by Brian Moore
I said to Meg, ‘But what about the hospital? I just got a letter from her about a lump she has.’
‘I’ll put Dick on,’ she said. I heard her call. ‘Dick? Dick?’ And then, to me, impersonal as a telephone operator, ‘Just a moment, please.’
While I waited for my brother, the dizziness came back: it was the sort I get when I stoop suddenly, then straighten up again. I go blind for a moment. His voice came into my blindness. ‘Hello? That you, Mutt?’ The dizziness cleared and I felt the small turn of an emotional screw. Mutt was my nickname when we were kids. He is the only person who still remembers it. In a way, that says it all. He knows me as Mutt who tried to chop off her hair when she was eight. I know him as my big brother, Bat, who carried me on his shoulders up a cliff face in the Bay of Fundy, twenty-five years ago. And, at the top of the cliff, my father waited and my brother was thrashed on the spot. I was Mutt and he was Bat and in the last photograph I saw of him (the one Mama sent last Christmas) he is quite grey.
I told him about Mama’s letter and asked about the lump.
‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘She’s got to go into hospital to have it removed. Just a minor operation, she’ll be out in no time.’
‘Yes, but, yes –’ I said – ‘but, what if it’s malignant, aren’t you worried at all?’
‘I’m not worried,’ he said. ‘It’s just better to have these things out. No sense taking chances.’
‘But, Bat, I don’t even know where it is – where is this lump? She didn’t say.’
‘It’s rectal,’ he said. ‘A rectal polyp.’
‘Oh, dear,’ I said and laughed. He laughed too, for Mama’s shyness is a family joke. Although my brother is the only doctor in the Butchersville area, Mama has never allowed him to examine her. She never ‘felt’ right about it and so she drives forty miles to see old Dr McLarnon in Wolfville. But, after the laughing, I asked, ‘Seriously, I mean is it something to worry about?’
‘Well, it could be malignant.’
‘Then what?’
‘Then, we’ll just have to hope they get it all out.’
‘But, supposing they don’t get it all out, supposing it’s malignant and it grows again?’
‘It’ll mean another operation.’
‘But she’s over sixty, Bat.’
‘I know. Let’s hope it’s nothing.’
‘I should phone her,’ I said, but he said no, not to, it would only put ideas in her head. He’s right. I’d forgotten that, for people of Mama’s generation and in towns like Butchersville, long-distance phone calls mean trouble. Then I put my foot in it. ‘All right,’ I said. ‘Let me know, won’t you, Bat? As soon as possible.’
‘Okay, I’ll drop you a line the minute I get the results.’
‘No. Phone me. Collect, if you like.’ That was a mistake. It was as though I was saying he’s tight. Which he isn’t. There was a pause, and then, ‘I’ll phone,’ he said. ‘I think I can afford it. What’s your number?’
I gave it to him. I wanted to make some joke, some apology about the collect remark but he didn’t give me time. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘I’ll be in touch.’ And hung up. I remember that he said nothing about Terence. But then I didn’t say, ‘Say goodbye to Meg for me.’ Or whatever. Look, he doesn’t know Terence. Oh, forget it. No sense in making a court case out of something somebody forgot to say.
Mama. I remember thinking I must look up ‘polyp’ in the dictionary and then I thought of my father.
My father died during the war. He died in bed. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in the old Park Plaza Hotel in New York. He was on leave from the Canadian Army at the time. Red Davis told Dick that Daddy had died screwing, that some woman was in bed with him and that the Canadian Embassy in Washington had to do a lot of finagling to avoid an inquest. Died in the saddle. I can still remember Dick as he said it, laughing in a shocked, schoolboy way. I was ten when my father died, fifteen when Dick told me. I wonder has he any idea how that ugly little story has affected my life, how, all through my teens, any time a boy made a pass, I froze, afraid that I might become like my father. And sometimes, when I’m with people like Janice, I see her looking at me and know she’s thinking I’m promiscuous and I have this foolish desire to tell her I’m not, I am promiscuous only in my dreams, those doom dreams where I am naked in hotel rooms with naked men and I know those dreams are mixed up in my mind with the story Dick told me about my father and with my fear that, somehow, I am like my father.
