My True and Complete Adventures as a Wannabe Voyageur

by Phyllis Rudin

  So with worry number one out of the way, worry number two, which had been waiting patiently in the wings, took centre stage. You can probably guess what it was after all you’ve read so far. That I’d knock on the door and whoever opened it would never have heard of this Morrie character I was inquiring after. That my thief had set me up and at this very minute, with me safely out of the way, he was having his way with my museum and it couldn’t yell to me for help.

  It was this image of him brutalizing my birthright that finally pushed me to reach for the knocker instead of standing frozen on the stoop like a spare gargoyle. Morrie must have been hovering behind the leaded panes of the front window because he pulled open the door after only one rap. The way he nearly shook my hand off my arm to welcome me in made me suspect that he had similar doubts to mine about us ever connecting that day.

  My host led me out of the front hall into what must have been the living room, but it was hard to be sure seeing as how it was buck naked. Couches, no; coffee tables, no; loveseats, no; piano, no. Just plenty of nuthin’. It wasn’t a cheerful newlywed emptiness either, a freshly-painted emptiness open to a future of Ikea possibilities. It was an emptiness of removal. Puncture marks in the walls signalled where paintings used to hang, with little anthills of plaster dust on the floor underneath each one. A darkened oblong on the floorboards marked out an area rug’s former turf. The only sign of life was a framed wedding photo sitting on the mantle, but I couldn’t get near it since this maybe-living room wasn’t our immediate destination. We kept right on going and passed into what was theoretically the dining room, but again, no tables or buffets or breakfronts to hint at its former vocation. I mean nada. I checked it out as best I could as Morrie hustled me through. A room like that, in its golden olden days had probably hosted sit-down dinners for thirty guests, maybe forty. Silver and crystal. Baccarat or some such. Nowadays the only way to serve a meal in there would be picnic style, butts against bare floor.

  But not our butts apparently. We weren’t pausing there either. Morrie opened a pair of sliding doors at the far end and motioned me to go into the next room. At least it was clearly identifiable as a kitchen. Whoever’d cannibalized the other rooms hadn’t sunk his incisors into this part of the house yet. Now this was a room that gave a hint at the house’s former glory, even if the lonely table in the gigundo eat-in area was a fifties bridge table with two mismatched chairs. Size-wise it more rightly belonged in Jerry Seinfeld’s apartment. It was at that rickety bridge table, shimmed with a matchbook, where Morrie eventually sat me down.

  “Can I offer you something? A beer? Coffee?”

  “No thanks. I’m good.” He helped himself to a Schweppes from the fridge and settled in opposite me.

  “This is a little awkward, Ben,” he began.

  I helped him along. I was a super soft touch now that I’d tramped through the empty barracks he had to call home. My family’s bungalow may have been modest, Morrie’s garden shed was probably roomier, but it was cozy, no denying. “Well, we’re used to things being awkward between us, you and me, wouldn’t you say? With our history? So just start in. Go for it.”

  “Right. You’re right. It’s not like we got to know each other in any conventional way.” He fingered the purplish bumplet on his scalp that was the memento of our first meeting.

  “Well, it’s like this. Before I introduce you to Lena, I just want to mention a couple of things. Ground rules sort of. Maybe that’s not very hospitable. Lena would treat me to a matching bump on the head if she ever caught wind that I was stage-managing your visit, but here goes anyway.

  “You remember back at your museum that day, I told you that my business washed out?” I nodded my recollection. “Well, when I couldn’t find another job after, I didn’t know what to do. Lena’s condition was deteriorating. The house was mortgaged up to the hilt. I needed cash. There was no one I could get to float me a loan. So what I did, I started to sell things from the house. Little things at first, some candlesticks here, an Inuit carving there. A print, a watch. Bits of my fur trade collection. And that kept me afloat for a good long while. But eventually, in the way of things, the money I picked up doing that ran dry so I had to move on to the big stuff, the furnishings, the chandeliers, the rugs, all that. The stars out of my collection. I sold everything that wasn’t nailed down. I’m telling you if I could have peeled the paint off the walls and stuck it back into the cans for a refund, I would have. That’s how close to the edge I was running by then.

