Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  “Mangia. Mangia,” said Eugene, backing awkwardly toward the door.

  “We walk with baby,” said Maria, picking Stephanie up and carrying her to the stroller.

  They were gone in under five minutes. They had spoken less than a dozen words.

  They brought Stephanie back two hours later. She began to cry when they left.

  And so they became neighbors. And slowly they found their way together. As the years passed it was clear that Eugene and Maria liked Morley and Dave and loved their kids. Maria continued to offer advice about child-rearing. She understood the pressures of early parenthood. She often arrived at the front door unannounced and took both kids for long walks—wandering patiently through the neighborhood while Sam studied hubcaps and Stephanie poked at flowers. These seemingly aimless hikes always ended at an Italian bakery, where Sam and Stephanie both developed what would become a lifelong passion for cannoli, panettone and zabaglione.

  It was a river that flowed two ways. Dave brought Eugene and Maria records from his record store—Italian opera and Italian folk music, Maria Callas and Gigli.

  Eugene taught Morley (not Dave) how to grow tomatoes, and how to care for their pear tree.

  It was one of those friendships that can only happen between neighbors. A friendship that happened mostly out of doors—mostly in the backyard. A friendship that would never have developed if it wasn’t for the children.

  Eugene and Maria moved back into the basement apartment the summer Stephanie was fourteen. The move wasn’t planned. There was a five-day heat wave at the end of July. On the second night Eugene slept in the basement bedroom because it was cooler down there. Maria joined him the next night.

  They moved the television down the night after. There was already a kitchen there, and a bathroom with a tub. They could walk right out into the garden. They had everything they needed.

  They moved back upstairs for the winter.

  They were both relieved the following May to move back down. They didn’t need stairs in their lives anymore.

  That second autumn, when it was time to move upstairs, they kept putting it off. When they finally went up, they went up reluctantly. Neither of them saying anything about it. Neither of them wanting to admit the house was too big for them. Neither of them wanting to say how heavy they felt when they had to climb stairs.

  One afternoon, in the middle of January, Eugene said, “It would be warmer downstairs, you know, closer to the furnace.”

  They moved back down after dinner. Unknown to Dave they were living a cozy winter hibernation, close to their frozen and preserved garden and, best of all, close to Eugene’s wine.

  Weeks went by before Dave realized something was different. One afternoon he was looking into the backyard, watching a blue jay at the bird feeder, when he noticed Eugene’s lawn chair had been left out all winter. It was while he was staring at the snow-covered chair that he realized he hadn’t seen Eugene and Maria for weeks.

  It was Morley who pointed out the grapevine hadn’t been cut back in the fall as usual.

  Dave said, “Maybe they’ve gone on vacation.”

  He started to watch the house for signs of life. Every night at nine the lights clicked off abruptly. But it was as if they were on a timer.

  “If they had gone away they would have told us,” he said to Morley. He went over to check.

  They didn’t answer the bell. They couldn’t hear it from the basement with the television on.

  Dave came home.

  He was still fretting the next night.

  “It’s not right,” he said. “Something is wrong.”

  He was worried. He had, after all, told their son he would keep his eye on them. Tony had told him he wanted to get them into a home. Or a seniors’ residence. Anywhere there were other people. Anywhere there was a staff to watch them.

  Dave went over again the next night. When there was no answer at the front door, he went around the back to look in the windows. He didn’t think of looking in the basement until he saw the flickering light of the television. He squatted down and peered through the basement window—and there they were, both of them, asleep in their chairs in front of the TV. Eugene’s head was tilted back, his mouth open. Maria’s chin was on her chest. For a moment Dave thought they were dead. Then Eugene’s leg twitched and Dave said, Thank you, Jesus, and went home.

  He called on them the next night after supper. By the patio door.

  Eugene squinted at him over his glasses. He hadn’t shaved for several days. He looked alarmingly old, shuffling back to his chair.

  Maria said, “Are you hungry?” But she didn’t get up. She didn’t even try to put anything on the table.

  He worried about them all March, calling every few days, dropping in on weekends.

  They always seemed tired. Worn out.

  Dear Tony, I am worried about your parents.

  He finished the letter, but he didn’t mail it.

  For two weeks it sat by the cash register at the record store.

  On the first Saturday in April, when he woke up, he could tell it was going to be a glorious day. He could tell before he got out of bed by the way the sun was coming through the curtains, by the way the air felt: warm and light on his face. Suddenly, it was spring.

  He made coffee. He took it upstairs to bed and read the paper. He heard Sam run downstairs. Heard the door slam. When he finished his coffee, he would go out too. He would take Arthur for a long walk.

  When he stepped into the backyard, he took a deep lungful of air. It felt wonderful to be alive. It felt wonderful to be outside without a jacket.

  He looked around his yard and smiled. Then he looked next door and almost fell over.

  There was Eugene—clutching the top of his ladder as he tried to thread a rope through a pulley he had rigged to the side of his house.

  He was leaning out, precariously, reaching farther than he should.

  And there at the bottom of the ladder, holding it steady, was Dave’s son, Sam.

