Daddy Lenin and Other Stories

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  “Not too many lately.” I got up and turned on a light. His eyes narrowed against the sudden brightness. “You ever hear of verbal abuse?” he said abruptly. I had no idea where that had come from.

  “Yeah. There are notices up about it everywhere now.”

  “I never heard of it before until that bitch Home Care director came by. Said they got a strict no verbal abuse policy. She told me I better watch my mouth with her staff. The woman had a ass on her like a double-wide trailer. I told her to get the hell out of my place, and go out the door sideways so she didn’t stick there and make me have to call for the jaws of life.”

  “Okay, good demonstration of the concept of verbal abuse. Well done, Ted.”

  “I never took shit from anybody and I’m going to take it from some fat ass that bosses a bunch of diaper-changers?”

  The question was purely rhetorical, but I answered it anyway. “Highly unlikely.”

  He stirred in his chair, wincing with pain. “Even in the army I never let nobody push me around,” he said, still rivetted on explaining his long-term take-no-shit policy. “I got called up this one time before Colonel McTavish on account of a spot of trouble with some limey Red Caps outside a pub in Leatherhead. ‘Gunner Aker,’ he says to me, ‘this is the fourth time you’ve been up before me in the past six months on charges. Young man, you are no credit to your King, your country, or your family.’ I looked him straight in the eye and cut the cheese. Good and loud. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I says, ‘it’s all that rough cider I drunk last night. Same rough cider got me in trouble with the Provost Corps.’ I got twenty-eight days for that fart.” He looked around his apartment as if he expected to spot an eavesdropper lurking in the shadows. “And now I can’t even say what I think in my own jeezly house.”

  “Loose lips sink ships.”

  He had a lot to get off his chest. Ma had said that with all the deaths in the family Ted had no one to pay calls on him anymore. Evie, who used to drop in on him now and then, no longer went to see her husband because whenever she did he threw a fit and accused her of having had him “locked up in the Black Hole of Connaught.”

  “You can’t even flirt with the good-looking nurses,” said Teddy. “Where’s the harm in that? When it comes to women I’m like a dog chasing a car. What would I do with it if I caught it? I don’t mean nothing by it; it’s just talk. I told one of them a little story and she said it was ‘inappropriate.’ I think she was the one complained to the fucking double-wide.” He scratched his face with the brace on his wrist and grinned hugely. “It’s kind of funny what I told her. See, when I was overseas I wrote this letter back home to Rudy Demchuk. I says to him, ‘Over here in England I get nothing but chicken, chicken. There isn’t a night I don’t go to bed without a breast in one hand and a thigh in the other.’ Well, Rudy’s reading that out to some of the boys in the lobby of the post office and they’re splitting a gut. The United Church minister comes in and wants to know what’s so funny. So Rudy, who’s a character, hands the preacher the letter and winks at the boys. The minister reads it over and says, all thoughtful, ‘You know we hear these stories about rationing in Great Britain, how hard things are over there, and I think it would be wonderful if I could share Mr. Aker’s letter with my congregation. It would be a great relief and a terrific boost to the morale of all the parents of boys serving overseas to know their sons are being so well taken care of over there in the Old Country.’ And Rudy agrees that would be an excellent idea and the fucking innocent dope takes my letter with him and reads it out in church to everybody.” Teddy paused. “So you tell me, what’s the harm in trying to give somebody a good laugh now and then with a story like that?”

  I said nothing. Teddy sat there, eyes fixed on me. Suddenly he said, “You called me a lunatic once. You think I’m a lunatic?”

  Honesty is seldom the best policy with the old. “No.”

  “Because the double-wide says she’s sending somebody over to give me some sort of test. I told her, ‘Don’t bother because if they show up they’re not getting in my fucking door. Sure, maybe I give those Home Care girls a little shit when they do a half-assed job around here. But it’s good for them. They need toughening up. They ought to learn life’s no bed of roses.’ ” He hesitated. “So do you think they’re sending some head doctor over here because of this verbal abuse business?”

