by L. R. Wright
Alberg was surprised that a man who’d had heart surgery would be smoking a pipe. He wondered if Mrs. Dixon worried about it.
“And those people haven’t been well served by the Mounties in a lot of cases.”
“I know,” said Alberg. He tried not to close himself off from Dixon’s frank and thorough scrutiny.
Dixon waited, but Alberg was determined not to have that particular conversation.
“You want to know about the adoption of Maria,” Dixon said finally.
“Yes,” said Alberg. “Whatever you can tell me.”
“Because she’s dead.”
“Yes.”
“Murdered.”
“Yes.”
Dixon set down the pipe to rub his temples. “Bloody tragedy.”
The house reminded Alberg of his mother. There were lace antimacassars on the backs and arms of the sofa and the three easy chairs; not on the leather chair, though. The butter tarts were truly delicious. On the piano behind him he’d glimpsed a congregation of relatives in picture frames. Mavis Dixon probably still had a clothesline out back, he thought, and insisted on pinning up the laundry in fine weather.
“I forget—where do you come from?” said Edward Dixon suddenly, the pipe back between his teeth.
“Where was I born?” said Alberg. “London. Ontario.”
“No, now.”
“Oh. Sechelt, B.C.”
“Is this a small place?”
“Yeah. Pretty small.”
“Well, that’s good. Because you gotta know small towns to be able to understand about Maria.”
He hadn’t filled his pipe. He puffed at it, making sucking noises of which he was apparently oblivious, and he gesticulated with it, achieving with this prop an expansiveness that was otherwise absent. But he wasn’t smoking it. Alberg was relieved.
“You know everybody, in a small town,” the old man went on. “Which is sometimes good, and sometimes bad. But often you don’t know people as well as you think you do. You know what I mean?” Again he didn’t seem to require a reply. He set the pipe carefully in the ashtray that was built into the top of the tobacco stand and brushed at the knees of his pants. “I was ten years old at the time,” he said. “I knew the Gages. There were two other kids, boys, and then Maria came along. I don’t think she was planned. Hell, I don’t think any of them was planned, I don’t think I was planned, for Pete’s sake. Wait here a minute.” He got up and left the room.
Alberg smiled at Mavis Dixon and drank from his coffee cup, which she promptly refilled.
“Mavis?” Dixon hollered from somewhere down the hall. “Where’s the photo albums? Never mind, I see ’em.” He returned carrying an old album with black covers, his finger marking a place. “There. That’s them. Ira and Nadine Gage. Maria’s mom and dad.”
It was a black-and-white photo that had been tinted, and it showed a couple in their early twenties, standing at the edge of a furrowed field. The man was facing the camera, the woman was snuggled against his right shoulder but had turned to smile at the photographer. The man was wearing gray pants, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and white shoes with black toes. She wore a short-sleeved white sweater tucked into pants whose legs were wide and flowing, and white shoes. Her hair was short and curly.
“This was before they got married,” said Dixon.
“And you were related to them how?” said Alberg.
“My mother was Ira’s cousin. She’d moved to Saskatoon by the time it happened.” He made his way across the room and lowered himself onto his leather chair. “And she’d met Agatha, and knew about how Agatha wanted kids but couldn’t have any of her own.” He shrugged. “And so that’s how it came about. Things could be pretty informal in those days.”
Alberg looked at the photo again. The man’s head was bent toward the woman’s, and her body leaned into his. A slim tree trunk appeared behind them, and leaf shadows were scattered delicately across the photo, faintly obscuring Ira Gage’s face and throwing a dainty pattern upon Nadine’s elegant trousers.
“Tell me about them.”
Dixon picked up his pipe and tapped it gently into the ashtray, emptying nonexistent ashes. “Nadine came from Rosetown. I don’t know how she and Ira met up. She was okay until the first kid was born. That was Thaddeus. Born the same year as me, but two months later.”
Dixon rested his forearms on his thighs, leaning forward to look into the fire, his pipe held loosely in his right hand. Through the pair of corner windows behind him, Alberg watched the snow fall; there wasn’t much of it, but it was definitely snow.
“It’s not unusual for a new mother to get the blues,” said Dixon, looking at his wife as if for confirmation. “But I guess Nadine Gage got them pretty bad. Had to go to the hospital here in Saskatoon for a while.”
Alberg realized as he listened that this was one of the things he liked best about the job: the stories. He thought it was probably true what he’d read somewhere, that there was a limited number of stories, and they just kept getting relived, repeated, over and over, with an infinite number of variations that were almost inconsequential. But to him, this made them only more fascinating.
Dixon got up and put another piece of wood on the fire, deliberating for several seconds over the selection that was stacked neatly in a brick-lined alcove next to the firebox.
“She had another one almost right away,” he said, poking the new log into the middle of the fire. “I’m damn sure that one wasn’t planned,” he said, glancing over his shoulder at Alberg. He put the poker away and sat down again. “Same thing happened. Ira got his sister to help out, because this time Nadine was in there longer. And even when she got back from the hospital she was in a bad way for a long time.” He rubbed at his right eye with his fist, a gesture strangely childlike and poignant. “My mother used to talk about this a lot. She said people weren’t very sympathetic—including her. And she used to say, if there’d been more sympathy... Ah, well.” He looked at Alberg. “I’m gonna just cut to the chase here.