Am I? I do not know. I was in school when he died. I remember the funeral, the gun carriage, the Scots bagpipes playing a lament, Daddy’s service cap on top of the Union Jack which covered the coffin. It rained. Or did it? I was there but do I remember it, wasn’t I told about it, time and time again, the gun carriage, the piper, the flag, the cap on the coffin? Adults tell us things that happened when we were small. ‘You were in Halifax, we brought you from school, don’t you remember the funeral?’ ‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t. You were too young.’ But children are insulted at being thought too young, they want to be grown up and so they listen to the adults telling whatever it is they’re supposed to recall, then memorize it and, in time, they come to believe they do remember it. But they don’t.
I don’t remember my father’s funeral. I don’t really remember my father. He is, to me, a framed photograph in my mother’s bedroom in Butchersville. He wears an army officer’s cap. He has a large moustache. His eyes seem amused. He looks young. I hate moustaches. I hate backstairs adulterers who come home to the Little Woman as though nothing ever happened. I hate officer types. I hate men who like uniforms. I hate charmers. They say he was. A charmer. Daniel Malone Dunne. Dan Dunn, what a charmer. Old and Dunne. That’s my secret joke about him, a guilty joke for he is dead and when I say it, I think again of how he died. Malone, according to Grandma Dunne, was the name of an Irish cardinal. It seems this cardinal led thousands of Irish emigrants to Australia to save them from the famine. My great-grandfather was to have gone to Australia with the cardinal’s group and had christened his new baby in honour of the cardinal. But, at the last minute, Great-grandfather Dunne changed his mind, raised his own passage money, and sailed to Quebec instead. If he had sailed to Australia I would not have been. Sometimes, I think of that.
If I did not know my father, if I can barely remember him, then it is ridiculous to let his manner of death upset me so. Our father who art in hell, cursed be thy name. If I no longer believe in this God I mock, then is it blasphemy to make fun of the Lord’s Prayer? And why (since I do not believe) does it comfort me, here in the dark, to say that prayer all wrong, as once, when I was a child, it comforted me in the dark to say it right? Prayers are charms, they are knocking on wood, I know it and yet, today, after that phone call to Dick when I went back into the living-room and looked up ‘polyp’ in the dictionary, I tried to pray. Polyp: a tumour projecting into a natural cavity. Tumour is a word to put the fear of God into a person and there and then I started, as I have so often before, to blubber out a plea to the Almighty. And then, as always, could not go through with it and stopped, ashamed of my concept of God who’d place a value on the panicky, God-hating prayers of someone like myself. So, unable to pray, even for you, Mama, I thought of you who can pray, you, lying there in bed in Lord Tweedsmuir Memorial Hospital in Wolfville, saying your prayers before they come with the sodium pentothal to put you to sleep for the operation. I said to myself I would fly to Wolfville to be with you and as I made that vow a trembling started up (I don’t know why), a trembling which worsened into the shakes when Ella Mae came into the room behind me, plugged the vacuum in, turned it on, and that noise which is bad enough at the best of times sent me hurrying out of the room and into my bedroom to slam the door and rant in my mind against Ella Mae, a shiftless bitch who gets fifteen dollars for a day’s work that she skimps, coming in late, leaving early, it’s more like four hours and if she weren’t black and I weren’t so cravenly liberal, I’d damn well tell her so.
But even as I raged against Ella Mae, I knew it had nothing to do with her, it was my hateful pre-menstrual tension that put me in a lunatic anger against her, that started the trembling that becomes a shaking, independent of me, as though my heart is an engine which suddenly comes loose inside me and will shake my whole body into pieces. The Curse that comes once a month, making me murderous one minute, suicidal the next, weepy, sick, silly, confused, and I sit here appalled, feeling some other self within me begin to go berserk. As I did this morning when I sat in my bedroom raging against the maid, then falling into a mindless panic when the house intercom rang outside in the front hall. Ella Mae shut off the vacuum and went to answer, while I sat there behind my door like a condemned person, awaiting the execution party. Ridiculous as it sounds, that is not an exaggeration. And yet, I knew, I know (listen to me, Mary Dunne, whoever and wherever you are) that I had no reason to feel that way, I have committed no crime, I am, by all normal standards, a fortunate woman, these fears of mine are without foundation and it did not make sense for me to sit trembling behind my bedroom door and how foolish (I know, I know), how foolish my fear would seem to a person who really sat in the condemned cell. And yet I am not exaggerating when I say that this morning I waited for Ella Mae, as though whatever news she brought would end me.
