“I’ve done all right.”
“I’ll bet there’s a story behind that.”
“Not really.”
“And I’ll bet you never talk to reporters.”
“Never.”
“So it’s going to be a long night.”
“Perry, have another drink.”
And Ben retreated again to the kitchen.
The kitchen was drenched in the smell of beef and wine from the stew, whatever it was called, simmering away in the oven. When the time came, Ben put the potatoes on to boil, and later the carrots, and he sliced the bread and buttered it, and then everyone moved from the veranda to the dining room. Ruth Chapman arrived in the kitchen to make a salad dressing from vinegar and olive oil and toss the salad.
As the guests came into the house for dinner, Ben could hear the conversation had taken a turn.
“I tell you, it’s the taxes.” That was Bruce Bagnall, his voice raised. “The hard times would be over in six months if the federal government would stop taxing us to death.”
“Tell me more about your suffering, Bruce.”
“Now look here —”
Ruth Chapman sighed. “Perry has decided he doesn’t like Bruce, and he’s already had four martinis, so this dinner is probably going to be a disaster.” Then she winked at Ben. “But disasters can be so much fun.”
Who can figure out such people? Ben thought to himself as he removed the beef from the oven. He helped her spoon the food onto the plates and take the plates out to the guests, and poured the wine so they could toast.
“To the king.”
“To Franklin Roosevelt.”
“I’m not toasting a Communist!”
“And I’m not toasting a Brit!”
“Thank you, Ben,” Ruth Chapman said, and he took his cue and went back into the kitchen, where he fixed a plate of food for himself, as she’d told him he could. The stew astonished him: rich and smooth and subtle. Nothing his mother had cooked had ever come close.
Dinner was long and loud, and when they weren’t yelling at each other they were laughing, and they yelled louder and laughed louder as Ben opened and poured the fourth bottle of Bordeaux. Ben wasn’t sure they even noticed the blueberry pie and ice cream that Mrs. Orton had made special at Smalley’s. Ben had most of the dishes washed and put away by the time Ruth Chapman proposed, “Why don’t we have our brandy in the living room?”
He brought out the brandy glasses and carefully poured from the heavy crystal decanter where she kept — she had assured him — only the very finest cognac. When he came into the living room with the tray of glasses, he saw that Larchworth had launched into another story, and everyone was listening and laughing. Even Bruce Bagnall was red-faced.
“So the cop says he died at the scene, but the doc says they revived him in the ambulance, and my editor’s standing there in the newsroom screaming at the top of his lungs. ‘I don’t care what it takes! I want him dead by the next edition!’”
“Damn, but you’re funny, Larchworth.”
Ben found himself laughing, too, as he listened while this wildly animated man with the thick glasses paced around the room and waved his arms and even jumped up on furniture, telling stories of gin joints and crooked cops and even crookeder politicians. Eventually he collapsed into a chair, exhausted, and everyone else was exhausted, too, from laughing so hard.
“Did you know that Ben here plays the violin?” Ruth Chapman told her guests. “I’m told he’s very good.”
“Oh, really? Helen asked, with an encouraging smile.
“Oh, really?” Bruce Bagnall asked, without the slightest interest.
Ben flushed. He had forgotten about the violin, what with dinner and all. Besides, he didn’t really want to play, especially after Perry Larchworth had enthralled everyone for almost an hour.
“I don’t really play much,” he mumbled.
“Yes, you do,” Ruth Chapman contradicted him. “You practice every morning in the toolshed. Your mother told me.”
“The toolshed?” Larchworth raised an eyebrow. “Is it the acoustics?”
“Why don’t the two of you play something together?” the nephew, Chester, suggested. “You know we love to hear you play, Aunt Ruth.”
“No you don’t, but it’s sweet of you to pretend, Chester.” Ruth Chapman got up. “Come on, Ben, why don’t we play a duet?”
“Oh, I —”
“Come on, son,” Larchworth called out. “We were put on this earth to suffer.”
“Consider it an order.” And Ruth Chapman headed for the piano.
Ben slouched out to the kitchen, retrieved the violin and slouched back. He tried to tune it as quickly as he could, because everyone was watching, while Ruth practiced a couple of scales.
“Ben, do you know ‘Flow Gently, Sweet Afton?’”
“Sure.” It was one of his mother’s favorite tunes. Ruth Chapman improvised an introduction in the key of D. She looked up. Ben raised his bow and began to play.
He was awkward at first, his fingers felt stiff, and his nervousness trembled down his arm. But it was a lovely tune, as soft and flowing and gentle as the Scottish stream it described. And it was a pleasure to have such a fine accompanist. He noticed that Larchworth had cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Ben heard the lyrics of the song in his head, tried to make the violin sing the sense of those lyrics.
Flow gently, sweet Afton, among thy green braes,
Flow gently, I’ll sing thee, a song in thy praise,
My Mary’s asleep by thy murmuring stream,
Flow gently, sweet Afton, disturb not her dream …
They played it through, and when they finished the applause was real, and Ben couldn’t help smiling a bit, because they had been really good.
“You have a beautiful sound,” Helen Turnbull told him.
