Next Life Might Be Kinder

by Howard Norman

“Yes, just read what it says.”

  In France it was I saved

  my brother Donald McMillian’s life,

  not vice versa.

  It was I carried him

  back to the trench.

  God as my witness.

  —Henry McMillian

  “Beautiful language,” I said.

  “Beautiful language revealing a big, nasty family secret. And as part of my research, I found out that Henry McMillian—may he rest in peace here—Henry and his older brother, Donald, both served in the same Canadian infantry unit in France during World War I. Their family was close to the Dewis family, who at one time lived in Port Medway but now live in Advocate Harbor, up along the Bay of Fundy. My research took me up to Advocate Harbor. Want to hear what I transcribed from Mrs. Annie Dewis, age eighty-one, up there?”

  “Very much.”

  We went back inside the library. Bethany Dawson opened a metal cabinet and took out a notebook. She sat at her desk and paged through it until she found the right entry. “Okay,” she said, “this is from Annie Dewis, transcribed from a tape recording. I can’t do her voice justice, but here goes:

  Donald McMillian simply couldn’t live down the shame of it. It ate away at him that he’d lied. All those years about it being him who saved his brother Henry’s life. It was Henry, by the way, who suffered the mustard-gas cough, whereas Donald breathed freely. In 1926 Henry McMillian drowned off a lobster boat, gone missing into perpetuity. His marker is down to Port Medway. So his grave is empty, having died at sea. He died angry at his brother, which is awfully sad, to my mind. Some say it was innocent drunken carelessness, the two brothers out in the lobster boat that morning. But those who say that are fools, too much faith in mankind. And you know, folks who have too much faith in mankind, they live everywhere, not just in Nova Scotia.

  Rarely, but still now and then, a murder visits our province. My opinion? This was a brother murdering a brother, like in the Bible. Bible, with the exception of it occurring on a lobster boat. As for proof of it being a murder, all the proof I ever needed was the fact that shortly after Henry drowned, Donald married Henry’s wife, Evie. They got married in Peggy’s Cove, not at home. No, they eloped to Peggy’s Cove! They just came back and announced, “Well, we’re married now.” Their courtship was dishonest. How about those sour apples?

  Now, they waited months to have the service, in case the body washed up, but it never did. So when Henry McMillian was laid to rest by sermon only—since the body’s not in the grave—when his spirit was laid to rest in the ground, there was a fellow named Baron Wormser, a real artist with a chisel, he could chisel an epitaph in either vertical-horizontal traditional print or beautiful cursive, just like on a Hallmark greeting card. Anyway, Baron Wormser had been paid three years in advance by Henry McMillian himself, and since you’ve already copied out what it says on Henry’s marker, you know the exact words Mr. Wormser was obligated to chisel. He was obligated to carry out Henry McMillian’s wishes for retribution, those wishes being signed, sealed, and delivered in a legal contract. And Mr. Wormser being a dignified person with pride in his profession, properly did it, properly under the watchful eyes of God. I attended graveside, and let me tell you that when everyone went down to the cemetery and read those words you could have knocked every last person over with a feather. You’d just have to ask the Lord: how did Henry McMillian keep that to himself all those years? The discipline of the righteous sometimes knows no bounds. Kept his brotherly heroic act in France to himself all those years. And here’s the icing on the cake. The very day that Henry’s spirit was laid to rest, his brother Donald purchased a new pair of scissors. Then he secured those scissors in the attic window in his and Evie’s house, which formerly was the house Evie and Henry lived in. You had better believe that Donald prayed every night that the scissors worked. Scissors in the window—you want to know what that’s all about? Well, it has to do with ghosts. A scissors placed to keep an attic window shut keeps out unwanted ghosts. And it keeps wanted ghosts in. Wanted, unwanted. The scissors let the house enforce the distinction. Tell me: why would anyone not believe Henry McMillian? Come now, why would anyone lie on their own gravestone?