‘Somebody for you, the doorman say.’
I do not remember now what arguments I used on myself to force myself to get up, open the door, go to the hall and listen in on the intercom earphone. ‘Hello?’ I said, quaking in the dooms as, reassuringly, the doorman’s voice floated up, garbled, like something from a spaceship. ‘Jamanforya. A Misiter Pee-eee-pers.’ I thought of the television comedian with, I suppose, hysterical relief. ‘Mister Peepers?’ I shouted back. (What could he want?)
The doorman’s voice, whistling in the wires. ‘Come about eee-ee – apartment.’
And, oh, Sweet Mother, I’d forgotten all about him, the man who phoned yesterday answering the ad Terence put in The Times about subletting our apartment for next summer. A Mr Peters. I’d written his name on the pad by the phone in the bedroom. I told the doorman to send him up, then ran back into my bedroom for a quick self-inspection. I was tidy at least, and Ella Mae was cleaning up the place. The doorbell rang and rang again. Trust Ella Mae not to answer the door when you want her to.
Mr Peters. From the very first moment there was something about him, a feeling that I should know him. ‘Mrs Lavery?’ he asked. And then, ‘My card.’ (Handing it to me.) I looked at it, no address, just his name, Karl Dieter Peters. I put it in the little silver card tray on top of the captain’s chest in the hall, realizing as I did that it’s the first real calling card I’ve ever put there. And, at the same time, the me who’d been in the glooms five minutes before was grinning at the way Mr Peters doffed his old pearly grey hat and stepped over the threshold, small and dapper, with rosy old Santa Claus cheeks, little white Vandyke beard, Chesterfield overcoat (beautifully tailored, but so old it was verdigris green around the black velvet collar) and oh, with his silver-headed malacca cane, his lemon chamois gloves, his movement into the hall, courtly and formal as though he were tracing the first steps in a gavotte, I tell you he was an old ducky, all right. You’d want to take him in and keep him.
So, there it was, my first impression, me falling for him as he asked if he might take off his overcoat and thank you so much and off with it, laying the hat and gloves on top of it, revealing himself in navy double-breasted blazer, white shirt, and a silk rep tie which, like everything he wore, was almost at the point of being too worn to use but still perfect. And he, like his clothes, very, very old although at first I wasn’t on to that because although he kept his cane he made it seem the action of a dandy, not a dodderer, and it wasn’t until he bumped into the captain’s chest, his old hand reaching out as though playing piano scales, tra-la-la-ing, searching for the edge of the obstacle, that I realized how blind he was.
Blind? But not so, really, for when he came into the living-room, he peered around and, ‘Haar,’ he said. ‘What a lovely armoire.’ Which I thought was clever of him for the armoire, although not obvious, is the best thing in the room, it and the oriental carpet which he also noticed and said something complimentary about, I forget exactly what. Then asked if he might look at the other rooms after which the two of us might perhaps have a little talk? I said perfect and so off we went on a conducted tour and as we went through each room he picked just the right things to remark on, my collection of miniatures and those wonderful old copper pots I picked up for nothing on the South Shore. And all the time I was quite calm inside, thinking now nice he was when, suddenly, in the kitchen I had this worry: why would a person of his age take an apartment in the city for just three months and why would he consider taking an apartment with two bedrooms and two baths, which was obviously far too big for him? And, when no answer came, I glided to the edge of a near-panic. Trying to forestall it I turned to him and pointed out that the kitchen oven has a built-in thermometer. ‘Although,’ I said, ‘I suppose that would interest your wife more than it would you?’ looking at him in question marks as I said it. But he didn’t pick it up, just nodded and moved on out of the kitchen.
