by Tim Bowling
“I’ve never met a poet before.”
I waited for Delmore to return to form, to snarl, “You still haven’t.” But his reverence was as genuine as his life in poetry had been. I was ashamed for doubting him, and so I quoted in a low voice some lines from his poem, “All Night, All Night”: “‘O your life, your lonely life / What have you ever done with it. / And done with the great gift of consciousness?’”
Delmore had had enough. He grabbed my elbow. “Stop. That’s plenty.” I saw the whole poem in his horrified eyes, but it was Keaton’s ghost who walked up and moved his lips as I heard the single reverberating phrase, “‘An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown.’”
It was a moment of truth, and Chelsea’s face, behind which I saw my own children’s faces, their children’s faces, the endless replication à la Keaton’s Playhouse, decided me. We might indeed be helpless and in a constant fall, but to be appalled was a choice: we could choose it, or fight it, or, as in my case, and Keaton’s, too, choose it and resist it with every fibre of our beings for the sake of others. Keaton was a great clown, and tragic, but never appalled. And Delmore Schwartz, like every other artist, was not appalled at the time of creation. Let the powers of the world do what they will: this much, this joy of making, belongs to the maker.
“The great gift of what?” Chelsea asked.
“Oh. Of consciousness.”
She blinked her large eyes. “Did you make that up?”
“No. A man named Delmore Schwartz wrote it. Eighty or so years ago.”
A deeper growl this time. “For fuck’s sake, don’t tell her how old I am!”
“Delmore?” Chelsea said. “I’ve never heard that name before.”
“His mother named him . . .”
“Oh, God, don’t!”
“After a dancer in the silent movies. Frank Delmore. It’s not generally a first name.”
Delmore was angry now. “Enough with my mother. She’s been dead a long time, longer than me. Better worry about your own.”
Yes! My own! I looked wildly around and couldn’t believe my luck. A telephone booth, an honest-to-goodness pay phone in a tall rectangle of glass, shone like the Holy Grail from across the parking lot. Phone booths weren’t as rare as mechanical banks, but they were getting that way. As I stood there, trying to figure out how to explain to Chelsea why I needed to make a phone call but didn’t need her phone, she made the situation easy for me.
“Professor? Are you feeling okay now? You’re not in a hurry or anything? I was just hoping to check out this pet store.” I must have looked baffled, for she went on hurriedly. “My mom just broke up with her boyfriend. I’m worried about her. I think maybe a cat, something to look after, some company.”
“Oh, sure, go ahead. Take all the time you want. I’ll wait out here. I need to think everything over. It’s been quite a day.”
“I know, right?” A dimple appeared and disappeared in one cheek, and reminded me of that old TV commercial where a finger pokes the Pillsbury Doughboy. “Here. Let me put your stuff in the trunk.”
I gave her the two toys and the poster. When she had locked them securely in the Pinto, she gave me a quick little smile and made for the pet shop. Once she had vanished inside, I turned towards the phone booth. And there was Keaton, standing solemnly beside it, crushed porkpie hat in his hands. Delmore, meanwhile, had crawled – if you can say that of a bear – into the back seat of the Pinto, no doubt to sleep off his feed of fried garbage, and perhaps some mortal memories, too. I hastened to the booth, took off my glasses to read the long-distance instructions and dialled. As the phone rang in my mother’s house – five times, six times – I wondered, as I always did, if she was all right. Life is fragile for everyone, but at ninety every day is a tenuous bonus. So I was relieved when, on the eighth ring, she finally answered.
The conversation proceeded normally enough for several moments – her health, her recent visits from my brothers and sister, the weather (it was sunny on the coast, still summer-warm). My mother was garrulous but large-hearted with it, and her tendency to repeat stories and information was often redeemed by a sudden, surprising memory that I’d never heard before. We’d talked a great deal over the years, especially since my father’s death in 2001. So when I answered her question about what I was doing – after hesitating and deciding not to go into the whole strange business of the mechanical bank just yet – with, “Oh, I’ve been watching some Buster Keaton movies lately,” to say that her response was shocking would be an understatement.
“Your brothers saw him, you know.”
“Yes, I’ve heard about that.”
“Of course, he was a lot older then.”