  “Lena, she never knew. She hasn’t been able to leave her room for anything other than a doctor’s appointment, it’s been years now. I only keep up what she sees or feels; her room naturally, the A/C, the heat, the garden. The adapted van. And living in this neighbourhood I can’t let the exterior of the place go to pot. The neighbours wouldn’t put up with it. So the landscaper and the stonemason do tag team to bleed me dry.”

  “So you’re saying she doesn’t suspect anything?”

  “Nope. Not a thing.”

  “She never asks to go into the rest of the house for auld lang syne?”

  “Never. You’ll understand when you see her. She’s very weak. And the pain is tough to control. Just getting her out of bed is a struggle. She trusts me that everything beyond her room is the way it always was. She has no reason to think otherwise.”

  Okay. So I’d never met her. But it seemed impossible to me that this Lena, if she had even a gram of intuition, wouldn’t clue in that hubby was selling the house out from under her in dribs and drabs. How could he keep an operation like that secret from her? But then if I was any kind of expert on the inner workings of families, I would have been better at repairing the broken widget in my own. God knows the fix I’d tried to apply was a flopola of grand proportions. Yet didn’t I persist with it till this day?

  “Doesn’t she have nurses, aides, I don’t know, therapists coming in, someone who might spill the beans?”

  “There’s a suite built onto the back of the house, next to the garage. That’s where she stays now 24/7. I had it done up years ago when things were different. It was going to be her studio. To paint in. There’s an entrance from the garden. Anyone who comes to look after her comes and goes that way, off the driveway. They don’t have access to the rest of the house. That door’s locked. You’re the only one in years who I’ve let in through the front door.” I could already feel the weight of the baggage my front-door status bestowed on me.

  “So here’s the thing. Those ground rules I was mentioning? You have to swear to me not to let slip anything about the house to Lena. Nothing that might make her suspicious. And for sure nothing about the thefts! If she had any idea…. She’s very, what can I say, rigid in her standards. That’s how she was raised. If she ever suspected I’d been involved in anything even a fraction not on the up and up, she’d never forgive me. Of that I’m positive. To her there are no shades of illegal. Don’t talk to her about mitigating circumstances. No exceptions. No loopholes.

  “Lena’s father was a furrier. That’s how we met. He had a business card, and above his name it was printed honest, conscientious, and reliable. That card said it all. And it didn’t apply just to him alone. It was their family motto sort of. They lived by it. So she can’t know. Do you understand? She can’t.” He ran his hand nervously over his forehead as if to second guess why he’d ever been foolish enough to invite over this chink in his armour.

  I’d come this far. And it wasn’t like I was making a pact with the devil. “Your secrets are safe with me.” By rights it should have looked clinical in there. The hospital bed at the centre of the room was studded with a cockpit’s worth of levers and controls. You could probably raise it, lower it, or set it on the spin cycle. The owner’s manual for that baby must have been a good half-inch thick. A wheelchair was pushed up against the wall, and I caught the corner of a porta-potty type contraption hidden behind an oriental screen. But somehow, for all that, you didn’t feel like you were in a sickroom. Lena too
k care of that.

  Morrie led me over to the bed and introduced me to his wife. She was a tiny little thing, pixyish I guess you’d say, with her dyed carroty hair cropped short and shooting out from her head at funky angles. Her lips were perked up at the corners as if to mock all the medical gizmos that had clearly stumbled into the wrong room. Her eyes had a cheeky glimmer to them. If only she were wearing the little green hat and matching tights, you’d have sworn at first glance she was Peter Pan’s great-grandmother. But that illusion got a kick in the teeth when you stopped to take in the dramatic curve to her spine. It was as if she were trying to perfect some advanced yoga pose that demanded she stretch her chin down to touch her knees.

