Paul Is Dead
Page 5
“No,” Lydia replies, scraping her cup along its saucer. Did her denial sound too sharp? “No, not really,” she amends, adding quickly, “Tell me about the heritage designation.”
“Some old fishing shack or something near the docks—I’m not sure what exactly—that’s important to the old Icelanders, Alan’s firm wants to raze it to build condos. There’s lots of construction going on up that side of the lake now. Retiring boomers, you know. Summers at the beach in Gimli. Winters in Mexico or Florida. Never have to put up with another Winnipeg winter. If you can afford it,” she adds glumly.
Heritage designation. Lydia’s mind grips this. How serious could some little lake town be about preserving historic properties? What force of law would such designation have? Is this the answer?
Eadon Lodge was surely one of the oldest cottages in the area. Not simply old, but untouched. Her father resisted change, adamant all his life the cottage remain as he’d known it as a boy. Still, this and that changed. Marion won a protracted battle over indoor plumbing, installed—Lydia remembers with cruel clarity as the place of the outdoor privy turned site of her very hell—in early August 1969.
After Bibs died in 1998, Lydia expected what she had dreaded, that Marion would turn to her and announce that she was going to sell the bloody cottage, that she was too old to keep it up and—of course—she always hated it anyway. Lydia was prepared to counterargue for sentimentality, for family memory, for efficacy—she and Ray would come up to Canada and spend summers at Gimli, they would enjoy it in retirement—all of it a lie, anything to stave off a reckoning she knew one day would come. Then, nine years ago, when financial burden was not set to crush her, she was prepared to buy Eadon Lodge, if she had to.
But her mother surprised her, astonished her. Marion not only kept the cottage, she kept it intact—unlike her home on Oxford Street—down to the last knickknack. All she added was a deck. She mailed Lydia a picture—several pictures, inside and out Eadon Lodge, as if to prove she wasn’t kidding. Lydia remembers looking at the pictures—her first views of the cottage in thirty years—and then setting them afire on the gas stove.
Now, that day had come.
Could she cede Eadon Lodge to the town of Gimli in some fashion, so that it would remain as it is into perpetuity—or at least until her death? And yet it seems so farcical. What would they do? Have guided tours?
Could a heritage designation preserve the status quo?
“What are you going to do with the cottage?” Briony asks.
Lydia affects a shrug. “Sell it.” She glances at her friend; a sudden thought grips her. “Why? Would you like to buy it?”
“Oh, no. I mean …” In truth she and her husband could ill afford a second property. She envies Lydia the windfall that two properties will give her, along with money her father surely socked away. She has no idea how urgently Lydia needs the cash.
But Lydia is weighing that very need against the equally desperate need to keep Eadon Lodge and its grounds intact. She makes a swift decision: “Briony, why don’t you just … have it. Take the cottage. A gift. I’ll have the lawyer—”
“Oh, Lydia.” Briony puts her free hand on her friend’s arm. She is touched yet somehow freaked by the extravagant offer. “It’s too much. I’m—”
“You’d be doing me a favour, really. My only condition would be that you keep the cottage as it is.”
“Oh, Lydia.” Briony continues to gush, but feels somehow that some penny has dropped. There’s a flicker of urgency in Lydia’s eyes. “It’s unbelievable, but I couldn’t. Tim, you know … I mean … the cottage isn’t accessible, is it?”
“You could put in a ramp.”
“But the bathroom. I would need to …” Briony is caught between bewilderment and horror. She doesn’t wish to sound churlish. But she doesn’t want the cottage, not with the peculiar condition attached. Her last memory of Eadon Lodge is one of distaste, of anger and confusion and embarrassment. And Tim’s health is worsening. He will have to be institutionalized before long. This she hasn’t told Lydia. Briony has no energy for any of this. She would do with Eadon Lodge what Lydia must do: sell it. She needs money, too. They all need money.
“Well, it’s a thought.” Lydia says, lifting her teacup. She can see from Briony’s troubled expression that the offer has been a mistake.