  Teddy looked worried. It wasn’t often anybody saw Teddy looking worried. I tried to reassure him. “Whoever comes won’t be a psychologist or psychiatrist. More likely a nurse or a social worker. They do this sort of thing with seniors all the time now. Maybe she’ll ask you a few questions like, What day of the week is it? Who’s the prime minister? What season is it? When’s your birthday? Just to see how you’re managing. Don’t sweat it. You’ll pass with flying colours.”

  Teddy patted the lump under the afghan. “They send somebody over here, somebody’s going to be sorry.”

  “You’ll be the one who’s sorry. So lose the pellet pistol, Uncle Ted. In fact, you better give it to me right now. For your own good.”

  Teddy ignored that. “I know something about head doctors,” he said, “how they operate, the fuckers. In Italy an officer took me out of the line and sent me to a casualty station on account of I climbed out of a slit trench under a mortar bombardment and stood up in the open. I figured, Fuck it, if I’m going to die it’s not going to be like a rat in a hole.

  “This doctor come to see me, he looked about thirteen years old. For chrissakes, he had braces. Tin-toothed cocksucker. He said they’d given me to him to examine because when he got back home he was going to specialize in mental cases. Not them words exactly, but that’s what he meant. You wouldn’t believe the kind of shit he asked me. I says to him, ‘One more question about my mother and I’ll drive your Adam’s apple out the back of your skinny neck.’ ” Ted fumbled for a package of cigarettes on the table beside him. It was difficult to watch the agonizing effort it took him to make the lighter work. When at last he got his cigarette going, he sucked a long, grateful breath of smoke into his lungs. “This casualty station was in some rich Italian’s house, and after I threatened this doctor they strapped me down on a bench that was by the entrance. I guess it was there for the peasants to cool their heels on while they were waiting to kiss the ass of the big shot who owned the place. That bench was all marble and colder than a witch’s tit. This is December I’m talking about and I could have caught pneumonia laying there on that fucking slab of ice. I probably wouldn’t be here now if Colonel McTavish didn’t order that quack to release me. The colonel told him my only problem was that I was a malingerer. McTavish sent a corporal to collect me, probably to make sure that the doctor didn’t make a fuss about letting me go. Me and the corporal ran into him when we was leaving the casualty station. I stopped and said, ‘I’d like to make an appointment, please.’ ‘What do you mean? Appointment?’ says the doctor. ‘An appointment for after the war,’ I says. ‘I’ll look you up so’s we can have a nice long chat about your mother.’ He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

  I got up and said, “Well, I better be on my way.”

  Teddy put his hand under the afghan and yanked out a very realistic-looking pellet pistol. One of those replica models that get kids shot by the police when they wave them around. “Take it,” he said. “In case I get an itchy trigger finger.”

  I did.

  On reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Uncle Teddy and the psychiatrist to Counsellor Sally. I don’t want her musing about a family history of mental instability. I should also have kept my mouth shut about the pellet pistol, but sometimes Counsellor Sally’s sympathetic demeanour can lull me into saying things I don’t mean to divulge.

  She wanted to know what I did with the pellet pistol.

  “I don’t know. I got rid of it.”

  “That doesn’t sound very definite. How did you get rid of it? Was it disposed of safely?”

  “I smashed it to pieces and dropp
ed it down a chimney.”

  “That’s not very funny,” said Consigliere Sally. “I happen to have seen The Godfather II.”

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, “that was a joke. After all, it’s not a real gun. It’s not all that dangerous.”

  Counsellor Sally said, “Remember when we began our sessions? I said that everything we talk about is confidential. The two exceptions to this rule would be if you were to speak about harming yourself or someone else. That I would need to report.”

  “And I haven’t done either of those things.”

  “Correct. But I would like an assurance from you that you are not contemplating doing something rash. In regard to Mr. Drogan. For my own peace of mind.”

  “You can sleep easy. I wouldn’t dream of it. I destroyed the pellet pistol. Scout’s honour.”