  Dave’s first impulse was to drop the dog leash. “Arthur! Stay!” he said. He was about to jog around the fence. He was about to ask how he could help. But he stopped himself.

  Eugene had asked Sam to help.

  He already had the help he wanted.

  Someone who would let him be in charge.

  Someone who would let him climb the ladder.

  It took the two of them two hours to uncover the tree and twenty minutes to pull everything else out of the hole.

  There wasn’t only a fig tree in there. Eugene had also buried his fuchsias, his geraniums, a passion flower vine and a bougainvillea.

  Dave went back inside where he couldn’t be seen. He stood by the kitchen window watching his son working. He watched him lifting the plants out of the grave, watched him lugging them the length of the backyard. Watched him lining them up in the sun by Eugene’s back door.

  It was as if spring itself had been buried in Eugene’s backyard, as if spring had been lying in that hole waiting for Sam to lift it out and breathe it back to life.

  The tree came out of the ground with one fig still clinging to a high branch. They stood it up and packed earth tenderly around the root ball. If only, thought Dave as he watched, if only he could bury an olive grove.

  Sam was home for lunch, with a twenty-dollar bill in his pocket.

  “I was working for Eugene,” he said.

  Dave waited for half an hour before he went over to admire their work. Eugene was sitting in his chair smoking.

  Maria came out the door.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  On Monday Dave tore up the letter he had written to Tony. He wrote a new one on Tuesday night.

  Dear Tony,

  There has been a cardinal in your father’s backyard for several weeks trying to convince us all it was spring. This weekend it finally had something worth singing about.

  Your father and mother were in the backyard for the first time since October. It
has been a long winter, and as I watched your father working I thought how he has become like the fig tree that he loves so much.

  The winter was difficult—we haven’t seen much of him since Christmas. Like his tree, he spent much of the winter underground.

  Last fall you asked if the house might be too much for Maria and Eugene.

  An hour after you left, your father came over and said, “My son wants me in a home. We are not going to go.”

  I didn’t mention our talk.

  I don’t think you need to worry about them right now.

  He got the fig tree up on the weekend. He had a friend of his over to help out.

  I can see Eugene through the window as I write this. He is sitting in the yard. He looks tired, but happy.

  Dave paused over the next line.

  How do you sign a letter like this? To a man you hardly know.

  Sincerely, he decided.

  Before he signed it, he read over what he had written. Then he looked over at Eugene. He had just lit one of his little cigars. He was waving madly at Maria, trying to get her attention. Maria was at the far end of the garden working on the grapevine, with a pair of pruning shears.

  Dave smiled and looked back at the letter in front of him.

  I will go and visit them after supper, he added.

  They always make me happy.

  And I will write again soon.

  Love, he wrote.

  Love, Dave.

  Love Never Ends

  There are people you meet when you are a child—school teachers, coaches, store owners—people whom you orbit when you are small and without much gravity, people who influence the way you travel for the rest of your life. Art Gillespie was such a person for Dave.

  Whenever Dave thinks about Art Gillespie, the thing he inevitably returns to is a baseball game on a Sunday afternoon in 1966. Sometimes he starts thinking about that ball game, and it is the ball game that leads him to Art, rather than the other way around.

  Big Narrows Miners versus the Baddeck Junior All-Stars. Dave playing left field. Art Gillespie coaching. Kevin Campbell, sliding into third base, is called out, and Art is exploding off the bench—storming toward the third base umpire, Scotty Leblanc. Art, looking for all the world as though he is going to slug Scotty—which would have had all sorts of unfortunate repercussions, considering that Scotty, who owned and operated Scotty Leblanc’s Academy of Music, happened to be teaching Art’s daughter, Milly, the clarinet that spring. Milly was counting on playing in the Elks’ Music Festival in Antigonish, big time.

  Scotty almost fainted when he saw Art steaming toward him, his face all red and pushed forward, his fists clenched. It did look bad. Until Art abruptly drew up not six feet from where Scotty was standing. He looked down at his fists and up at Scotty, and then he shook his head as if he was trying to clear it, as if he was just as surprised to find himself halfway to third base, and abruptly spun and walked back to the bench without saying a word.

  He dropped down beside Dave and said, “You don’t have a chocolate bar, do you, Davie?”

  It was a most un-Art-like moment. Art never got angry. Art never raised his voice. Dave, his mouth hanging open, his eyes wide with surprise, looked up at his coach and shook his head. “No,” he said, “I don’t have any chocolate, Art.”

  Art spat on the ground. “Don’t worry. It don’t matter.”

  Art Gillespie, third-generation owner-operator of the Big Narrows Ice Company. Born in March of 1917 on the farm where he spent his boyhood and all his adult life, the farm nestled in the maple bush at the base of Macaulay’s hill.

  Art Gillespie. Son of Norm, who ran the ice company before Art took it on. Norm, who used to drink with the great pilot Johnny McCurdy.

