In this pompous and joyless city of police and moral perfection and one man stands
Where you are brutally thrown out of beer parlours for standing where no man stands
Where the pigeons roam free and the police listen to each pigeon’s demands
And they are taking down the beautiful houses once cared for with loving hands
But still the old bandstand stands where no band stands.
Chapter 26
“…Stalked Fatefully…”
—AND TO CHEER HER up because they happened also to be on their way to visit Tommy in hospital. Tommy’s school term had already begun when they left the beach for town but he’d spend a Sunday afternoon with them in Stanley Park. He cracked two ribs when the supporting chains of a swing they’d left him to play on alone for a few minutes had given way. His injury by reflex action had caused a colonic complication, not apparently serious, but giving anxiety enough, and the boy considerable pain.
But Ethan’s poem was not having the right effect.
And though, to their relief, Tommy seemed much better, surrounded by grisly comic books he was sitting up in bed between the legend Tasting and a portrait of the infant Jesus, in whose hand were two shingle nails, being shown by St. Joseph how to build a cross. On their way back from the hospital to the apartment Jacqueline became more irritable and depressed than ever.
Lex talionis, Ethan thought again, whereby if under certain circumstances a man accidentally brought about the death of a child, not he, but his child must be killed. But Tommy had not been killed. What if he had been killed? What if his injury should cause complications that lasted for life or, if he should take a turn for the worse, the now…Perhaps poor Jacqueline was just depressed because it was the same damn hospital where she’d had her hysterectomy. Moreover she’d had another dreary day, this time in his company, of fruitless house-searching. The sight of that house in its final death throes had put the lid on things.
“It’s all the fault of the damn beach,” she broke out suddenly.
“You can’t blame Tommy’s accident on the beach.”
“Yes, I can. If we hadn’t been quarreling about it in the park that Sunday we wouldn’t have left him alone on the swing. And I can’t see why he doesn’t want to stop with us at the apartment if it’s not because he’s got the idea that home’s a bad place anyhow.”
“They only accepted him at St. Jude’s on condition he’d board there…And we only got the apartment on condition we’d have no children with us.”
“But he doesn’t even like to visit us here.”
“Who would?”
“Maybe if we can get a decent house we can live in for a change it’ll be different.”
“Live in!…We’ll never find a better place in a million years than our little cabin.”
And the quarrel really blazed out into the open when they got back to the apartment, which Ethan had entered however this time with a sigh of relief like a man going to bed, or one who has at last eluded his enemies for a while; even if his enemy was only a beard, he’d felt its unusually hot pursuit of him this afternoon.
“What you don’t see is that I’m only too glad to get away from your goddam shack!” she burst out at him, her eyes looking black and wild: she was in what they called her “wild Assiniboine mood”; but the horrible thing about such quarrels was that they had a dramatic falsity and banality that seemed implicit in the very life they were quarreling about, viewed from the corroding standpoint of the city with no respect for the religio loci!
It was as if they had exchanged sunlight on water for photographs of sunlight on water, cool commotion of blowing grasses and pennyroyal, or reeds and the rippling waters, the soaring love with which they followed migrating birds, for the tragic incidental music that always accompanies documentaries involving blowing grasses, rippling waters and migrating birds, and soon they would not be able to have told the difference, perhaps prefer the incidental music for which they had to be as thankful for as the films. Soon they might not even have that.
“And anyhow what right have you to identify life in this apartment with life in a new house?”
“God forbid I should do that. And please don’t call it a goddam shack.”
“Why don’t you give me a chance? Look here, Ethan Llewelyn, what you’ve selfishly overlooked is the fact that that beastly cook-stove was a tyranny for a woman, that the lack of conveniences was much harder on me—”
“Though not so damned hard as you make out a case for their being.”