Helen breaks away from a clump of cousins, old women and a few old men whom Lydia had earlier smiled and clucked with in half remembrance, and joins them.
“Lydia, eat something, dear,” she says, proffering her plate. “The salmon ones are quite good.
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Have you ever been to Eadon Lodge, Helen?” Briony interrupts, Lydia’s offer clinging.
“Oh!” The question startles Helen. Of course, the cottage is part of the estate, too. Funny Lydia hasn’t mentioned it. “Once, in the fifties,” she replies after searching her memory, “before I moved away. I went up with my parents. Why?” She glances sideways at Briony, sensing some subtext to the question.
“We were just talking about it. I used to go up with Lydia when we were small.”
“What I remember most is the high ceiling.” Helen says. “I know cathedral ceilings are common now, but then, particularly in a summer cottage, it seemed … almost outlandish. Oh, and that peculiar lamp hanging from a long chain from the ceiling. That sticks in my mind, too. Not really a chandelier, more like a …”
“An upside-down crown,” Briony supplies.
“Yes! Very good. All the light bulbs like jewels. Is it still there, I wonder, Lydia?”
Lydia’s heart gallops. She steadies the teacup with her other hand and tries to purge her mind of an obscene memory. “I don’t know. It’s been years for me, too. It’s probably still there. My father didn’t like anything to change at the cottage. You know, I really should go over and say a word to—”
“… it seemed so remote, the cottage.” Helen pops a pinwheel sandwich into her mouth. “Not now, I suppose?” She glances at both women for confirmation.
“Lots of new building going on now,” Briony replies.
“Funny your grandfather building it there, well north of the town,” Helen turns to Lydia.
“I wondered that, too. Years ago.” A vague memory arises of asking her mother, after school, and being told to ask her father, which she never did. Lydia pieced it together later from overheard conversation and her own speculations on her family’s psychology. “My grandfather was a snob, I think, and misanthrope.”
Helen and Briony exchange glances.
“Your grandfather coped with a challenged child, though, didn’t he?” Briony says soothingly. “That would have been hard in the twenties and thirties.”
Lydia, troubled by her spurt of vehemence, makes murmuring agreement. Grandpa Eadon coped because a woman stepped in, as women do. Henry’s spinster sister-in-law, May, gave up her life in Renfrew, Ontario, to manage the Winnipeg household and the two motherless little boys and left abruptly fifteen or so years later. Lydia recalls only the outlines of this ancient history, from some dinner table conversation. The idea of not having a mother disturbed her as a child. So who brought you up then, Daddy? Why did she go, Daddy? Bibs supplied only an outline. Marion attempted context “when she was old enough to understand,” as they say: May likely “set her cap” for Henry and had been rebuffed or dismissed or something. Even Marion had never been able to pull the full story from her husband. The child Lydia soon lost interest. But the teenaged Lydia speculated that her father must surely have thought of May as his mother. And the middle-aged Lydia realized it with force when, in one of her Christmas stays, she first visited her now-frail father in his last residence, a nursing home, and found him confusing her with May in a storm of childish tears that left her shattered and exhausted.
As troubling was her father’s confusing an aide in the nursing
home, one of the petit Filipinos who seemed to populate the place, as his long-dead brother, Lits. “I’m sorry,” he would repeat over and over to the young man who looked past his head to Lydia with a smiling forbearance. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
6
Dorian glances at the date at the top of the page: July 8, 2008.
Today is July 11.
He tosses the Free Press onto the table. He’d like a cigarette, but the PA’s arrival is imminent, and there’s no smoking in the trailer, even if it’s his bloody assigned trailer. In the scene they’re set to shoot, he, as Bert Hammell, owner of the Morningstar Cove Marina, will extend to his teenaged fatherless grandson, Adam, some pithy advice about women’s hearts. Adam, the troubled blond studmuffin with the heart of gold, is played by Ethan Elias, for whom Dorian stands in loco parentis on the set and off. Ethan peppers him with questions about his roles and his goals, which Dorian neatly elides, sidesteps, dissembles, grandiosifies—because he can. He’s an actor! If you can lie, you can act, baby!