“It’s the toolshed,” Larchworth interjected. “All the greats started out in toolsheds.” Ben blushed, but it didn’t seem as if Larchworth was making fun of him the way he’d been making fun of Bagnall, who seemed to have forgotten how angry he’d been an hour before.
“Play some more!” Bagnall shouted. He’d liked the music after all. “Encore!”
But most of what Paul Chapman knew he didn’t know, and most of what he knew — reels and jigs and other square-dance music — was foreign to her. They played a couple of rousing hymn tunes, and the cottagers across the lake must have wondered why people were singing — more like yelling — “Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah” at a cottage, but there was an appetite for something more fun.
“Play some of your square-dance music, Ben. Give us a tune.” Ruth got up from the piano.
“All right.” He didn’t mind now. In fact, he kind of liked having everyone listen to him play. “This is ‘Ragtime Annie.’”
He tapped his right foot four times to give himself the beat, and away he went.
Larchworth let out a whoop, and the guests started clapping along. This was his kind of music, the kind he loved to play, and he was good at it, and he knew it, and they knew it, too. It was toe-tapping music, music you couldn’t listen to sitting down, music that made you just want to grab someone and swing them around.
“Woo-hoo!” Chester’s friend Tad yelled, when Ben had foot-stomped to a finish.
“You boys move that couch,” Ruth Chapman commanded. “We’re going to have a dance.”
Now they were in his element, listening to his music and dancing to it, like everyone did on a Muskoka Saturday night, if they could. With barely a pause for breath, Ben launched into “The Girl I Left behind Me.”
“The kid needs a drink.” Larchworth emerged from the kitchen, carrying a bottle of beer along with a very large martini — well, glass of gin — he’d poured himself.
“Oh, no, I —”
“One won�
��t hurt,” Ruth Chapman smiled. “We don’t want you to overheat.”
So he took a sip — it was bitter, like liquid oatmeal without brown sugar, but it cooled his throat — and then gave them the “Peekaboo Waltz,” a lovely tune in three-quarter time. The men took turns waltzing the three women around the room, then stomped their feet and began twirling each other when he switched to “The Crooked Stovepipe,” an old square-dance favorite. They couldn’t square dance to save their lives. But they were having an enormous amount of fun, though it was a typically hot, muggy night, and before long everyone was sweating and Ben’s beer was gone, but that was okay because someone brought him another.
They didn’t want to stop, and he didn’t want to stop, either. He went through them all: “St. Anne’s Reel” and “Maple Sugar” and “When the Moon Comes over the Mountain” and “When It’s Springtime in the Rockies.” Sometimes, Ruth Chapman would recognize the tune and sit back down to the piano and chord along. Other times, she danced up a storm, though it was a strange thing to see a grown woman jig with a cigarette in her hand. Larchworth managed to drink while he was dancing, which might have had something to do with his lurching from side to side from time to time.
Sometimes Ben would play a popular tune, like “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” or “Carolina Moon” that everyone would recognize, and they’d stop dancing and sing along. (No matter what he sang, the nephew was notoriously off-key.) It went on like that for a couple of hours, until they were all too hot and sweaty and exhausted to keep going, and the Bagnalls declared that they had to get back to their cottage, and the others decided it was time for bed.
Ben felt elated, and giddy, and light-headed, and strange, and suddenly in need of air. He stepped out onto the veranda to catch his breath. Make an impression, his mother had told him. Well, he’d made an impression. He’d made them sing and dance, and singing and dancing was the very best thing you could do if you were having a party, better even than beef stew with a fancy name.
Ruth Chapman had escorted the Bagnalls of Beaumaris down to the dock and their boat. He didn’t know if she wanted him to stay and help clean up. She wasn’t coming up from the dock, so he headed down. It was strange, though, the path seemed steeper and harder to navigate, even though he’d done it a thousand times.
He found her standing at the end of the dock, gazing up at the Milky Way, its broad, pale band arcing across the night sky from tree line to tree line.
“Should I … do you want me to wash or dry or … something?” he asked.
Ruth Chapman looked away from the stars and peered at him.
“How many of those beers did you have?”
“I dunno. A couple. A few.”
“Too many.” She shook her head. “Your mother is not going to be happy with me in the morning.”
“Yes, she will. She wanted me to make an impression.”
“And you did.” She smiled. “You were the life of the party.”
“I love to play.”
“It shows.”
“Ruth!” Larchworth yelled down from the cottage. “How about one last nightcap?’
“Up in a minute, Perry.” Then she turned back to Ben.
“It’s a shame, really.”
“What?”
“That there’s no one here to teach you properly.”
“I know! There’s so much I don’t know how to play, but I could play it, I know I could, if someone would just show me.”
“Well, maybe you’ll get to Toronto some day. I’m sure they have some fine teachers there.”
“No, I’ll never get to Toronto. I’ll never get away from this lake.”
She didn’t catch the resignation in his voice. “Well, who would want to? It’s so beautiful.”
“Not now it’s not.”
That surprised her. “What do you mean?”
