by Liam Durcan
There he was, over some meal listening to her talk about her family, explaining to him how she’d finally decided on pursuing a career in art, seeing her smile and laugh. Both he and Celia still lived at home, not six blocks from each other. They laughed at that, but neither one of them could figure out why. And through it all, Patrick felt like a grey-raincoated dissident finding himself on the other side of the wall, enjoying an inexplicable day of freedom and wondrous excess.
They rode home on a nearly-empty bus and didn’t say much to each other. They’d talked all night, after all, and so were reduced to the residue of conversation, to chit-chat–how Monkland Avenue was coming back to life and what it would mean for Le Dépanneur Mondial. But the ease, the pleasure they both had in each other’s company, impressed him. The silences were like a lovely snaking song, full of subtle, irresistible grooves and hooks, mirrored in the rolling motion of the bus. He was counting stops until theirs arrived. Three. Two. One. We’ll be friends, he thought. We are friends. He said goodnight to her and tried not to have his face drawn into the smile of a sidewalk cult recruiter. The night ended, quietly and definitively, like a door closing.
A couple walked by on the sidewalk behind Patrick as he stood at the window, the reflected flare of a red windbreaker in the window registering only by the time they passed. He listened to their footsteps already abbreviating into the night. Patrick fished out the card that Roberto had used to call the pension and saw that the address was listed as Geestbrugweg, fifteen blocks away, according to his map of Den Haag. He turned away from the gallery and began the walk back into town.
Along the Strandweg, the buildings dropped away, and in the dark interval between the street lights he got a slow, cycling sense of the depth of night. The lights of a tanker hung suspended in the North Sea. He picked up the pace, enough to get his head pounding and feel a little sick to his stomach.
One morning, a few weeks after running into Celia at the art exhibit, Patrick had sat down for breakfast and watched as his father suddenly reached out with his right hand. Patrick’s mother was looking for something in the cupboard; he remembered this, he heard the door close with that cupboard door sound. The radio was on. For some reason his eyes were on his father’s hand as it froze there in the mid-breakfast air, and he had the impression his father was trying to ward something off. He watched the right hand drop slowly and then grip the edge of the table. His father had massive hands, the base of his thumb muscled thick as a chicken leg, and he squeezed the table so tightly that the thumbnail blanched. Patrick watched in fascination, as though he could only make sense of the man piece by piece, following the forearm up to the sleeve of his T-shirt and then finally arriving at his fixed and ashen face. He called out to his mother.
His mother dialled 911 while Patrick eased his father to the floor–eased, that was a joke, he remembered easing him like a lumberjack eases a redwood. Patrick started doing something that approximated CPR. His father’s lips were already cool and bluish, and he had stopped breathing. He knew he should remember something personal from his father’s last moments, he should, by rights, have had a flood of memories, some expression of devotion to him, but all he remembered was thinking: “This is a man dying.” Then he felt panic and the cold burden of futility, the sense that he was trying to overturn some unstoppable physical fact. This is a man dying. They took him to hospital in the calamity of sirens and frantic, choreographed action, but he was dead. Patrick and his mother sat in the hallway in the emergency department, watching the doors open and seal up again like great tectonic plates. Patrick was in sweat pants, he remembered the cord dangling, and his mother was still in her dressing gown underneath her overcoat when a doctor came out and told them he had died.
An aneurysm had formed on his aorta. The doctor suspected that it had enlarged gradually, the vessel’s wall thinning under the pressure until it burst. The doctor, who had up to this point been holding his hands together in a seminarian pose, suddenly extended the fingers of both hands into the gesture of explosion, a little supernova. In case they hadn’t understood.
His mother didn’t cry. Not a tear. Not the second cousin of a tear, as she would say. She looked like a person who’d been promised a ride on a wet day and had been forced to walk. Deep disappointment in an aorta. She looked at her son, with what Patrick imagined was that same air of disappointment, as if in the first months of the first year of medical school they should have taught him what to do when the biggest artery in the body ruptured. Patrick was mute, watching the doctor’s hands resume their marsupial lives deep in the pockets of a lab coat. The doctor turned and walked away.
