CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  There were railway tracks up past the street in the distance, and in the weeks that followed I’d hear the trains pass and I’d lie awake, thinking of the accident and the man.

  The next time I heard of the man, the girls had taken me all the way up to where the accident had been. They turned and took me along the main street to a corner store and I was afraid of the sun going down. They suddenly became mothers taking me shopping and there was a man called the manager in a white apron staring at them and Karen said, “Hurry, they’re closing!” It was because the manager in the apron knew the man and if we were late he would send the man after us. I wanted to go home but Karen had a basket on her arm, her hands hanging with busy self-importance, and she told Wendy to load the basket. The man in the apron watched while the girls counted coins and then he told them to put everything back and they rushed to put it all back, looking for whatever they could pay for. The lights flashed and the man shouted, “Make it snappy,” and the lights were going off one by one and we ran out and I thought the man was coming after us and the girls were screaming and pulling me because I couldn’t run as fast.

  When we were walking and I was out of breath, Wendy pulled five barrettes and three packs of gum from her dress and Karen said, “You shouldn’t of. You’re going to get it,” and Wendy said, “So? They’re not going to know.”

  “The man will find out,” Karen said.

  “No, he won’t,” Wendy said. “The man wasn’t there.”

  “The man’s gonna kill us. He knows where we live. He knows where Henry lives.”

  I thought the man would come to get me and I started to cry. The setting sun shone low along the street where the accident had been.

  “He doesn’t know we were there,” Wendy said.

  “He lives across the street. He’s going to see us,” Karen said. “He’s a murderer. He killed someone. There was so much blood, it filled up the basement.”

  I went into my house and my mother said good night to the girls on the porch. As she put me to bed, I tried to tell her about the man but she said it was all right. When I began to sleep there came the sound of the train that ran along in the distance, beside Dupont Street, where the accident had been, in a clacking whisper-roar, a sleeping rush that came as the man suddenly stood up in a brown suit by a washbasin in an attic room lit by a setting sun, red as blood, and there was blood in the basin.

  That summer, I played in the moss and clinker and scattered coal by the basement windows of the big old houses; I played under dark sash windows speckled with rain dust, windows that shook when trucks passed and reflected cars at night. Somewhere, as evening came, the man was always in an upper room, under a sloping ceiling, just like my own room, and Wendy said that he slept all day and wakened at sunset, and only then did he wash the blood from his hands.

  Wendy and Karen and I and an older girl with glasses called Judy and a sleepy kid called Arthur were on my front lawn and we fell on top of each other, laughing, in a game of Ring Around the Rosie when someone said something about having to be home at dark but then they were on the walk and I went with them around the block to a street I had seen once before and Karen was saying, “He’s too little,” and though the sun was going down, I didn’t want to be too little, so I went with them.

  They went far and now I was more afraid to go back alone than to go on with them and the street lights were coming on and they were starting to run ahead of me and I was trying to keep up and not be afraid.

  We got to a big street and there were no houses on the other side, just the last of the sky and a twinkling star, and Karen broke into a run, long-legged like a boy, and her legs, then her waist disappeared downward in the dark as if she were being eaten from below by darkness. But it was a hill going down and Karen was ahead and someone said, “Christie Pits.” They were gone in windy open darkness and there was a loud bang and sparks and I turned to run and I was jerked back by my arm and Wendy and the others were running, wild, in blowing wind in the dark and there were voices of boys or men and a man in a white shirt and smoke drifting and Karen was there and then was swallowed up and someone yelled, “The man!” and there was hysterical screaming.

  Wendy came out of the dark so that I wasn’t lost and she said, “Come on!” Karen was screaming to Wendy, “Don’t show him! Let’s get out of here.” They passed a street lamp and a spattering of blood on pavement, red where it pooled, black where it was thin. We were near the edge of the park where the hill went up and Wendy said, “Stay there. Don’t move,” and pulled down her underpants and peed and stood up flicking up her dress and I saw her vagina, a naked “V” in the pale light as she pulled up her underpants and Karen yelled at her from a distance, “You stole. I told you.” Then they were running up the hill now and my chest was hurting and the man was coming after us to kill us, and I knew I would die because I was behind and couldn’t run fast enough.

