by Lou Allin
FOUR
Though she opposed new development on Wapiti out of principles both selfish and unselfish, Belle had no objection to trading in established properties, in this case, a large piece by the marina. The original owner had bought cheap, tacked up a small camp and outbuildings, then squatted on it for decades, paying only minimal taxes. Then about twenty years ago, as lakefront grew scarce, land values had started to climb. The price had risen to 95K for each of three lots in the last hot market. Why Julia Kraav wanted to purchase all three properties was a puzzle. Perhaps she had a big family.
In order not to waste time and effort, Belle had vetted her client as carefully as the law allowed. The older woman had been almost embarrassingly frank in disclosing her financial assets. Not only a fine brick home on York Street but over 700K in rock-solid investments. How had the Kraavs saved so much, the husband a Sudbury Transit driver and the wife a salesclerk? Then Julia had described their life plan: no kids, a tiny house shared with her parents, every cent banked, the last ten years in GIC’s when the rates hit double-figures. A year of retirement and Tomas had died of liver cancer, she had added with bitterness. “Congenital heart disease killed all of my family before fifty-five. And here I am, alive and kicking after two operations, and my darling man is gone. Life is not rational.”
As Belle rolled down the driveway, she wondered if Julia were intending to sell her house as well; if so, the broker’s commission would be impressive. The open garage beside the house held trailers with a Seadoo and a 40 horse bass boat, strange toys for an elderly woman without children. A fancy Jeep Cherokee with leather interior was parked in the drive, its fender suspiciously creased. Evidence of costly landscaping peeked from the snow: new tie beds and pink crushed stone as expensive as marble. Life-size bronze statues of a doe feeding and a buck boasting ten-point antlers graced the front lawn. A hedge of small cedars from the walkway to the house gave way to a row of six-foot junipers. Belle had priced one of those charmers before shouldering her shovel and heading to the bush for a handy pine.
As she stepped up to the porch, Belle peered into every Northerner’s dream: a Florida room containing a hot tub, heavy-leaved tropical plants, and floor-to-ceiling glass, probably low-E, which regulated the heat transfer for efficiency. What a spa. Take a trip and never leave the farm. Suddenly she wished that she and Julia were better friends. Answering Belle’s knock at the stained glass door, her client stood in a velvet morning gown. “Come in, dear. I’ve been expecting you.” Even thinner than when Belle had last seen her, Julia glittered with feverish excitement, massaging her tiny hands, a blinding diamond on the ring finger. “I have such plans!” A younger look-a-like, conservatively dressed in jeans and silk blouse, sat on the couch, twisting the tassel of a pillow; she was introduced as Emily, a “baby” sister, and her eyes were afraid.
“I have been in touch with Mr. Converse,” Belle said as Julia took her coat and showed her to a wing chair. “He is willing to offer all three adjoining properties as a package for $70,000 each. That’s quite a drop, but winter is a bad time for cottage lots. Nobody wants to buy what they can’t use immediately. A bargain for you, though.”
Pacing back and forth, the woman beamed as she waved a double checkbook. “I can give you the money now. I’m just so thrilled to have found the perfect place for my project. And now everything will be completed by summer.”
Belle glanced at Emily and felt some misgivings at the concerned expression on her face. If Emily had doubts about the value of the purchase, perhaps reassurance would help. “It is excellent property. You’ll have over 750 feet in lakefront with three acres across the road. A sandy beach and plenty of room for septic. There’s a dug well, but for my money you’d be better off pumping out of the lake. Less iron.”
“I remember the day you took me there, when we drove over the hill and saw the trees and the lake beyond spread out like the promised land. I closed my eyes and saw my vision come to life. So many good people to help. Isn’t God wonderful, Emily?” Her sister sat mutely tearing a tissue into bits, a thin smile in answer.
“I’m a bit confused, Mrs. Kraav. What do you mean by ‘so many people’? These are just cottage lots,” Belle said, suddenly aware that she was clicking her retractable ball-point pen like a set of worry beads.
Julia shuffled a pile of letters across the coffee table, passing Belle envelopes with hand-written addresses, the crabbed alphabet of the barely literate. “Look at the responses to my ad.”