The next few days were full of well-dressed people saying fairly predictable things to him, kind things, telling him he was a good son. Lying, he felt. In that mood, the constant parade of condolence-givers–all with that beatific, gas-pained look on their faces, all having the same pronouncement of him–seemed to be little more than an organized prank, an ironic indictment of his failings.
After the funeral mass came the cemetery and its hillside stubbled with gravestones and a big hole in the ground, big enough to stare into and see the bottom of miry clay and small pools of water. He remembered the graveside: his sisters and their husbands and kids shifting gears through various Kübler-Ross stages to suit their individual terrains of grief, and his mother, more composed than anyone in the immediate family, a person more than pleased to tell the good Dr. Kübler-Ross to feck off with her stages and just let her be. And he felt plainly stupid at not understanding until then how death changed things, that death was not only possible but inevitable, that death had been necessary for him to understand how much he cared for his father.
From there, it was to a receiving line in the church basement at St. Monica’s, his sisters and mother ahead of him (what did that mean? Was he in charge now? No one spoke to him about that). He remembered the Garcías at the funeral service, how he’d never seen any of them at church before, how Marta smelled of vanilla, the traces of wariness Patrick thought he could detect on Roberto’s face. A solemn, wordless bear hug from Hernan. Then Celia. Leaning over to kiss her on the cheek as she passed in line, looking at her earlobe and the tiny colourless hairs that covered her neck and for a moment not wanting to think of anything else.
The church basement wasn’t enough, of course; even Patrick could sense it. If there was one rule governing the socio-cultural life of a household containing two different ethnicities, it was that the customs that survived the merger will be those that are the most trenchant clichés. In this spirit, the Lazerenkos’ house harboured countless Ukrainian Easter eggs painted with orange and black geometric patterns and strategically placed Celtic paraphernalia along with the iconic Irish-Catholic devotional object: the photo of Kennedy flanked by his papal wingmen, John XXIII and Paul VI; they listened to polka music and marched down to St. Catherine Street to watch flatbed trucks laden with drunken local radio personalities plough through the slush every St. Patrick’s Day. Although he would never admit it, Patrick loved this about his family, loved this about his parents, even if he understood that in some ways the Lazerenkos knew no shame. And in that way, he knew that his mother had already decided that they would have a wake.
His mother asked to be helped up onto one of the chairs in the church basement, and from that height–her head was still barely above most of those in the gathered crowd–she announced that everyone was invited back to the house that night for a wake commencing at eight o’clock. There was an absolute, deep-sea silence, and for a moment Patrick got the impression that people were uncertain if this was some sort of aberrant grief reaction, the kind that should be indulged and ignored. But then Father Francoeur, who had been chatting with the women from the Catholic Women’s League, stepped forward and said, “That is a wonderful idea, Veronica,” and the crowd started talking and nodding among themselves.
It was hard to keep up with his mother after that. It was as though some long dormant genetic program
had been activated. She raced home to open all the windows of the top floor to let the banshee out and unfurled the linen table cloth, her regimental banner in all things domestic. She put out the good cutlery and the Belleek china and was a dervish of the small tasks necessary to receive company. Patrick watched and knew that it wouldn’t be safe to stand in her way. Platters of cold cuts and bread materialized and just after eight the doorbell started ringing. Patrick stayed downstairs with his mother and sisters and their families as long as he could. They mingled with his father’s friends from the Port who told him, as a form of tribute, he supposed, that Roger Lazerenko had a great singing voice and that his father was famous for once having thrown a five-pin bowling ball onto the roof of a three-storey building from the sidewalk below. He tried to imagine the circumstance that would call for such a feat. People ate and drank, and their neighbour Mr. Lavasseur told Patrick about a real Irish wake he had been to as a child in Pointe-Saint-Charles in the forties, how in an upstairs room the body would still be present and everybody would say prayers around it before having the first drink.