  In fact, eight years before Art was born, Norm used the Big Narrows ice sleigh to drag the Silver Dart—the biplane that made the first powered flight in the British Empire—onto the ice of Baddeck Bay. Norm was, in fact, standing beside Graham Bell the moment the airplane bounced twice and lifted off the ice. He heard the great man mutter “Goddamn” under his breath when the rickety flying machine, or aerodrome as Bell liked to call it, took flight.

  Art kept the sleigh in the back of the barn long after his father had passed on, long after they had stopped cutting lake ice, and he would show it to anyone who asked. He would stand by the barn door, tugging on his ears, which were as big and spotty as Portobello mushrooms, enjoying them enjoying it.

  Art Gillespie actually flew with John McCurdy when he was a boy. He was five years old. It was 1922. McCurdy took Art up the day Art’s father took him and his brother to Baddeck for Bell’s funeral.

  Art Gillespie, who everyone said could have played ball in the big leagues. He had a tryout with Boston and was offered a contract, but he didn’t sign. A month after he came home, they even sent someone, a scout or someone, all the way to The Narrows from Boston to try to talk him into changing his mind.

  “It was just a minor-league contract,” said Art, when Dave asked him about it that spring Kevin Campbell was called out sliding into third base and Art asked Dave for the chocolate bar.

  Dave never saw Art play ball, but he saw him play golf. Art hit the ball long and straight and easy just as you would have thought.

  Art and his plaid shirts. Art and his suspenders. Art and his dog.

  Art always traveled with a dog at his knees. He had one, a sheltie, who used to chew tobacco. Kept chewing even after Art himself quit.

  Art, who moved around town as if he were connected to it by a big elastic band. You couldn’t imagine Art leaving The Narrows—he would be snapped back if he went too far. In some ways, he was the town. You got the feeling that if he left, everyone would have to go.

  Art, who started delivering ice when he was thirteen years old, in the days when everyone in town depended on the Gillespies. They had a team of blind horses that pulled the ice wagon in those days—two old pit ponies who knew the route so clean that Art and his brother would jog along beside the wagon working either side of the street as the horses stopped where they were supposed to, without anyone telling them. Norm would ride in the back of the wagon and cut ice—and keep the books. The father had taught his boys a series of hand signals that his father had taught him, and as they peeled out of a house, they would either wiggle their hand in the air the way you signal a waiter for a bill (that meant a charge) or they’d swing their whole arm out, like an umpire calling a man safe at home, which meant they had been paid. Twenty-five cents for fifty pounds.

  Art, who worked with the horses and could show you a photo of a clipper ship loading ice that his grandfather had cut out of Bras d’Or Lake, bound for Europe. Cape Breton ice, boy. Going to Paris.

  Art, who had kept the ice business going. Bought an ice-making machine when refrigeration came and delivered bags of Big Narrows ice cubes as far away as Sydney. He kept harvesting a few hundred pounds of ice out of the lake every January—just because—but he wasn’t sentimental about it. He loved the new machine. He would reach into the freezer and pull out a handful of ice cubes, holding them the way a grain farmer might hold a handful of prize seed. He would pop a cube in his mouth, suck on it and then pull it out, saying, “Now that’s beautiful ice . . . you put that in a glass of water and it would just shimmer. It’s so clear it would disappear.”

  When he got the ice machine, he bought a storefront on Main Street between the Maple Leaf Restaurant and Judy’s Sewing Shop. He opened a laundromat in front and had the ice machine in a room at the back. “Same business,” he said. “Just add water.” To get to his office (which was in the back, with the ice) you had to walk down a narrow laneway between the restaurant and the laundromat, past the vent for the dryers. Which meant you had to walk through clouds of steam to get to the ice—a fact that pleased Art.

  Through the steam to an office that looked like the ticket bureau at the old railroad station—Art’s yellowed varnished desk, Art’s rubber stamps, a spike for invoices.
r />   Art and his dog. Flannel shirt. Suspenders.

  Art, who lived for ice, went to Florida once a year with Betty, his wife. The first time they went was on a bus tour of the southern United States. First stop, Memphis. When Dave asked him about Memphis, all Art said was “The ice was cloudy. They don’t know how to make decent ice down there.” He didn’t like Orlando either: “Shopping malls everywhere.” But he liked Cape Canaveral. And he liked the beach. “First thing I did,” he said, “was make a snow angel in the sand.”

  Art.

  Art, who made ice. Art, who gave Dave his first summer job. Art, who coached ball.

  Art, who had been around long enough to remember the year his family got the first radio in Big Narrows. Nineteen twenty-eight. You had to use earphones to listen. And Art loved to tell the story about how, on account of the earphones, he was the only person in the house, in fact the only person in Big Narrows, to hear the report about the abnormally high tides in the Thames River in London, England. Tides so high they were threatening to overflow and burst the riverbanks. He was eleven years old. They had only owned the radio three days, and he was unaccustomed to the conventions of the medium. He got the Thames River in London, England, muddled with the Thamesville Creek, which ran through The Narrows. He was convinced the entire town was going to be swept away. He insisted on sleeping in the attic for three nights. His mother let him because he was so intense about it, though he wouldn’t tell her why. He didn’t see the point in getting everyone worked up.