by André Alexis
Still, why leave everything to her granddaughter, when Stanley, her son, was the rightful heir? That was a question that caused Eleanor a curious distress. She did not feel it unjust to cut Stanley out of her will. The choice of a beneficiary was her business, hers alone, but there was something inadmissible behind her choice: she did not love her son, had never managed to love him. She might not have minded these feelings, if she’d been incapable of love, but this she was not. She loved her granddaughter. She even felt (diminishing) affection for her grandson, but for her own son there had never been anything but a kind of repugnance. It had little to do with Stanley per se. She could see he was what is called a “good man.” No, her dislike had to do with things per accidens. First, there was Stanley’s father. Eleanor’s relationship to Stanley’s father had been, well, tender but intricate. Her husband was related to the Marquess of Exeter or the Earl of Devon or some such. A young man of great wealth, he had, inexplicably, fallen in love with Eleanor and, “going unaccountably native,” married her. Though it offended and appalled his family, though he was cut off from the even greater wealth that would have been his had he married sensibly, Robert Stanley married a woman he loved, a black Trinidadian, and lived in the colonies until he was drafted into the war and died overseas, in Italy, in 1943. You’d think Eleanor and her son would have been, at Robert’s death, shunned by his family, but she did not give them the chance. She refused to have anything to do with any of them. Instead, she (and her lawyer), after many bitter (and, for Eleanor, frugal) years, took stewardship of Robert’s estate (two million pounds, with property in London, Dawlish, and Lans-en-Vercors), and cut his family dead.
It was a strange kind of cutting, though, because there was something frankly self-lacerating about it. Somewhere in her consciousness she must have believed her husband’s relatives were superior to her, believed their culture superior to her own, their holdings greater than the place from which she’d come. That is, she must have believed in her own unworthiness because she abandoned Trinidad not long after her husband died and, from then on, would no more speak of her own family and culture than she would of her husband’s. At her husband’s death, she found she could move neither forward (to England) nor back (to Trinidad) and so was left stateless as well as bereft.
Had Eleanor felt any love at all for Robert Stanley? Yes, she had. (He was, in fact, the only man she would ever love.) But she was young and her feelings, deep as they were, were an erotic confusion. She was flattered and moved by Robert Stanley’s affection, impressed by his social standing, overcome by his choice of her above all the eligible women he might have had. At the same time, she doubted his motives, suspected she was being used to hurt his family, and could not quite believe his liltingly mumbled avowals of devotion. And yet, in the end, something within her was broken by his demise.
By the time her granddaughter was born, she remembered her own emotions more than she did the man himself. He’d smelled of lilac soap, he’d had a slight stutter, and it was he who’d named the boy Stanley Stanley, insisting that “Lord Stanley Stanley” had an aristocratic ring to it. Very little left of him, really…except, well, Stanley himself, who so resembled his father he was a constant reminder of Robert: a living memento mori, a keepsake of worlds gone and worlds abandoned. (All of this would, of course, have interested her son, who knew nothing of his father or his father’s family because Eleanor pugnaciously discouraged his curiosity, just as he, more gently but with as little yield, discouraged his children’s curiosity about all that had been kept from him.)
There was another, more particular reason for her dislike of her son: she had been told, before his birth, that she would love her child. Love, they said, would overcome her, and she had looked for it, only to discover the great lie. She’d felt distaste at first sight of the boy, as if she’d given birth to her own ambivalence. Every now and then, a tide of maternal sympathy would wash over her and, briefly, she would look down at Stanley and think herself favoured, but these feelings did not last long and, in the end, she came to resent her own “instincts.”
So, she disliked him, but why could she not love her son? People often love those they dislike, don’t they, especially when it comes to family? She’d given this some thought, desultorily, over the years. She first assumed it was because he was a “trying” child, but even she could not keep up that pretense for long. Stanley had been a quiet and affectionate boy. Then she supposed it was this very quiescence and affection that put her off. Yes, perhaps, but…in the end, it seemed it simply was not in her nature to love her child, as it was not in her nature to do anything expected of her.
Why, then, had she chosen to live with Stanley? Well, whatever her instincts and whatever her emotions, she was a frugal woman and, as she got older, she felt increasing worry at the thought of expenses and spending. As living with Stanley would cut her expenses down, it was an attractive idea; more attractive still, given her recent, nagging sense that all was not right with her. There wasn’t anything she could put her finger on, but there you are. If something were wrong, she would need whatever family she had. Her feelings for her son had nothing to do with it or, if they did, they were trumped by practical considerations.
So, she had come to live with Stanley and his family in 1981, still vigorous at sixty-eight. Still vigorous? Yes, but she kept this to herself. It did not seem to her “helpful” to appear too healthy, so she’d insisted on imaginary ailments, leaning on Stanley’s arm whenever they walked about, moderating her temper, making herself mild, or almost mild. She had done so well that it was now, three years later, difficult to do things she should have had no trouble doing: walking alone, getting up from bed, and, most important, keeping her affairs in order. It was bewildering reading a bank statement or letter, like staring at a face or landscape that one knew well and having it become suddenly strange. It was as if memory itself suffered a defeat, though she didn’t quite understand it was memory that had been defeated. Rather, she sensed something was wrong or something was missing, and she was sometimes convinced that someone was out to get her.
