Most Anything You Please

by Trudy Morgan-Cole

  “I hope he’s all right in that place,” Ellen said, not explaining whether she meant Frank in Toronto or young Frankie in the Pen. Her eyes drifted towards Mrs. Stevens’s screen; she was at once annoyed and fascinated by the large screen and the blaring noise of Wheel of Fortune. “What have she got on?” she said as Vanna streeled across the screen in one of her glittery ball gowns. “Sure the whole back of it is wide open, she’d catch her death of cold going out like that.”

  Rachel laughed out loud at the image of Vanna White going out the door into a windy St. John’s night and Nanny Ellen telling her to put on a jacket or she’d freeze. Ellen smiled too; she forgot a lot these days but she was still pretty sharp.

  “What is it like at the shop, are you busy these days?” Ellen asked. In the little silence she looked at Rachel and her own face fell when she saw her great-granddaughter’s confusion. “Oh, you don’t work in the shop, do you?”

  Rachel seized gratefully on this, which had the advantage of being true. “No, I don’t work in the shop,” she said. “Remember, I’m a music teacher?”

  “That’s right, a music teacher.” In fact Rachel had gotten back into doing some of the music therapy stuff on a contract basis this year, but “music teacher” was easier to explain to Ellen so that was what she had settled on. She and Larry had a new album coming out; Ellen liked Rachel’s music and cherished the CDs. She listened to them if someone helped her put them in the CD player, and she would often say, “Your grandpa Wes would have liked this.”

  But Ellen liked to have a proper name to give to someone’s job, and whenever anyone said that Rachel was a singer, Ellen said, “Yes, but she teaches music to children as well.” Sometimes Ellen would add, “Her father is a singer,” although Henry was far less popular and well-known than Larry & Rae. Rachel thought that for her great-grandmother, identifying Henry as a singer was a way of acknowledging that he had failed at normal life, while there was hope for Rachel yet.

  Anyway it had gotten them off the subject of the shop. Sometimes Ellen remembered they had sold the shop and the house; other times she talked as if it was still there, Audrey still behind the counter. It was hard to know what to say at those times. Aunt Treese was a great believer in just playing along; if Ellen mentioned the store as if it was still a going concern, Treese was likely to say yes, she just dropped in there the other day and picked up a bag of potatoes. Audrey and Aunt Marilyn, on the other hand, argued that Ellen didn’t have dementia, she was only forgetful and it was better to keep her anchored in the real world as much as possible. Audrey would say, “No, remember, Mom, we sold the shop. I’m retired now and I must say it’s grand, no worries about opening that place up every morning. The fellow who bought it got the downstairs turned into another apartment and he got them both, upstairs and downstairs, rented out to students from the University. I’m glad to be out of it I don’t mind telling you.”

  You never knew where Ellen’s mind was going to go. One time, after they’d been talking for a good half hour about things completely unrelated to the store or young Frankie—Ellen had, in fact, been telling her about a visit she had from Melissa and how Melissa’s little girl was cute but very spoiled—she had stared off into space for a few moments and then said, loudly and clearly, “That was a shocking thing, what he did. A terrible thing.”

  Rachel was sure Ellen was thinking of young Frankie and what he did to the store, and to the family name. “Thank the Lord your father never lived to see it,” she added, and Rachel understood this, too. Though her father, Henry, was alive and more or less well, she knew that Ellen was likely to say “your father” to any of her grandchildren or great-grandchildren as well as her own children. It was understood that she meant Wes, the father of them all.

  “You’ll never guess who I saw the other day,” Ellen said. Again, this could go in a number of directions. She was still, as Rachel told everyone, pretty sharp, and often the person she had seen was indeed someone who had been in to visit. But she had been known to confuse TV with real life and once spent most of a visit trying to explain to Rachel how Isaac Hynes, who used to work in the butcher’s shop, came in the room every night before she went to bed. The mystery wasn’t solved until Audrey and Rachel were both watching The National together one night at Audrey and Richard’s place, and Audrey realized the striking similarity between Peter Mansbridge on The National and the late Mr. Hynes. So now Rachel just said “Who?” without any idea what to expect.