See, said my Mad Twin, he’s avoiding you, he’s not going to answer you. Now stop that, warned sensible self. You’re being silly. Of course he has a wife, she wasn’t able to come along. And they probably need the extra bedroom because their grandchildren may come to visit them.
But it was no good. When we went back into the living-room and sat down together, I had to tuck my hands under my knees to hide their trembling. His accent, I noticed, was vaguely British and the conversation between us went something like:
‘Haar. I hope I didn’t disturb you, not putting you out too much, am I?’
‘No, no, not at all.’
‘I thought the afternoon would, haar, be more convenient so to speak, but you, haar, said this morning, you remember?’
‘Yes, I did. Yes, this morning is fine for me. Do you, d’you like the apartment?’
‘Charming, yes. Beautiful things you have.’
‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘I mean that’s what worried us; you see, we’re going to be in Europe all summer and my husband feels that if we could find a suitable tenant it would be wiser not to leave the apartment empty.’
‘Haar.’
‘The rent would be three hundred which is less than we pay ourselves. And furnished, of course.’
Why is it when I get involved in any business transaction I at once feel dishonest for although every word I was saying is true and the rent is three fifty, unfurnished, somehow, in the business of me being the seller and he the buyer, I felt like a crook and damn Terence, I thought, it was his idea to rent the place, why doesn’t he handle it himself?
Suddenly, the old boy let a ‘Haar’ out of him so loud I thought he’d begun to choke, but no, he was merely clearing his throat, an action he followed by producing a large white handkerchief, seizing his nose between handkerchiefed thumb and forefinger, tweaking nose hard, then beginning a thorough old trumpeting, sneezing, and reaming out of all nasal passages, an action he concluded with a flourish of the white handkerchief and a sudden smile, cheeks scarlet, eyes watering. ‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Haar. Well, Mrs Lavery, that price is, it’s a bargain in this neighbourhood. I know. Over on the West Side, all those killings, you know, coloured fellas stabbing people in their own elevators: well, Mrs Lavery, haar, I happen to know in some of those same buildings they’re asking more than you’re asking here.’
I remember thinking he seems well up on rents, he’s well up on everything, because then he started asking all the right questions about watering the plants, defrosting the fridge, very sensible about everything, moving along in the smooth gear of someone who wants to take the apartment and, the moment he implied I was giving him a bargain rate, I completely forgot my worries about why he wanted the place. I mean it was one of those situations where he made me fe
el I was doing him a favour and that, of course, made me want to do other favours for him and so my trembling stopped and, although it was after twelve and I was to have lunch with Janice Sloane at one, I remember I got up, went to the butler’s tray where we keep the drinks and asked him if he’d like something.
‘Sure I’m not keeping you, Mrs Lavery?’
‘No, no. That’s all right.’
‘Well, then,’ he said. ‘A dry sherry, perhaps?’ And rose, leaning on his cane, coming over to the drinks tray. He peered at the sherry I poured. ‘Haar,’ he said. ‘Wisdom & Warter. Sherry Wines and Spirits. Very good, very good.’ And I found myself laughing and saying, ‘You really do know everything, don’t you, Mr Peters,’ for to know about Wisdom & Warter, well, I mean. And he laughed too. ‘No, no, I wouldn’t say that, Mrs Lavery. But Sherry-Lehman yes, that’s a good wine shop.’
And just then, for a moment, it seemed to me I did know him. I remember, as I was about to hand him the sherry glass, I stopped as though I were having my picture taken, for that was the moment in which I knew him and lost him again and was left, angry with myself for having been downed in that fleeting Indian wrestle with my memory. I handed him the sherry and stared at him as he sipped it, an old man in the Iron Mask of anonymity. Then I remember, I thought, look here, if he’s to be my tenant I have a right to know who he is and so asked him if he was a New Yorker and he told me, no, he lived at Montauk Point out on the island and he’d heard he could rent his place for a great deal of money in the season, so he’d thought to make some money this summer by renting it and moving to town.
I know Montauk. The year of my ‘theatrical career’ was the one I did summer stock at the John Drew Theatre in East Hampton. It’s quite true, I thought, that an old boy like this could almost make his year’s expenses by a summer rental, if he has a nice enough house. But what didn’t make sense was his taking our place here. Too expensive.