Aw shucks, aw heck, aw-men, Gerry thinks. Beside him, Vivian sniffs. He looks at her and squeezes her hand and she smiles tightly. Then Dr. Wallace is standing in the aisle by the head of the casket. His arm is raised in benediction. The service is over. Duane and Gretchen look as if they want to complain about being short-changed.
“Ten minutes,” Vivian says. “That’s long enough.”
Gerry is nervous driving behind the hearse to Cedar Glen Cemetery. He’s afraid if he gets separated in traffic he won’t be able to find the cemetery. The old roads that he remembers leading to it are submerged in new six-lanes. He vaguely recalls that you used to turn left at a frozen custard stand and go on past a big white barn, the first sign of the country on that edge of town.
The hearse has a flashing purple light that gives it a sort of U.F.O. air. Gerry hugs its bumper as they drive the slow lane of the Queensway. They get off the divided highway and onto smaller streets. He heaves a sigh of relief as they slide through on the yellow light at an intersection, sticking together.
Cedar Glen Cemetery does, in fact, have cedars. Gerry and Vivian drive slowly through dark clumps of them, interspersed with autumn-gaunt hardwoods on cemetery roads that regress from pavement to grass and gravel ruts like a country lane. The heater has been on in the car. Now Gerry finds he’s too warm and rolls down the window. There’s a country smell of wet leaves. They go to an old part of the cemetery. Most of these plots with their heavy, respectable monuments were filled long ago and haven’t been touched in years. Ornamental planting has overgrown and softened the lines of obelisks and fat granite and marble dominoes. This section has a settled, natural look, with the stones seeming to emerge like some geological outcropping.
“This is beautiful,” Vivian says. “It looks so old.”
The mourners have thinned out here in the cemetery. Most of the frail elderly and the car-less have skipped the long haul to shiver on the edge of town in a fall afternoon. Cars crunch to a stop on the gravel path. Bob and Mavis, Doc and Mort have come. The rest are family. Cousins and their spouses get out of warm cars, button their coats and pick their way across the damp grass.
One is Barbara, the daughter of Gerry’s Aunt Carmen. She’s a slim, blonde woman who, Gerry figures, must be sixty-one or -two. He remembers when she was a cheerleader for one of the new high schools on the edge of town. She’d have been in her last year of high school and Gerry was in tenth grade. Barbara comes up and puts a hand on his sleeve.
“Mom and Dad have gone to my place,” she says. “It’s too cold for her, and, with her eyes, she’s scared of walking on uneven ground.”
“I’m just glad she could get to the funeral,” Gerry says. “I know she’s waiting to go in for treatment.”
“Look,” Barbara says. “I want you guys to come over to our place after. We never see you. I think you were only to the house once with your mom.”
“If you’re sure it’s no trouble, Barb,” Gerry says. Barbara pats his arm and goes off to invite other people.
Underhill’s has made a slight professional miscalculation. When Gerry made the funeral arrangements, he was unsure how many healthy family members he could muster to be pallbearers. He asked Frank Underhill to provide some. Frank produced four nondescript but respectable-looking, elderly, middle-aged men, and at the funeral home, with the coffin on a trolley, they had performed fine. Now, however, they’re finding the walk from the hearse to the grave heavy going.
“That little fat fellow’s going to have a heart attack,” Vivian says.
Barbara’s husband Peter and a couple of other male cousins seem to agree. They and Gerry edge the suffering pallbearer aside and take the handles of the casket alongside the other Underhill bearers. They carry the casket to where Dr. Wallace waits by the open grave.
Gerry hears but doesn’t hear the words of the committal. He hears crows, calling to each other from somewhere in the Cedar Glen cedars. He smells the damp earth and the nearby presence of the cedars. He’s trying to recall the last thing he said to his mother that she might have understood. If he doesn’t count having to explain Gretchen and Duane crooning at her bedside, he has to go back to short, wandering phone calls that had become shorter and more wandering in the past few weeks. If he doesn’t count phone calls, he’s back to his last words of his visit last winter, when she got confused and thought she was going with him.