Before coming to Stanley’s house, she’d had a routine, places to go. She had, or thought she had, a reasonably firm hand on the rudder. But since coming, she had abandoned her schedule and she’d begun to lose track of her own life. For some time now (a year was it?), the details had become simply unmanageable. The worst of it was the being lost. There were times she couldn’t remember where she was or what she was doing and even the city landmarks didn’t help. How could they, in April, when the city was just warm enough to be a somewhere else, like Port of Spain, the city of her birth, and the War Memorial a strange distortion of Cipriani, his statue on Frederick Street, as if the world itself wished to see her by the wharf with her Gra’ma Ada, the sky above the sea an indescribable blue and her grandmother smelling of cocoa butter?
Until now, Ottawa had always refused to be anywhere else, even when she wished it were. It was dull, cold, and homely, but she had come to feel for Ottawa as she’d felt for her grandfather, a man of tweed whose feelings for her were scarcely perceptible, save that he was the only one to speak to her as an equal and he always managed to pass her a dollar note, even later when he had to be helped to sit up and he smelled of creosote, because he insisted on shaving himself, though his hands shook and he cut himself horribly…
And where was he, now? Dead and buried in Trinidad.
And what if Ottawa died within her? Where would that leave her?
– Stanley! she cried.
She had moved in with Stanley, pleading frailty to justify the intrusion. But perhaps she had outsmarted herself. The pretense of frailty seemed to have led to frailty, and she was something of a prisoner in her son’s house. She managed to be on her own no more than once or twice a week, her family being loath to allow her out without company. And now, it seems, they were right. She got lost in the city, forgot her son’s address, forgot what his house
looked like, wrote letters that she’d discover in her purse weeks later, unposted, there in her purse along with packets and packets of sugar. The only bright side was that these episodes were, as far as she could tell, infrequent, and she had always returned to herself, posted her letters, threw out the sugar, found her way home.
But for how long? And what could she do about it? She would have to consider doing the thing she’d so far avoided: she would have to confide in someone, because it was now clear that, one day, she might not return to herself, and what would happen to her then? How bleak it was even to think about these matters.
At least it was clear in whom she would confide: Mary, her own granddaughter, her best hope in all of this.
– Stanley!
Stanley and his daughter were in the kitchen when they heard Eleanor’s call. They’d been discussing politics, as they often did together. Though Mary was Liberal, she could not stand John Turner: white-haired, falsely jovial. She was actually thinking of voting Conservative in the next election.
– Really? Stanley asked. You like Mulroney, then?
Stanley himself belonged to no party. He voted based on what he could make of the candidate. He agreed with his daughter that this wasn’t the best way to go about voting, but if it’s true good men could be brought down by rotten parties, it was also true they sometimes brought the party up with them, wasn’t it? He had voted for Diefenbaker, and then he had voted for Trudeau. Hard to say whom he would vote for next, but, these days, his chief political pleasure came in talking politics with his daughter.
They heard Eleanor’s muffled call and Mary stood up.
– I’ll go, she said.
– No, no, said Stanley. She’s calling me.
And he went unhurriedly up to the second floor, preparing himself for whatever Eleanor had in mind or whatever mood she was in.
As it happened, Eleanor wanted to use the bedpan, and this was a complicated matter, not biologically, but emotionally, because she did not, in fact, need help to use the bedpan. When she first moved in, she had asked for help and, to her chagrin, had found the experience humiliating. But, as she could not admit that asking for help with the “po” had been a ploy, she went on asking, though it never ceased to be an embarrassment.
Of course, Stanley understood that when his mother hesitated or began to speak about the weather, say, what she really wanted was the bedpan, but he felt it would be rude to simply hand it to her. So he always waited until she asked for the pan. As a result, although they never spoke of important things, the moments before Eleanor asked for the bedpan were among the closest they shared.
Eleanor:
(pause) Stanley. I wonder if you would…open the window for me?
Stanley:
The window? It’s pretty cold out, Mom. Are you sure?
Eleanor:
Stanley. I find it insufferable.
Stanley:
(sighs) Okay, Mom.
He opens the window.
Stanley:
Is that all?
Eleanor:
No, no. (pause) I was also wondering if you might (pause) bring up the newspaper? It’s intolerable to be bedridden and ignorant. It’s really too much, on top of all the other indignities.
Stanley:
What indignities?
Eleanor:
Well, having to ask for the po, for instance.
Stanley:
You need to use the po, Mom? Why don’t you just ask me?
Eleanor:
You simply will not understand the humiliation.
Stanley reaches under the bed for the bedpan, then hands it to her.
Eleanor:
Thank you. I wonder if you would step out while I use it?
When it was over and he had emptied the pan and replaced it beneath his mother’s bed, Stanley made sure she was comfortable and then returned to talk with his daughter, whom he loved without a hint of complication.
