Homesick

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  All he said was, “I like Nixon.”

  I gave up and went to scrub potatoes in the kitchen then. Retreat so’s you live to fight another day. It’s hard to blame the kid when Stutz is as bad, an encouragement to him really. He hasn’t got a good word to say about the Senator either. Of course, Stutz being the sort of religious he is, the Senator’s being Catholic is no incentive. Tolerance was always a watchword with Stanley, and I tried to show Stutz that he had a prejudice but he couldn’t bring himself to agree. Never mind that after the first debate he as much as said that if you elect the Senator you’re mailing America parcel post to the Pope. “Change all the menus, it’s fish on Fridays for everybody,” he says. Considers it the height of wit to call the Pope “Big John” and the Senator “Little John.” It gets on your nerves after a while, a person with one joke.

  The problem is that the Senator’s got too much class for the likes of Connaught to appreciate. I said as much to Stutz. “Yes,” he shoots back. “Class spelled M-O-N-E-Y.” You know exactly what kind of individual you’re dealing with when they confuse the two. Stanley always knew the difference. Say with Roosevelt, who wasn’t exactly a rag-picker. I looked Stutz straight in the eye and said, “Don’t talk to me about class. Class around Connaught is when a man doesn’t wear brown shoes with a blue suit.”

  How’s Stutz expect to win an argument with me when he doesn’t have the facts? Me, I’ve got them cold. “Look,” I told him, “Senator Kennedy’s been to Harvard and Princeton, the best colleges in America – ask anybody, it’s public knowledge they are – and one in England besides, the name of which I don’t recall offhand. He’s a war hero and he reads 1,200 words a minute – about a thousand more than you do in a year. He’s visited thirty-seven countries and wrote a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. And look, just look at that wife of his. They say she speaks five languages and buys her clothes in Paris. It isn’t any ordinary dope that attracts a wife such as that. Like attracts like.”

  When I was Daniel’s age I was going to speak French. Now there’s nothing left but Je ne sais quoi. Quelle heure est-il? Not enough for a conversation with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Not enough for a conversation with a dark, sophisticated man on the deck of an ocean liner.

  She’s a beauty, that Jackie Kennedy. Even pregnant she’s beautiful, which is a feat. It’s how you can judge if a woman is really beautiful, if she can hold onto her beauty six months gone. Then the good bones and breeding shine through. Me, I was never happier in my life than I was six months pregnant, my feet disappearing underneath me, ankles like an elephant’s. But beautiful I wasn’t. Now I’m sorry I wouldn’t let Stanley take my picture. “Next time, next baby,” I said. “I’ll improve with practice.”

  What gets to me is nobody around here is smart enough to recognize what’s truly beautiful. In particular the men. Big tits is their idea of beautiful. Ask a man in this dismal hole to name a beautiful woman and nine times out of ten you’ll get Marilyn Monroe. A person shudders to think that their kid will grow up no different. Not that I expect Daniel to marry a Jackie Kennedy. I’m not that far gone. Just so’s it isn’t some doll who wears too much make-up, tight skirts, and owns a pair of pointy boobs that look like they’re trying to drill their way out of a pink angora sweater. All I ask is for her to be good enough for him and not so good that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Amen.

  Still, the rumour is that Papa Joe Kennedy isn’t cut from the finest glass himself. You have to hand it to the old Paddy sonofabitch, he saw to it that his boys were an improvement on him. Which is all I aim for. I take heart when I see what can be done when you put your mind to it. Love conquers all. Not one of those Kennedy boys can’t pass for the finest Irish crystal – Waterford, no less.

