by Claudia Dey
‘Hello.’ My voice is meek. Barely audible. The chalk of dust in my throat. I catch myself in the hall mirror. I touch my hand to my cheek – a sudden febrility. ‘Hello,’ I say again, needing to sit down, which I do on the sheen of the floor. Sun thumps in my head. I look back at my footsteps from the front door; they are the tracks of an animal, a stray. I take off my boots and place them on my lap. Spit onto my palm, and rub away at the footprint closest to me. I hear a creaking from the top of the stairwell. I pull myself along the floor to see what it is. There, leaning into the curved banister, standing in elegant repose, is not the man from the photographs – ancient and maimed as I had envisioned him – but a mummy, perfectly, seamlessly wrapped.
You vanished once before. From your adoptive mother, the nurse, Plump Marie Legros Ledoux. A big-pawed scrubber, firm tugs at collars and sleeves, she attended your birth with two other nurses whose faces were much more sour than hers. While you were finding your way into the mortal world, a slender cut at six pounds thirteen ounces, Marie’s husband, the maternity-ward doctor, Sheb Ledoux, was picked off the road by black ice. He was not injured, but he was stuck in the ditch. He observed that his eyes were being iced over. He found a pack of matches in his pocket but they were wet and his hands would not work. He started singing a number he saw performed once by a big-breasted bottle-blond burlesquer. He felt impossibly hot. He stripped and was quickly turned white with falling snow.
You were precocious, the nurses all agreed. Most infants are pinched and whining, blind fighters, but you were not. You winked and flirted. Candlelight, soft-shoe, the nurses were thoroughly seduced. Especially Plump Marie who, the next morning, found herself both a widow and a mother.
When you were old enough, you cooked Plump Marie breakfast and left her this note, poor penmanship, always lowercase, on her kitchen table, its brown porcelain top and rust-speckled legs:
gone to save the world,
sorry mother,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole
Later that day, Plump Marie was found in her socked feet on her front stoop, staring down the lane, a cob of corn in her right hand, one meagre bite taken, her usual petal-pink lipstick left behind in a smear. French songs about flash-pan loves replayed until they formed bulbs exploding in her head. Veins of white shock collapsed her. In an accident of translation, her obituary listed the cause of death to be failure of the heart.
After you told me this, your stubbled face striped with tears, you left these words in my ear: Abandonment is a contagion, Eugenia. Abandonment is a curse.
‘You have been unconscious for the better part of a week. So boring for me, my Fata Morgana, when I expected pyrotechnics, but still, welcome, welcome to Orphan Stadium.’ Eyes shut, my lids are a pitch against the world. The smell of shaving cream and balsam wax.
‘Lucky for me and you – other wise I would have had another corpse on my conscience – I have some medical know-how.’
I open my eyes and there it is, that spoiled face, moustache sculpted so adroitly across it, his hair, now white, lion-thick and still long to the shoulders. He rubs my right hand, pressing my fingertips between his. He is beautifully assembled in a dark suit and silk tie. The tie is pink and bronze, a column of flowers. A dog pants at his feet like the other end of an obscene phone call. Finbar calls the dog Tulip. I run my left hand over Finbar’s cheek. An unfinished encaustic. Before ironing. There is something familiar to it. Not from the photographs, which we studied so closely, but in another sense. It reminds me of the story Samuel told me about a poet lost and frightened in Cairo. Just when she was about to cut her trip short, the Queen streetcar went by – Toronto’s old streetcars had been shipped to Egypt. And instantly she was at home. This is how I feel looking at Finbar – he is the Queen car passing me in a strange land.
‘You fell in love, didn’t you? Ah, the battle.’
I look out the window. Finbar’s house is propped up on the Scarborough Bluffs. Toronto Island’s raw materials. Made of white sand and clay, the bluffs are built like corrugated castles, the work of extravagant children. In certain early lights, they are copper. Their drops are sheer and if you have vertigo you will swear that, standing still at their edge, you are swaying.
‘Did my father come?’
‘No.’
‘Where did you find his bicycle?’
‘His bicycle?’
‘The one in the motel room.’
‘It was left on my lawn two weeks ago.’
Two nights after he left. The night I tried to hang myself.
‘I never did see him, Eugenia. When I noticed the bicycle, I was turning out my lights. It was late. The wheels were still spinning. While I didn’t see him, he may have seen me.’
I imagine you in your bare feet shifting in the trees, and Finbar inspecting the dark, ‘Who’s there?’ And you, upon hearing his voice, caving to the ground, for the first time in your life not knowing what to say. Not the reunion you pictured. Not at all.