Who said that? Brando?
He can almost prophesy Ethan’s career arc, because its foundation is much like his own: a modicum of talent married to a certain genetic happenstance: being a good-looking white guy. Ethan will do okay. He’ll almost always have work. He might even hit the heights. But for that, talent and looks aren’t enough. You need luck.
Dorian remembers fucking up a chance to play a lead in a revival in the late ’70s of Rope. Where might his career have gone if Bruce Greenwood hadn’t replaced him? He’s beginning to fantasize. It’s true, acting is mostly a lot of waiting around. He’s bored. The role is unchallenging, much of it him projecting some variation of gruff love. Most of the cast, and crew, is very young. His only contemporary is Sara Hindle, with whom he’s shared stage and screen in Toronto productions. She has a role parallel to his, the grandmother of Ethan’s character’s love interest. Sara’s a laugh, but she’s a dyke who likes a drink. She really likes a drink, and Dorian, teetotal for fifteen years now, itches for the velvety, oily feel of vodka on the tip of his tongue and the back of his throat whenever he joins her after the day’s shoot. Itches for it more than he does at home, in Vancouver, craves the rush along his veins, sometimes thinks—against all wisdom—maybe one. Just one. I can handle one.
He’s ambushed by memory in this place. He imagined he would be, but never anticipated the ferocity. Is it the light, the unsparing prairie light? Is it the aroma, the scent of sage in the heated breeze? Or is it the lake, the great grey sea of a lake? He can glimpse it if he turns his head just so outside his trailer window. Those hot August afternoons of sunbathing forty years ago at Eadon Lodge, made vaguely restive by the tedium of his book or the delicious plane of Paul’s thigh, he would lift his eyes and send them roving over its characterless surface—darker grey through sunglasses—to the shimmering mirage of the distant shore.
Dorian’s eyes fall back on the newspaper. The Free Press has a daily obituary summary on the front page, boxed, above the fold. He hadn’t noticed this before. The list is alphabetical; the second name is Eadon, Marion. His attention sharpens. Wasn’t Lydia’s mother’s first name Marion? Of course it was. He knows this perfectly well.
A production assistant pokes her head in, ready to take him to the dock where the scene is set. Dorian holds up a warning hand. He scrambles though the disarray of newsprint for the correct section and finds the full obituary. With picture. Marion Patricia Eadon (née Clifford), 1924 to 2008. A picture forty years old. When Dorian last saw her. Marion, crisply coiffed. His heart jolts. He begins reading the words Lydia composed a week ago.
But the production assistant is quivering with annoyance. Time is money. Dorian rises. He doesn’t need the details. Knowing Marion is dead is enough. Why had he put off thinking this day would come? All the parents are gone. They had to be. He knew Bibs was. Briony told him. She’d announced herself backstage at the Manitoba Theatre Centre—when was it? 2004?—when he had appeared in Night of the Iguana. But Marion was going strong. Dorian thought her an eternally skinny clotheshorse, like the Duchess of Windsor. Did he really think she would live on and on? Lydia must be in the city. The funeral was when? He makes a quick last glance at the paper. July 9—two days ago. There would be the house on Oxford Street to deal with.
And Eadon Lodge.
What if your parents sell it? he hissed at her at the Halloween party. This was in the kitchen at Oxford Street, before the evening descended into chaos. What if somebody else buys it? What then?
It won’t happen, Lydia assured him.
But your mother hates the cottage. Grimli, she calls it, remember? Grim-li.
Marion reigns, but Bibs rules, Dorian. Bibs loves the cottage.
Your father’s older than your mother. Men die younger. What will the widow Eadon do, Mrs. Peel?
He remembers Lydia faltering. It was hard at twenty to imagine your life at sixty, seventy, parents gone, children grown. If, Lydia told him, my mother tries to sell, I will stop her, of course.
And if you can’t?
I will.
And if you can’t?
