Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  Gerry rules out the magazine rack and the godfather’s mummy case.

  “Something in dark wood, I think,” he says.

  Frank shows him a casket with interchangeable corners. They can be cherubs, flowers, or a variety of sporting images: curling brooms and fishing gear, ducks and pheasants.

  “This is quite popular.”

  “She’d come up and choke me, Frank. Not her style, I’m afraid.” The boxes seem expensive but Gerry has a mildly drunken-sailor feeling that permits pissing money up the wall at a time like this; within reason. He finally settles on something that looks like it might have contained very large duelling pistols in some more fastidious age of giants. Frank makes approving noises.

  “That’s the ‘Unknown Soldier,’” he says. Incredibly, in an alcove, there is a poster-size picture of a box like the one Gerry has picked, carried by French soldiers in kepis at some sort of re-interment.

  Gerry doesn’t know how the “Unknown Mother” might go over with his mother, but he thinks he remembers the coffin she picked for his father being like this one. He was drinking then, of course. He doesn’t feel he can ask Frank if Underhill’s has any record of what they buried the old man in.

  Gerry is at the airport early for Vivian’s flight. He has a need for neutral, anonymous space and the arrival hall provides it. He buys the day’s newspapers and an over-priced sandwich-in-a-croissant and a coffee. He and Vivian will have something to eat later. The snack-bar is on the second floor of the terminal. He sits at a table looking down into the arrival hall, reads the papers and fiddles with the crossword puzzles. There seem to be surprisingly few arrivals. Either it’s a slow time of evening for flights or the new air terminal is big enough to disperse a planeload of people and make them look sparse and insignificant. He watches Vivian’s flight number slowly flicker its way to the top of the screen.

  Vivian’s flight via Toronto and one from somewhere in the Arctic arrive at the same time. She comes through the arrivals gate with a mixed bag of travellers. Some are in business suits, some in down parkas and improbable cowboy hats. Vivian wears her leather coat and has a self-sufficient air. Gerry feels he’s seeing her for the first time. It hits him that he wants her, physically. Three days of dying and death have made him feel vibrantly alive.

  This is why people are horny in wartime, he thinks. Ha ha, you missed me! The bells of hell go dingaling-aling, for you, but not for me...

  He waves to Vivian and weaves through the small crowd to hug her.

  It is the wrong side of midnight and Gerry and Vivian are sprawled naked in the teenager’s-bedroom tangle of their motel room. The newness of place and oddness of circumstances seem to have worked for them. The room is lit only with the flicker of the TV with the sound turned to nothing. The baseboard heating hums and ticks and the room is warm. It smells funky with the scents of the love-making that ambushed them almost as soon as they walked in the door. It smells of Vivian’s perfume and a medium vegetarian Greek pizza. The pizza box sits on a chair by the bed.

  Vivian sits up and pours herself a glass of wine from the bottle on the night table. Gerry had picked it up that afternoon to welcome her. Her outline is indistinct in the TV lighting as she rolls on her side, glass in one hand, the other touching gingerly between her legs.

  “Jesus, honey, I guess we needed that.”

  Gerry is drinking diet pop, delivered with the pizza. “I know I bloody did.”

  “Like a couple of kids,” Viv says. “You don’t suppose we’re getting too old for this stuff?”

  Gerry’s hand covers her exploring one. “Doesn’t feel like it at the moment, does it?”

  “Get me some Kleenex. Is there any more pizza left? Now I’m starved.”

  “There’s two chunks, a slice each, unless you want to save it for breakfast.”

  Later still, they lie with the light out, separate but holding hands. They’re flat on their backs talking to the invisible ceiling.

  “I brought your blue suit and a couple of white shirts. I put in your new black shoes,” Vivian says. There’s a silence. “How are you doing?”

  “Not bad, really. It’s funny. You build it up in your mind and then it’s just over.”

  “It wasn’t like that with Dad,” Viv says. “He dropped down dead in the kitchen. That was a shock.”

  The room is very dark. It has heavy drapes to keep the parking lot lights out. Gerry rolls closer to Viv.

  “You aren’t still horny?”

  “What can I say? Coffins and naked women rubbing themselves with pizza turn me on. Nothing odd about Adamson.”

