The casket sat under the front window, closed. Joyce wondered whether it might be empty. Alice Henley had told her that there were empty caskets for some of the poor folks who had been cut to ribbons on the runway back in forty-six, because what was left of them couldn’t be put in a box.
The young novice, Sister Rosalia, led the rosary on Thursday night. Her slender throat puffed and quaked as she rang out the mysteries in a high, clear voice.
Teddy kept his distance, but he and his wife sat next to Joyce for the funeral. There was a big turnout, though the service felt drab and perfunctory after the drama of the wake. Back at the house, the parlour felt empty without the body and attempts at conversation died in the rattle of unsteady cups on saucers.
When Joyce brought down her small, sturdy case in the morning, she found Teddy and Sister Rosalia standing inside the front door. They looked as if they had been standing there for some time.
“She’ll accompany you to the station and carry your bag,” said Teddy. The sister looked fearful, standing next to Teddy with her hands hidden and her wide, dark eyes on Joyce.
“Oh, but I can carry this. It’s nothing.”
“Well, you’d best get underway then,” said Teddy. “Goodbye, Joyce. We’ll remember you in our prayers.”
“Thank you for everything,” said Joyce, and would have said more. But Teddy was out the door.
Sister Rosalia walked quickly, though they had plenty of time. “This way,” she said. “This way.” Joyce knew the way. The railway station was almost in sight of the house, at the end of a path that ran down a small slope and alongside the tracks.
They walked in silence until the girl turned her wide eyes to Joyce and said, “I was nearly spoiled, you know. We had a lodger who…I could have been spoiled.”
“I don’t understand, Sister.”
“When Father took in lodgers, there was one who tried.” She looked away again, hugging one arm to the other. “I kept away from him. Once he caught me at the washing, and meant to force a hand. He pulled at my clothes. But then he stopped before anything else happened. He seemed to be in pain, and then there was a dark spot on his trousers. He said it was because I was filthy.”
“What’s your name, Sister?”
“Rosalia, since I took my vows.”
“Before the vows.”
“You mean my baptismal name. I was Elizabeth Margaret.”
“Elizabeth, why are you telling me this story?”
“I never told anyone before, outside the Order.”
“Don’t you think you should keep it that way?”
“But what if it might help someone else?”
“How can it help anyone?”
Elizabeth stared at the ground. “Well, I, I didn’t want, I mean, just because a girl is spoiled…” Her voice trailed off in what might have been a sob. With her cameo face and fulsome, straight teeth, the strands of black hair escaping her wimple, Joyce thought it awful foolish for her father to have invited strange men into the house.
Elizabeth stopped walking. The path had taken them parallel to the railway tracks, and they were close enough to the station that Joyce recognized several men and women waiting on the platform. She had met them during the wake. A little boy stared at her as he reached into a wrinkled bag and crammed candy in his mouth.
“Do you have your permissions for the train?” asked Elizabeth. “From Uncle Ted?”
“Yes. I have everything.” Teddy had presented the required papers to her that morning, and had done so with some ceremony, explaining that travel on the branch line was restricted to persons with written permission from the company.
“Uncle Ted says he doesn’t blame you, and he wanted to be Christian about it so he let you come here.” She spoke quickly, and pressed both hands to her legs, flattening her habit as the wind picked up. “He says Uncle Eric was awful, how he…he carried on. He says Jesus is merciful. You’ll find some literature for your journey. You have my prayers. My prayers are with you, I mean. Goodbye.” She hurried away, the habit lifting behind her.
Joyce dropped her suitcase beside her and opened her purse to retrieve the brown envelope stamped Anglo-Newfoundland Development Company. In the folds of its officious documents she found a pamphlet: The Next War: A Call for Christian Vigilance Against the General Slackening of Moral and Social Standards. She opened it to a page marked by a white strip of paper.