“Years went by, no more babies, which everybody who knew them thought was a very good idea. And then Maria was born.”
Edward Dixon stood up and walked behind his chair to look out the window at the darkening sky and the still falling snow. “When Maria was a few months old, Nadine got up in the middle of the night and started killing people. First Ira. They figure he never even woke up. She stabbed him in the heart. And then the kids. Thaddeus first. He never woke up, either.” He turned around and put his hands on the top of the chair, leaning there. “But the others did. Geoffrey slept in the same room as Thaddeus. Maria was in a tiny little room across the hall. It was Geoffrey’s yelling that wakened the hired man, Art Johnson, who slept downstairs in a room off the kitchen. But by the time he got up there it was too late for Geoffrey.”
Dixon looked off into the middle distance, frowning, as if he’d been there himself and was trying to remember exactly what he’d seen. “Art said she came out of the boys’ room with a knife in her hand and blood all over this long white nightshirt she was wearing, and on her bare feet, too, and she glanced at him and sort of hesitated, and then she headed across the hall. And that’s when he tackled her.” A shudder passed over his face. “He got their blood all over him.”
Alberg waited. “What happened to her?” he said finally.
“She got locked up. They call it a psychiatric hospital now.” He moved around the chair again and sat down.
“Did Maria ever find out about this?”
Dixon nodded wearily. “Same way you did. Sitting in that same chair. Only it was summer. What was it, Mavis—five years ago? Six?”
“More like seven.”
“Did she talk to anybody besides you?”
Dixon nodded. “She talked to her mother,” he said heavily. “Right after she left here.”
1987
Chapter 19
“AND AS FAR AS I KNOW,” said Edward Dixon, “she’s still there.”
Maria’s vision altered. She found this very curious. Light was suddenly sucked away from the room in which they sat, leaving Dixon shrouded in darkness, as though in a cave, with only a single pinpoint of illumination shining upon his face from somewhere. Maria asked him where it was, this place where her mother had been taken all those years ago, and his voice, when he answered, created luminous letters in midair: he opened his mouth, and letters of the alphabet swarmed into the air, glowing in the dark like phosphorescent alphabet soup. Maria studied the letters, but it was not an alphabet she knew.
She nodded politely, smiling, backed out of the house—or felt that she did—and made her way to the rented car parked in front. It was a small silver car, waiting obediently. Maria climbed in and had to tell herself all the things there were to do: close the door, lock it, insert the ignition key, put on her seat belt, turn the key—good. The motor started. Now move the gearshift into the “drive” position.
Maria sat perfectly still for a moment. Then she swiveled her head slowly to the right. Edward Dixon was standing in the window, looking out at her. Maria felt nothing. He lifted his hand in a gesture that was half wave, half blessing. She kept both hands on the steering wheel. Then she faced front again and drove away.
She turned left at the corner and soon reached a main street beyond which she could see the gray stone buildings of the University of Saskatchewan, where the man who wasn’t her father had gone to school. She headed for the center of the city and the Bessborough Hotel, where she was staying because as a child she had once stayed there with the people who weren’t her parents. As an eight-year-old she had opened a desk drawer, found a bottle of ink and removed the lid, and managed to spill it. She remembered the blue-black puddle creeping slowly across the bottom of the drawer and onto the hotel stationery. She had closed the drawer, slowly, and then spent an apprehensive evening waiting for one of her nonparents to discover the mess. But they hadn’t. She liked to think that somewhere in this hotel even now, today, there was a desk drawer containing a large but faded inkstain.
In her room—where the desk drawer was ink-free—she looked out the window at the South Saskatchewan River and the university rising from the opposite bank. It was a warm summer day. The river was a darker blue than the sky, and a brisk wind tossed the branches of the trees that were clustered along the water’s edge.
After a while Maria took a deep, steadying breath, pressed her palms against her chest, between her breasts, and sat down at the telephone table to call the institution where her mother had been housed for the last forty-eight years.
***
She drove there in her rented silver car with the window open, drove slowly along a two-lane highway. When there was a break in the flow of traffic, she often heard a meadowlark, one of the few birdsongs she could identify, and this sound created in her the singular feeling that was simultaneous pain and joy. It was a melody from her childhood. The flat expanse of prairie, the circular horizon, the thunderheads moving rapidly across the summer-blue sky—these were things from her childhood, too, as powerful, as exultant, as the mountainous, seaside landscape where she now made her home. Through the car window came the song of the meadowlark, the fragrance of canola, the rough prairie breezes—and Maria for a few sporadic instants was almost able to forget where she was going and why.
Eventually, though, she reached her destination.
It was a large, not unfriendly building—except for the bars on the windows—constructed of red brick. Maria wondered, getting out of her car—where did they get the brick?
Inside was a small reception area that felt like a police station. There was no entry into the main part of the building without going behind the reception counter. A Plexiglas wall with wickets cut out of it extended several feet upward from the countertop. Two women were sitting behind it, one working at a computer, the other peering through eyeglasses at paperwork that Maria couldn’t see.