  “I’m glad to hear it.” Counsellor Sally shifted in her chair. She didn’t look entirely convinced by my assertion. “But let’s return to your ‘joke’ about the pistol. You don’t think that didn’t contain an element of aggression? Just like the ‘joke’ Uncle Teddy told the Home Care nurse? That it wasn’t intended to make the hearer of it ill at ease, to make her feel some discomfort?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Is there a possibility that telling me about your uncle’s hostility to being examined for a mental or emotional problem was a way of expressing your own resentment towards me?”

  I didn’t bother to answer that. The two of us sat in silence for a time. Then Counsellor Sally said, “I would like to make an observation.”

  “Feel free.”

  “It strikes me that you speak about your uncle’s actions with a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, you seem to think it important to leave the suggestion with me that you disapprove of his behaviour, but – how shall I put this – I can’t help thinking that I detect a tone of approval, even admiration in your voice when you talk about him. Would you say that in some way you might even admire your Uncle Teddy?”

  “Maybe,” I said grudgingly.

  “Can you elaborate?”

  “He always stuck up for himself. As he would say, he refused to take shit from anybody.”

  “And you feel that you have failed in that regard.”

  “Well, I’m taking shit from Drogan now, aren’t I? Truckloads of it.”

  “And your Uncle Teddy’s attitudes, his ways of dealing with others – do you consider them healthy?”

  “Not healthy maybe. But effective.”

  “Would you call injuring others, alienating others, an effective approach to life problems? Look at the outcome in your uncle’s case. He ended the last years of his life alone.”

  “Look, I’m not holding him up as the gold standard of decorum. All I said was that he didn’t let people take advantage of him.”

  “The picture you draw of your Uncle Ted is of a very aggressive man, often violent, certainly an intimidating presence. So how did it make you feel when you saw that power so diminished in his final years? Your uncle ill, shrunken, frightened?”

  “Did I say he was frightened?”

  “You left the impression with me that he was.”

  “Okay, maybe a little spooked because he thought he was going to get labelled a head case. I can identify with that.”

  “Perhaps you identify with him in a different way. See a similar fate in your future. Isolation. After all, you have no life partner. That may frighten you.”

  “Wife.”

  “If you prefer that term.”

  Counsellor Sally waited. I kept her dangling. Finally, she glanced at her watch. “I see that our time is up for today. But I think we’ve done some good work, opened up some issues. Let’s revisit them next session.”

  The last time I saw Teddy he was still worked up over the prospect of somebody coming to “dig around in his head.” It had been four months and nobody had shown up. The waiting only seemed to increase his anxiety. I told him that that was how bureaucracy worked or rather didn’t work; things got lost in the shuffle. It was highly likely that the paperwork had been overlooked, a call hadn’t been made – who knew? – he should stop worrying about it and breathe a sigh of relief.

  Teddy was pretty sure now that the nurse who had reported him to his nemesis the double-wide was the one he had told the chicken joke to.

  “She’s some kind of religious nut,” Teddy said. “In the old days you knew where you stood with church-going people. Everybody was either United Church, Anglican, or Catholic. But now people belong to these screwy churches you’ve never heard of. You got no idea where they’re coming from. It’s all hellfire and Blood of the Lamb.” He stared at the images on the muted TV. It was never off. “She asked me to pray with her,” he said.

  “That’s definitely not something she’s got any business doing. That’s off-limits. You should complain to her boss.”

  “Double-wide?” said Teddy. “Not fucking likely. And it wasn’t so bad.”

  “Don’t tell me you prayed with her.”

  “I didn’t pray. She did. I let her. So what?”

  “So what? There’s a principle involved. She’s not entitled to stuff her religious opinions down her clients’ throats. It’s unethical.”

  “There was this program I seen on the TV,” said Teddy evasively, his gnarled fingers beginning to pick and worry the afghan. “It was all about people who died and then come back to life.”

  “What was this, some evangelical program?”

  “No. Scientific.” Teddy’s voice was vehement. “It’s been proved. These people really died – their hearts stopped and then the doctors brought them back. And they all said they went down this long black tunnel and they saw this light shining at the end of it. And they said they’d never been so happy because they saw old friends and family waiting for them. Heard beautiful music. Shit like that.