Ethan was remorseful. What he had really overlooked—he thought he only saw it now—was that the threat of eviction had poisoned their life in Eridanus for Jacqueline more completely and fatefully perhaps than for him, to such an extent (and here came all these thoughts again, here in the bus) that she had not been able to live without transferring herself in advance to the thought of another home: and while he had felt there was something traitorous in the facility with which she was able to do this, the truth seemed—for under her hands the “goddam shack” had become beautiful, or more beautiful, that in order to bear the loss of Eridanus and their life there—and it was the Barkerville all over again (and in the bus it’s the recalcitrating words about the Barkerville all over again, bound to these thoughts like Ixion to his wheel) she had to pretend. Or were they simply engaged in some elaborate form of ignoratio elenchi? not talking about the cabin at all, Tommy being the point at issue, their anxiety for him become their anxiety about the beach. Or was there some other underground process of substitution at work, some buried jealousy on her part, or the cabin become the child they could not have? Moreover not even the threat of eviction had really poisoned that life, he saw. He was capable of thinking of it now, quite as if it still existed, with a boundless impatience, an immeasurable longing—
“And I did hate it! Do hate it—Hate it! Hate it! Hate it!”
Ethan was watching her as she said this, her furious dark eyes, her sweet sleek cap of dark hair that curled slightly around her face; she was wearing a beige, some sort of beige, turtleneck sweater, and a full black skirt with a wide red belt and high-heeled red shoes—in the country she wore slacks oftener than shorts and he’d forgotten, for a moment, what pretty feet and beautiful legs she had—and as she spun around in her anger, her skirt flying out like a dancer’s, her hair flew out a little bit from her head, and she almost stamped like a child. Though Ethan wanted to lose his temper still further, he was extraordinarily excited, as well as angry, and picking her up, Jacqueline still half fighting with him, and how light and little she felt—he tottered with her to bed in that stifling apartment in which one felt sealed as in a tomb.
“Tommy hated it anyway,” said Jacqueline later, still not quite repentant.
“Do you remember last Hallowe’en?”
Jacqueline sighed.
“He can’t have hated the prospect of the beach so much,” Ethan went on, “since he wangled the whole weekend off from St. Jude’s for his Hallowe’en celebration.”
“Do you remember how worried the poor child was all day it was going to rain?”
“Do you remember how worried we were?”
“Do you remember—”
“Do you—”
The cloudy October night with the inlet dark and Styx-like. And the mountains and mountain shadows immense in the gloom. And themselves alone on the beach, not one light in the fishermen’s cottages, but with such a sense of from the dark night withdrawn, and of love within the cabin and of being a little family so happy in one another. While outside the salmon had stopped jumping, and the only sound was a barking dog; or the distant sounds of foreign firecrackers like faint machine-gun fire from the opposite bank. And the refinery lights too bright, still portending rain.
And Tommy’s excitement at the rockets all lined up on the windowsill to go to the moon: and the wonderful names of the fireworks: the Brocks Crystal Palace, Jack-in-the-Box, the volcano-shaped Volcano, wrapped in black and orang
e paper, with a pattern of irrelevant lightning flashes, the Illuminated Light cylinder dressed in red and green, the Flower Pot, and the Electric Fountain: and the Golden Rain, the Aurora and the Glittering Cascade; the Guy Fawkes Mine, and most exciting of all, the Three-Bead Hooter, from Hong Kong, manufactured by Kwong Lee Duck and Co.
Jacqueline first lighted a Titania’s Magic Wand, two Titania’s Magic Wands, it being as if, she said, God were trying out a few experimental worlds and stars and suns and calculating how long they would last, and whether the aesthetic principle involved could somehow outlast the worlds He created, save did that matter? asked Ethan, since the form of the snowflake was within, mattered even less, by the way, since both were nearly duds, except to Tommy, who began to assume an air of ruin, which was hurtful, for his parents felt themselves to be on trial, were perhaps even trying to woo him to the beach.