  Wendy ran back and got me and in a while we came to our street and my chest was hurting and my face was wet and I ran in the front door and my mother whacked me on the behind.

  Every day I wondered if the man was coming, because Wendy had stolen. Sometimes the man was in the upper room. Sometimes he came down the street, covered with blood from the accident. The man, in his brown suit, could come soundlessly into your house at night and kill you in your sleep. The man was in the western sky. At night, in the dark, I could feel his hands on my neck.

  In the fall, when Wendy and Karen were in school, I watched television. I watched Popeye and black-and-white seas and an eastern land with minarets and domes and a sky that was grey like the sky outside the window, the sky under which the man slept.

  After I started school, my mother took me a few doors up and in through a driveway between two immense walls of houses and into a paved yard where a great elm thrust the concrete into shards and by the back door there was a thin blond boy, younger than I was, playing with a truck under a forsythia bush. My mother introduced him as Stephen and said to stay there until she came back. Stephen looked up at me, frowning, and recited his address: the city, the province, the country.

  I asked Stephen if he knew about the man.

  “His name is Mr. Gimble,” Stephen said.

  I extended the road in the dirt for Stephen’s truck and said, “The man is a murderer. He murders people.”

  Stephen stood up and looked to the west and closed one eye in concentration and extended a crooked finger and said, “He comes from over that way.”

  “The girls across the street said he’s coming.”

  “My parents said not to talk about him,” Stephen said. “He used to live here.”

  “He used to live in your house?”

  “I’m not sure. He might live next door.”

  Stephen’s family lived on the top two floors and on the second floor, in the dining room, you could see across the drive and through the neighbours’ half-drawn blinds and curtains into big dark rooms where dim figures did things without sound. In Stephen’s living room, another window looked sideways to a two-storey veranda and above it you could see the dormer where the girls might have said the man lived. Stephen was pretty sure it was Mr. Gimble. The house was full of a big Ukrainian family, the Dirvitches: the father, the mother, the children, aunts, uncles, a grandmother and a couple of roomers. My parents had said that roomers were a bad influence and Stephen speculated that they might be murderers. As Stephen’s mother was giving us lunch, Stephen said that Mr. Gimble had sneaked downstairs in the night and carried away Luba Dirvitch’s little sister and suffocated her.

  “Don’t be silly,” Stephen’s mother said, “Mr. Gimble is running for alderman and he has personal problems and anything you overhear you must not repeat.” Whatever that meant, it was only another indication that Mr. Gimble was a danger.

  Stephen and I would discuss the problem of Mr. Gimble as we played in my yard or around Stephen’s garage. We’d talk about how tall Mr. Gimble was and how quickly he could come. In the corner of my
yard, with water from a hose, we dug a hole which would tunnel under continents, eventually trapping Mr. Gimble, and then chase him up through the earth to China which was also west, over the sky, beyond the other side of the block. In the basement of Stephen’s house, Stephen turned on his grandfather’s radio with its short-wave band and we listened to a shaking carnival sound through static and Stephen said the music came from the land of Mr. Gimble. We fitted some old plumbing through a fruit crate with a funnel for a mouth and an elbow joint for a penis and decided it was Mr. Gimble and poured water through it so that it urinated. This was the potion we kept giving to Mr. Gimble to put him to sleep so we could escape from the basement.

  Stephen was always reflecting, calculating. He already knew about numbers. Though he wasn’t yet in school, his mother was teaching him to add three and two in pencil on the surface of the enamel table in their kitchen. I didn’t see the point of adding three and two.

  One Saturday, Stephen and I met Karen and Wendy on the sidewalk and I said, “They know about Mr. Gimble.”

  “My mother said he’s the murderer,” Stephen said.