  Bethany allowed this story to register a moment, then asked if I’d like a copy of the notebook pages. “For your reading pleasure,” she said, “on a rainy night.” I said yes, and she made one on the Xerox machine near her desk, then returned the notebook to the file cabinet. When she sat behind her desk again, she said, “And now I have a question for you, if you don’t mind. When we first spoke on the telephone, you said you didn’t think there’d be much worry about theft—of library books.”

  “Yes, I remember saying something to that effect.”

  “I only mention it because, in the whole time I’ve been librarian here, there’s never been a book stolen. Oh, certainly there’s been some absent-mindedness. People forget about a book for a week or two past the due date. That’s to be expected. Two years ago Philip Slayton accidentally took a book to Africa for a month—well, maybe not accidentally, but not on purpose with ill intent. On his return, once he got over jet-lag, he settled the full fine. But theft of books? No, we hadn’t had that until around a year ago, I think it was, give or take a month . . .”

  “What happened then?”

  “Eleven books suddenly gone missing. We were in the middle of an inventory. One of our volunteers brought the titles to my attention. You see, the first year I was librarian, a woman named Mary Evans—she’s in the cemetery by the wharf—you may have noticed we have the Mary Evans Children’s Reading Room. Port Medway paid for the plaque out of public funds. Well, Mary Evans donated her personal library. It was more personal than most, because it had so many of the books she herself read as a child. She even spoke to several elementary school classes here in the library. A very pleasant woman.”

  “Maybe some kid’s too embarrassed to return the books.”

  “Still, it’s just so selfish. I mean, a library’s for everyone. I mentioned the incident to Pastor Eversall, and he got word out through church bulletins. Then there’s the gossip route, comes useful for such purposes. No reward and no punishment, that was the best policy, I felt. Just leave the books on the front stoop. Who cares as long as they’re returned. But so far they haven’t been.”

  “I go to yard sales all around the province,” I said. “I like to go to used-book stores. I’ll keep an eye out.”

  “You’d need the titles for that, wouldn’t you.”

  “Oh, yes, what was I thinking? The titles.”

  She disappeared for a few minutes. When she returned she had the piece of paper on which she’d written the titles.

  “I took up a lot of your time today,” I said.

  “It’s my job to have my time taken up. By library business.”

  I put the list in my shirt pocket, and when I got back to the cottage, I tacked it to the corkboard above the telephone in the kitchen.

  Time May Be Going Not in a Straight Line

  I CONTINUE TO ORGANIZE and file Elizabeth’s notes; I want them all readily available should she request something. Just this morning I found notes marked “Test of Courage,” which included the following passage from The Victorian Chaise-Longue:

  Time may be going not in a straight line but in all directions and in no direction, and God may have changed the universe so that it is my body that lies here and no dream, or not my body and still a dream from which I shall be freed.

  The test of courage is still valid, said her conscience, you must know, you must look. So she lifted her head and looked down at her body.

  There, framed by the crumpled clothes, set on ribs barely covered with skin, rose two small breasts. My breasts? cried Melanie, or not my breasts? Dare I touch them, these breasts that may be mine and alive, or will they crumble, will they rot if I touch them with my living hands, my hands on long-dead breasts? These are whiter than mine, she said, smaller, sadder than mine, and in a convulsive move
ment she laid her hands beneath them and they did not rot, small hot living breasts, and, pulsing through them, the too-fast-beating heart.

  One night in the Essex Hotel, Elizabeth came to bed quite late but I was still awake, reading, which book I can’t recall. “What I love most deeply about Marghanita Laski’s novel,” she said, “is how you discover the relationship between unforeseen psychological incidents and the memories they cause, and how Melanie finally realizes what is happening to her. It’s all so upsetting and so exciting and so strange. Some days, it’s like I live in this book and at night I visit us here in the hotel. Do I seem locatable to you, darling? Am I all present and accounted for? Because if I’m not, I’ll toss this goddamn novel in the trash and do something else. I want to be here with you. With us. Am I?”