  Which must make it kind of disheartening for a father when he sees those brainless women carrying on over his boy, misjudging the Senator for a movie star instead of a future president. Old Joe didn’t raise him to be Errol Flynn, did he? The reporters have a name for them – jumpers. The double-jumpers are the ones holding the babies. They ought to have their heads examined, bouncing up and down on tiptoes, jiggling, squealing. It’s enough to give us all a bad name. Worst of all, men like to see it. A certain kind of smile will pass over Stutz’s face when he sees them hopping all over the TV. Deep down, he has it figured for sex, even in my case. Let him suppose what he supposes. Nobody imagines a person like me can believe in the higher, finer things. My friend Pooch certainly didn’t. That time I made the mistake of letting down my guard and talking of Stanley, what did she say? “Rub your eyes, Vera. Nothing could ever have been like you say, that good. How long were you married? Less than two years, right? Trust Pooch, who knows whereof she speaks, two years is as long as the warranty lasts and then something is sure to break. Money troubles, he starts running around, something. Seems to me that what you’ve been admiring all these years isn’t a husband but a character out of a book. Either way, he’s dead or never was. A ghost.”

  She had no notion whereof she spoke. She never even met Stanley.

  I’ve lived most of my life with the feeling that I missed the important things by a breath, an inch. Daniel isn’t going to. That’s why I try to point him in the right direction every chance I get. “The Senator is a man you can look up to and admire,” I said to him. “A man like your father was. A scholar and a gentleman. The type of man who can be an inspiration to you.”

  And he laughs at me and says, “Let him be your inspiration, Nixon’s my man.”

  You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Of course, if nobody shows him the trough then he’s done for. He didn’t want to sit through that first debate with me but I made him, the two of us side by side in the restaurant on counter stools. You can’t tell me he didn’t see Nixon all shifty-eyed like a door-to-door salesman asked to show his business licence. Yet when it’s all over and I ask him what he thought, he says, “Couple of times it looked to me like Kennedy was lying.”

  He can’t fool me. Deep down inside he’s his father through and through.

  Old Joe Kennedy says he never interferes with what the Senator thinks. Regardless, I don’t doubt he gets the Senator to where the Senator doesn’t know he’s going. That’s love, too, in a good cause.

  20

  A cheerless Saturday morning in October found Daniel standing beside his grandfather’s pickup in a windy street, waiting for the old man to come out of his house. With each new gust the wind seemed to gather strength, setting all the naked elms which lined Monkman’s street swaying and creaking faintly. By nightfall their broken branches would litter the road. On Main Street, the tin store signs flapped and clanged as clouds of grit were driven down its length with the force of buckshot, pinging softly wherever they struck glass. Overhead the sky was streaked like a river heavy with silt, murky with the dust swept up from farmers’ fields and scurried into the heavens. A blanched, fuzzy sun tried to break out from behind this dirty grey curtain.

  Daniel, shivering, leaned his back into the wind, wobbling indecisively on his heels when he lost his balance in its violent fluctuations. Every now and then he blew on his numb red fingers and then drew them up inside the sleeves of his jacket. Underneath the jacket he was wearing a white shirt and tie as his grandfather had requested.

  He wondered if maybe being so nervous made him feel the cold more. There were times – if he was really nervous – that he shivered in a perfectly warm room. Now he trembled like a leaf thinking about how he was going to tell Alec it was out of the question, there was no way he was going to do what he wanted. It wasn’t so very long ago that he had stepped out of his grandfather’s house and into the windy street in the hope that he would find there the courage to say what had to be said. He hadn’t though.

  Now he repeatedly and impatiently glanced at the front door, wanting his grandfather to make an appearance so he would be forced to settle it. When Daniel had left him over a quarter of an hour ago, his grandfather had p
romised to be right out. So where the hell was he? Dawdling and pottering, most likely. Checking all the lights and the burners on the stove for the tenth time, looking for the cigarettes or matches he had mislaid. He was getting to be a proper pain in the ass to get moving, apt to lose track of time and things, speedy as a drugged snail. Hurry up for chrissakes, don’t you know it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out here?

  Daniel had debated climbing into the cab of the truck where he would be warmer out of the wind, but he worried he would feel trapped again, like he had in the house. He was still convinced it was wiser to break the news to his grandfather out in the street, rather than inside the house, or inside the truck where the old man had a chance to corner him. Inside anywhere Alec might be tough to escape. But out in the street if the old boy started to argue and kick up a fuss all Daniel had to do was turn away and walk off in any direction. That was his right, wasn’t it? There was nothing that said he had to go along with every crazy idea the old bugger dreamed up, was there?