– Is Gran okay? asked Mary.
– Oh, yeah, said Stanley. She’s just getting older. Like all of us.
{10}
A FACT ABOUT WALTER BARNES
It was around the time Eleanor began to die, a year or so after Walter had ended his relationship with Louise, that Louise’s husband, Paul Dylan, began to suspect his wife and Walter were having an affair. He was a jealous man, so suspicion of his wife’s fidelity was almost second nature, but this was the first time he imagined that Walter had betrayed him.
His suspicion of Walter was well founded, of course. What was unusual was that it took Paul so long to suspect Walter. Most of the other Fortnightly Club members, had they been as uxorious or jealous as Paul, would have been wary of Walter from the beginning.
The Fortnightly Club had begun with a kind of nostalgia. Paul Dylan, Robert van Leuwen, and François Ricard had been drinking at the Royal Oak. They’d been drinking for hours when François made a disparaging comment about the civil service. Van Leuwen then suggested that civil servants hadn’t always been so ignorant, that at the turn of the century there had been standards that today’s bureaucrats would not meet. Bureaucrats had been expected to be morally irreproachable and to know Latin, Greek, algebra, history…
Yes, but in those days the general public was better educated. Besides, there was a long tradition of intellectual intercourse in the capital. People would meet to exchange ideas, to debate the significance of this and that.
Was the tradition dead?
Yes, because there was no one to revive it.
Messrs. Dylan, van Leuwen, and Ricard did not imagine they could revive a lost tradition, but the idea was amusing. The three of them already formed a group of sorts. They met often, and spoke of ideas until late at night. They were undisciplined, however, and though ideas were exchanged, it was like an exchange of fog. The presence of others, a community, they felt, would raise the stakes, provide a real challenge to their shared beliefs.
For the first gathering, van Leuwen invited Henry Wing; Mr. Ricard invited his wife, Michelle, and Mr. Dylan invited his wife, Louise, Perry Newman (his lawyer), and Richard Nevins (his dentist). There was no agenda. Amateurs all, they talked about nothing much, but they did so with emotion, and it was this emotion that enticed them to the next gathering and the one after that. A small community was formed: unstable, not quite compatible with its own ideals, more practical than metaphysical, because Canadian. No one could remember who brought Professor Barnes, but by the time Walter attended his first gathering, the salon had existed for a year and things had already changed, becoming more casual but, also, a little more obscure.
Walter was liked, especially by Paul, who thought him a dry, ascetic academic with a meticulous memory for detail. For Paul, head of his own company of computer programmers, Walter was exotic without being a threat, and he was more interesting than most programmers, solid and good men who stared off into space if asked about anything other than computing. And then there was Walter’s voice: deep, muted but distinctly attractive, alluring, even.
Now, like Paul Dylan, a number of those who knew Walter thought him shy, not given to physical expression of his emotions. The impression came, perhaps, from Walter’s reserve and discretion that could be misinterpreted as disinclination to physical intimacy. This was not at all the case. In fact, Walter’s chief respite from the vita contemplativa came through sexual intercourse, through banter, foreplay, intercourse, and brief post-coital familiarity. When his own company was too much to bear, which it often was, he
put on his coat and went out and petitioned the first woman he happened to see.
What kind of man was he, at those moments?
He was calm and reassuring, his persona that of a man who is lonely but not desperate, a lyric poet, say, his loneliness a wound but also the origin of his attraction. (It didn’t hurt that he was tall, patrician in looks, with a slightly hawkish nose and lively blue eyes.) His approach, though abrupt, was playful and deeply confident. (He was almost certainly aware of his talent to seduce, but this, for those who found him charming, was part of the charm.) From the first moment, before he spoke a word, Walter’s presence suggested something like a pleasant conspiracy, and an attentiveness, though his attention was not such as to make one too self-conscious. All in all, there was to Walter a melancholy charm, an obvious intelligence, and a frank sexual appeal. He was sometimes slapped and occasionally insulted, but he inevitably found someone in the same mood as he was, with similar desires. (Perhaps it says something about Ottawa that his average was much better than one in ten, though there were evenings when he would petition ten or twenty women before succeeding.) It wasn’t that Walter didn’t mind rejection, but rejection was as intimate, in its way, as what followed acceptance, and he had learned to appreciate its fascinating range.
In his pursuit of women, however, a kind of pedantry plagued him. Walter actually had personal preferences. He preferred to sleep with young women of Malaysian descent. He found pageboy haircuts and plucked eyebrows positively arousing, but he had long discovered how hopeless it was to seek those things out. By the time you found a woman with a pageboy do, hours might have passed and there was no guarantee she’d be willing to sleep with you. It was, quite simply, inefficient. Besides, in the end, it didn’t matter about the woman’s hair and eyebrows. It didn’t matter what she looked like at all. A singular appearance or beauty only made it harder for him to forget the woman afterwards. So he had resolved to systematically accost: whichever woman he encountered, he propositioned. In this way, he slept with a fair cross-section of the female population.