside a glass of orange juice, and on her finger was a diamond ring. At their wedding, the man’s brother and best man read a passage from Milton’s Paradise Lost in which Adam is given the choice of staying on in Eden after the fall, but chooses instead to spend the rest of his days with his Eve, for they “never shall be parted, bliss or woe.”

  And They Lived Happily Ever After …

  My sister and I love to tell our friends the story of how our parents met one September and were married the next on a brilliant day when the valleys of Toronto were adorned in bright yellow golden rod and royal purple asters, and the trees over-arching the boulevards of North Toronto were crimson and gilded.

  We also tell our friends how our folks went back to Northern Ireland on one of those “trace your ancestor” trips with a genealogist, and how they discovered that both sides of the family were from County Fermanagh. But it gets more interesting. Both the families had ancestors who came out from Fermanagh to Toronto on sailing ships. Our father’s grandfather had travelled with Timothy Eaton who founded the Eaton’s department store chain. Our mother’s grandmother had travelled with Robert Simpson who founded Simpson’s department store, the rival of Eaton’s. Our friends ask who we are: Eaton’s or Simpson’s and we always answer that we grew up in a Morgan’s household because that was the closest department store. It is an old Toronto joke about approximations and strange meetings.

  But the story of our parents becomes even stranger. Once they reached Fermanagh and had met up with a historian, he showed them where the families had come from. Both were from a little town called Springfield, just outside of Enniskillen. From the ancestral home of our father’s family, our parents had looked across a small valley to the ancestral home of our mother’s side. And when our intrepid travellers searched the local burial records, they discovered that both sides of the family were buried in a little church yard at a cross-road called Monea. The graves were only a few yards apart, and when our father tripped over a crawling vine that had sprouted from his family’s plot, he picked it up and followed it and its end had wrapped itself around the tombstone of our mother’s clan.

  Everyone, we are told by biologists and anatomists, is the product of chance. Everyone is a longshot miracle where the odds of life play out exactly to code or else we do not exist. That’s fact. But there is also truth in fiction and my sister and I saw it one drizzly summer afternoon when she was reading for her doctorate in Dublin and I was researching my post-doc in London. We knew our parents were somewhere in the country, but all we had heard from them in letters was that we would hook up in Dublin when they were done unraveling the mysteries and tangled vines of our ancestry and that we would have one last family holiday together in the Yeats country of County Sligo. They said they would leave word at our B & B about when they would come to Dublin. One of us had sent a letter that caught up with them in Belfast, a short note about our Sligo plans saying “that’s no country for old men,” to which our father had replied: “Am feeling my oats.”

  My sister and I had just spent the afternoon in Trinity College Library after meeting up with some friends for a rather wet lunch. As our taxi puttered and halted along Landsdowne Road several blocks from the rooms at our bed and breakfast, we inched along and were discussing the differences between English and Irish literature and wondering where and when we thought our parents might show up. Each of us still had another day’s worth of research to do. On the sidewalk about a block ahead of us were two figures — a man and a woman, arm in arm, dressed in navy blue rain hats and navy blue trench coats and sensible brown leather walking shoes. Each had a small brown bag slung over the right shoulder and short umbrellas clutched in their free hands waving back and forth in motion with their stride. They were strolling together, swaying step for step in unison, as if their walk was a dance and each foot forward a bar of music harmonizing with the other.

  “Look at those two,” I said, pointing them out to my sister. “Maybe they are part of some cult or secret society that makes them dress alike.”

  “As God made them, he matched them,” she said laughing before she stopped herself abruptly and pointed. “O my God! O my God! Look! Those are our parents! They’re here already!”

  And together, as if oblivious to the traffic and the congestion of a Dublin rush hour, we saw them walking together as if attached, as if they were one, swaying with an invisible lilt that connected them to one another. They were two people brought together by the hand of some force that ordained that they should find each other, if not by acquaintance, then by the command of chance. And once together, by the dictates of that mysterious force, they should always be together and live happily ever after. My sister and I agreed that they must have been made for each other and that they reminded us of Adam and Eve at the conclusion of Milton’s poem, who through Eden, hand in hand, made their solitary way.

/>   T & C

  There are many worlds, some better, some worse, but Mike did not belong in this one. The bright, almost perfectly green pasture hills and their white, horizontal bar fences rolled beautifully toward the shining trees of the wood lot where every inch of growth was tidied of weeds. When held up against the world of Mike’s wealthy cousins and their riding crops and sleek black jumping horses, his world of a small apartment and a boring desk job did not stand up well. The only advantage he had over them was that the air of the city streets did not smell of manure.

  When they had all been little, his cousins had been as middle class as he was. Maybe they were richer now, but they had sat on the edge of the curb and watched the floats of the Santa Claus Parade pass by; money had not been a dividing line in the extended family. Money was something Mike got for birthdays, and was quietly spirited away by his parents for his college fund. He had been educated. His cousins had not. They didn’t need education, his uncle said. Their side of the family came into wealth.

  Uncle Garry loved to go to Kentucky. “The horses are fast and the women are faster,” he liked to quip, and he should have lost at least half his fortune to Aunt Martha in the divorce. Martha never spoke up at family gatherings. She sat with her hands folded on her lap, clearing her throat, and nodding whenever Garry spoke.

  “Lucky for me, she died of cancer,” Uncle Garry chuckled to Mike from behind the lavish mahogany bar in the studfarm’s family room. Garry poured a bourbon for each of them. Matilda, the jumper cousin, lounged on one arm on the leather sofa. She set her feet up on the coffee table. Between the heel and the sole of her right riding boot, a small clump of horse cookie hung on for dear life, and the smell reminded everyone in the room that she had come from the paddock.