“Now it’s summer, and it’s tame.” He looked out over the dark water. “It’s a big pond, and people play on it — go swimming and boating, and they sit beside it and it looks really pretty. But you should see it when it’s beautiful.”
“When is that?”
“November. Everyone’s gone away, and the lake is ours again, and all the leaves are gone, and everything is brown and gray and hard, and the lake is gray and choppy, and snow falls on it, and you can barely see the islands through the snow. That’s when the lake is beautiful.”
He didn’t know about the effects of beer. He just knew that suddenly he wanted to talk, could talk all night.
“Sometimes in January, when there’s a white sun — through the clouds, you know? — and the lake is froze over and you can’t hear a single sound except your feet crunching the snow — sometimes, like that, it hurts, it’s so silent and frozen, and you’re so alone.”
He hadn’t rambled on like that since his father died.
Ruth Chapman was smiling again.
“You are an artist, Ben Mercer.”
“Huh?”
She stepped close to him and leaned forward and kissed his cheek. He didn’t move.
“Now get yourself home to bed.”
He climbed into the punt and, fumbling, untied the ropes. She gave the boat a playful push with her foot.
“Good night, Ben.”
“Good night.”
And he rowed, unsteadily, across the brief stretch of water that separated the two of them, and wondered whether he really was an artist, and whether he ever would really learn to play the violin, and why she had kissed him.
Limits
Pain.
Pain even before light, even before he opened his eyes, which brought more pain. Pain that seized his temples and squeezed, making the blood pound, which made the pain worse. He groaned, closed his eyes, rolled onto his side, curled into a ball. What would it take to make the pain go away?
“Aren’t you up yet?” Henry called from the bottom of the stairs. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m sick,” Ben moaned from beneath the sheets. But he wasn’t sick. He was dying.
He heard Henry clumping up the stairs, heard him come into his bedroom, and suddenly the sheets were gone and Henry was standing over him.
For a moment, he didn’t say anything. Then, “Go throw yourself in the lake. Right now.”
The pain of cold on top of the pain of pain? It seemed more than Ben could live through. But the prospect of living didn’t hold much appeal right now, so he rolled out of bed, waited for the whirling room to steady, decided he probably wouldn’t throw up, then groped his way into his swim trunks. He knew Henry and his mom were watching him as he made his way through the kitchen, but he kept his head down, shamed, sullen. Outside, he winced at the piercing sun as he made his way gingerly down to the dock. Then — good-bye — he plunged into the lake. The early August water was practically tepid, but it was enough in his fragile state to shock his system, forcing the air out of his lungs, forcing him to surface. Still, the pain wasn’t quite so bad.
He swam a few desultory strokes but soon gave up, contenting himself with just treading water, every now and then disappearing again beneath the surface, where the world was blissfully cooler and darker, until he was forced up for air.
“Ben,” his mother called. “Come and get your breakfast.”
Breakfast. Oh, God.
She was waiting for him with a towel and a shirt when he reached the kitchen, and he was grateful for both. But just the smell of the plate of fried eggs and bacon waiting for him made his stomach heave. The thought of actually eating it was intolerable.
“You’re going to eat your breakfast. All of it. And that’s all there is to it.”
He slumped into his chair, picked up a fork with a trembling hand and scooped up a mouthful of egg. There was a moment of great danger, but the moment passed.
“How did you manage to get drunk
last night?” Henry demanded. “You were supposed to just be helping with the food.”
“Somebody gave me a beer because it was hot,” Ben replied, squinting warily at the bacon before him.
“It was a whole lot more than one beer,” Henry shot back. To be honest, Ben couldn’t remember how much he’d had to drink. He only knew that he was never going to drink again as long as he lived, if he lived.
His mom seemed more upset than angry. “I told you to make a good impression, and look what you did.”
“I did make a good impression,” Ben protested. “I played the violin for hours, and they danced, and somebody kept giving me a beer, and that’s how …” He gratefully gulped the coffee that his mother had poured for him.
“Well, I don’t know who these people are, giving liquor to a fifteen-year-old boy.” Henry attacked his bacon savagely with his fork. “I have a mind to go over there —”
“Oh, really,” his mother said, exasperated. “As if you think I don’t remember when you came home soused from that dance at Walker’s Point.”
“That was different,” Henry grumbled. “I was sixteen.”
“It was your birthday.”
“That’s not the point.”
“The point is it’s over.” His mother started to collect the dishes. “Are you supposed to go over there today?” she asked Ben.
He shook his head, carefully. “Nah, not till Tuesday, after everyone’s left.”
“Good.” Henry got up from the table. “You can catch up on some of the work you’re behind on here. Starting with the barn. I want you to muck it out and lay down fresh hay.”
The barn, it turned out, was as good a place as any for throwing up.
Ben wished he was over there, though. He saw them, as the sun lowered in the sky, sitting out on the dock, drinks in their hands, laughter rippling across the water as Larchworth paced the dock, arms windmilling. He had played music for them, and they had danced for him, and he had talked to them, and they had called him by his name and given him a beer, or two, or whatever — they had served him when he was supposed to be serving them. He had become part of their group last night, almost one of them; he had almost belonged.
The Landing Page 7