Something in her tone gave me pause. “Older?”
“Sure. He was an old man when he made that railroad movie up here. But when I met him during the war, he was probably about your age. Let’s see, that was 19. . .”
“Wait a minute, Mom.” I looked through the dusty glass at Keaton’s ghost. The ghost, I just realized, was sometimes young, sometimes old; the bodies kept stepping out of each other. But the middle-aged Keaton, the forgotten Keaton, remained a cold corpse, forgotten even in the hereafter. “You met Buster Keaton?”
“Well, not exactly met. I shook his hand.”
“You what!”
“Sorry, Tim, I can’t hear you. The connection’s bad. Or it could just be this darned hearing aid. It’s not working again. I’ll have to get your sister to drive me out to the hearing aid place for an adjustment. It’s a good thing I don’t have to pay for it. The Veterans covers most of –”
“Mom,” I said firmly, and I hoped kindly. “Tell me this again. You shook Buster Keaton’s hand? Where?”
The slight pause ought to have warned me.
“At the end of his arm, of course.” Her laughter, which conjured up a delightful image of her face, turned into a hacking cough. After a few seconds, she recovered and apologized. “This darned hiatus hernia.”
I took a deep breath and vowed not to talk to her as if she was a child. “Very good, very funny. But are you sure it was Buster Keaton’s hand?”
“I might be old, but I know it wasn’t his leg.”
“Mom.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s who it was. He was selling war bonds. I remember he gave a kind of speech at the factory where I was working. Yes, Buster Keaton, that’s right.”
I didn’t know what to say. It was certainly possible that Keaton had travelled to Toronto during the war to sell bonds; plenty of legends from the silent screen still shone with enough glamour to be good for patriotic causes, and most of them, like Keaton, were happy for the work. Well, not exactly happy in Keaton’s case. His star in Hollywood had long since fizzled out and he was still drinking. He might have been in Toronto and not even cared what city he was in. I knew for a fact that the last filming he ever did took place there, when he starred in an industrial film called, of all things, The Scribe. But that he had touched my mother’s hand! Time leapt from my corporeal frame and ran screaming silently across the four lanes of traffic. I thought of Mrs. Hatt, the old lady from my childhood who, as a little girl in London, had watched Queen Victoria go past in a horse-drawn carriage. The curious, living reach of history!
“What . . . what . . .” I stammered, “did he say to you?”
Another pause, and then, matter-of-factly, “Nothing that I recall. He seemed very shy. But it was so strange. You know, I had just met your father then, and I was already in love, so maybe I was seeing him everywhere. But I remember thinking, he could be Heck’s father. I’ve always thought they were quite alike, your dad and Buster Keaton.”
“I know. They were.” I shivered the whole length of my body, a response that seemed so much more than physical. “Dad was shy, too. And wiry and muscled like Keaton.”
My mother laughed. “Your brothers both said your dad, when he got old, looked just like the Buster Keaton they saw in White Rock. They said he even moved the same.
”
“They never told me that!”
“Well, you ought to phone them sometime. I’m sure they’d be happy to hear from you.”
“Oh?” I was drifting back to my Edmonton reality; the train tracks of 1964 were being ripped up by the decades. I focused on the trembling door of the pet shop as if it were a portal to the other side of silence.
I didn’t quite know why the news struck me so. After all, many people were still alive who had met Buster Keaton. I knew that Gerald Potterton, the director of The Railrodder, was in his mid-eighties and living in Quebec, and that, even more remarkably, the wife of the mayor who had hosted Buster and Eleanor Keaton at a civic dinner in Rivers, Manitoba, was one hundred and still living there. Of course, there would even be people still alive who had met Keaton at the height of his creative power and fame in the mid-1920s, though they’d have been children at the time. But those human beings who had actually entered theatres to watch silent film when silent film was the world’s most popular entertainment medium were becoming as scarce as world war veterans, phone booths and mechanical banks.