  Karen looked at Wendy and said, “Should we tell them?”

  “Tell them what?” Karen said.

  “That he’s the man. All the blood. Over on Euclid Avenue.”

  Stephen visored his eyes with his hand and frowned at the girls in the sunlight.

  “Who’s the little guy?” Karen said.

  “Stephen.”

  “Why’s he so small?” Wendy said.

  “He’s my friend,” I said.

  On the third floor of Stephen’s house, on the carpet in his father’s study, Stephen and I did a jigsaw puzzle of Zorro in Mexico. I said even Zorro had never found Mr. Gimble and Stephen said that Mr. Gimble had gone through Mexico and I said that the girls had seen Mr. Gimble but Stephen said they were trying to fool me.

  Winter came and the girls were gone. They didn’t leave, they didn’t even move away. They were simply gone. I had never even known where they lived, only that they lived across the street. I remembered their hair, their dresses, their mysterious violence and their stories and secrecy and the infinite profane wonder that lay far back, behind Wendy’s grey skin and freckles.

  Children whose names I knew, like Arthur and Judy, were gone and so were all the others. My parents said they had moved somewhere called the suburbs.

  Stephen and I began to watch television at each other’s houses and then one Sunday I was in the third-floor spare room across from his bedroom and through the window onto the alley I saw into the neighbour’s window: a room as dark as a fish tank with a strip of burning sunlight on the wall as if a shadow could enter and cross it. I telephoned Stephen and said that Mr. Gimble had moved next door.

  Mr. Gimble still wakened and washed his hands and Stephen said that it was time to figure out where he travelled from and returned to. We went outside and copied street signs onto a map. As rain fell in the alley outside the study in my house, we expanded the map to Bathurst and Huron, Bloor to Dupont where the accident had been. The map ended with the train tracks and the escarpment. We marked points on the periphery where Mr. Gimble had been sighted. We added the railway tracks and the Midtown Cinema.

  That November, Stephen and I redrew the map, including an enlarged detail with a plan of Stephen’s driveway and the garage and the Dirvitch house and when we were out there checking the map, Luba Dirvitch, who was younger, asked what we were doing. We showed her and she said it wasn’t allowed and went in and told her mother. Mrs. Dirvitch came outside and Stephen nervously said we were only waiting until his mother came back to give us lunch. Mrs. Dirvitch asked us if we wanted some soup.

  The Dirvitches’ kitchen was full of steam and the smell of cabbage and as we ate, and Luba watched us suspiciously, we kept glancing down the hall into the darkness which seemed to go on forever and tried to stop laughing about Mr. Gimble. From the Dirvitches’ kitchen, Stephen’s house, the driveway and the garage and the tree that broke through the concrete looked familiar but unfamiliar: Stephen’s house from the other side, skewed and through steam, as if from a different world.

  In September, Stephen was sent to a local grade school and I was sent to a Catholic school that was well to the north, beyond the escarpment, beyond the boundary of the map. On the first day at my school, a lot of the kids in class were talking and the old woman teacher threatened everyone with the strap, and told us if we weren’t sorry in our heart we would go to hell and we’d burn. If we’d ever been burned by a cigarette, it would be like that but all over our body and forever.

  School loomed above the escarpment, a world of older boys with pointed shoes who smoked cigarettes and greeted each other with a kick to the groin, or Italian girls who already had earrings and breasts, of kids who would knock your hat off to make you hit back so they could beat you up, of teachers who yelled and screamed or made you stand up and ridiculed you. I didn’t do as well in school as Stephen did.

  When my father was travelling and after the house-keeper left at noon, my mother would sleep for long periods. Sometimes in the evening, when she gave me my dinner, her eyelids would be heavy and she’d tell me I didn’t love her. When my father returned, I overheard him arguing with my mother about her drinking.

  Sometimes at dinner, when my father was away, my mother would sit staring at me, periodically losing consciousness. There would be no lights on and the sun would be setting and her eyes would open and she’d pick up where she’d left off, telling me that she knew what was going on in my soul and that I hated her, that they were worried about me and were thinking of sending me away. Then she would slump over sideways.

