CVC

by Gloria Vanderbilt

  When the snow had gone and the streets were dirty and damp, Stephen and I went west as far as we could go, into the land where Mr. Gimble had walked. The houses were a little smaller and a lot of the people spoke Italian or other languages and there were more corner stores. It was getting time to turn back when a girl around our age, who was neither white nor black, perhaps a dark Italian or something else, smiled at us chewing gum and asked us, grinning, if we wanted to play games in her basement. We were courteous and asked her what the games were.

  “Wait and see,” she said, laughing.

  We discussed it and Stephen looked at his watch and decided it would be better to get back.

  “You don’t know what you’re missin’,” she said. “Prizes and then surprises!” and she laughed.

  That spring, after his ninth birthday, Stephen spoke importantly of what he called “my condition,” something he called his lymph. I would ask him about it but Stephen wouldn’t say much more. Soon Stephen was in bed. In July, Stephen’s mother and sister got mad at me and told me not to bother Stephen; he had to rest. In August, I didn’t see Stephen at all.

  My parents and I brought Stephen puzzles and books in the hospital and I brought the latest edition of the newspaper and its reports on Mr. Gimble, but without Stephen’s calculations and geography. On Thanksgiving, at the hospital, Stephen was an odd colour and hardly spoke. In December my parents and I went down to an Anglican funeral home. I was told to stay with my aunt out in the lobby, but through the doors I glimpsed the awkward brown shoes at the end of the coffin; the shoes Stephen had worn only once.

  On a clear night in January, I went outside his house and saw the overturned bowl of the firmament, the stars and planets that had their centre above the block, with a planet over Bathurst Street and a constellation over Spadina Road and the shifting skies that tracked the man, ever shifting, but now more distant.

  I tried to do another copy of the newspaper but it was difficult. I tried again but I couldn’t and I left it. By the study window there was the light of a grey day in the alley, grey like the day we started the play about Mr. Gimble. But I watched television now. I watched it all the time. Sometimes the black-and-white seas in Popeye brought the old skies back, the skies of Rio de Janeiro.

  One Wednesday I came home from school very tired and barely finished my homework. The following morning I wakened with my throat sore and my head congested and my mother kept me at home. I had trouble sleeping at night for the heat in my face, and difficulty breathing. In my dreams, the corners of the room would fade into sparkling darkness and the floor would give way into nothing. In the day, I lay in bed and watched television until I had too much trouble breathing. I spent two days in hospital and then my father took me home and now I slept heavily.

  I wakened on a Friday, still in the study, and it was raining in the alley and my mother told me they had brought my fever down. Apparently I had nearly died. I got up and moved to the window and saw a glimmer of moss among cracked bricks and the alley was alive with rain. She told me it was April. I dressed and went outside.

  The outlines were there, what you saw was there, but everything else was gone. I remembered the sisters, Wendy and Karen, and things came back with the sound of the train that still passed at the end of the street. I remembered Arthur and Judy and faces that had never had names.

  I went down Stephen’s driveway, past the elm, the broken concrete. By the back door and the forsythia I found Stephen’s hockey stick and took shots against the back wall of the garage and Mrs. Dirvitch returned from shopping and asked me if I wanted soup. In the kitchen, there was the steam and the cabbage smell, and then outside, the strangeness of Stephen’s house, still there but the other way, distant and backwards. I asked to use the bathroom and Mrs. Dirvitch told me it was upstairs and I went up. I stopped at the door to a big shabby bedroom and saw that it was the mirror image of Stephen’s dining room, through the windows. I went in and looked across the alley to Stephen’s dining room and like a dream saw myself and Stephen at the table, writing the newspaper.

  After I was back at school, I tried to stay away from my parents by watching television or staying in my room or by walking the surrounding streets. One day I went farther west as if I were going off the edge of the earth, all the way west to where Mr. Gimble had been.