But still it hadn’t rained anyhow. So for safety they began to set the fireworks off, shooting them out to sea, from a child’s bucket filled with sand, one of their fire extinguishers, which they placed at the end of the pier where Jacqueline, from the glow of her lighted punk, charged an object named the Midnight Sun that, in the bucket, looked like a sharply cone-shaped dunce’s hat in a Mexican lake bed. Not very successful. Then Ethan produced a livid beer parlour of malodorous light, from which issued a hurricane of flying onions and Christmas bells, a horrendously beautiful spectacle, with the luminous balls slanting then bouncing upon the pier, as they were not meant to do, and dying so impressively that Tommy observed, “What I’d like to do is bang, boom!”
So Jacqueline made a magic of cerise fire, which exploded into a fountain of multitudinous silver and gold fire and sparks that elicited from their son the response, “That’s better than the sparkler.” And Jacqueline, trying to conceal her disappointment, saying, but with such an air of being importantly a mother that Ethan had to laugh:
“Now I want you to notice the smell of the punk, Tommy. Something like a peculiar incense. It has a smell so completely its own. You light your punk and it just glows on the end.”
And then, Mount Vesuvius erupting backwards, the Glittering Cascade a mere trickle, the Roman Candles short-circuiting, the Guy Fawkes Mine a complete dud, and Tommy’s disappointment that they hadn’t a Catherine Wheel.
“I had one and then I put it back,” Jacqueline explained, “because I decided it was too dangerous.”
“Yes, old man,” said Ethan, “you have to nail it to a post and when it spins, if it comes off, it can shoot off in any direction, and might even set fire to the house.”
Then Tommy, soon mollified with some more sparklers, saying, “Mother, you look just like the Statue of Liberty.” And not being allowed to set off the larger fireworks, setting off two sparklers spluttering at once himself and dancing madly round the platform with them, yelling, “Yippee, I’m an Indian!” And then getting more and more excited. “I want the one that’s made in Hong Kong. I like particularly the Three-Bead Boomer.”
“Isn’t any Boomer, old chap. What you mean’s the Three Bead-Hooter. Here we are. Made in Hong Kong.”
“That’s just what I meant, that old Three-Bead Hooter—”
And Jacqueline, at the end of the pier, bending backwards away from the sputtering fuse, having touched her glowing punk to it, in a manner that, in the opposite direction exactly balanced the seaward declension of the rocket, that neither boomed nor hooted, but was not less impressive for that, so Tommy said;
“Now it’s your turn to pick a firework, Daddy, Daddy—”
And Jacqueline, like a child herself saying, “Dozens! Such wonderful names!”
And the Electric Fountain, seeming for at least five minutes to be a dud too, only dull red fiery worm, then suddenly Zip: burgeoning forth magnificently into a shower of golden fountainous stars, expiring in a steaming livid Paracutin, and ending in a fizzle.
“It looked like Versailles and lasted no longer than the treaty.”
But the rain still holding off and the evening becoming triumphant, with Tommy, getting more and more excited, like a drunkard who can’t stand the space between drinks, crying, “Choose a firework! Choose a firework!” wanting them to go off continuously.
And Jacqueline saying, “I just want them to go on.”
And himself, like Tommy, who wanted them to go on. And the ecstatic moments of light like those burgeoning fountains and exploding fireworks that never unhappily did go on.
“Let me be your angel…Didn’t I find you the little house on the beach in the first place?”
“Ah yes…”
Jacqueline had been lying facing him with her head on her arm; now she raised herself on one elbow, and though he couldn’t see her face very well in the twilight, for the days were drawing in (he had pulled the curtain and they hadn’t, as they still thought of it, “lit the lamps”; maybe out of habit, for lighting the pretty blue and silver and copper lamps at dusk had been a ritualistic action demanding some concentration and care). Jacqueline’s eyes looked enormous and pleading.
“That’s what we’re both trying to do, my heart’s darling.”
“You don’t give me much cooperation.”
“And what a hope there seems to be!”
Post coitum omne animal triste est…That again was not always true in the cabin. It could be succeeded just as well by exhilaration, bursts of humor, and purification of a swim, racing along back to the house looming up above you, your eyes in a sea squall, dizzied with mountains and sea gulls and pines. But who wanted to be exhilarated in a bewhiskered slippery bathtub with a view of the toilet seat?