No dear, you’re staying here, Gerry thinks. That’s the last thing I said. You’re staying here. The last thing we can say to anybody or, possibly, they to us.
The crows yell in the cedars. Far off, behind the trees, the start of the rush-hour traffic growls softly.
Cousin Barbara and her husband Peter live in a tidy subdivision where every other street manages to be a cul-de-sac. Barbara has circulated among the dozen or so people who came to the cemetery and asked all of them. Mort leaves Doc to get there on his own and rides with Gerry and Vivian to give directions.
Barbara’s daughter Helen is there when they all arrive. She tells Gerry and Vivian that she and her husband live just a few blocks away. She’s dropped over to look after Aunt Carmen and Uncle Charles and put a couple of casseroles in the oven.
“I guess we’re...what? Second cousins?”
“Close enough, I guess. I always get confused.”
Vivian takes charge of Duane and Gretchen and herds them around. First they gravitate to Aunt Carmen and Uncle Charles. They feel Aunt Carmen is arguably the saddest person in the room, since Gerry seems far-too-much himself. However, she’s not sad enough for them either.
“Peter,” Aunt Carmen says to her son-in-law. “I found that chapel chilly. I don’t know how you people stood being out in the cemetery. I’m still cold. Do you think you could find a nice little drink of rye for an old lady?”
Gretchen and Duane fidget. Helen takes the kids to the den and turns on the TV for them but Gretchen keeps popping in to see what’s on. They hang around for half an hour and accept cups of tea, but then they plead horse-feeding as an excuse and leave. Vivian fusses over Joshua and Natalie on the way to the door.
“The poor children,” she says when they’ve gone. “That Gretchen has about as much life in her as I don’t know what and Duane’s not much better, God help us. It must be Jack’s side of the family. My crowd were easy-come-easy-go.”
Gerry circulates, catching up on cousins.
They’re cousins, but they look like uncles, he thinks. He sees his mother’s dead brothers in a couple of chunky men in dark suits, the sons, who are now the age their fathers were when Gerry left home.
Some female cousins seem to have married clones of their brothers, fathers and uncles. In the kitchen, a cousin’s husband reaches for the mineral water at the same time Gerry does.
“You’re a friend of Bill Wilson’s too, Gerry?” the man says, using the AA catch phrase. “I think Barbara told me. You mentioned you were on the wagon when you brought your mother to see her, a couple of years ago.”
And I thought I was the only one in the family, Gerry thinks. He chats with the man and his wife. He catches up on kids, grandkids, a couple of divorces and a remarriage or two.
Nearby, Doc has found he does business with another of Gerry’s cousins in the hardware trade. Rob knows another from the Masons, and his wife Mavis is talking fabrics to a knot of wives.
Barbara is explaining to Vivian how Gerry is considered the exotic member of the family. “He’s got a real Newfoundland accent,” Barbara says.
“I don’t know about that,” Vivian says. “He doesn’t sound like where I come from. A bit townie, maybe.”
In a family room off the kitchen, Barbara’s husband Peter is showing Mort the player piano that came from the original family farm. “I did the restoration myself,” Peter says. “It took me two years. I got a whole bunch of rolls on E-Bay.”
It’s early, still before six, when everyone is surprised to find they’re hungry. “You’d think we’d had to dig the grave or something,�
� Barbara says to Vivian.
The Ottawa cousins are used to each other’s company. They fall easily into a buffet line and even know what cupboards to look in for glasses or serving spoons. They absorb Vivian and Gerry and his friends into their groups at the kitchen table, the dining table or at coffee tables in the living and family rooms.
After supper, Peter pumps the player piano. He gamely pedals through “Ride of the Valkyries.”
“That’s worse than riding the bike,” he says. Others volunteer to pump and they run through Peter’s collection of rolls, singing along with the ones they know. Bob’s English wife Mavis brings the house down with “Bird in a Gilded Cage.” Gerry gets a round of applause for “When You and I Were Young Maggie.”
Vivian volunteers to pedal for “Till We Meet Again.”