  “That little one you used to go around with. That one Taylor, you know? Haven’t laid eyes on her for years, but she was in here the other day.”

  Oh, another misplaced memory. Rachel still felt a little jab below the breastbone when she thought of Vicky Taylor. Everyone grew away from their high-school friends and it was likely that if there hadn’t been any sharp break between them, she and Vicky might not be friends anymore anyway. Still she missed Vicky, regretted how it had all ended. “Poor Dan Taylor,” Ellen said aloud, echoing Rachel’s thoughts. “I don’t suppose his wife and youngsters ever got over that. But of course I said nothing about that to the little one when she was in.”

  “What was she in for? Just to say hello?” Rachel wanted to play along, to imagine a world where Vicky Taylor might walk through the door and they might renew their friendship.

  “She’s with one of the churches,” Ellen said. “Church of England, I think. Did you know they got lady ministers now?”

  This was so unexpected, so unlike anything Ellen might come up with to account for an imaginary visit from a long- vanished neighbour, that it gave Rachel a moment’s pause. She asked one of the RNs if there was a list anywhere of the chaplains from the different churches who visited the nursing home. It took some time to dig up the list, but the nurse found it at last, a typewritten, many-times-folded piece of paper in a drawer. Under “Anglican” three names were listed, one of which was the Reverend Victoria Mills. Mills could be a married name, or Victoria could be a sheer coincidence, of course.

  It was not, in fact, a coincidence, though it took Rachel a while to track her down. “I’m half afraid,” she admitted to Larry. “It’s been years. But I’ve always wondered what happened to her. An Anglican minister is the last thing I would have guessed. I’d have thought of topless dancer or corporate CEO before I’d have come up with that one.”

  “Well, you don’t know for sure it’s her,” Larry said.

  Finally Rachel dropped by the chaplaincy office on one of her visits and saw that each of the visiting chaplains had a little pigeonhole there, and she dropped in a note for the Reverend Victoria Mills to ask if she used to be Vicky Taylor from Hennebury Place. They met by accident, in the hallway outside someone else’s room when Rachel had gone to get her great-grandmother an ice cream bar from the freezer near the nurse’s station.

  “Rachel,” said the ash-blonde woman. They were the same age, of course, but Vicky looked more adult, like a proper grown-up in a nice blouse and skirt and heels. The clerical collar was very discreet, peeking out at the neck of her navy blue blouse. “I got your note, I’ve been meaning to call,” Vicky said, which Rachel guessed was a polite lie.

  “Nanny said you’d been in to see her. I mean she said it was you, but she gets confused sometimes, and I—you know, I hadn’t heard anything about you in years so I didn’t think…and the name…”

  “Mills was my married name,” Vicky said. “I’m not married anymore. I only moved back here just over a year ago. You’re doing well though—my sister Karen told me she saw you perform at the Folk Festival. She sent me one of your CDs.”

  “Yeah, it’s been…um, you know, music is a hard business, kind of, but my…Larry’s very talented, and very focused on getting our stuff out there, so I guess I’ve been lucky that way. How about you, how did you…?” Rachel waved her hand vaguely towards the clerical collar, and Vicky put a hand to her throat and laughed.

  “Oh, tha
t’s a long story. I know it’s not what you’d expect, but…well, we should go have a drink sometime and I’ll tell you all about it. No, really, we should. I’d like to catch up. I feel bad about the way we drifted apart, but, you know, it was a really rough time. I wasn’t thinking all that much about other people.”