  These streets had endless pillared porches under a different sky. Someone said “Hi” and I turned and saw the grinning dark girl and she said, “Do you remember me?” She asked me if I wanted some pop and I said okay and she took me down an alley and into a basement rec room and gave me a sickly-sweet cherry soda and turned on a television and introduced me to American Bandstand. I mimicked the singers and she doubled up laughing. We had a pushing contest on the sofa and our laughter was drowned by the roar of the train and Mr. Gimble was in the distance and the train receded and she said, teasing, “Will you go steady with me?” A woman yelled from upstairs and footsteps were coming down and the girl told me I had to get out fast and she held out her arms operatically but I just laughed and ran out. I set off for home thinking of her and then turned and tried to remember where her house was. I looked up: Stephen would have said something about it being under Orion, Orion the hunter.

  One evening in September, when I’d started Grade 11, my father and mother remarked that Alderman Gimble had gone on trial for using municipal funds to entertain his mistress. Later, I saw him on the news on television: weedy and balding with a pencil moustache and horn-rimmed glasses, waving away reporters.

  On a night at home, my mother and father were having coffee and my mother said the bank robber, Bill Gimley, had died in prison. He’d been famed for his sharp brown suits and he’d been living in a rooming house near Christie Pits when it was believed, though never proven, that he’d murdered a suspected informer who was found with his throat cut on the third floor, and in another room there was a basin filled with bloody water. Later, I learned that Wendy and Karen had lived in a basement across the street and that their mother had been a prostitute.

  In Grade 11, I liked to pretend I was from nowhere and dress in an anonymous trench coat. After school, I’d get off the bus at a diner, a few blocks from home, and sit and do my homework and read the newspaper while the trains passed, shaking the cereal boxes and rattling the cups. One day in April, I’d just left the diner when I saw the girl coming toward me over the water from the melting snow that ran across the walks. She had a body now and wore a ski jacket. She lived in the same house but this time we went up to the third floor and sat cross-legged on the bed in her room. It was the same game of laughing but soon we were tangled together, half-naked, and there was a noise downstairs and she jumped out of bed, wearing only a sleeveless undershirt and below it the unexpected luxuriance of pubic hair in a band of late sunlight and the train passed, roaring.

  It was a long train and I could hear it still going away as I left and I realized I was walking away from home. Dark fell fast and I was in Christie Pits and the wind was wild, the light standards swaying, the pools of light moving in cold abandonment, the wind roaring in the trees and I thought: it’s still there, it’s all still there, we’ve been taught in school about things ending and new things beginning. But none of it’s true, it’s all wrong, it doesn’t end. Because I was looking up and Stephen was there among the stars, in the firmament, the whole thing alive and numinous and the great shadow even yet stalking among the houses of the west. And I thought, I know I’ll be with that girl again, but I also know Wendy and Karen are there too and even if they’re dead they’re alive and the fact is, you carry it with you, all of it, as sure as the hunter is fixed, emblazoned in the night sky, as sure as his name is Orion.

  Helen Marshall

  THE ZHANELL ADLER BRASS SPYGLASS

  The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass was a masterwork of beauty: the slim brass mailing tube, the swivelling brass mountings and the gleaming mahogany tripod. When Richard Damaske saw it in the catalogue it evoked images of medieva
l astrolabes and Antikythera mechanisms, seven-teenth-century telescopes and Copernican sextants, the abandoned debris of an era of exploration when the world seemed as perfect and new as an egg.

  “All right,” Richard said, when Danny had finished tearing through the blue-and-silver wrapping paper. “Tonight, Dan-o, tonight we’ll get this baby set up and I’ll show you something…something that’ll just knock your socks off.”

  “No one says that anymore, Dad.”

  “Sure, they do, buddy. You still have socks, don’t you? Yes? Good. Then be prepared to have them knocked off.”

  Danny grinned. He was pleased immeasurably by the gift, but pleased also by the way his dad smiled at him. It had been months since his dad had smiled like that.