  I screwed up right off the bat by sticking out my hand for her to shake. It was too late to retract it when I noticed her hands were balled up into permanent fists, the knuckles all knobbly and swollen. They looked like hunks of ginger from the market. Lena was unfazed by my gaffe. She just shrugged her shoulders as if she were the one at fault, raised her right arm as best she could and gave me a friendly dap. With that one move, which I had the sense cost her her full energy quota for the day, she made me feel welcome when I really deserved to be booted out the door as a grade-A shmuck, an insensitive young punk that her husband had been sucker enough to drag in from the street. But she was too fine, choosing instead to flick my blunder away and put me at ease in her home. She must have been an incredible hostess back in the days before her dining room went the full monty and her body started to feed on itself.

  “Hello, Mrs. Shukert. I’m happy to meet you.”

  “Likewise. I’ve heard so much about you, Benjamin. And please, call me Lena.”

  “Thank you for inviting me over. Your house is very beautiful.”

  “I hope that my Morrie gave you the grand tour?” There was a trace of Eastern Europe in her diction, a little hand-me-down shtetl underneath her t-h’s.

  “Just the downstairs so far.”

  “He didn’t take you up to show you the view? That’s what I’ve always loved most about this house, the way you can look out the windows at the back and see forever, like you’re God in heaven if you’ll pardon my presumption.”

  “Don’t you worry,” Morrie assured her, “he’ll get the full upstairs tour when we go up to my room. I guarantee it.”

  “That room,” she dismissed it with sham irritation. “His man-cave. Isn’t that what they call such a place? It’s not a term I ever heard until recently. I learned it from the television. I watch it far more than I should now that my gymnastics team has dumped me for some reason.” I’d always been a great admirer of a slow-pitch wiseass delivery, and this Lena was a pro. “Although,” she continued, “maybe I have the term wrong. A cave must mean that it has to be in the basement, no? And Morrie’s is not.”

  I was able to offer some clarity on the subject. “I think it can be on an upper floor. But then you have to call it a mantuary.”

  Even if her illness was wasting her away, her body had forgotten to mention it to her laugh. It packed a healthy wallop, a great brassy whoop that shed years off her and let me catch a glimpse of the fireball Morrie had married.

  “A smart boy my husband brought me home. You can teach me all sorts of useful things. I hope you won’t make yourself a stranger. I don’t get much company. What my loving husband does to put people off, I don’t know, but they don’t come around like they used to. But you, I have a feeling you’ll come again.

  “Now, when he takes you upstairs, dear boy, I hope you’ll find that it’s been cleaned up to my standards. I haven’t been able to supervise the upkeep in a while. If there are any dust bunnies in that room to shame me, I’ll have this one’s head.” She eyeballed Morrie who smiled down on her withered frame like the sun shone out of her pupik.

  “Nothing like a few dust bunnies to make a place feel like home.” I reassured her.

  “It’s kind of you to say so. You’re well brought up I can tell. I know my husband tries to clean up in there in his way. He refuses to let the cleaning woman go in. She might disturb his system. Destroy the perfect order. But he’s not cut out for mopping and scrubbing, my Morrie. His talents lie elsewhere. The other day he bumped his head on one of his display cabinets and it left him a good lump. Next time I’ll send him up there with a helmet.” So that’s how he’d explained away the knot on his head, this guy I’d sized up as shrewd? A feather-dusting accident? Not too inspired if you ask me but she seemed to have fallen for it.

  “So I hear you’re in charge of your own museum,” she said. “Not many men your age can boast of such an achievement. You must be very accomplished.”

  “It’s not actually my museum, Mrs. Shukert.” Morrie’s earlier speech about his wife’s honesty fixation had a truth-serum effect on my replies.

  “Lena, please.”

  “Okay, Lena. See I’m just the hired help. Morrie must have exaggerated my importance.”