  “Come here then,” Vivian says with vast patience.

  She rises sleepily and invisibly around him like a tide of warm darkness, and after they’ve gasped and shuddered, they roll to the side and fall asleep apart.

  The next morning, Gerry and Vivian are at the retirement home bright and early. Pale sun streams through bare November tree-branches outside the window as they rummage through drawers. In the home’s garden below the window, black squirrels are busy. They importune residents seeking the last fall rays for food and they scrabble in flowerbeds for bulbs.

  Vivian watches them from the window. Newfoundlander that she is, squirrels still have novelty value for her. For Gerry they’re more nostalgia from childhood. He also knows that squirrels can be obnoxious as well as cute.

  “Remember Tanya feeding the squirrels the first summer we came up here?” Vivian asks. Then she goes back to finding the right clothes for the funeral home. She purses her lips, discovering screw-ups in laundry that have been made over the years. She holds up a cotton nightgown with a teddy bear on it. “Where do you suppose that came from? It’s nothing your mother ever wore.”

  “You never know,” Gerry says. “Maybe she was a closet Care Bears fanatic.”

  Vivian finds the dress she says Gerry’s mother told her she wanted to be buried in. Gerry drives downtown with it, to drop it off at Underhill’s. He asks after a florist his parents and aunts had done business with. Frank Underhill looks blank.

  “They’ve been closed for years,” an assistant, a woman about Gerry’s age, says.

  Gerry thanks her. Then he gets the name of a reliable florist and orders flowers, and drives to his appointment with the minister.

  The minister’s name is Dr. Wallace and his office is in the basement of a church hall that Gerry still thinks of as new. It was opened the year he left the Cub Scouts. The corridor walls are covered with artwork from the daycare that inhabits a corner of the basement and rainbow emblems from the gay reading group that meets Tuesday nights. The smell, however, is familiar: a mixture of floor polish, children and dusty hymn books.

  Dr. Wallace is a small, white-haired man with a ruddy face. Gerry thinks he would look at home coxing a rowing crew. His office is hung with pictures of grandchildren. There is a lumpy hand-thrown jug full of pens on the desk. It’s painted in green and yellow stripes and inscribed Grampy. Dr. Wallace’s tear-drop bicycle helmet hangs on the back of the door, and a corner of the bookshelf has back issues of Mountain Bike and some frayed Agatha Christies.

  The minister shakes Gerry’s hand and gets him a cup of very indifferent coffee. Then they sit, neither rushing to fill the silence. Gerry decides to speak first. “It must be difficult, being asked to sort of jump in here when we haven’t been in touch with the church much.”

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Wallace says. “My secretary, Mrs. Whillans, knew your mother quite well in the UCW years ago, and I’ve been to see Kit a couple of times.”

  “I’m glad you’ve got the name right,” Gerry says, impressed. “I don’t think one of your predecessors had ever met Dad when he buried him. His name was the same as mine, Gerald Edward, but everyone called him Ed, never Gerald. The poor minister never asked and we didn’t think to tell him. He kept referring to him as Gerald.”

  “It happens,” Dr. Wallace says.

  In the course of half an hour, they decide that sh
ort, simple and traditional is what’s called for.

  “Would you like a hymn?” the minister asks as though he’s offering after-dinner liqueurs. “Underhill’s has quite a good little organ.”

  “Can we sort of pencil it in?” Gerry asks. “Mom was awfully old and the notice is only in the paper today. We may only get a handful of family. If it’s you and me in duet, we might scrub around it.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind singing,” Dr. Wallace says. He seems to imply that he’s been asked to do worse.

  They settle on the “Twenty-Third Psalm” as very suitable. It’s just as well, because Gerry can’t think of many other hymn titles.

  “If we’ve got the numbers,” Dr. Wallace says, showing him out and shaking hands again. “I’ll see you tomorrow a little before two.”

  When Gerry gets back to the retirement home Vivian has been busy. She’s given away garbage bags of clothes to the home. Through Lawyer Bob, she’s called a rep from a moving company for a quote on shipping the few good bits of furniture. The room is dotted with piles of stuff with sticky notes saying “ship.”