  When his grandfather had raised the matter nine or ten days ago, Daniel had naturally assumed he was speaking of some time in the far distant future, not thinking in terms of weeks or even days. He remembered how and when Alec had broached the topic because it was at an historic moment, only minutes after Bill Mazeroski had homered in the last half of the ninth inning to give the Pirates a ten-nine win and the World Series. Daniel was still crowing in triumph over the two dollars his grandfather had handed him to settle their World Series bet when Alec suddenly said: “I been thinking – some time you and me ought to take a trip.”

  “Why not?” Daniel, vindicated, grinned delightedly. It wasn’t just the two dollars which had put him in a good mood, it was also coming out on top for once. He had finally got the better of him. The old bugger’s jaw muscles had locked when he saw that rocket from Mazeroski’s bat go sailing over the fence. For a second he looked like a man pissing ground glass. Tough titty.

  “A long trip,” his grandfather qualified.

  “The longer the better,” said Daniel.

  “Of course, with my eyes the way they are lately,” said Alec, “you’d have to do the driving. Be my chauffeur.”

  His pronunciation made Daniel smile. Chuffer, he’d said. Be my chuffer. “I’m your man,” Daniel agreed. “The two of us’ll see the world together. You and me.”

  “Good,” said Alec, nodding his head. “Good.”

  Nothing more had been mentioned until several days later when Alec began to think aloud in Daniel’s presence. “I guess it would have to be on a Saturday,” he mused, “when you don’t have school?”

  Daniel didn’t have a clue to what he was referring. “What would have to be on a Saturday?”

  “The day we take our trip – it would have to be on a Saturday, wouldn’t it?” asked the old man earnestly. It was his earnest air which led Daniel to suspect a joke. His grandfather was always particularly, devoutly earnest when he argued that pro wrestling was on the up and up.

  “For sure a Saturday,” said Daniel, assuming an equally serious manner. “Even a globe trotter like me can’t afford to miss school.”

  In the next few days Daniel watched his grandfather’s prank grow more elaborate and detailed. Alec related his plans to make the truck roadworthy for a long trip. It needed an oil change and wheel alignment and while it was in the garage he might as well put new tires on all around, didn’t Daniel think? Daniel soberly thought and agreed. Two could play this game. Yes, by all means, tires all around. And his grandfather went off, pretending to order it done.

  On Thursday, however, when his grandfather had set their departure for eight o’clock Saturday morning, and issued directions as to how Daniel was to dress for the trip, the boy experienced a pang of uncertainty. But reason urged him to dismiss it and he did. In the past his grandfather might have allowed him to pilot the truck on country backroads where cops never patrolled and traffic was virtually non-existent, but he had more sense than to encourage an unlicenced thirteen year old to venture out on the highways. Daniel’s height alone would make him conspicuous behind the wheel. The RCMP would stop and charge them before they made fifty miles.

  Daniel, with spiralling anxiety, wished his grandfather would give up his practical joke. But there were no signs he was ready to relent, not even when Daniel provided him with opportunities to make a clean breast of it. When Daniel had asked: “So where are we going Saturday, on this big trip of ours?” his grandfather had replied: “Saturday’s soon enough to know. Marching orders issued Saturday.” Then, with hesitation. “You haven’t said a word to her now, have you?”

  Daniel had sworn he hadn’t.

  Putting on a white shirt and tie this morning, as his grandfather had told him he must, was part of Daniel’s attempt to turn the tables on Alec. Hoist him with his own petard, as Mr. Gibson who taught Shakespeare was fond of saying. If that old fart thought he was going to have a good laugh at Daniel’s expense, tricking him into a white shirt, a tie, and expectations of a trip, he’d better think again. Because how would Alec feel if, rather than going all foolish and sheepish at falling for a practical joke, instead Daniel went all downcast and heart-broken?

  Alec might learn that there was more than one actor in this family. Oh, how could you play such a mean trick when you knew how I was looking forward to this? he’d accuse him mournfully. It’s a pretty raw deal, if you ask me, to raise a person’s hopes way up and then crush them.

  He’d feel King Shit of Turd Island then, wouldn’t he?

  And the bonus would be beating the old bugger twice in less than ten days. First the World Series, then giving him a dose of his own brand of mischief. He who laughs last, laughs best.