  At school, I didn’t make friends and always looked forward to getting home, but once home I’d look forward to getting to Stephen’s up the street. When I’d mention to Stephen what I’d learned about God and hell, Stephen would have no comment. Stephen seemed to live in a house that was simple and austere in pale light, like the Dutch picture in his living room of a woman in the grey light of a window, the picture itself in the pale light of the window of Stephen’s living room.

  Stephen’s mother had decided he should attend the local Anglican church service and I noticed the jacket and new, awkward-looking brown shoes that Stephen’s mother had bought him for Sundays. But in a while it became clear that for Stephen’s family, church didn’t really matter. In the end, Stephen only went once.

  One day, when my mother had passed out and gone to bed, I had dinner at Stephen’s and Stephen said that his parents had been talking about moving to Montreal. As I went home that night, the street lights came on and I wondered what would happen when Stephen was gone.

  That spring, I was still hoping the move to Montreal would be forgotten when we started writing a play about Mr. Gimble. Mr. Gimble was always somewhere offstage and the characters, a lion, a bear and an elephant, wondered what to do on his approach and the animals had arguments about how to deal with him. The play was called “The Man.” In the end, the animals were pursued by Mr. Gimble through mountain and forest and finally caves until the lion and the elephant escaped by deserting the bear. Mr. Gimble tried to kill the bear, but he sank in quicksand and the bear escaped. We didn’t find happy endings interesting and we had the bear wander off, wounded and bloody, looking forever for the lion and the elephant.

  Stephen was now taller than I was, and thin. Stephen was seven and I was eight but Stephen could already calculate the difference between our weights, multiply it by itself, subtract the weight difference from the product and that would be the height of Mr. Gimble. On weekends now, we wrote a newspaper named for the block. It had its stock page, its news, its women’s and sports sections, much of the paper related to Mr. Gimble, all written in columns on lined, legal-sized paper.

  Stephen decided that according to the map of the world, Mr. Gimble lived in Rio de Janeiro. I was skeptical and to settle it, we played Pirate and Traveler in Stephen’s basement and if either of us landed o
n Rio de Janeiro, it meant Mr. Gimble was there. I landed on Rio de Janeiro and we argued until we found a compromise. Mr. Gimble was in several places at once. What was more, Mrs. Dirvitch and Mr. Gimble had been lovers and Mrs. Dirvitch had betrayed Mr. Gimble by evicting him and now lived in fear. There was no longer any doubt about Mr. Gimble’s other residence when, one Saturday in his basement, Stephen turned the dial of his grandfather’s radio and through static on the short-wave band were voices, remote and elegiac, with shaking music. Near the red line on the yellow dial was “Rio de Janeiro.”

  By Christmas, the bear had staggered, wounded, to Toronto, and Mrs. Dirvitch knew it was only a matter of time before Mr. Gimble would be resurrected from the quicksand outside Rio de Janeiro. The ever-nearing presence had now taken on some urgency and Stephen believed the man, Mr. Gimble, could in theory be located using the stars and he got an astronomy book. Finally, on a map, we drew in the heavens according to the points on the compass. Stephen went into his backyard and squinted at the night sky, again with one eye closed, the same way he had squinted at me when we had first met under the forsythia, the pencil now waving in his thin hand as he slowly marked and erased.

  Another year and Stephen’s family still hadn’t moved. After school now, as the street lights blinked on, Stephen and I played ball hockey with boys from Stephen’s school on the broken concrete drive. Sometimes, just the two of us played, opening the garage and making a goal against the back wall with the other goal where the houses narrowed the driveway. When there were enough to make teams, we played fast and violently around the big elm and through crumbled leaves, slapping the ball out of the Dirvitches’ wild roses until suppertime when the backs of houses became shadows and the cold was intoxicating, and in the last of the freezing red azure the world was still alive and violent.