  The home sends up a plate of sandwiches and a pot of coffee. “Her board was paid for,” says the girl who brings it.

  When Gerry and Vivian go back to the motel that evening, there is a message from Duane and Gretchen.

  “You don’t want to see the kids tonight, do you?” Viv asks. “This is about you, this trip.”

  “I don’t mind,” Gerry says.

  “We’ll call them later,” Vivian says. “We’ll see them tomorrow anyway. I’ll call after we have dinner. We’ll say we came in late.”

  That’s what they do, pleading non-existent get-togethers with long-lost Adamson relatives. In fact they go to a cozy Italian restaurant and are tucked up in bed watching a rerun of A Night to Remember on TV when Viv finally does call.

  They fall asleep before the lovable old couple decided to stay together and drown and the ship’s orchestra plays “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  Gerry wakes early on the day of the funeral. Vivian hardly stirs as he gets up, showers and dresses.

  “I’m going out for a bit,” he says. “I’ll bring you a coffee when I come back.”

  Gerry steps out into the frosted parking lot. The motel has buildings down both sides of its parking lot. The shadows are still long on his side and the frost on the cars is heavy. However, across the lot, a golden light is working its way down the walls and across the pavement as the sun gets higher. Gerry breathes deeply, feeling the cold air in his nose.

  A good day to be alive, he thinks, on this funeral day.

  Gerry takes himself for a walk the way he’d walk a senile but sedate dog. He cuts out the back exit of the motel lot and wanders in residential streets, following his nose. Each intersection is a mental toss of the coin to pick the direction. The neighbourhood he walks through is brick and stone with big trees. It seems to be settling into the ground, like logs and stones into moss. Gerry realizes he misses the brazen clapboard of Newfoundland, ducked-down in the valleys or daring the wind to knock it into the sea or blow it across the bogs and barrens.

  Gerry makes a zigzag progress in a big loop and eventually finds himself in a strip mall just down the street from the motel. He finds a barber shop open early and pops in for a trim. The shop is called Vito’s. According to the name on his smock, the barber who cuts Gerry’s hair is Vito himself. There is another barber in the shop, and he and Vito bicker like an old couple. Gerry gathers that the other barber is Vito’s brother-in-law. He is reminded of his regular barber shop in the mall at home. The walls are covered with pictures of soccer teams and Grand Prix racing cars.

  “Is there going to be any hockey or what?” Vito asks.

  “I don’t know. Are they even talking?” Gerry doesn’t follow hockey but apparently he doesn’t need to. Vito simply pulls isolated questions off the front page of the paper. It’s like striking single notes of a xylophone.

  “How about that fire in Vanier?”

  With his hair cut and beard trimmed, Gerry drops into a doughnut shop next door to Vito’s. It’s a non-chain doughnut shop, an independent with some variety in its coffee. Gerry buys a French roast and a croissant. Spreading butter and jam on the croissant, he’s surprised at how composed he feels. He feels benign, ready to be pleased by little things like strawberry jam. He orders a second croissant and takes Vivian a couple of cranberry muffins and a coffee when he returns to the motel.

  The funeral is set for two o’clock and Gerry has arranged for only an hour of what Underhill’s calls “visitation.” Gerry and Vivian get dressed and meet Duane, Gretchen and the kids at a nearby mall where Gerry has spotted a restaurant with a lunchtime salad bar.

  “They can graze,” Gerry tells Viv, as they dress in their room.

  “So should we,” Viv says. “Pizza and muffins! This skirt is bar-tight.”

  They fill a corner booth in the restaurant which is big and bland.

  A “family” restaurant, Gerry thinks. Well, for what it’s worth, we’re a family. That’s why we’re here.

  Vivian makes a fuss over Joshua and Natalie while Duane and Gretchen commiserate with Gerry. “We’re very sorry about your mom,” Duane says, shaking Gerry’s hand. “She’s in a better place.”

  Gretchen just mutely hugs him with a slightly noble air, as though she’s curing a leper by the laying-on of hands. She seems sadder than is appropriate for the funeral of a woman she barely knew.

  At least she’s not singing, Gerry thinks. Mute grief is okay.

  Vivian announces she’s going to do the salad bar and sweeps the kids ahead of her.