  If they’d met in the mall or something, that might have been it—the way you say you’re going to catch up, and exchange phone numbers, and then never see each other again. But because Vicky did have a regular visiting schedule at St. Luke’s, their paths crossed often enough that it eventually made sense for them just to meet up and have that drink. Sometimes, Rachel knew, re-connecting with an old friend gave you just enough material for one evening over drinks: that had been the way when she met up with Sharla on a trip to Halifax. But it wasn’t like that with Vicky. Something of what made them click together all those years ago was still there, and one drink turned into an occasional evening out together.

  “So it works out kind of nice that you have a friend who’s an actual priest,” Larry said. “I mean, Anglican, but still.”

  Rachel was at the sink washing their supper dishes. They owned the Gower Street house now, more or less—she used the money Audrey gave her from the sale of the house to put a solid down payment so that the mortgage was no more than what their rent used to be. They rented out the top floor, and someday, if they ever had money, they planned to do the place up properly. A room on the first floor that used to be a parlour was now a studio suitable for their own practice and their students’ lessons. They had talked over all the possibilities when they got the money, but without the connection to the old store in Rabbittown, Rachel found she wasn’t actually that interested in owning a business. What she really wanted was a home.

  “Why, you think I need a good influence in my life or something?” she asked.

  “No, I think we need someone to marry us. I mean sure, Paddy offered to do it, he claims he’s some kind of minister but I’m pretty sure this is something he wrote away for, had to send in six box tops.” Paddy was Larry’s younger brother. “My mother’s going to be crying anyway if it’s not a proper mass with a real priest, but maybe an Anglican minister will be better than nothing.”

  “You think I should ask Vicky to marry us?” It wasn’t a bad idea, but it also wasn’t what was on Rachel’s mind at the moment. When she thought about reconnecting with Vicky, picking up those loose threads and weaving them into the pattern of her adult life, she thought about other loose ends. “I’m going over to see Henry tonight,” she told Larry.

  “Cool, I’ve got some CD’s I want to bring over.”

  “I’ll take them for you. I mean, if it’s OK—I just kind of want to talk to him alone.”

  “Sure.” Rachel had always been glad that Larry got on so well with her father, mainly because it meant she rarely had to be alone with Henry. But Larry didn’t seem surprised that, out of the blue, she wanted to go visit Henry on her own.

  After the dishes were cleared away she walked up to his place, which was only a couple of blocks from the old store, a basement apartment on Salisbury Street which Rachel thought was the dingiest place on earth. It seemed to suit Henry, though. On the step outside his apartment door she paused, wondering if she should have asked him to meet her down at Hava Java for a coffee or something. But no. She’d been putting off this conversation—they both had—ever since he came home. Nearly three years. But it was time to talk.

  Rachel knocked on her father’s door.

  AUDREY

  “You look lovely,” said Richard. “For all the worrying you did about it.”

  In the end, Audrey went to the Model Shop and said, “Grandmother of the bride, but the bride’s not wearing white, she got some kind of long hippie skirt on, and the wedding is in Bannerman Park.” And the woman at the Model Shop had exactly the right dress for that. Richard looked lovely in a gray suit with a nice dark red tie. If Rachel and Larry and all their musician friends wanted to show up looking like a bunch of hobos, that was their business. If they wanted to get married in Bannerman Park when there was rain in the forecast, that was their worry. Audrey had a lovely dress and a handsome man by her side, and that was all she needed to bring to the party.

  Despite the forecast, it didn’t rain. They pulled into the parking lot at one-thirty to find a crowd of Rachel and Larry’s friends putting up folding chairs, and a girl playing the violin up in the bandstand. It was overcast and windy, but there were a few slivers of blue in the sky. Maybe Rachel would be the bride the sun shone on after all. Audrey and Richard sat in the front row, their chairs marked out by ribbons. The rest of the family arrived: Alf and Treese in the van with Ellen and her wheelchair; Marilyn and George; June and Norm; the various cousins. A whole rowdy bunch of Larry’s relatives with one elderly lady who raised her cranky voice saying, “What kind of a wedding is this, why didn’t they have it at St. Patrick’s?” Hearing the old cat complain made Audrey stubbornly determined to have a good time, no matter how queer a wedding it was.