No, it wasn’t my mother’s having met Keaton that struck me, though it was certainly a surprise, or even that he resembled my father, which I already knew; it was that she had held Keaton’s hand, that she had touched him. The hand that had soothed my brow in childhood illness, perhaps even in the autumn of 1964 when Keaton was walking the tracks of White Rock, had touched the great comedian’s trembling, sweaty, alcoholic hand in 1940 something. I saw the handshake, then I saw the one hand float out of the other hand and, almost seventy years later, pick up the phone because I had made it ring from this booth in a strip mall in Edmonton, the city where Alexander Pantages had built a grand vaudeville theatre that the younger Keaton had starred in. Another few lines of American poetry came to me, these by Elizabeth Bishop: “I knew that nothing stranger / had ever happened, that nothing / stranger ever could happen.” But the strangeness wasn’t frightening. It was . . . I didn’t know exactly, but the ghost outside the phone booth was less distant now. Absurdly, I wanted to put him on the phone. My grasp on reality, however, hadn’t slipped so far.
I spoke with my mother a while longer, told her about her grandchildren’s health and activities, the hockey games and play rehearsals and music lessons, and I mentioned our dog, Chinook, who, ironically, was terrified of the wind and would whimper and refuse to leave the house on stormy days. Then I said, “Yes. Okay. I love you, too,” and hung up just as the pet shop door sprang open and Chelsea emerged, her head swivelling. No doubt she was wondering where I’d gone.
Startled out of my reverie, I left the booth and hurried across the parking lot.
Something – perhaps just a primitive creaturely instinct – made me pause before I had gone thirty feet. I saw the girl turn and stride to the driver’s side door of her ridiculous car, the car of my youth. And it struck me all at once why I had stopped: I was testing her; no, not just her, but her whole generation, which had been raised in a culture of such wealth, celebrity obsession and materialism that it was a wonder, as much of a wonder as the survival of whales in the planet’s toxic oceans, that they had any loyalty or honour at all. We had locked a thirty-thousand-dollar cast-iron bank in the Pinto’s trunk, and I had walked away. My blind, antiquated, innocent faith! I had walked away to call my elderly mother from a phone booth! I might just as well have said to the Fates, “Here. Show me the way to the slaughter.”
Now Chelsea had her hand on the door, and the world came crashing in. I told myself, fiercely, to move. “You will be sorry if you do not do what you should do,” I heard on the french-fried air, except it wasn’t Delmore speaking (he still slept in the back seat), and Keaton was nowhere to be seen (visible nowhere, present everywhere, like God). It was the voice of the mercenary usher of the practical verities, and, at long last, I heeded it. I cried out, but rather feebly, and began to run, awkwardly. Pain flashed in my torn knee ligaments and my heart jackhammered my rib cage, not from the physical exertion, but rather from the humiliation that so often attends a trusting nature in a world of self-interest and scams. Because I knew exactly why I ran. No matter what fine interpretations I put on my haste, I ran for the cash, and I ran as wildly as a contestant out of the studio audience for The Price is Right. The person who comes closest to the cost of his pride without going over wins . . . what? Buster’s little fellow would say, the girl. Keaton himself, whose third marriage was supremely happy, might say the same. As for Delmore Schwartz, who had spent decades in futile legal dealings trying to recover some of the wealth his father had left, decades that amounted to only bitterness and failure, he went well over the cost, and the host of the show shook his hand and said with rehearsed sympathy, “Here are some lovely parting gifts: a bottle of cheap booze, some painkillers and an all-expenses paid stay in a fleabag hotel until you die.”
But this was North America, 2012. Thirty, or even twenty, thousand dollars bought a lot of pride. I heard a whole lifetime of gym teachers and sports coaches shout, “Come on, come on, get the lead out!” However, just as I had begun to increase the production of lead in the pursuit of cast-iron, Chelsea ducked into the car and just as rapidly ducked back out. Perhaps Delmore had growled at her? My glasses had slid a little down the bridge of my nose and I couldn’t quite make things out clearly. I came to a stop fifty feet away and tried to control my breathing. In the little storm of my teetering faith in humankind, I stood still and waited for the house front to crash perfectly over me. An inch either way . . .
“Hey, Professor!”
Chelsea’s Cheshire cat grin broke off her face and came whirling like a boomerang across the yawning expanse of years that lay between us. Then the girl herself followed. As she approached, I saw the purse in her hand – it was neon green and round, and I wondered if she’d somehow stolen a traffic light in those few seconds when it wasn’t yellow or red.