The Good-Time Girl
A decline of parental responsibility was an unfortunate by-product of the war effort, as well as a diminishing influence of religious and social values. Having grown up in a time when the stable life of home, church, and school was disrupted and threatened by the Japanese and German Peril, young people prone to social and mental defects emerged with no sense of responsibility. Left unchecked, these defects led to a licentious deviation that has been particularly damaging for young women.
It is this subset of the community’s wasted and wanton that produces the ‘Good-Time Girl.’
She is self-centred, valuing little beyond personal enjoyment and committed to little beyond her own gratification. She is morally and emotionally unstable, with a tendency to reject discipline and control.
Joyce turned to the front of the pamphlet. Pages flipped in the breeze, and she caught it at the table of contents: The Jewish question. What happened to daddy? Idle hours and delinquency. Healing the wounds. The corners of this page were decorated with small line drawings. A smoking man in a fedora, a shapely woman drinking from a glass, a crying baby, and Jesus on the cross.
Boarded and seated, she returned to the bookmarked article and browsed it, registering phrases at random. …personal adornment…the venereal stain…she often does not trouble to wash and is sluttish about her undergarments.
She took a TCA linen napkin from her purse and wiped her shoes. Tugged at her hemline a couple of times—she was travelling in the troublesome skirt again, the one that hung on to the seat while her legs slipped forward and out. She held the pamphlet tight in one fist until a man came around selling the raspberry drops she and Gloria used to gorge on every Christmas. Then she dropped the pamphlet to the seat beside her and bought the candy.
//////
Christmas was approaching. She asked Gordon what bookings the band had, and said she wanted to sing. They hadn’t replaced Eric. A lot of halls and clubs didn’t have a proper piano anyway.
The change was immediate, and so obvious as to be embarrassing. They heard it in the sure-handed flow of a tune, in new spaces that let a little air into a horn solo or a crescendo. The band sounded cleaner, like the grit had been washed from it.
The only difference was Eric’s absence.
Joyce flew to St. John’s and found a rippling plum-blue cocktail dress with a high neckline and a pearl-beaded bodice miraculously cut to her size. The first night she wore it, she had the extraordinary sensation of opening her mouth and the music coming with hardly any effort, the words forming and settling back on her like mist. It stayed like that for many nights after, and she had the cocktail dress nearly worn through by summer. Occasionally, a song might put a lump in her throat for no reason. A simple line she had sung dozens of times overwhelmed her one night with its perfectly matched string of words—glitter…gleam…dream. She had to skip the final chorus, feeling stupid and embarrassed until Gordon struck up the next number.
Gordon needed the band more than Joyce did. Fran was getting out again, picking up a few groceries at the Co-op or driving Matilda to Girl Guides. People said it was good for her, a fresh start. The way she shuffled about with little steps and big, wide eyes, hardly exchanging a word with anyone, was an embarrassment trailing Gordon’s every move. But people still danced to songs about romance and eternal love. Gordon had been right all along. It was a kind of playacting, a dress-up game.
Every show the band did now closed with Gordon takin
g the microphone to sing “Days of Wine and Roses,” while Joyce stepped down from the stage and danced with any man who offered. Sometimes other men would cut in and the band would give the song an extra couple of turns, until everyone waiting could have his twirl. Some of them treated the dance with great solemnity and ceremony, and Joyce suspected these were the men who pitied her. Others were flirty and breathy, with crawling hands pulling her to their hard hipbones. These must have been the ones who understood that she had never truly been Eric’s fiancée, though she had never mentioned this to anyone except Den, who was airtight.
“Is that what people are saying?” she asked Gloria one afternoon. “That I’m good for a bit of fun?”
“Oh, goodness no!” cried Gloria, though neither of them pretended the answer was truthful. “It’s not like if we were back home,” she added. “It’s not like you’re spoiled goods.”
13
The video arrives with no identifying details. But the dark, unadorned space can only be a motel room.
Carter opens it while brushing his teeth. Isabelle and Sam are safely below, bickering over breakfast.