But there was another objective reason for Ethan’s gloom that began to fasten on him as if it were that octopus which lived in the aquarium. When he said they’d never find such a house as their cabin in a million years he really meant it. Ethan simply did not believe that the sort of conjunction of favoring yet opposing circumstances which had maintained Eridanus’ existence in balance for so long could arise again, or be discovered elsewhere to have arisen. Another Eridanus was not to be found. Where else could you find the freedom, the privacy, the absolute privacy, and yet when you needed it, the friendliness, not too far, not too near, where else find all man’s simple needs so simply satisfied? It was unique: in one’s praise, as in another’s denunciation, as when the papers cruelly said, “No other city in the Pacific Northwest has stood for such a disgrace to their waterfront! Look at Seattle! Put these hovels that look like so many marine growths to the torch and keep going!”
And now, in October again, when the summer people had gone and Eridanus was nearly deserted, the tugboat’s whistles sounding through the fog over the water; in the forest the sunlight striking down through patches of fog, making oases of celestial light, the silence, the steepness of the forest path, the moss growing on the bark of the trees reaching out of sight, the ferns growing in the moss: and the silence of the pretty little cottages where such simplicity and happiness lived for a moment, but don’t you believe it! There is nothing that the brute blind muzzle of the world loves to do more than destroy this kind of happiness, once it has rooted it out, in the name of the future it cannot see.
“Ethan, look here,” Jacqueline was shaking his arm, as they lay on the bed, smoking. “Ethan—It’s absolutely ridiculous to say we can’t find another place where we could be just as happy. It may be different, it may not be another Eridanus, but even Jean Taschereau said—”
“I know what you’re going to say. That British Columbia is a large place. About twice as large as France, in fact. And that because Jean Taschereau found somewhere up in the dry belt where you can still stake a claim and buy land for two dollars an acre on some lakeshore or other, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t. But I hate lakes, and so do you, after living by the sea—salt water I mean—and anyhow the whole thing would be far too isolated, I don’t want to bury you in the wilderness.”
For the paradox was that it was humanity, sparsely represented as it mi
ght be, that had given Eridanus its beauty, not nature alone.
“What!” Jacqueline cried, sitting straight up in bed. “Do you mean to lie there and tell me that Eridanus was not isolated, that you were not burying me out there in that Christ-awful godforsaken hole!” She lay down again abruptly, groaning, while Ethan, wounded, wrestled with this further ambiguity. “To you that was not your idea of burying me in the wilderness?”
“Not altogether. We were near enough to here, to Vancouver—”
“Oh God! Vancouver! on Hangover—If that’s not wilderness I don’t know what is. You have only to step off the highway into that forest beyond McHeath Road to be lost—hikers are always getting lost—we got lost—”
“—Where we could go to concerts.” (Ethan reflected that they’d been to only two this year at that, and now the season was over.) “And haven’t you just reminded me that you found the godforsaken hole?”
“Oh!”
“You couldn’t see so many intelligent and brilliantly produced plays in a London season as we’ve seen here in the last year,” said Ethan, who now would even defend the city in order to defend Eridanus. “I found it exciting to be in at the birth of a new theatre in this country.”
“Bah!” Jacqueline now automatically took the other side. “Just give it a few more months and those enthusiastic amateurs will be back to Noel Coward again.”
“Of course I never dreamed when we saw Sartre’s No Exit a few months ago that we were going to find ourselves in exactly that same hellish apartment of his.”
“If it’s hellish it’s largely because you make it so.”
“They’ve had some first-rate exhibitions at the art gallery. Nobody, Jacqueline, whose mind was not absolutely provincial could take a snobbish attitude toward that, even though most Canadians seem to…No, I didn’t ‘bury you in the wilderness.’ ”
“I don’t see how anyone could have a more provincial attitude than yours is.”
“Oh, come off it, Jacqueline. What with your misology and my misoneism—”
October Ferry to Gabriola Page 20