Julia’s too-merry laugh, just a tone below hysterical, raised the tension. “Oh, you don’t understand. It’s Tomas, my husband, as I told you. He came all this way as a boy from Estonia without a penny in his pocket. Didn’t know a word of English either. What a story. I’m writing a book about our life, and I’m up to 1955 with the first three chapters. It’ll be a bestseller, you watch. Even a movie eventually. Anyway, this whole development is for him, something really special to keep his name alive long after I’m gone.” She picked up another sheet. “Here’s the notice I placed across the country in the major newspapers,” she said.
It read: “All Estonians are welcome to relocate to Northern Ontario to live at the Tomas Kraav Memorial Apartments. Moving expenses paid, free rent, a lakefront for recreation and nursing care for the elderly. Apply Box 23432 Sudbury, Ontario.” Belle passed from Julia’s radiant face to Emily’s pale terror, struggling for words which she feared would destroy this illusion.
“But the land isn’t zoned for multiple dwellings.”
“Oh, you.” She tapped Belle’s knee with her fingers, drew out the words coyly, as if being teased. “My builder told me, ‘No problem, no problem at all.’ The whole east side will be developed along with that new park. Maybe a mall for shopping and a theatre. Won’t that be a miracle for those poor souls? Many of them have never had a decent meal or a warm bed.” As Julia clapped her hands, Belle saw through a shift in her gown a deep burgundy scar traversing her thin breastbone, which rose and fell with her quick breathing as if nourishing itself upon impossible dreams. The sight reminded Belle of a baby robin, blind, featherless, heart beating in a fierce rhythm to keep warm.
Belle scribbled a few meaningless notes to buy time, not knowing how to continue. “Do you think I could have a glass of water?”
“Oh, certainly. Hostess with the leastest, aren’t I, Emily? Just excited. Would you prefer coffee?” When Belle shook her head, Julia floated her gown out of the room, leaving a faint trace of Estée Lauder.
The sister spoke quickly. “You’re an honest woman, I can see. This scheme will break her, take every penny. She can buy the land and put up the buildings, but what then? There’ll be nothing left for the support she promised them, or for her own expenses. It’ll be a nightmare.”
Belle sighed. “Of course. And she’d need an act of Parliament to change the zoning. That’s single residence only. How do you want to handle this? She looks pretty fragile.”
“Yes, she’s been mixing Tomas’s drugs with whatever garbage she could scrounge from her doctor. We’re preparing to get a court order by Friday to lock up her finances until she can manage on her own again. Maybe you saw some of the toys she’s been using to attract her friends and relatives. She wants to buy the world for anyone who loves her. Thank God she didn’t hurt anyone with the Cherokee. But it’s Tomas’s death, you see. That’s the centre of it all. I’m trying to get her into grief therapy.”
Having invented some plausible stall technique which involved another meeting with the owner, Belle crossed town and logged in at the office. Uncle Harold had converted the downstairs of a splendid Victorian house in an older section of town lined with elegant cottonwoods. The upstairs rented to a retired couple who wintered in Florida but needed a Canadian address to maintain their medical coverage. Belle’s realty company was no giant, but she had a long term, loyal clientele. In the earlier property boom, many wannabes had jumped on the bandwagon to make a fortune by selling real estate “part-time”. These o
pportunists had long departed, and a $2,000 licensing fee kept the field lean and mean. Belle ran the business with an answering machine, a cellular phone and Miriam MacDonald.
Her first lieutenant had signed off a lifetime of bookkeeping to join Palmer Realty five years earlier. “There is nothing creative about accounting,” she insisted, “unless you’re working for an American savings and loan or the Parti Québécois during a referendum.” She balanced her work for Belle with a passion for quilting. Her pieces had won awards, but she accepted commissions more for personal satisfaction: “That Log Cabin one for Alderman Winder cost me a month’s labour, design and sewing. The $500.00 wasn’t worth it.” To Belle’s embarrassment, Miriam had presented her with a stunning king-size quilt in the classic Whig Rose pattern for her birthday.