‘When the bicycle was still there in the morning, I thought it might be useful in our correspondence.’
‘Why did you send me to the motel? Why did you make me wait?’
‘To see if you could.’
I have been here for a week, boxed by a fever in a slender single bed in a spare room with nothing tacked to the walls, a leather chair in one corner where Finbar crossed and uncrossed his legs while reading the newspaper in his fine Italian suits, fresh hydrangea pushed through the buttonhole of his jacket, Tulip’s jaw draped over his shoes, both of them, ears tuned to my every breath. ‘I did not lie in my biography. I may have exaggerated, which a widower is warranted to do when he wishes for a visitor. I know you expected something much more bilious and decrepit. Sorry to disappoint. Trust me, hand on the faint tick of my heart, Death stalks, and he always has. Even when I was a boy, my relationship with him was a personal one – I had jilted him somehow, cheated, and so he chose me to watch. And yet his preference seems to be for those I love. I come from a long line of suicides. I am constantly trying to redirect his bloodthirst toward the source, but to no avail. You are, Eugenia Ledoux, in some slight danger here, cavorting with the marked likes of me.’
He puts his hand on my forehead. His skin is smooth, the underside of a reptile.
‘I am happy you have come. And I am sorry to have startled you into a faint. I dress like that when I go into the city for supplies. I have to say, you startled me too. In the Queen’s silver nightgown, you do look so much like her.’
‘You have to help me.’
He kisses my forehead, his lips not tingling for the first time in a week. ‘You had a high fever, but fire washes us clean, doesn’t it.’ And then, ‘You spoke in your sleep, Eugenia. A language that I do not know. But it reminded me of La Finta Giardiniera. My favourite opera. Everyone is mad with love in that opera.’
I stay at Orphan Stadium for the duration of the summer. Finbar and I constellate each other as though we have always been here together under this one sturdy roof. We split a small roast at night. We speak in shorthand. We parcel out the newspaper. We play cards. I wear the Queen’s dresses. He hems them for me and handwashes them in the sink. I tell him my middle name. I watch him trim his moustache. By the end, we share our bathwater, and I forget about his face. We do not comment on our likeness; we accept it and recognize its oddity in the unspoken way that twins accept twinship. I tell Finbar about the girl on the rope. I tell him that I want to perform the stunt that no one else can perform. I tell him that you have levitated into outer space, and I imagine you shining in the darkness, a coin in a closed fist, and Finbar says, ‘This is something the Queen would believe.’ I tell him that I must find you because when I do you will explain everything. You will lay out our history like a set of perfectly tied knots. You will tell me that I did not misinterpret love.
‘In order to achieve what it is you wish to achieve, Eugenia, you must make one promise t
o me now,’ he says. ‘And it is that while you are here, you will do everything I say.’
Finbar hands me a white shoebox. Inside, wrapped in tissue paper, is a pair of soft leather shoes. Indian leather. Black. ‘The only kind to wear.’ He ordered them from New York. I slip them on. A second and more intelligent skin. ‘It is all in your ankles.’ Finbar unlocks the padlock to his basement. He leads me down the narrow stairs. ‘Careful.’ The room is empty. The walls are covered in knobs. They are made of pine and look like the joints of animals kicking through the cement. They look like Finbar’s face. This is his training ground. It has not been touched for thirty-five years. It is the way I imagined his house would be. The dust is upturned urns. I remember Immaculata and me at your funeral. The spatter of rain. Our small hands in the Crock-Pot, felted grey.
‘You are in perfect equilibrium only if you can keep your centre of mass over your ankles.’ He draws a line between his ribs, extends his arms and, for a moment, is the Vitruvian Man. He has me climb the knobs. Ascend. Descend. Ascend. Descend. I am not allowed to use my hands. I repeat the exercises until I can last long enough, toes tapered into a point, to cook venison soaked in red wine. He chooses venison because it is a tough meat, one that should simmer for a few hours. One that should be marinated for a day if it is to fall succulent from the bone.
‘Aside from your ankles, your abdomen will keep you on the rope.’ Finbar, in a black three-piece suit, lies on the ground. The posture of a corpse in a casket, and me above, his only mourner. Then he claps the ends of his body together, the jaws of an alligator. A sit-up from a tai chi warm-up, he explains that it will work the muscles buried behind other muscles, the ones that flex in front of my spinal cord. It will make a Roman shield out of my stomach. My turn. He counts as if he were taking my pulse.
Finbar has me lift a barrel over my head, adding an inch of water to it every day until the barrel is full. ‘Your arms will stop you from tipping.’ Afterwards, hands gripping the barrel’s edge, I stretch to strengthen my spine. I grow two inches taller. Finbar lets out the hems of the Queen’s dresses.
