The Only Café

by Linden MacIntyre

  “Good,” said Doc. “Keep an eye on it, read the wires. You might try to get a sense of the sectarian splits. Use whatever personal contacts you have. Everything in Lebanon is personal. Especially the grudges. But why am I telling you?”

  Cyril was nodding. Wires?

  “Work with Hughes on this. He knows the place inside out. I think he was born over there, back whenever. The other stuff, I wouldn’t waste my time. Arms dealers…nothing that we can contribute from this end. And Sabra and Shatila? Anniversaries of massacres bore the snot out of me.” He stood. “One other thing. The better story might be here in our own backyard. Those young guys who got caught plotting to blow up the spies next door—I’m sure they weren’t the only ones with something like that in the back of their hot little heads. Think about it.”

  Cyril stood. “Sure,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “I’ll get the library to send some stuff to your desk and you can go through it. Summarize it for me. We’re going to be needing a lot of archival stuff. Boil it all down to say, a page, and shot-list the best footage. I think it would be useful for you, just getting to see what other people do. Right?”

  “Sure,” Cyril repeated.

  “And don’t be shy about saying what you think.”

  “Not a problem,” Cyril said.

  3.

  Cyril walked from the office to Aggie’s place, which gave him forty-five minutes for reflection on how he was going to handle her. She’d see his homecoming as some kind of moral victory. Of course she would. It would have been a stretch to say he loved his mother. The mutual dependency of a single-parent household made them more like siblings. But he respected her. She was tough and sentimental in the way of Irish women. Her anger had an overlay of sorrow that made her volatile and difficult to read when she was riled.

  She’d regarded his departure from their home so he could live with Gloria as nothing short of a betrayal, which had led to an epic shouting match about society and sin. It might have left him feeling guilty had he not been so familiar with her tearful rage. He wasn’t exactly afraid of her. He just didn’t like to fight with her because he always lost.

  Cyril knew of only two people who could intimidate her—his father and hers, Pius Lynch, an old coal miner who had learned to channel a natural aggression through murky union politics in Nova Scotia, where she was from. What Pierre and Pius had in common was an ability to impose an overbearing silence on the most agitated situations. With little more than an unflinching stare, they could drain a moment of its passion. The stare would say: this really isn’t worth continuing because of what might well come next.

  Cyril envied that quality, but didn’t have it. He was, as his mother often told him, “too Irish and too Mediterranean.” His flight from Gloria’s had been typically impetuous. Now what?

  She’d said, in the phone message: “I hope you’re okay…I hope you’ll get in touch when you feel up to it…” She’d almost apologized about the books. The beginning of reconciliation? Or mere kindness. No matter. He was on his way back home, to Aggie’s, square one. He couldn’t have imagined this a month ago.

  He was walking through a small urban park, not far from the university. The mid-September air was still heavy with the smog of summer. The park was busy. Students burdened by debts, anxieties and backpacks; a circle of boys, kicking a soccer ball; two black women curating a flock of white kids who were throwing water at each other. On a bench, an older man sat with a pretty blond woman who was conspicuously younger, maybe even Cyril’s age. They were staring straight ahead at nothing in particular, his arm relaxed across her shoulders. Her hands were folded on her lap. Colleagues? Her father? Her lover? Their expressions were too calm to be revealing.

  Cyril stopped, fished his phone from his jacket pocket, speed-dialled Gloria’s number. Got voicemail. “Hi. You’ve reached Gloria Frame. I can’t take your call just now…”

  He was instantly jealous. Where was she? Then he remembered: Friday night, drinks with other first-year associates in commercial litigation. It was routine. Team building, she called it with a roll of her lovely emerald eyes. “Hi,” he said into his phone. “It’s only me. I miss you awfully.” And instantly regretted that he had said it.