Shadowy limbs move. A flick of hair. It’s a woman dancing. The window behind her is a square of sunlight, and she’s silhouetted against the glare. She pivots, showing a round cheek and an arm topped by a T-shirt sleeve. There’s no music. The woman laughs and hugs herself, the arms rise, bringing a dark shirt overhead. It falls behind her and the light catches the white of a bra and armpit. The dancing resumes. Her arms twist behind and the bra drops while she turns away. A small, shadowy breast, side-on. A hand reaches and pulls her back to face the camera.
The picture freezes in a blur of flesh as Carter drools a gob of toothpaste, slurps it back, and gags on it.
“Everything okay up there?”
“Yeah.” His eyes water. He hacks painfully into the sink and gargles. The email from Will included no message, just the attachment and video in the subject line. Carter watches again with his headset plugged in. It starts with male laughter and indecipherable voices, except when Colin calls, “For the boys, for the boys!” in a sing-song voice. The sunlight in the window is reflected off the grill of a parked vehicle—the blue one that took them through the last couple of years.
He’s expecting the hand this time. It emerges from the screen’s edge, touches her shoulder. There’s laughter as it slides briefly for a stroke of the breast, and takes her arm.
On third viewing he focuses on the moment of laughter as the girl exposes herself. It’s almost lost behind Colin’s loud, approving “Yeahhhhhh!” The laughter belongs to Carter. As does the hand.
She dances again, and he watches the quick movement of the hand, the fingers turning to quickly cup the breast as the girl turns. The grip on her arm is firm, with the thumb wrapped around her bicep.
//////
“Aunt Kat had an eye. A brilliant eye,” says Shelley. “The family let her down, leaving her all alone in that big old house, way out on the Durham County Line. Poor Kat.”
Isabelle and Shelley tumbled through the door a few minutes ago, carried on the winter wind, toting heavy bags from the market and liquor store. Isabelle announced that Sam was staying with his grandmother in Hamilton, then the two women set to work on a window-fogging, stove-spattering Spaghetti Bolognese, “like we used to make.” Bacon spits in the skillet and onion skins blow across the floor. “Spag Bol!” the women cry. “Spag Bol!”
Aunt Kat lived in her kitchen and her sewing room, Shelley explains as she smashes garlic cloves with the side of a knife and stirs them around the bottom of the pot. In an old house she inherited from her parents. She spoke in a hushed voice, produced enormous meals for the extended family, and was rarely seen to take up a plate. Eating at Kat’s house left Shelley stricken, as if the loneliness had been poured into her cooking and shared around the table.
“But what an eye. She could see clothes on a person. She did a bit of knitting and sewing over the years, but nothing much. A brilliant, wasted eye.”
“I can’t believe you never told me about her before,” says Isabelle, her cuffs red with tomato juice.
“I had no appreciation. I thought she was just a silly old woman.”
Shelley opens a bottle of white and fills champagne flutes. Carter takes his glass and sits on a stool against the wall, keeping his distance.
“You could have learned so much from her,” says Isabelle, nearly shouting. She’s been possessed by a nervous gaiety since Shelley clomped into the house, kicking off purple sneakers and greeting them both with mock kisses. (Mwa! Mwa! Pressing her face to one cheek, then the other.)
“She never had the chance,” says Shelley. “The chance to just hide away and make clothes and use her imagination and make mistakes.”
“To make dueling bandage skirts with her best friend.”
“Exactly.”
Carter has heard about the dueling skirts. In Shelley’s occasional visits, he has heard all the favourite tales from the idyllic fashion school days. How Isabelle and Shelley spent hundreds of hours with their pencils and scissors, labouring over sheets of tissue paper and rolls of cheap fabric. Every day they dug into their mountain dragged home from Goodwill, raiding it for buttons and ruffles and strips of leather or tulle or denim. The whole apartment stank of sweat and polyester and mothballs, of old closets and basements. The mountain produced treasures, like the gold buttons for Isabelle’s high-waist capris, the green serge for Shelley’s asymmetrical skirt, and the endless supply of Lycra for their naughty line of dominatrix yoga wear. They found occasional coins and crumpled bills—including a memorable cache of eighty dollars—an old baby picture, which they framed, a pair of unwashed black underwear from the Gap (ladies petite), also framed, and a knob of driftwood kept as a talisman. There were church bulletins, keys, tickets and tokens, fossilized wads of chewing gum and used tissue, court summons, mouldering food scraps, and mouse shit.