“Don Messer,” somebody says. “Smile the while you kiss me, sad adieu...”
“Kit used to get such a laugh out of your Uncle Cyril about that song,” Aunt Carmen tells Gerry. “He used to think the girl’s name was Saddy Doo.‘What kind of name is Saddy Doo?’ he’d say.”
Gerry and Vivian stay and chat with Barbara and Peter for a while after the crowd thins out. It’s quite late when they drive back to their motel.
“I’m glad we were with people after the funeral,” Vivian says. “It’s nice to get to know your family after all these years.”
“For me too,” Gerry says. “Some of those people I haven’t seen since before Pat and I were married.”
“It’s a good thing you saw them. You won’t be back here much anymore, I guess, not regularly anyway.”
“Smile the while you kiss me, Saddy Doo,” Gerry sings softly, as they pull into the motel parking lot.
fifteen
NOVEMBER 2004
It is not quite eight in the morning, two days after the funeral, and Gerry is juggling two big paper cups of coffee outside the door of the motel room. He sets them on the frosty bonnet of his rented car and digs in his pockets for the key. A clipped-looking older man with two small dogs on leashes comes out of the next room.
“How do you like the small Pontiac?”
Gerry hadn’t really been aware he had a Pontiac. “Fine, I guess. I’ve only had it a week. It’s a rental.”
The clipped man looks at Gerry as if there’s something immoral about rented cars. Perhaps Vivian isn’t his real wife either. He loads the dogs into the back seat of a very clean car with a Canadian Legion decal on the back. The dogs have a folded blanket to sit on.
“White schnauzers,” he says. “They’re rare.”
“Nice dogs,” Gerry says non-commitally. The white schnauzers watch him out the back window. They seem pre-occupied with schnauzer thoughts and a sense of their own rareness and superiority. They remind him of two elderly, diminutive, twin bachelor brothers who were both elders at the church Gerry and his parents went to when he was about ten. They monopolized a vestry committee meeting over a suggestion to omit the confession of sin from some services. They were against the idea.
“Opinionated little runts,” said Gerry’s father.
“They’re old and they’re lonely,” his mother had said.
Gerry finds his key and takes Vivian her coffee.
They spend their final morning doing last-minute errands. Gerry drops Viv at the retirement home to pack anything she doesn’t want shipped by the movers. He drives downtown to drop off undertaker paperwork and spends an hour signing papers for Bob.
When they are done, Bob picks up Vivian’s theme from the night of the funeral.” I hope you’ll get back sometime, guy. It’s always great to see you and Vivian.”
“Yeah, I’m sure we’ll keep in touch. I don’t say we’ll be up as often, but it wouldn’t kill some of you guys to take a trip east sometime.” Gerry wonders what he means when he says this. He’s asked his friends many times over the years. Doc drove down in 1974, for his and Patricia’s wedding. Mort had spent a night with them once, during the Joe Clark election in ’79. Mostly though, the distance seems too much. He wonders how much he’ll miss coming here. He and Bob shake hands.
“Take care, guy,”
“You too, buddy.”
When Gerry gets to the retirement home, Vivian is waiting for him. She’s got a suitcase of his mother’s packed. It’s a small suitcase that reminds Gerry of old newsreels of British kids being evacuated from London.
“You need a gas-mask bag and a name-tag,” he says.
Vivian is looking at the photo album that he and his mother passed the time with on his last visit.
“I’m taking this,” she says. “I’ll put it in the desk and the movers can ship it. I called the kids and said goodbye and I called the phone company. They’ll cut the phone this afternoon, tomorrow morning at the latest.”
They take the room keys to the desk then and say their thank-you’s to the staff. Vivian leaves contact names and numbers with the movers. Gerry punches the code on the elevator buttons that prevents residents on this floor from wandering off. It’s the street number of the home reversed. The elevator is crowded with old people with walkers. It’s after eleven-thirty and the slow-motion rush to early lunch has begun.