  Mary Agnes Lynch lived in a neighbourhood where people mostly left their doors unlocked. Her street was lined with sheltering maples that were ancient, and grand houses built for large families, constructed uniformly of weathered brick but subtly distinguished from each other by a corner tower, or wooden dormer, or verandah. There were oak trees somewhere, probably in backyards, judging from the distinctive leaves that would mysteriously show up on lawns and sidewalks every autumn. Cyril noted that the dead leaves, the great annual ordeal when he was living there, were already starting to appear.

  Growing up on Banting Avenue he’d always been conscious of how few kids there were, which, now that he was older and more observant, probably explained the lack of contact among the residents. Some streets, he knew from friends, become communities. Without children, a street like Banting was just another pretty urban road.

  He’d never seen a fire truck on the street. People aged, ailed and failed here, but never seemed to need an ambulance. He was never able to determine how stricken people, not to mention dead ones, were evacuated without anybody noticing. Families broke down and marriages broke up but when people left the street they did so quietly. The only time that Cyril ever saw a cop car on his mother’s street was on a day in late June 2007, when they got the news that Pierre Cormier was gone.

  Aggie’s door was locked, something new since he’d moved out, perhaps a rare admission of vulnerability. He knelt, tilted the heavy cast-iron planter by the front door, felt under it for the hidden key. No key. He then wrestled it aside impatiently, revealing the rusty circle that marked the spot the awkward ornament had occupied for decades, but there was nothing. He had to ring the doorbell and would wait a good three minutes before he heard her footsteps on a stairway.

  He noted that she had dressed for him in a black turtleneck and dark brown slacks that accentuated her slimness. Aggie paid a lot of attention to her appearance, as is frequently the case with women who are strong, even after abandonment. She had a fine feminine figure maintained by careful eating habits and long daily walks. She also smoked cigarettes for appetite suppression but was beginning to suffer subtle consequences—microscopic lines around the mouth, underneath the eyes—nicotine effects she recognized but, so far, was able to mitigate with cream and powder, though the powder now seemed to highlight facial fuzz he’d never noticed. Her hair, a healthy mass she usually kept bundled high on the back of her head, was auburn, but, it seemed to Cyril, trending toward a more dramatic shade of red.

  He leaned in, she turned a cheek, closed her eyes, he kissed. She turned without a word, took his hand and led him in. He sensed maternal warmth and it made him feel like running.

  She offered a drink and he accepted. “A Scotch. Neat.” Neat meant strong and he felt he needed reinforcement. He sat and waited. And when she came back she had two glasses and the decanter which she placed between them on a coffee table that never ceased to remind him of the terrible spring day twelve years earlier when Pierre Cormier had exited their lives the first time. She stared at him for what seemed to be a long time. Then poked at an ice cube with a long forefinger.

  “I’m glad you’re back,” she said.

  He held up a cautioning hand, smiling. “I don’t know for how long. I’ve been staying with a friend. He said I could move in.”

  “However long,” she said, “I’m glad to see you. We really have to try—”

  “You don’t have to say—”

  “No, I mean to say…I…have to try harder.”

  He sipped his drink, trying to suppress resentment. Her contrition couldn’t quite conceal an irritating smugness. He put the glass back on the coffee table. It had a heavy glass top set in a stainless steel tubular frame. There was a book of paintings by Ken Danby. Kid i
n a hoodie sitting on a shore, looking out. He remembered his father’s feet, firmly planted there. Pierre standing on the coffee table. The golf ball where the book is.

  “When are you going to get rid of this?” he asked, nodding toward the coffee table. “I’d have thought by now…”

  “If you only knew how much we paid for it.”

  “I’m sure you could get your price in a flash. Let me put it on Kijiji or something.”

  “Oh, come on,” she said, with a dismissive wave. “Think of all the history…”

  “Don’t.”

  She was smiling. “You let too many things bother you.”

  He shrugged, remembering how things had bothered her.

  “Do you understand now what I’ve been saying all along?”

  “What have you been saying all along?”

  His mother just shook her head, studying him. “I should have left the mess…the clothes, the books, boxes of them. Just dumped there…”

  “You don’t know her side of it.”