All the Garcías arrived, even Marta with Nina in tow, and from the far side of the room he saw his sisters take their coats and go through the motions of introductions. He wanted the house emptied, dark and quiet as a cave. No people singing. No happy reminiscences. Grief, which he now understood to be a word describing threads of loss and fatigue being woven into a thick black cloth, made no sense in the noise. Without telling anyone, Patrick went up to his room to be alone.
It was cool in the house with the windows left partially open, and he lay down in his darkened bedroom and did nothing, satisfied to float in his gloom until sleep came. Then the door opened. He thought it was his mother or one of his sisters at first, coming to bring him back down, and it was only when she sat on the edge of the bed that he realized it was Celia.
At the time, he didn’t think deep thoughts about love affirming itself in a wake-house or that they represented a life force amid all that grief. He tried not to think about his mother downstairs or his father somewhere else. He didn’t care about the possibilities of banshees pausing on their way out to watch the two of them struggle out of their formal grieving attire. The thought shamed him now and then, but he could think only about the smell of Celia García’s hair and the way her mouth tasted. He could think only about how much he wanted to touch her and hold her. She said, “Don’t say anything,” and he complied, not knowing if she wanted to stop him from saying something stupid or just to be quiet. He had nothing to say. He just wanted to listen to her breathing, loud and deep enough now that it drowned out the sound of voices rising in some as-yet unidentifiable song from the floor below. Christ, he remembered thinking, please don’t let it be “Danny Boy.”
Patrick walked away from the sea and back toward the lights of Den Haag. As he arrived at the Hotel Pension Henrietta on Geestbrugweg, the glow of the building’s facade and the small courtyard under the streetlights gave him the impression of having experienced a shortened night, of having returned to twilight or been thrown forward into the next morning’s dawn. Patrick could have got to the pension more quickly had he met anyone who could have given him directions, but it appeared that someone pulled the plug at five o’clock and all the citizens drained out of Den Haag.
The pension was a three-storey building of brown brick with a front door whose heft suggested it was designed to repel the Visigoths. Inside, it smelled like an old European house, a category unto itself. The lobby culminated in a small desk, and, as if to respect scale, a small man sat behind it. He lifted his eyes from a book when Patrick asked for the Garcías’ room and, after positioning a bookmark with great ceremony, he called up. The small man gave a hooked-on-phonics approximation of Patrick’s name to whoever answered. A pause followed, longer, Patrick thought, than it took to consider the name of a routine visitor. After putting the phone down, the man indicated where a visitor could wait.
Patrick sat fidgeting on the doughy sofa in the sitting room for ten minutes before getting up to look at the bookshelf. It was full of Dutch translations of well-known novels, perhaps not the most helpful collection for a house destined to be full of foreigners looking for the diversions of a good read. He pulled a book off the shelf and turned to the first page of In de ban van de Ring: which he thought, given the perplexed, constipated-looking dwarfs and pseudo-Celtic flourishes that defaced the cover, was probably a translation of The Lord of the Rings.
“What are you doing here?” Celia asked as he closed In de ban van de Ring. He didn’t want to alarm her by saying he thought Hernan was ill. He had planned to tell Celia that he was just out walking and wanted to speak with her, but the way she appeared, bearing down on him like an angry bantamweight and backing him into a corner of the sitting room, made him adjust.
“I spoke to your father’s doctor.”
“Why?”
“I was worried about him. He doesn’t look well to me.”
“What’s the doctor got to say?”
“He can’t give me details, but he tried to reassure me.”
“And you came to tell me that.”
“No, no. I was out. I was walking around–” She pursed her lips. Jesus, he thought, a gallstone of a personality sometimes. It was like talking to his mother. It annoyed him that the most important women in his life talked to him like they were his parole officers. “I found these beaches. Scheveningen. Not far from here. I thought you might like to go.”