“How goes the battle?” Belle called as she pushed open the door.
Gray hair in a frizzy afro, her stockinged feet working a therapeutic wooden roller under her desk, Miriam grimaced, mouth tsking as her pencil checked a list. Gulping at intervals from her mug, she pummelled the computer keyboard and seemed annoyed at what she read on the screen. “Sacrifice. Hostie.” French Canadian minced oaths always made Belle laugh. How many other languages centred their curses around the church and its trappings?
“Stop swearing about communion wafers. You’re a Scot, or so you claim. Problems?” She sidled to the coffee machine and poured a generous cup, grateful for the practicality of black appliances. Wouldn’t it be great to be able to afford an office cleaner?
Miriam puffed an errant silver curl from her forehead. “I’ve got such a chain of conditional sales that I’m a screaming mimi. Even if we’re not the first realty on half of them, we’ll make out like our former Prime Minister. But there’s a fly in the proverbial ointment. Mr. Proulx on Norman Lake wants—get this—” she snarled, stabbing at a blurry black and white picture pinned onto the corkboard, “319K for his cottage. With only 65 feet frontage? It’s a fishing shack with an outhouse at a 45 degree lean. Everyone else in line is being quite reasonable.”
Belle smiled. “So it goes. He’ll come around if he really wants to sell.”
“If he really wanted to sell, he wouldn’t ask the moon. And the whole house of cards may collapse by then.” She muttered to herself, “Câlice.”
“Chalice. There you go again. But doesn’t this beat toting up a balance sheet in that cockroach race? Remember when you worked all night in an unheated shed to cook books for that sheet metal firm just before Revenue Canada hit town?”
Miriam stiffened. “Please don’t use terms like that. You know I have never done anything actually illegal. But you’re right. I don’t relish dancing to anyone’s tune. Thirty years of penal servitude was enough. And I’m not going to stew over this. Once I finish with Mr. P., he’s toast, as my daughter says, at least this week.” Her daughter Rosanne was twenty-three, a graduate from Shield University, now attending teacher’s college in North Bay. “I warned her,” Miriam said. “She’ll have her hands full. Has she forgotten what a rotten teenager she was? I needed an exorcist.” Then Miriam skidded to a stop between words and gave Belle a puzzled look. “You don’t seem yourself today, and I’ve been babbling. Thinking about Jim?”
“Oh, I had a call from his girlfriend. Every time I close my eyes, I imagine his body trapped in that swamp lake, turning in the tea-coloured water while the ice freezes over him like a glass ceiling. It haunts me like that Atwood poem: ‘The photograph was taken the day after I drowned. I am in the lake, in the center of the picture, just under the surface.’ ”
“That hand you described would bother me, too. Like an accusation or a plea.” She tapped her forehead in rebuke. “Forget that last part. Guilt is not what you need. Think about this. Suppose you hadn’t come along, suppose more fresh snow had hidden the accident. The boy might never have been found. That’s a parent’s worst nightmare.”
“It was pretty remote. What with the occasional wolf and fox in the area, the body wouldn’t have lasted long if it had washed ashore in the spring. Still, it’s small consolation for the family.”
“So what does this girl want?”
“Lord, I have no idea. Perhaps a friend of Jim’s to talk to.” Her eyes closed for a moment. “The last time I saw him alive, he was writing a poem to her on his own heart. I do and I don’t want to meet her. What might have been, and all that Victorian sentimentalism. And I hate funerals and viewings. Probably be an open coffin.”
“The theatre of death. Morbid, if you ask me.” Miriam rummaged under her desk. “Maybe this will help take your mind from the situation . . . and don’t you dare offer to pay me after giving me every book in Sue Grafton’s alphabet.”
Belle opened the small parcel with a child’s wonderment. “Wild Orchids! Do I dream? Where on earth did you ever find this? Surely not in town.”
“No such luck. Got it in Toronto at Sam’s. They sell classic videos there now. Rows and rows, just like a bookstore.”