  And so he was almost buoyant with happiness when he nodded off to sleep that night, the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass gleaming in the moonlight like the abandoned relic of some Martian exploration team, and that happiness stayed with him the next morning as he slung his backpack over his shoulders and marched off to North Preparatory Junior Public School. But when Danny came home that evening and he found his dad slumped at their makeshift kitchen table with the morning’s newspaper beside him, that feeling wavered.

  “Not tonight, okay, Danny?” his dad said, barely looking up. “Can’t you see that I’m…it’s just. That thing cost a lot of money. God, over five hundred dollars, what was I…And now I have to—” he broke off. “Can you just go play in your room? I’ll get you for supper in a little while.”

  “Sure, Dad,” said Danny. “We can do it later. We can do it tomorrow.”

  But the next day when Danny came home from school he found his dad in the kitchen, shirt soaked into an atlas of water stains. A pipe had burst on the floor above them. The water was beginning to seep through, first in little trickles and then in gushing streams. There was no thought for the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass then. Danny spent the evening emptying copper pots and bowls as the ceiling turned the colour of a winter storm blowing in.

  “Isn’t this fun, Dad?” Danny asked, as he heaved about with a massive soup pot. “We’ve got to bail faster or else we’re going to go under!”

  “Damnit, Danny! Just be careful where you put that,” his dad replied, and as an afterthought: “Wash your hands! The last thing I need is you getting typhus and your mother breathing down my neck about it; who knows what’s in these pipes?”

  In the wake of the nautical disaster and the subsequent evenings spent unpacking soggy boxes and blow-drying old clothes, Danny forgot all about the spyglass, but on Friday evening when he trudged through the door, he was surprised to find his dad in his bedroom, the miraculously pristine box folded down and the thing itself pointed out his window, nestled between his fraying, navy curtains.

  “Sorry, Dan-o,” his dad said. “I know things have been. Different. It’s not easy for you. Nor me – ha, but you know that, yeah? But tonight I’m going to knock your socks off just like I promised. Okay, buddy? Even if they don’t say that anymore. Tonight is all about you.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “C’mere.” And Danny did, and his dad hugged him in one tight burst of affection before settling him in front of the eyepiece. “Would you look at this? Just look. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Danny said. “A real beauty.”

  “You don’t get this quality for nothing, not for cheap, no. Not the double-refracting lenses. Not magnifying up to sixty times the naked eye…and, erm, helical focusing rings.”

  “What’s helical focusing rings?”

  “Well, helical…like, uh,” his dad squinted. “Like a hel-icopter, you know, but with rings.”

  Danny smiled. He imagined great spinning blades, he imagined infrared sensors and, and extradimensional something-or-others. “It’s great, Dad, really great. Thanks. The best present ever.”

  At that his dad flushed a deep shade of red that made the faint traces of his beard stand out, and he smiled such a proud, excited smile that Danny couldn’t help but grin too.

  “Let me show you.” His dad adjusted the knobs. “There. Just stand and look into the eyepiece. It should be set up for—”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Danny. There it was, the sky awash in a swirl of colours. “What is it?”

  “The Orion nebula.” Danny’s dad frowned. “Is it okay? It says the light pollution makes it hard, you know, but maybe, well, maybe we’ll be able to take it out to the field by Papa’s place. You’ll get some real good images there, I’m guessing.”

  “A nebula,” Danny breathed. “Wow. Is that what it really looks like? Am I really seeing into space?”

  His dad chuckled. “Of course, buddy. Well, mostly. That’s not what it’s like now. It says that everything you’re seeing, it’s already happened. Something to do with the way light travels. What you’re seeing is how it was.”

  “Oh,” Danny said.

  His dad stumbled, seeming to sense his son’s disappointment.

  “Don’t worry, if we get a really good night, I bet you can see something over a million years old.”

  “A million years old? Really?”

  “I promised I’d show you some really good stuff, didn’t I? And here—” His dad picked up something off the bed. “A journal. To record what you see. It’s already got your name inside it.”

  Danny fingered the velvet of the embossed stars and rocket ships before flipping it open. “To Danny Damaske. From Richard Damaske. Lots of love for your twelfth birthday, buddy. Dad.”