“The beach? Are you serious?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday. What are you going to do, camp out at the empty courthouse? I thought if Nina and Paul needed to do something tomorrow, the beach would be a nice change.” Nothing. Even after bringing Paul into it, leveraging an afternoon of possible happiness, she showed no sign of softening. To Patrick she looked as if she was sniffing him for some ulterior motive.
“I see,” she said, her expression not relenting. He handed her the guidebook with its cover showing the pier and the beaches in summer, a pastoral fronting a boardwalk and a grand-looking hotel called the Kurhaus.
“It’s not far. Close enough to walk.” He pointed to the page she’d opened to, a city map showing transit connections. “There’s a tram too.”
“I don’t know, Patrick.”
“It’s the low season,” Patrick said, trying not to have it sound like a sales pitch. “There’ll be no one there. I can come by tomorrow to take you.” Celia was silent. “What?” Patrick asked.
“This,” Celia said, pointing to the door, “you coming around like this, unannounced.”
“What?”
“I’m not comfortable with you just imposing yourself–”
“Imposing? Is that what you think? If there’s been any imposing, it’s been your brother imposing his fist on my face, it’s been your lawyer imposing on me to put my career at risk. And let’s not forget the imposition of me coming all the way to Holland to be told that I’m imposing.” Patrick tried to get the two parts of his jacket zipper to engage, but his hands shook too much. Celia grabbed the sleeve of his jacket.
“Patrick, I didn’t mean it like that. Look, we appreciate you being here. I just meant that, personally, I’m not sure I feel comfortable with you.”
He pulled his arm away from her. “Well, you don’t have to go. Nina and Paul can go. Hell, send Roberto. He’s a goddamn riot.”
“Patrick, stop.”
“I’ll be here tomorrow at ten o’clock. You can do what you want. It’s the beach, for christsake.”
Twenty minutes of walking wasn’t enough time or distance for his anger to subside, and he was almost sorry when his hotel came into view. He thought about walking farther, but the night was cool, a sense of November in the air, and it would get colder still. The Hotel Metropole gave off a hum that grew and blossomed as he reached the front door. The lobby was deserted and the concierge’s desk was empty. He passed by the entrance to the bar, which offered a fine view of the Metropole’
s lobby and made him wonder if the concierge was holding court at a table inside. Patrick arrived at the bank of elevators and punched at the call button. While he waited, he walked over to the glass wall that separated the bar from the rest of the lobby. The wall was made up of several layers of tempered glass, so thick that it distorted everything on the other side into a myopic blur. It reflected well, though, and it was as he studied his own image in the glass, opening and closing his good eye, that he noticed a flickering motion from inside the bar. There was a rhythm to it, a movement like someone flapping, all of it difficult to discern through the wall of glass. As he stared at it, the movement stopped, and then started again. Patrick edged closer, the hand was really going now, and he could see it connected to a person, smaller, standing on the other side and refracted through the glass, waving from the bar. It was a woman. A scrambled channel of a woman. He ducked around the glass wall into the bar, his imagination sprinting ahead–Celia had reconsidered her ungratefulness back at the pension and hopped a cab, come over to the Metropole and now she wanted to talk, yes, a real heart to heart. He felt dizzy as he bounded up the two steps into the bar, regaining his balance to find her standing there, hands at her side, familiar now.
“Hello, Birgita.”
FOURTEEN
Patrick sat up on the edge of the bed, a balancing act, and not one well-recommended after a night of too little sleep and with a hangover imposing martial law. Off to one side, a series of red lines hovering above the bedside table organized into different shapes, then numerals, and finally, a time. He should sleep but his feet were already on the floor, taking him now to the washroom and then back again. Not even a promise of morning outside. Den Haag slept in the grid of lights; administrative dreams, banker’s dreams, dreams of people who wanted to go home. He couldn’t remember what he dreamt, if he dreamt anything. Even though he could tell the bed was empty when he awoke, he still put out a hand, ran it over the sheets, just to make sure she wasn’t there before turning on the light. The light stung when he snapped it on. The bed was empty.