Maria leaned forward to speak through one of the wickets. “I’m here to see Nadine Gage.” This got her a curious glance from the young, ponytailed woman at the computer.
“One moment, please,” the other one said with a smile. She was older and had a pair of crutches propped up in the corner where the counter met the wall. She got on the phone and murmured.
While she waited, Maria turned and looked out the window. The thunderheads were much nearer. By the time she left here the rain would probably have come and gone, a cool delicious shudder expelled by the returning sun.
“May I help you?”
Maria turned.
“I’m Carol Hartley, the director. I understand that you’d like to see Nadine.” Her hands were clasped at her waist, and her head was tilted a little. She looked slightly amazed. Well, no wonder, thought Maria.
“Yes. My name is Maria Buscombe. I’m her daughter.”
“Really,” said Carol Hartley.
“I was adopted when I was a baby.” The woman was studying her critically, and Maria tried unsuccessfully to relax. “I discovered only yesterday that—that she’s here.”
“You’re familiar with the circumstances under which she was admitted?” said the director.
“I am. Yes.”
The woman’s gaze was abrasive. Maria wanted to avert her eyes and shift from foot to foot.
“Why do you want to see her?”
Maria, suddenly composed, considered several replies. “Forgive me,” she said finally, “but that’s a ridiculous question. The woman is my mother.”
“Let me put it another way,” said Carol Hartley, unruffled. “Why do you think she ought to see you?”
“Maybe she shouldn’t see me,” said Maria. “That’s something you’ll know better than I.” She realized that the women behind the counter were listening and felt a flash of anger that this conversation wasn’t being conducted in private.
The director sat on a bench near the door, gesturing to Maria to join her. “Nadine hasn’t been well,” she said, lowering her voice. Maria made no response. “She’s had a couple of heart attacks.” The director fingered the gold chain around her neck. Her long hair was pinned to her head in a series of tight loops. Maria smelled perfume. There must be people with allergies in this place, she thought. She imagined the director sailing through a dormitory and leaving in her wake elderly mad persons whose sudden sneezes were toppling them out of their beds.
“Do you think seeing me is likely to provoke another one?”
The director gave her that steady stare again. She was a little older than Maria, an individual who looked strong and confident physically and who had about her an air of impenetrable serenity. She stood up. “Come with me.”
Maria followed her down a long hallway with an abnormally high ceiling. Then into a long room split horizontally by a thigh-high counter that was itself divided by three-foot walls into ten cubicles, on either side of which was a chair. From the center of the counter a sturdy wire divider rose several feet and was secured to the four corners of the ceiling. The room was empty.
“Wait here,” said Carol Hartley. “I’ll see what she says.” She went back into the hallway.
Maria sat down at one of the cubicles.
Her side of the counter faced a wall with a row of windows, barred, at the top. Through the glass Maria saw the now darkened sky and a tree being whipped by the wind. There were two doors on the opposite side of the counter, one on either side of the room, near the windows. Maria had placed her handbag on the floor next to her chair. She moved the chair now to align it more precisely in the middle of the cubicle.
She thought she might be having a dream or acting in a movie. Her mouth was very dry—she longed to go outside and lift her face into the rain that had now begun to fall, to let it slide across her lips and into her open mouth. She started when the door behind her opened and Carol Hartley reentered the room.
“She says she’ll see you.” She was smiling a little. She sat down quietly on a chair by the door.
When
the door on the other side of the counter opened, Maria’s heart took a tremendous leap. For an instant she thought it had literally stopped, and she wondered how long it would last, this flash of consciousness between death and the brain’s acceptance of death. An old woman in gray stepped through the door, followed by a male attendant dressed in white. Maria’s heart lurched back into action and assumed a shallow, rapid, but constant rhythm as she watched the elderly person who was her mother make her reluctant, unsteady way across the room. Maria heard the shuffling of her slippered feet and the sound of the rain slapping furiously against the windows: all sounds were echoey in the linoleum-floored expanse of this graceless, charmless room.
As the woman came closer Maria saw that she was thin and frail, dressed not in gray, but in sweatpants and a sweatshirt that were faded blue. She had long white hair in a single braid. Her back was slightly humped, and arthritis had contorted her hands, held hesitantly in front of her, into claws. The attendant pulled out the chair for her, and she sat down, rested her claws on the countertop, lifted her head, and gazed dispassionately through the wire at Maria. Her eyes were rheumy but alert. For what felt like a long time, there was silence.
“Do they still call you Maria?” It was a surprisingly strong voice.
Maria nodded.
Chapter 20
HAMILTON GLEITMAN found his way to a classroom in the Buchanan Building at the University of B.C. He took a seat near the door and dropped his knapsack onto the desk. He took out a pen and a notebook and a file folder and stowed the knapsack at his feet. He looked around him then, at these people who would be the first to experience his poetry.
They were perhaps twenty-five in number. Many of them were younger than Hamilton, but some were older. Some were talking among themselves, but mostly they were sitting alone, absorbed in the summer school course outline, or a paperback book, or jotting things in notebooks.