  “You can’t get through this dissertation, Elizabeth, without being preoccupied. You want to teach at university. How else can you go about things but the way you’re already doing?”

  “The part I’ve been most obsessed with recently”—she picked up the novel from her desk and read the above paragraphs—“it’s like Melanie exists between being a woman and the ghost of a woman. It’s something in between. I have to think it through.”

  Elizabeth lifted her nightgown over her head. She drew my hands to her breasts. “Just touch, here.” She had her eyes closed. It was as if she was trying not only to banish the paragraphs, but to make herself be locatable.

  “With your mouth now,” she said.

  The Fifth Lindy Lesson

  I PRACTICED TO THE Boswell Sisters album, usually when Elizabeth was at the library. I even purchased a used herringbone sports coat at Harold’s Haberdashery (whose sign read, A Touch of the Old Country) on Sackville Street. “All first-time customers get a tie thrown in gratis,” Harold himself said. I was wearing the sports coat when Elizabeth came back from some errand or other. We moved the chaise longue aside and practiced the lindy. “I’d say we’re somewhere between intermediate and advanced,” she said when we sat down for a late dinner. “Though I’ve never seen advanced.”

  Then came the fifth lesson. It had been two weeks since the last one. Arnie Moran had, according to the note he left in our hotel mail slot, “suffered the grippe” and had had to postpone the previous week’s lesson. This night, Elizabeth and I got all gussied up and had a glass of wine before going down to the ballroom.

  On the bandstand Arnie Moran was facing away from the students. When he turned, we saw that his nose was heavily bandaged, and under the bandage was a metal clamp of some sort. Elizabeth said, “That doesn’t look like the grippe to me.” He stepped up to the microphone and said, “Yowza! Yowza! Yowza! I’m risen up from my sickbed and raring to go! Let’s cut a rug!”

  Once the music started, it struck me that Arnie had become more aggressively exacting in his hands-on instructions. Twice he cut in on couples, exiling the man rather crudely and being very critical of the woman’s steps. When he said to Elizabeth, “You look like you have a stomachache—happy thoughts now, happy heart,” Elizabeth said, “Back off!”

  Arnie did back off, but he didn’t like it one bit. When he got to the microphone he offered a comment: “A few lessons under their belt and some people think they’re ready for a dance competition! Tsk tsk tsk.” Though it sounded only mildly petulant, his reprimand set a negative tone for the remainder of the lesson.

  He lightened up a little at the end, saying into the microphone, “You’re the best group I’ve had this year. Yes, sir!” (Of course we were the only group he’d had.) Then he winced and touched his nose and, as he had done for the first four lessons, punched in a slow love ballad by Patti Page on the jukebox. Elizabeth and I clung tightly to each other. “I’d do it with you standing up right here, right now,” she whispered in my ear, “but it’d lack a sense of privacy, don’t you think?”

  “Maybe just a little.”

  When the song ended, everyone applauded and left the room. Arnie Moran unplugged the microphone, packed up all his accoutrements, and pushed the bandstand to the corner. He was now concentrating on his financial ledger. Elizabeth and I walked to the door. “I feel like asking Arnie Moran—but I won’t,” Elizabeth said. “I feel like asking him if he’s going to press charges against the creep Alfonse Padgett. The grippe my sweet ass!”

  “You don’t know that Padgett did that to his nose,” I said.

  “Who else?”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “Want to go to Cyrano’s?”

  “In your black dress and in my herringbone?”

  “I’m sure Marie Ligget will recognize us. So nice, isn’t it, how she gives us a second espresso for free when she’s on the night shift, like she is tonight. We’re lucky to have a friend like her.”

  What I’ve Been Saying for Months and Months

  With Dr. Nissensen, May 16, 1973:

  As soon as I entered Dr. Nissensen’s office, I said, “The librarian at the Port Medway Library mentioned that eleven books went missing. Around a year ago.”

  “The question I must ask now: is it inevitable, in your mind, that these are the same books Elizabeth lines up on the beach?”