“I wondered where you went,” she said. “I thought maybe you’d gone back to close the deal with the antiques guy.”
Her face was so alive, so bright, so urgent, that I thought it had to change, just like a traffic light. I knew that kind of change took decades not seconds or minutes. The traffic gearing down around me still raced towards her, as it should. She flourished her purse. “You should see this pet shop. It’s a joke. If I had enough money in here, I’d buy every one of those poor animals. Even if I just let them go, even if they just ran into traffic and got creamed, they’d be better off.” Now the purse became a canteen that she was holding out to the afflicted species of our obliterating age. I almost reached out to drink from it. I hoped there was more than water inside. “I asked the dude how long he’d been pimping for the SPCA.” She sniffed and tossed her head back. “He didn’t like that.”
Chelsea’s moral outrage, her simple courage in acting on it, worsened my humiliation. I stood there, transparent to myself, like the little horse locked in the trunk. It was obvious that the girl saw nothing of my exposed faithlessness. Her whole being pulsed with some sort of bold purpose, and I waited, on the lip of a volcano burbling with ambrosia. The sleeping Delmore dreamed of flowers in meadows. The ghost of Keaton, wherever he was, squinted his twenty-nine-year-old directing eye against the lens. I saw us all, posed in a still frame, one of millions on the cutting-room floors of an obsolete world, but a world that hung on to us like sleep, heavy with sleep’s blurred images and half-whispered secrets. For a few seconds, as she spoke, I saw Chelsea’s mouth move and I looked all around her for the subtitle because I couldn’t read her lips. Then the sound of her voice crackled through the century of decades and almost made me jump, just the way ordinary people, ordinary men and women and children, in the late nineteenth century jumped when the earliest films showed an onrushing train. How much we have learned to take in our stride! How little we translate the meaning of the train’s approach!
“. . . monkey. It has the saddest eyes. And I swear they follow me.”
“Monkey?�
�� I was certain I had misheard her.
She laughed. “I know, right? It’s crazy. He’s just a little dude, not much bigger than a cat. And he has this great personality. Come on, I’ll show you.”
A teenaged woman in a duffle coat and hiking boots tugged on my elbow to lead me across a strip mall parking lot to meet a monkey full of personality. It was decidedly not an ordinary day, yet the strangeness now had a natural quality. At least I could not, on the spur of the moment, think of anything more meaningful to do. But, in my middle-aged life, meaning was always companioned by anxiety. As I walked at Chelsea’s side to meet the little dude whose sad eyes followed her, I felt apprehensive, not because of the strangeness, but rather because I could imagine she was my daughter about to introduce me to her first serious boyfriend. One of the Fates, this time in the unsmiling form of Keaton’s ghost, stood at the pet shop door and mouthed, “Bleat as you enter.”
I took a last look around at the parking lot, with the lemon-yellow Pinto sitting there like the caboose of some clown parade that had lost touch with the parade route, and was relieved that Delmore had not emerged from his brief hibernation. I couldn’t imagine him lumbering into a pet shop. Then I gave my head a shake, reoriented to reality and understood that I was also the caboose of a mental clown parade, and the bright, familiar clamour of 2012 kept disappearing around the corner in front of me. I hurried through the framework of the open door to catch up.
The shop stank, of course. How could a pet shop not stink? It was every bit as small and crowded as Ollivander’s antiques shop. But then, a pet shop is an antiques shop, for there is nothing in contemporary North America more antiquated than those other species with which we share the planet. Even cats and dogs have become relics – we have made them into nothing more than oddly shaped surrogates of our own broken and misplaced emotions. How often in cafés have I heard couples intensely discussing what I believe to be a child’s behaviour, only to find out, to my dismay, that they’re discussing a spaniel or – that dog who just cries out to be infantilized – a Shih Tzu. Sometimes, when out walking our golden retriever, speaking firmly to her when she pulled on the leash, I thought of the film Planet of the Apes; what horrible fate will befall us when the dogs take over? Leashed on Planet of the Dogs, perhaps it will be better if we’re treated as dogs by our canine masters. To know yourself human, and yet to be kept from your humanity, would be the cruellest of fates.