“Will your mother be alright with Sam?” Carter asks. The woman has lately complained of nerves, and how children make her anxious.
“Oh yes, they’ll be fine.” Isabelle holds the bottle of olive oil overhead, tipping and twirling it to send a spiraling stream into the stockpot.
But Shelley isn’t finished with Aunt Kat. It all came to a sad end. They left her alone out on Durham County Line all those long dark winters, until finally she went mad and they put her in the home and sold the house.
“Shameful for the whole family, all of us, to let it happen like that. I was so wrapped up in my own life. If I could have it back, I’d go live with her.”
“Aww,” says Isabelle, and reaches for a brief, one-armed hug, cheek to cheek. Glasses are refilled.
There was a very bad scene a few weeks before Ronnie died. As Isabelle tells it, Shelley went to see him without telling her. Isabelle found out and drove into Toronto, where there was an ugly confrontation. Carter isn’t clear on why she found the possible relationship so abhorrent. Couldn’t Ronnie use a woman? A reconciliation at the funeral, with a heartfelt hug, could have been the perfect, final grace note between them. But Shelley insists on the tether. They still have fashion school, after all. They were closer than lovers back in those innocent days, sharing a double bed in their basement apartment. Occasionally they would even “make out like teenagers,” according to Isabelle. “Just a comfort thing,” she called it. “Just kissing. We were both so lonely.” But surely, with the two of them in the same bed every night… “Your mind goes there because you’re a guy,” Isabelle insisted. “It was just kissing.”
Carter has never been good at drinking. It puts him to sleep. But today the buzz from the wine is fortifying. It burns a little, as if glowing inside him.
Shelley turns to him and says, “What about you?”
“What?”
“Your younger days, what were they like? You were in a band. There must have been so
me wild times.”
“It was great, but its time was brief.” This is his stock answer.
“But what was it like?” Shelley lowers her voice to a purr of comic seduction. “Didn’t the girls throw themselves at you?”
“Not at Herb,” says Isabelle. “He was married.”
“That’s a shame,” says Shelley. “Did people come to see you?”
“It was a big soap opera, and a big break-up at the end.” He’s being unfair. It doesn’t account for the way music, or the idea of music, pulled like an undertow. But he can’t give a name or purpose to this force. It’s why he’s had trouble arguing his case with Leah.
“But what was it like when it was wonderful? What did you love best about it?”
“My Telecaster.”
“What’s a Telecaster?”
“A guitar that can make you believe anything.”
“Really? I bet that came in handy. This was the nineties, right? Would I know any of your songs?”
“I doubt it.”
“Can I hear some now?”
“Not now. But we’ve got plans to get them back out there.”
“Are your songs embarrassing, like someone reading your high-school poetry? Horrible feelings and heartbreak?”
“No.” The comparison is not entirely off the mark. But he chafes against the touch of glee in Shelley’s voice. “Maybe a bit young and foolish. But it shouldn’t be dismissed because of that.” He shrugs. “It’s old.”
“Carter left all that behind long ago,” says Isabelle, dumping ground sausage into the pot. “We both let a lot of things go when we got married.”
They switch to red for dinner. Carter breaks the cork and has to push the rest of it in to pour. They drink and spit flecks of cork. Soon he is finding out things he never knew. His wife hates her hair, and has never found a style that can minimize the expanse of her forehead and the impossibly thick bridge of her nose. Also, even her most carefully selected shoes look absurd, big planks at the end of each leg.
The End of Music Page 19