  “There’s no excuse.”

  “She’s under a lot of stress, starting out at a big law firm. You have no idea.”

  “I was married to a lawyer.”

  “You were married to a mining executive.”

  “Let’s not argue. I’m glad to see you. How are things where you are, the new job?”

  “It’s hardly a job, Mom.”

  “You have to start somewhere and I’m glad you got your foot in the door. I’m proud. I tell people…”

  He grimaced but before he could respond, the doorbell rang. “Who can that be,” Aggie said, stood and left the room.

  Loud female voices. He recognized the laugh: Lois. Then his mother sounding like a little girl. Petey, give Grandma a hug. He cringed. Petey. Grandma? His four-year-old half-brother. Quietly he exited the room, through the kitchen, up the back stairway.

  The books were neatly piled in banker’s boxes along a wall in what had been, and now it seemed would again be, his bedroom. He’d counted the books at Gloria’s—there were two hundred and seven of them, textbooks from Pierre’s law school days in Halifax, crime fiction, a three-volume history of Irish nationalism, a gift from Pius Lynch. One title caught his eye, The Most Distressful Country, which might have accurately described a dozen places he was now trying to become familiar with. There were many books about the Middle East. Lois had suggested he take them off her hands when it became clear, at least to her, that Pierre was never coming back.

  He noticed that the lid on one of the boxes had been opened. The diary box—he hadn’t really examined any of them, other than to count them. He carried it to the bed and dumped the journals out. There were twenty-four of them. The earliest were cheap stenographer’s notebooks, the first from 1983. The writing was squiggly Arabic. By book four his father was writing in English that was equally indecipherable to him. He searched through the pile for the year 2000.

  It was a real book with a hard black cover. A daily planner for the epic year. His hand was shaking when he turned to May 26. The entry was written clearly but it was just as unrevealing. Cool clear Friday. Home early. That was it, except for one loaded phrase at the bottom of the page: Over and out.

  He turned the page. May 27. Royal York. Long talk with Ag. Acrimonious. One of those days you don’t forget. Rocket Richard died today.

  Cyril sat for what felt like a long time, staring through his bedroom window. He hadn’t even realized that his father followed hockey. Then he remembered a Christmas when his dad presented him with skates. But he was unable to recall if he’d ever worn them. There was a hockey stick but he did remember that he’d given it away, to someone.

  A massive maple tree stood just outside his window and at night it seemed to breathe aloud, a calming sound that invariably led to a merciful unconsciousness. Over and out. Three words that would sum up the next seven years of all their lives. He took a deep breath, then fished through the pile for the 2007 journal, but he couldn’t find it.

  Cyril waited on the landing at the top of the stairway, listening for voices. Silence. But when he entered the living room they were still there, Aggie and Lois sitting quietly, studying their coffee mugs. The little boy, Pete, was on the floor with a colouring book, scrawling. Cyril was about to retreat but his mother spotted him. “I was wondering where you got to. Say hello to your little brother. Petey, will you look who’s here?”

  The little boy scrambled to his feet, went to his mother, pressed against her thigh. She hoisted him onto her lap. “That’s Cyril,” Lois said. “Your big brother. Say hello to Cyril.” Petey glared. Cyril took a seat just inside the door. “Hi, Lois,” he said.

  Lois smiled and nodded and, as she often did, responded like a ventriloquist, through Petey, now Petey the Puppet. “Hi, big brother Cyril. Someday I’m going to be as big and handsome as you are.” Cyril forced a smile. Pete squirmed out of his mother’s lap and returned to his colouring book.

  At the meeting in the lawyer’s office Lois had seemed tense, distant. A little bit uncertain. Even though she was only, what—Christ, still only twenty-nine—she’d looked much older, very much the melancholy widow. Now she was refreshed, a new hairstyle that flopped off to one side and obscured much of her forehead and right cheek, a side part on the left.