  There was a bunch more of Rachel and Larry’s friends, and young Vicky Taylor in one of them Anglican priest’s robes. Neither Audrey nor Ellen was completely sure that Vicky could be a real minister, but Rachel insisted she was going to marry them, and like the outdoor venue and everything else, she was determined to have her way.

  Henry, who had refused to put on a suit but was wearing a decent, black button-down shirt with clean jeans, came and sat next to Audrey and Richard. Everybody was settled now, the violin girl joined by a couple of more players as the music built up a bit louder. And here they came down the path, Rachel and Larry hand in hand. She wouldn’t have her father walk her down the aisle; that was foolishness, she told Henry. “I’m a grown woman. Nobody’s giving me away. Larry and I are coming together to get married, that’s the only way it makes sense.” Rachel looked down at them as she passed and Audrey remembered that she had also added, “If I was going to have anyone give me away it’d be Nan—you know that.”

  Well. That was as it should be, Audrey thought. She’d feel foolish actually walking her down the aisle, or the path or whatever, but Rachel said it was her place to do it, and that was good enough.

  musical interlude

  HENRY HOLLOWAY

  —Now, this is a song my grandfather, Wes Holloway, used to sing, and I imagine Rachel might have heard it when she was so little she didn’t even know it was getting tucked away in her memory. But it’s the song she asked me to sing today, and it’s a pleasure to sing it for two young people who finally managed to sight their heart’s delight.

  I worked over that intro a bit, let me tell you. There’s a lot I’d like to say, and a lot I can’t say, about the song and the reason she chose it, about me and Rachel and all that water under the bridge. But she’s here now, hand in hand with Larry, vows said and everyone watching us. And this is the one thing she wanted me to do at her wedding.

  Play the first chord, lean in to the mic.

  Ye ladies and ye gentlemen, I pray you lend an ear

  While I locate the residence of a lovely charmer dear ...

  It’s no lie. This was one of Pop’s old songs, and maybe that’s where Rachel first heard it. As for the other reason she wanted it, well, that’s between the two of us. What it took for her to finally break down and ask about Stella! And what did I have to tell her, after all these years? That she was pretty, and clever, and I loved her once, and she kind of fell apart after having a baby at sixteen. Like anyone might.

  How can you be so cruel to part me from my love?

  Her tender heart beats in her breast as constant as the dove.

  —She loved you.

  That’s what I told Rachel, and I’m almost sure it’s true.

  She told me about the song, how it was like a charm for her. I never let on that Audrey got it wrong, that it was Outer Cove and not Logy Bay, a few miles furth
er down the road, where Stella drove the car off the cliffs. She’s Rachel’s Star of Logy Bay, and if a girl can’t have even one memory of her mother, she might as well have a song.

  And if she can’t have a father with enough sense and guts to stick around and rear her up, well, she had something better. She had a grandmother, a whole family, who stepped in and did the job instead. I might not be much of a father or much of a singer, if it comes to that, but if it’s what she wants, I’ll sing that old song for her today, for two people who are far better musicians than I could ever have dreamed of being. In the end, I never had that much to give, but this is what she asked me for.

  May the heavens above shine down their love

  On the Star of Logy Bay.

  coda

  SOMEONE WILL ENTER THE PEARLY GATES

  RACHEL AND ELLEN

  Someone will enter the pearly gates

  By and by, by and by

  I’ve been singing to her, though I don’t know if she hears me. In the last few days her face has changed. It’s as if a switch has been turned off, though the switch that keeps breath going into and out of her lungs is still on. Until Wednesday, I could still see a light in her eyes, a smile when I walked into the room. Now I sit by, press the button to adjust the height of the bed to where I can comfortably lean on it and take her hand, and Nanny Ellen doesn’t stir or mumble or open her eyes. A nurse looks into the room, smiles.