Always with a sense of ceremony, Finbar ties the braided wire between the willows on his lot. He moves it closer and closer to the edge of the bluffs until I am alongside them; below me, the sad and giant trees, their roots half-exposed, claw the cliffs. Desperation makes for persistence. I walk with a balancing pole and then Finbar has me drop it over the side of the bluffs. It spears the beach below, the only relic of a very small war. Tulip lunges after it, but Finbar grabs her neck. Her coat in his hand, they look like one creature.
I graduate to the grounds of the nearby Guild Inn. Windows shuttered closed, doors bricked over, the Georgian structure was once a private mansion, then an artist’s colony, a World War Two military base and hospital and then a hotel. Now it is full of ghosts. The curious walk its tunnels, plying crucifixes and sprinkling baby powder to track footsteps. They duck between the low pipes, trample the broken tiles, wave away the stench of mildew in the air. Like suitors, they leave gifts – a toy truck and a balloon for the boy once sighted cowering in a corner, one brown eye, one blue. They report whispers in the foyer, the clack of high heels in the upper floors, the squeak of gurney wheels, the shuddering mass of a shell-shocked soldier.
Tulip does not stray as we explore the paths behind the inn, touring the overgrown gardens and winding between the sculptures that stud the landscape: a bronze horse’s head, the frontispiece of the Quebec Bank, ‘Music Hall’ in red sandstone, the entrance to a school for boys. Finbar tells me that these facades were saved from demolished buildings and heritage homes. He knows the details of every one; he remembers when they housed audiences and industry – printing newspapers, readying doctors, hanging thieves. Like Finbar’s mind, these decorated onyx and alabaster headstones are a graveyard for the city’s architecture.
When I walk the wire between the marble columns of the Greek theatre and the inn, a patchwork of board and brick, swallowing the last of the sun, I hear Tulip growl at the shadows.
At night, I stand in front of the mirror and I trace the new muscles that rise in long strips under my skin. Dorsal fins. Strength is a kind of disfigurement. As a teacher, Finbar is stern and unrelenting. The kindest thing he says to me is, ‘History teaches us that the tightrope tends to be a family affair.’ He never claps. I fall three times. Three times, he catches me.
One night, Finbar is unwell. I slip into bed with him, the covers on us, heavy like hooked rugs. It is the only time I do this. All my nights are spent in that spare room, replaying the drills of the day, my toughened feet fluttering the sheets, becoming sure as a jungle animal. He says he hears a bell ringing. I hold him from behind. The frailty of his bones. In my arms, he feels breakable. ‘Let me tell you about my black armband, Eugenia, my sinkhole, my bullet, my Queen. I would have eaten her toenail clippings for breakfast.’ Finbar has never spoken about his Queen. She is an incantation he is ready for only now. ‘I howled if she locked the bathroom door. She howled back. This was our ragged cry, our loon song. We chased each other through the halls of this house, spitting on photos of my ancestors – she had none – their grave prohibition faces. We made love for heat or, too tired, too drunk for that, we broke the furniture. Bonfire the dining room! she would order. Her eyes: consumption itself. And I would. She made a February night look like the archangel. But she turned my toes to butterflies and pooled me into the most elegant erections the western world has ever seen. God, how I loved her.
‘She gets pregnant.’ Finbar’s voice becomes heavy, brimming with water. ‘She does not want to be a mother. She is convinced that she will die young. She always felt this world’s grip on her was too weak, too unsure. That it would abandon her. And so she thinks it fit to do it first. She wants the child to be loved. Nine months later, when she starts to feel the faint squirm of pain, we pack our suitcases and we drive. I say choose a direction and she says, “North, go north where the cosmonauts train.” She never complains. She changes positions. Leans over the passenger seat. Reclines on her side. But she does not cry once during labour. She is a daughter of pain.
‘Twelve hours later, we are in Kapuskasing, Ontario – far enough away from our life that the child will never find us. And the child is coming. We arrive at the hospital. The snow is falling so heavily, the three nurses fear the maternity-ward doctor is stuck in it. One of them is married to him. They will have to deliver the child themselves.
‘My Queen checks in under an assumed name. These are the only words she speaks to the nurses. “Rapsodia Satanica.” It is the title of an Italian movie. She will not let me come with her. She would let me watch her do most everything else – but not this. I stay in the car until she comes out twenty minutes later, barefoot and in her blue hospital gown. Her toes are painted red. She does not weave when she walks. Always a straight shot. But this night, she is bent forward, heading into a great wind. The snowdrifts are the walls of Troy. It is nearly impossible to get through them. I wrap her in a blanket. She sleeps the whole way home. She has been somewhere she cannot name. She smells like fresh dirt. At one point I pull over and I study her face. Boy or girl? But her face is a wet telegram. Milk fills and hardens her breasts. She wishes it away, and with its drought, the absence of the child becomes too real. Blond like me or dark like her. I beg but she will not tell me anything. She likens it to a death. One she wants to bury. Over the course of the winter, she slowly recovers. That summer, we go to Florence.