  Gerry orders a club sandwich. When he’s been on the road, working, he has always said that the club sandwich is the ultimate food refuge. When you can’t face any more restaurant selections, the club has a taste of homemade. He’s usually found that he shifts to the club-sandwich diet after about two weeks of travel. It hits him that it feels like a long time since he left St. John’s.

  The hour of “visitation” at Underhill’s strikes Gerry as being like the beginning of some politically incorrect joke where half a dozen stereotypes have an unlikely encounter in a bar or lifeboat or public washroom: A Scotsman and a rabbi and a kangaroo go into this Turkish bath...

  People from various compartments of his life gather in the dim, flower-scented room and Gerry trots about introducing them.

  His Aunt Carmen is there, slim, white-haired and wearing a dark blue suit and small, neat hat. She carries a cane now, the thin metallic kind that drugstores sell. She wears thick glasses and leans on the arm of her husband, Gerry’s Uncle Charles, a tall, slightly stooped man in a blue blazer. They’re in their eighties now. Gerry remembers his father always referred to them as “the kids.”

  There are half a dozen cousins and spouses. He’s kept track of some, but with others, he tries to match the solemnly smiling, almost shy faces with wedding groups from forty years ago.

  Doc and Mort arrive together. Doc wears a thick tweed jacket and a tie with khaki pants and scuffed suede shoes. Mort runs to a black suit and narrow, shiny shoes. A few minutes later they are joined by Lawyer Bob and his wife Mavis. They greet Gerry and Vivian and the kids, then work the room, nodding, shaking hands and taking unofficial charge of Aunt Carmen and Uncle George. In his estate-law practice, Bob must get to a lot of funerals. Gerry is silently grateful as Bob and Mavis help stir the mix.

  There are a few elderly former neighbours and some oddities. A former hair-dresser rolls in on an electric invalid scooter, accompanied by her granddaughter who drove her to the funeral.

  “Your mother was always one of my regulars,” she says. “She always took care of herself.”

  The widow of Gerry’s former scoutmaster appears. She was in his mother’s church group.

  “We always did the scout father-and-son banquets together,” she tells Vivian. Fifty years ago she’d lived down the street from Bob’s parents. Bob greets her, and he and Mavis add her
to their little herd of elderly guests who’d rather be sitting down.

  Gerry and Vivian move from cluster to cluster of guests, occasionally keeping tabs on Gretchen and Duane. They seem a bit distant, put-off by the funeral being held in Underhill’s chapel rather than a church.

  Gerry finds himself seething that they are looking askance at what passes for reverence in his generation. Shag ya! he thinks. Drive into a pole going home and I’ll rent a gay disco to wake you in.

  Finally, Frank Underhill and Dr. Wallace appear.

  “We ought to be going in now.”

  An organist is playing behind a carved screen as they move across a hall and into the chapel. It doesn’t sound electric. Dr. Wallace was right. Underhill’s organ is good.

  Dr. Wallace is good himself. He tells the congregation to sit and takes them through the order of service like someone quieting a large animal. Sometimes he speaks softly and intimately. Other times he seems to thump chummily on some collective back, talking about Gerry’s mother. He calls her “Kit” when he talks about her.

  Listening to him, Gerry realizes that the little minister had read his silences well yesterday. The reporter in him warms to the job of interviewing Wallace had done with him.

  Dr. Wallace looks at them confidingly. “I asked Gerry yesterday if he thought we should sing a hymn. He said yes, if we had enough people. I think we’ve got enough, don’t you, Gerry?” Gerry nods. They do have the numbers and the Underhill’s businesslike organist carries them along.

  “The Lord’s my shepherd...”

  To the other side of Vivian he hears Gretchen slip half a beat out in front, used to bouncier church music than the Presbyterian rumble that Gerry grew up with.

  “In pastures green, he leadeth me, the quiet waters by...”

  From a couple of rows back, Gerry thinks he can hear Mort and Doc. They used to sing this psalm, drunk, rolling home from Hull in Doc’s father’s car.

  “...and my cup o-o-overflows.”

  The hymn rolls to its end. The “amen” is pronounced the way Gerry remembers it from childhood church services. It’s a drawn out mooing, almost plaintive aw-men, not eh-men.