  “Don’t demean yourself. My husband tells me you’re extremely knowledgeable about his pet subject. He’s been waiting all his life to come across such a person, and now he’s found you.”

  “I’m flattered he thinks so.”

  “So, Benjamin, remind me how you and my husband met exactly?”

  Such a simple question. And it had a simple answer. I just didn’t know how much of the simple answer Morrie would expect me to lay on the table because my coach wasn’t there to semaphore me any clues. He’d stepped into the bathroom to get some water for his wife’s pills. I tried to stall. After all, how long does it take to pour a stinkin’ glass of water? But he stayed away for what felt to me like a good, long stretch. The door to the bathroom was closed. He must have stopped, as long as he was in there on pill duty, to take a quick piss. At least I hoped it would be quick. I knew from hanging around outside the bathroom waiting for my grandpa to vacate the premises that a quick piss wasn’t something to take for granted at that age.

  The seconds were ticking themselves off. I had to offer up something. I made the strategic decision to start off with fact, inch out from there, and see where it took me till the flush came that would save my hide. What else could I do? “Well, we met at my museum one day this summer.” I took a little dogleg to drag things out a bit. “We don’t get all that many visitors in the summer normally. Attendance goes way down starting in June. November’s our biggest month for some reason. Maybe people are in the store doing early Christmas shopping and run across us while they’re there. I don’t know. We’ve never done a questionnaire for visitors but it’s something I’m considering. I’ve written up a prototype. I can’t distribute it though without submitting it to my supervisors upstairs first. But if they give it their stamp of approval then I can have it ready to go out as early as next month. It has the usual kinds of questions. I’ve been doing some research. First there’s your demographic stuff, age bracket, sex. That kind of thing. Then I try to pin them down on how they spend their discretionary income on culture, how many museums they visit per year, how many movies, plays. How did they come to hear about the museum, what kind of displays they prefer. And I leave room for comments in case they’re in the mood to give a suggestion.”

  By the time Morrie came back in I was gibbering about parking. How I got there I couldn’t tell you. I was operating on autopilot. He put the meds on his wife’s tongue and followed them up with a straw since her frozen posture prevented her from tilting her head back to swig. I paused during the pill popping to catch my breath and Morrie caught my eye. I read the request to cut the blathering and bring him up to speed.

  “I was just saying how you and I met at the museum.”

  “Right.” He took over. “Remember I told you darling that I was at the Bay one day to pick up a new bed jacket for you and I passed Ben’s museum and went in to look around?”

  “Oh yes, you did say. My head is like a sieve these days with all the medicines I take. I do remember now. You said it was right in the middle of the store. How unusual.
How many stores do you think would sacrifice retail space to allow for an actual museum inside?” she said to me.

  “I don’t know for sure, Mrs…, sorry, Lena, but I don’t think it’s very common. Not anymore anyhow. My mum says there used to be a museum in the old Pascal’s Hardware Store down on St. Antoine. But the condo developers scooped that place up a long time ago.”

  “Well, there can’t be many stores that go as far back as the Bay does, at least not in North America, and with such an extraordinary history. A store that had a role to play in creating this country of ours. I wish I were able to see your museum. Such a story it must have to tell. Morrie says it’s a very impressive place.” Of course I thought it was impressive, but it wasn’t that often that I met up with someone else who shared my view.

  Lena drew me out on all the details, showing more interest in my place of employment after a ten-minute acquaintance than my own flesh and blood had ever managed to dredge up since day one. She asked me about preservation techniques and hands-on displays versus hands-off, real museological-type questions. Did I think we should set up small outpost museums in other Bay stores or go out to local schools to demonstrate how the voyageurs lived? Her curiosity seemed to help put her discomfort on the back burner. She acted as if there were no subject more fascinating than my museum, that if a fairy godmother bopped in and tapped her with her wand so Lena could uncurl and walk away from the straitjacket that was her body, the first place she’d head to would be the Bay to check it out.