  “I asked the religious lady what she thought about that and she said there wasn’t no light at the end of a tunnel for nobody unless they accepted Jesus into their heart. Otherwise, it was the Other Place. What do you make of that?”

  “I told you what I think. That woman should keep her opinions to herself.”

  Teddy ignored my observation. “But for guys like me,” he said, grinning uneasily, “I bet they got a trapdoor in the floor of that fucking tunnel. They mean to spring it under us when we’re on our way to the light. Get us when we’re not suspecting nothing. But me, I’m going to run down that tunnel full speed so when they spring that trapdoor I’ll have a good head of steam up and then I’ll be able to give one mighty leap and sail clear over the hole.”

  I laughed and said, “Well, Ted, if that religious lady is right and you clear the trapdoor, they’ll just lock and bar the door to the light on you. If they have any admission standards at all.”

  The look that came over his face. I don’t know how to describe it. Holy terror might come closest to what I saw there. He seemed stricken dumb, scared out of his wits. But Teddy being Teddy, he recovered soon enough. “Well then I’ll pound on that door to be let in. I’ll kick the son of a bitch down. Me, I don’t give up.”

  The next time I saw Counsellor Sally she didn’t revisit the issues that she had claimed we would return to. She threw me a curveball, a slider. She said that she had been thinking about the untruths I had told my students and that they puzzled her. Counsellor Sally said that she felt she knew me better now and had come to question her suppositions about why I had done what I did. I no longer struck her as being the kind of person who desired to inflate his importance. Quite the opposite. So why?

  “Boredom, I suppose.”

  That surprised her. “Boredom?”

  “The kids knew how preposterous my lies were. How preposterous I was. Crazy old Molson. My antics amused them. They were bored; I was bored. Besides, I was just putting in time until the end of the year when I would give the school notice I was retiring.”

  “But now you are adamant about not retiring. I don’t follow.”

/>   “Well, I never expected Drogan to find out what I was doing. I thought it was just between the kids and me. But when he decided to force me out I got my hackles up. I thought about all those years I had sat through staff meetings listening to that self-satisfied fraud and never once objected to any of the crap he was peddling. I took it. But all that time I guess I couldn’t keep what I was thinking off my face. Seeing that look year after year must have pissed him off. Then I committed the unforgivable sin, made fun of him to my students. Talked about him being lead singer in a punk rock band. That I had to pay for.”

  “But if you are reinstated, what then?”

  “If I get my job back, I’ll hand in my letter of resignation. But not until then. I should have retired years ago, but I didn’t know what else I would do with my life. I was hanging on through sheer inertia. I’m not proud of that.” I shrugged. “But if I win the battle, I’m gone. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

  “Well,” Counsellor Sally said thoughtfully and jotted something in her notebook. She looked up at me and sent me a gentle smile. “Let’s see what we can do about facilitating this outcome.”

  Four months after I saw holy terror written all over Uncle Teddy’s face, he died. The pneumonia he had escaped that winter when he had been strapped to a cold marble bench in Italy finally claimed him. Aunt Evie asked me to give his eulogy. She said he had always had a soft spot for me. Her grief was spectacular. She had one of what she called “Teddy Bear’s bears” placed in his coffin to keep him company.

  When I came to write Teddy’s send-off, none of the conventional plaudits could truthfully be applied. Good husband, good brother, good uncle. Definitely not. So I told the story of Teddy’s plan to leap for the light. I thought it was the truest thing I could say about him.

  The minister, a young woman whom Evie had enlisted to perform the funeral service and whom she had strong-armed to visit Teddy’s deathbed, said to me, “Just before your uncle died his legs were going like crazy under the covers. Like a dog chasing a rabbit in its dreams. Given his condition, I couldn’t see where the strength to make such an effort came from. I guess you answered that.” She gave a girlish toss to her hair. “Your uncle was a charming man. On one of my visits – that is before he lost consciousness – he said to me, ‘If all the ministers had been as good-looking as you, I’d never have missed church.’ ”