‘Legend has it that a drunk shook the wire. But this is not true. She had been on my shoulders a hundred times. This was the only time she spoke to me from that height. She said, “You have a son.” It was our first walk since his birth. Then she fell. She wanted to.
‘She never needed help with her dresses, the way most women do. So tall, she could do all the zippers herself. Whenever we went out, even if it was for an afternoon, she would pack so robustly, as if we would be away for days, for weeks. Her purse was full to bursting wit
h toothbrushes and diaries, underwear, a felt hat, an umbrella. If we flew abroad, she could not sleep the night before for excitement. She sewed drugs into her slippers. She was allergic to everything: ragweed, onions, the cats. But she loved them and did not mind their scratches – even when they ran across her face in the middle of the night. She always had bits of food in her pockets: almonds, bread crumbs, apricots. She was never hungry; she was always starving. We could not have chocolate in the house. If I snuck any in, she would find it, and run to a room she could lock. She would eat all of it in one sitting, not answering me on the other side of the door, not making a sound, until she would emerge, her mouth black like she had broken through the hide of something. She damaged the things she loved because she loved them voraciously. I was always afraid she might snap one of the cats when she held it to her. She did not know her effect. When she danced, she lifted her dress up her thighs. She never looked around to see if anyone was watching. Even though everyone was, she didn’t care. Her world was enough with her in it alone. When she wrote, she wrote furiously. I would ask her what she was working on, she would say, “My eulogy.” Children would follow her anywhere. She would half-ignore them and never give them candy, never pinch their cheeks and promise adventure, make faces and voices, shorten their names. She would just continue on and let them observe her. They did not know that for her this was almost an expression of love. She put butter on her eyelashes to make them grow. She sang the wrong words to every song. Even if they knew the right ones, an anthem, a hymn, the children would sing with her. Her version was always better. She rewrote the world around her. She gave everything the incorrect name. Plants, trees, constellations, meats, nuts, seeds – even the children. But no one minded. No one corrected her. Everyone just wanted to hear what they looked like to her. She turned everything into games – games she could never lose. She hated to lose. She could reach cupboards I could not. She never kept anything in its proper place. Wine went under the bed, shoes went above the sink, flowers were planted in the shade. She would stay up all night gardening. I would find her, dress covered in dirt, with a spade. When she did come to bed, she would not wash. In the morning, when she picked up her pastry, her hands were those of a chimney sweep. She asked me for a bugle. I bought her one and she practiced for a year and then put it away carping that she was too old to be the best, why didn’t I make her play when she was a girl – though of course we did not know each other then. We met after I walked the Falls the first time. When I opened the door to my hotel room, she was sitting with a dog asleep in her lap. She said it had been following her for days and it told her my room number and that my room number was her future. She said the dog was psychic. When she was pregnant, she would sleep outside our house, under a lean-to she built. She said it was too hot inside. She felt cloistered. She said the child needed air. Once, she climbed on the roof, kicking the ladder away, her belly so full, I screamed at her. When I reached her she said, “You take everything so seriously.” She had insomnia. She would wake me up and want to play hide-and-seek through the house. She wanted me to read to her. She loved my voice. She said she loved it so much she wanted to go blind. How she could hear every timbre more sharply if she was blind. She said that when she is gone, to talk, to talk to myself because she would be close and she could listen. To never stop talking. When she slept, her arms would fall over the sides of the bed. She would breathe like an underwater explorer. She never snored. She would tell me her dreams first thing in the morning and then forget them immediately. At lunch I would ask her what she had dreamed about, and she would shake her head. For her, those conversations did not exist. It was too early to be fully alive. If she went for a walk she would go too far and come home with grass and water in her shoes. She could never come through anything without being marked by it. She would fall into black moods and refuse to speak to me for weeks at a time. She would do anything anyone dared her to do – and of a group, she was always the first to drink a homemade wine, to jump from a rock into water, to laugh. No one could keep up. She loved to predict the timing of a storm. When it would hit. She would run to the window, press her forehead against it. A storm was a summons. She was the most interesting person I ever met. The fates, the furies, always leaping between us. She claimed that she chose me for the view. That on a chair on my shoulders, I gave her the best view.