  “You look good, Lois,” he said.

  She smiled. “How is the new job working out?”

  “It’s interesting,” he said.

  “I can imagine.” Her look was an appraisal—of what, he was not entirely sure.

  “Let me refresh your coffee,” Aggie said. “Cyril, can I get you something?”

  Cyril remembered his whisky glass. “I put a drink down somewhere.”

  “It’s on the kitchen counter. You can get us some fresh coffee while you’re up.”

  Lois said, “No more for me. We have to be going. I have a babysitter coming and I want to get him settled down before.” She turned to Cyril. “So have they got you working on any interesting stories?”

  “They’ve got me following the stuff in Syria, the Middle East.”

  “My God,” said Lois. “I hope you aren’t thinking of going.”

  “No fear of that. We have someone in Beirut.”

  “Beirut,” said Lois. “Your dad so wanted to go back there to visit. We were in the middle of planning a trip in 2006, when everything erupted.” She studied the floor for a moment, then remembered Pete. “What do you think, Pete? Should we be going?”

  Aggie’s face had become expressionless. “One thing I never heard him talk about, the old country,” she said.

  “You were gone a while,” his mother said, picking up the coffee cups. “Lois was asking where you’d disappeared to.”

  “What was that about?”

  “Just touching base about the will. Everything is fine.”

  “No fine print? No surprises?”

  “Nothing has changed. She’s been perfectly fair and up front all along. You know that.”

  Cyril laughed. “I remember when you weren’t quite so charitable, when she first informed you she had all the legal power.”

  “That was then. She came through. She really is a good person and you should make an effort to—”

  “I didn’t feel like socializing.”

  “You were upstairs?”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw where I put the books?”

  “Yes.”

  He spotted what was left of his whisky on the counter, near the sink. He found the bottle, refreshed the drink. “You?” he asked. She shook her head.

  “I was looking at the diaries,” he said.

  “Oh God. Maybe that isn’t such a good idea.”

  “There seems to be one missing.”

  “Oh?”

  “The last one, 2007.”

  She shrugged, turned toward the sink. “Don’t look at me. By the way, she has a boyfriend.”

  “Oh?”

  She turned the tap on. “Somebody she met over the I
nternet. If you can imagine. The risks people take. And for what.” She was shaking her head.

  “Mom, what do you remember of the day he left?”

  She turned off the tap, studied him. “Why do you ask?”

  “Do you remember him standing on the coffee table, with the golf club?”

  “Golf club? Standing on a table? You must be dreaming.”

  Cyril was alone in the living room, nursing a third glass of whisky. And Pierre was there again, blind to his son’s existence as it seemed he always had been. Strange how Cyril had so often felt invisible in his father’s presence. Pierre hadn’t even noticed Cyril near the kitchen entrance to the living room. He seemed to be entranced, standing on the precious coffee table. Bare feet, but just the same. The coffee table he wasn’t even supposed to put a drink on without a coaster. His father standing on it. Unbelievable. Perhaps, for once, Cyril wanted to be invisible, cringing there against the wall.

  His dad in jeans and a T-shirt, bare feet. He had a golf club clutched before him. Cyril wasn’t much into golf but it looked like a nine-iron. And there was a ball on the table. Pierre kept tapping at the ball to keep it from rolling, swaying his hips. Then he swung the golf club, swift and hard.

  There was the familiar click and the ball was gone. Cyril cringed before he realized that the patio doors were wide open. The ball sailed through. Then he heard the whack as the ball bounced off the high wooden fence that surrounded their backyard.

  Pierre fished another ball from his jeans pocket, bent low, placed it on the glass before him, tapped it into position, then swung again. Click. Bam, off the fence. His face was calm, the expression satisfied. He bent again. Another ball, another swing. This time a slight metallic scrape and a less clearly articulated click. And no responding bam from the back fence. Instead, a brief silence as the ball cleared the top of the fence, and then a shocking crash, glass shattering next door.