“You know I have none of the silents, Miriam. Thanks for thinking of me.” Belle handled the video with reverence as she studied the cover notes. 1929. Sudbury had passed the bushcamp stage and was manfully trying to grow into a city, entering the Great Depression on its magic carpet of silvery nickel. The Sudbury Wolves played in the NOHA, and 110 acres of parkland on Lake Ramsey had been donated by W.J. Bell. A World War One cenotaph had been unveiled, and Rudyard Kipling himself invited to pen an inscription. The Grand Theatre, formerly the Grand Opera House, had installed equipment for its first talkie. Maybe this delicate piece of celluloid had been the last silent shown to those lucky miners escaping the night shift, freshly scrubbed with carbolic soap and happy for relief from the dark tunnels beneath the city. She bent over and gave her friend a squeeze.
“Oh, hush up. Just let Rosanne use your computer for her term paper next time she’s home. I’d get her one except that Scrooge doesn’t pay me enough.” Miriam stuck out her tongue and winked.
“No problem. You know she’s welcome.” Belle paged through her notebook. “Hey, what about that Nelson place you went to last week. Are the Toronto people ready to bite?”
“Funny story, but we lucked out. Nelson had told me that the septic system had, in his clever little words, ‘been approved.’ When I visited for pictures, all I saw was a pipe sticking out of a partially buried holding tank behind the house. No field bed at all. Wet as a mad hen, I was. Of course those Toronto folks hadn’t even noticed. They think everything’s hooked up to sewers like in cities, but I saved us some embarrassment. Can you imagine the first flushes? Straight out the back and shut down by the health department.” She made a rude but descriptive noise.
Belle agreed. “And woe to us if the sale had gone through. Those weasel words might have held up in court. ‘Approved’ could have meant ‘approved for construction.’ ”
Satisfied that her paperwork was beaten into submission, Belle made her daily phone call to Rainbow Country Nursing Home. At 83, her father had become confused and tottery in his apartment in Florida. Since he had given up his Canadian citizenship, sliding him over the border at the crucial juncture when he could still walk and talk had been a miracle for which she still gave thanks. “Nursing station? It’s Belle Palmer. How’s the old man today?”
Apparently he was as cantankerous as ever, with his loud demands, and expecting his usual Tuesday shrimp lunch. She visited him once or twice a week, but their conversation seemed limited to the expected meal, the weather and television. It hurt her to see him diminished, to watch the pieces of identity and independence vanish one by one, his expectations dropping with his capacities. Still, if his world had shrunk to food and media, he was in the same boat as 90 percent of North America. And the spunk that had banished him from the dining room made her applaud; when he lost the spark to roar out demands, his life would fade to a guttering candle.
He might not have been the intellectual giant her mother had wanted in a husband, but he had been a loving, kind a
nd indulgent father, had rolled out a motorbike with a red ribbon on the handlebars when Belle entered university, and had slipped her money to travel to England. And as a booker, he had passed on his love of films. How many other ten-year-olds had white mice named Errol and Bette, or a pet squirrel named Clara Bow? As soon as she could walk, he had taken her twice weekly to the private screening room at his office to watch new releases, “every film ever made,” he told everyone later at Rainbow. Once the warm weather came, Belle hoped to take him out, wheelchair and all, to one of the blockbuster movies, or maybe even the impressive new IMAX theatre.
On the drive home, listening to CBC radio relate the eternal scuffles of the world, Belle dithered over dinner options. An ice storm had hit the area that afternoon, so she was pleased to see the sander in front of her until a sudden dirty spurt hit her car. “Whoa, all right! I’m backing off,” she said, remembering the price of her last paint job.
When she pulled into her yard and shut off the engine, she heard throughout the woods, a delicate symphony, the clear glaze on the tree branches tinkling onto the ground like broken chandelier crystals as the rising evening winds shifted course. Belle paused for a moment and tuned her ears to the delicate orchestration, a rare combination of sound, sight and texture. She reached toward a drooping willow twig, its soft gray pussies wrapped in a coat of ice melting under her hand as fast as it had formed. Back to reality, she sighed, knowing that she’d never get out of the driveway until she laced it liberally with stove ashes and sand.