I’ll call you. Don’t worry.
Promise.
Promise.
Would she remember after … what was it? Thirty-nine years? She was the only one sober at that party. She should remember. But to what length would she go to find him? Their ties were cut that Halloween.
Dorian follows the PA to the set, composing himself, bringing his lines to mind, pushing away thoughts of Eadon Lodge. But they seep back in. Two days earlier, they were filming on Lake Winnipeg, north of Winnipeg Beach, in a sailboat. The scene, three minutes in the finished work, was hours in the capturing, the morning’s filming filled with take after take, the camera buggering up at one point, a second assistant falling into the water, the weather turning abruptly, Dorian himself flubbing a line, then again, and again. It all felt unlucky, and actors, Dorian included, are a superstitious tribe. To auditions, Dorian wears his father’s watch on his right wrist, for example.
Dorian sensed something off that morning, some nascent atmosphere as they sped northward in the speedboat to where the sailboat and the camera boat were waiting for them. He thought of it later as Paul’s flickering shadow over shadowless waters, stirring them in death as he had in life. They shot across the lake’s murky surface, engine roar obliterating all conversation, Dorian scanning the scallops of beach along the shore as they drew closer to Gimli, then past Gimli, until they stopped across from a spit of land half curtained by trees. He kept his focus on the work, but boats are fickle things in moving water and in some turn of the bow, his eyes found it over Ethan’s shoulder: a white box trimmed with green, small and neat as a doll’s house, catching the sun, catching his breath. Eadon Lodge. Still there.
For now.
Whenever Dorian thinks of Halloween 1969 at the Eadons’ house he thinks of one of those mazy trees in films set in India dripping with chattering monkeys. Monkeys on the china cabinet and sofa backs, monkeys up the banister, monkeys swinging from the chandelier.
Nominally a Halloween party, it’s really a party at Halloween. Few are invited. Few are costumed, and none so provocatively as Dorian. Of the invited guests, Briony is still wearing her buckskin jacket, but she’s added a headband with a feather and rouged her cheeks into an Indian princess effect, the memory of which will make her cringe in later years. Alanna chose an elaborate—and gauzy—harem costume from Mallabar’s, which has ignited Alan’s censure and his lust. In a concession to the frippery of the event—and to Alanna—Alan is wearing a walrus half-mask. From the outside, he looks like a wizened, bearded (the beard is new) old brown man with obscenely long canine teeth. From the inside, the mask stinks of rubber atomized by the heat of his own breath. He gets a lot of goo-goo-ga-joob from the others as he passes into the kitchen to get another beer. “Are you the walrus?” several ask.
A thunderstorm rose over the lake and enveloped Eadon Lodge one afternoon when the six of them were finishing lunch. Who suggested a game of Monopoly? Mother Briony probably. Lydia, for one, was content to read in the bedroom, rain on the roof being so cozy, but the game was dragged out of the shelf at the bottom of the Victrola anyway. Paul dozed on one of the two old fold-out couches that anchored the living room. The rest gathered around a card table erected under the harsh light of the electrolier and played the game where, rather like life, luck was misinterpreted as virtue. Alan was ruthless, extending into this silly game all the aggression at his command. Immune to mockery, he soured everyone, even his girlfriend, until finally Paul rose from the couch and tipped the board onto the floor.
Dorian realizes too late it was unwise to mention Monopoly. Alan pushes the mask to the top of his head and shoots him a look that he interprets, his eyes swimming, as knowing. The vodka doesn’t dull the jangle of fright along his nerves. Here’s why: Alan came back, unexpectedly, to Eadon Lodge the morning of that last day, from the hotel where he and Alanna had repaired after the shotgun incident. He showed up to help—as he’d promised earlier he would—the boys lift the wooden covering from the old outhouse hole and fill it with the tarpaulined pile of dirt that had been sitting around for several days along with some sod. But he arrived about eleven to find most of the task done and the cottage closed and locked and silent and Lydia appearing—finally—at the door, pale as a wraith.