  Yet this morning it had only taken Daniel a minute to realize the mistake was his. His grandfather really did expect them to leave on a trip within the hour. For Alec it was no joke, but a certainty, real. There he was, all in a fuss in his Sunday best, a wrinkled, dark blue suit. “There’s something else,” he kept muttering to himself as he quick-shuffled his feet from room to room. “Just hold your horses. It won’t take me but a second to find it once I think of it.” Daniel couldn’t take his eyes from the huge black oxfords which Alec dragged back and forth on the linoleum. He could see his grandfather had made a disastrous attempt at polishing the shoes. His eyesight must be as bad as he claimed because there were thick dabs and crumbs of polish stuck like mud to the oxfords, which left a dull, streaky finish.

  Suddenly the old man brought himself up short, frozen in the effort to recollect what was nagging at him. Grandfather and grandson stood face to face. The boy glimpsed a series of black smudges all down Alec’s white shirt front, fingerprints left behind when he did up his buttons with shoe polish sticking to his fingers.

  He’s dotty, thought Daniel.

  A surge of blood chased this unbidden thought and heated his face. It was then he rushed off outside, to wait in the street and consider what he must do.

  There was no longer any question that Alec meant what he said. The truck was the clincher. In all the time Daniel had known him his grandfather had never once washed or cleaned the truck. This morning it gleamed, even under the muddy sky. Months, maybe years, of mud and dust had been hosed and scrubbed from fenders and door panels. His grandfather would never have carried any joke that far. Never.

  Every few seconds Daniel cast an apprehensive eye at the house. What in Christ was keeping him? It had been almost twenty minutes. Then the door opened and Daniel could guess the reason for the delay.

  His grandfather forged his way down the walk, swerving unsteadily from side to side as he was buffeted by the wind, his suit jacket tail whipping and flickering out behind him, his left hand grimly pinning his hat to his head. Held tightly in his right fist an enormous bouquet of artificial flowers he had spent the last quarter of an hour turning the house upside down for wildly fluttered and flaunted their blooms in the gale. Mrs. Harding, the beautician famous for h
er useful hobbies, whom he had appealed to when he realized that all his own flowers were brown and withered in the garden, was much celebrated for her skill at manufacturing paper flowers to decorate wedding cars, high school graduation exercises, and anniversary parties. The bouquet Alec bore was testimony to her floral artistry. For him she had created three dozen red crêpe-paper poppies tastefully set off by contrasting Kleenex carnations in pink, yellow, and white. Each of Mrs. Harding’s flowers was furnished with wire coat-hanger stems wrapped in green tape.

  Daniel’s need to purge himself of his bad news made him rude and abrupt. No sooner had his grandfather reached the truck than Daniel lunged forward at him, desperately shouting, “I can’t go. Forget it. There’s no way I can go. Just forget this trip, okay?” But his words were drowned in the roar of the wind, scattered harmless down the street.

  “What?” shouted back Alec. “What?” He went to cup his hand behind his ear but when it came up full of artificial flowers, confounded he had to let it fall back down to his side. He leaned forward and tried to tip his head to better catch what his grandson had to say. When he did, the wind curled up his hat brim and the fedora shuddered, threatening to take flight.

  “I can’t go on any trip with you!” cried Daniel, going up on tiptoe so that he was shouting directly into his grandfather’s face. Still, his grandfather couldn’t grasp what he said. The old man shook his head and gestured impatiently toward the truck, waving the bouquet. “You’ll have to get out of this wind! I can’t make out a goddamn thing you say!” he bellowed, jerking open the passenger door and clambering into the cab. Daniel was left no alternative except to crawl in on the driver’s side, where he didn’t want to be. He slammed the door and sat clenching the steering wheel while the old man fussily arranged the gaudy, showy abundance of the bouquet on the seat beside him. What was he doing with pretend flowers? Could it be that the old fart was angling to pay a visit to some woman? Daniel found the notion pretty disgusting. Yet he knew it was possible. One of Pooch Gardiner’s admirers had been nearly as old as his grandfather. Old Softy was Lyle’s nickname for him.