  I said, “One of your favorite phrases is ‘Be wary when the only option one allows is for a fabrication to become a fact.’”

  “I quoted that from—”

  “Well, you’re not a novelist. I don’t expect you to say things in an original way.”

  “Touché.”

  “It comes back to verification, doesn’t it,” I said.

  “Your old nemesis.”

  “So, in your way of thinking, if I rush up and throw myself onto the books and read the titles, and I discover they’re the same titles as the books stolen from the library, it would verify the actual existence of the books in the physical world. That’s A. B would be that therefore Elizabeth herself actually exists in the physical world.”

  Dr. Nissensen said, “Perhaps we should switch chairs.”

  “No. Then I’d have to think like you. I don’t want to think like you.”

  “That’d be too much like talking to yourself, Sam. Why would you come in here every week and pay good money to talk with yourself?”

  “At least your office, here, is a change of locale. From talking to myself in my cottage.”

  “When you go down to the beach at night to encounter Elizabeth, do you see it as breaking your solitude?”

  “It’s kind of you to worry about my solitude. But it’s a melodramatic word.”

  “Okay, then, your aloneness. Your aloneness compels you down to the beach. It’s a way of participating in the condition of things. The condition of things being that it is absolutely intolerable to be without Elizabeth.”

  “It’s like you’re hearing for the first time what I’ve been saying for months and months.”

  He wrote something in his notebook. “Did you ever think of inviting her back to the cottage?”

  “Elizabeth?”

  “Well, who are the women in your life? There’s Elizabeth. There’s Cynthia Slayton. There’s Lily Svetgartot. Now perhaps we could add the librarian.”

  “In my life?”

  “My point is, given your devotion, the fidelity to your marriage. You said yourself it gets cold on the beach at night. I simply can’t believe your lack of basic etiquette, Sam. It seems so obvious a thing to do. To invite your wife back to the cottage. If you don’t consider her a ghost, then there’d be no worry about importing a haunting presence into the cottage, right? Of course, it would take you away from the physical surroundings of the beach, to which you have become . . . habituated.”

  Silence.

  “When you were first courting, did you invite her back to your rooms?” Dr. Nissensen asked.

  “My room. My one-room apartment. No, I didn’t. And she didn’t invite me back to her apartment. What happened was, she asked me to invite her back to my room.”

  “Maybe it’s your turn, in this new phase of your marriage, for you t
o do the inviting.”

  “Know what? Fuck you. You’re suddenly giving credence to—”

  “Your worst nightmare, huh? That we might agree on something. Look, everything happens in a context, Sam. If the context is that the wretchedness of being alone is counterbalanced by accommodating an apparition, I eventually have to give that condition more leeway. At least in conversation.”

  “You seem exhausted,” I said. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m exhausted.”

  “Perhaps we have, together, exhausted a certain way of speaking with each other. The thought has occurred to me—it’s a concern—that I’m failing you, in an exhaustive way.”

  “Good Lord, bring on the violins. The thing is, lately—last few sessions?—I don’t even have the stamina to drive back to my cottage. I stay at the Haliburton.”

  There was a long silence. Looking around, I saw a copy of The Summer Before Dark, by Doris Lessing, on his desk. By the placement of the leather bookmark, it appeared that Dr. Nissensen had read it about halfway through.

  “I have something for you, Sam,” he finally said. He leaned forward and handed me a small leather notebook.

  I took it and examined it. “I doubt you’d allow yourself to give me a gift if it didn’t have a useful purpose for our work together. That’d be inappropriate, right? Professionally speaking.”

  “It’s a notebook specifically—just a suggestion—so that when you come to Halifax, you can jot down where you’ve parked your pickup truck. Write down which street, perhaps a house or building number, too.”

  At the Haliburton House Inn that evening, I sat in the small library off the lobby, reading the newspaper and having a hot cocoa. I took out the notebook from my back pocket. It was an elegant notebook, fairly expensive, I thought. On the inside front cover I wrote the date and signed my name, to verify.