  “Well, you deserve some really good stuff, don’t you? A little magic?”

  “It is magic.” Danny wrapped his arms around his dad. “Thanks. Just wait till Evan sees this! It’s gonna knock his socks off!”

  “I guess it’s sort of cool,” Evan said. He was reclining on Danny’s bed, his arms haphazard, one covering the fringe of bangs his mom couldn’t cut quite often enough. “I mean, my dad would never get me something like that.”

  Evan was in the same grade as him, but his birthday was in February so he had already had a good long time to get used to being twelve. For Danny, twelve was still new. Twelve was still exciting. But for Evan, halfway to thirteen, twelve was already kid stuff.

  “It has helical focusing rings,” Danny said. “It can magnify up to sixty times the naked eye.”

  “Huh,” Evan allowed.

  “It’s…”

  “It’s a bit queer if you ask me. I mean, what do you want with something like that? What does your dad think you are, a queer?”

  “What do you mean?” Queer was what they called Pete Cartwright, the new kid from Manchester who had been jumped up a grade.

  “I mean, that’s why my dad wouldn’t get me one. He’d be worried it would make me queer.” Evan rolled onto his stomach. The afternoon sun knifed across his face and revealed a landscape of acne craters and freckles.

  “You don’t want to try it?”

  “What for? It’s daytime. It’s not like there’s any planets or anything, except, I mean, for the sun, and that’d just, I dunno, burn your eyeball up like a toasted marshmallow if you looked at it through that thing.”

  “What about something else? What about…” Danny searched for something definitively not queer. “What about if we look into Sarah Englemont’s room?”

  The moment the words were out of his mouth it was like someone was turning a radio dial in his head, and what had been a muzzy static of pre-adolescent longing suddenly jumped into sharp relief.

  Sarah Englemont.

  This was new territory for Danny. He knew some of the other boys from class liked to look at the magazines they sneaked out of Mac’s Milk. They all had hiding places – under the bed wasn’t good enough, that was a well-known fact. Nor was under the mattress or in the sock drawer. Jammed behind the headboard, taped underneath the dresser, that was better. Sam Stenson, whose parents were both fanatical clean freaks and vacuumed the whole house top to bottom twice a day, had hollowed out an old encyclo
pedia with a penknife. With all the cleaning, his parents never got around to reading much.

  Over the last few months, Danny had watched Evan gain admittance into the secret cadre of boys who had been twelve for some time, sharing their winks and nudges, trad-ing greasy, glossy centrefolds at recess. Sometimes Evan, with a glassy-eyed look, would try to tell Danny about big titties and nipples as round and hard as gumballs. Would tell him about the time he found an inflatable plastic doll with “Bride To Be” Magic-Markered onto its chest dis-carded behind Spadina Station, and how there had been a hole down there, and he was absolutely sure it had been filled with cock slime.

  Danny didn’t quite get the point of these stories, but sometimes when Evan was done Danny would think about how Mrs. Pembridge’s breasts hung like half-filled balloons, and how sometimes when she quizzed them on vocabulary and spelling he might see the beads of sharp, little nipples poking out against her blouse. Then he would feel the same sweaty, glassy look steal over him, and he’d have to keep his workbook over his lap.

  The thought came to him again.

  Sarah Englemont.

  Sarah Englemont was different. Even at twelve, Danny could tell there was a difference. With Mrs. Pembridge you didn’t want to feel that way, you didn’t want to think about breasts and beady nipples. But Sarah was twenty-six. She used to babysit Danny to help pay for university when his family had lived across the road in the apartment beneath hers. Back in the days when his parents used to do things like “date nights.” Back when they could share the same space without wanting to kill one another.

  Sarah Englemont was like…she was like the way you felt on a hot August day when the smog and humidity sunk into your skull and made you drowsy. She was like when you ate so much Halloween candy you knew you’d get sick but for just a moment the world was all shimmery. Sarah Englemont was like that. Except she wasn’t only that. She was…she was…