A few minutes later, they have driven down the street to their motel and tossed their bags aboard the rental car. Gerry takes the key to the office while Vivian waits in the car. He’s been coming to this motel for ten years, since his mother moved into the home. He feels he knows the weedy-looking clerk, who, he gathers, is a ne’er-do-well member of the family that owns the place. Still, he supposes that in ten years he hasn’t spent more than twenty minutes in this lobby.
It took that little to make it familiar, Gerry thinks. Now it’s going to become unfamiliar even quicker.
A computer printer stutters out his bill, completing the process. Already he feels the motel fading around him.
Gerry and Vivian find themselves in early afternoon limbo. They have done everything they had to and their plane doesn’t leave until nearly six. Between motel check-out and airport check-in, Gerry feels they’re in a backwater of time, circling just out of the current.
They conceive a sudden nostalgic fondness for the Italian restaurant they went to a couple of nights before and go there for a leisurely lunch. In the shrunken universe they inhabit this afternoon, it’s become one of their places. They eat for amusement, making an idiosyncratic meal of several kinds of antipasti and salads. Vivian has a couple of glasses of the house white while Gerry drinks San Pellegrino. He talks her into a crème brulée for dessert, and after a couple of cups of coffee they feel they need a walk.
Gerry chooses an Aunt Louise place for their walk, the arboretum of the experimental farm. They park the car at a look-out that gives them a view of ornamental streams wandering from the canal under bridges and through willow trees reduced to pale pencil sketches by their fall nakedness.
“We used to hike around here on Sunday mornings,” Gerry says. “She’d take the other aunts to church and then pop up here for a little pagan fresh air.”
“Let’s walk,” Viv says. “I ate too much.”
They have the big park pretty much to themselves on a cool, sunny Friday afternoon. A few joggers and dog walkers pass them by, but for most of their ramble, they’re by themselves. There’s frost in the ground and the puddles are still skinned with ice although it’s late afternoon. They walk along the canal for a way. It’s been drained to a narrow stream at the bottom of its bed, just enough water for its winter tourist role as “the world’s longest rink.” They come to a set of locks. Across the canal is the university Gerry went to.
“God, it seems huge,” Gerry says. “None of those office towers were built when I was here. It was just the quad there and a couple of buildings on the back and the residences along the driveway.”
“Let’s go across and look,” Viv says. “I need to pee. I shouldn’t have drunk all that coffee.”
One set of lock gates is kept permanently shut to make a footbridge across the can
al. The gate top is wider than the others and has double handrails. Gerry and Vivian hustle across like exploring children. They scamper across the driveway, hand-in-hand, and go in a side door to the basement of the student union building.
“Relief is on the way,” Gerry says, pointing to a set of male and female signs with arrows. “The sign of the canny middle-aged traveller, the ability to find the loo anywhere.”
“I’ll see you in a minute,” Vivian says.
“Me too,” says Gerry.
They re-unite outside the washrooms and do a prowl around the older parts of the campus. Gerry discovers the geography of the university he knew thirty years ago, like a vestigial organ in the body of the present-day version. Mostly new has been piled on top of old, so by following the tunnel system, he can recreate his world of the late ’60s.
“This was Juvenile Junction, sort of a speakers’ corner and general hang-out. The Tunnel Rat’s snack bar was down there.”
“I was married when you were here,” Vivian says, “married and expecting Duane. Jack was supposed to be working in Labrador City and quit because he said he had an ulcer.”
“The year I got here, everybody was getting right into Tolkien,” Gerry says. “Personally I always sort of cheered for the Orcs. I got tired of all the amazing escapes and wanted somebody to eat the damned hobbits. Anyway, there used to be some really good runes in Elvish painted on the tunnel walls over the stairs down here.”
“When I think of all the stuff I missed,” Vivian says, “I get so damned poisoned. Get a job or get married. That’s what we were told. We didn’t know any better. I should have been here too.”
“And you’d be somebody else I’ve forgotten about or only run into now and then,” Gerry says. He takes her hand. “I guess we had to go our own ways to run into each other.”
They leave the university the way they came in, by a door close to the canal. A couple of girls waiting for rides by the door nudge each other at the middle-aged couple holding hands.
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