by Cary Fagan
“You can do that?”
“I don’t know, actually. Anyway, here, it’s inside this book. The book is for you, too.”
I hold out the book with the letter sticking out from between its pages. She looks at it a moment before taking it. Then she stares at the cover.
“The woman who lives with monkeys, right?”
“Chimpanzees, actually.”
She opens the book to the title page. “It’s signed.”
“Yes.”
“‘To a fellow animal lover’?”
“I guess that’s what she always writes.”
“A bit weird but thanks, I guess.”
“Don’t mention it.”
I take a step back and Kate Sulimani closes the door.
I PARK AT the curb and turn off the ignition. In the dark I rest my head against my arms on the steering wheel. I feel tired, but it isn’t the good sort of tired that comes from a long walk. I get out of the car and lock it with the remote key, making the lights flash.
I enter the side door as quietly as I can, but Lizette is still up, sitting at the kitchen table in a cotton nightgown. The cake we didn’t have time to eat is on the table.
“How was it?”
“Good,” I say. “She’s a woman who knows her chimps.”
“Is she older too or is it just us?”
I lean over and kiss her. “You’re very beautiful.”
She shrugs me off. “Do you want a piece of cake?”
“Hmm.”
She cuts a slice and puts it on a plate, slides it to me as I sit down. I take a bite. “It’s delicious.” I took another. “I don’t like firing people.”
The next few bites I eat without tasting and then the slice is gone. I want to go to bed but I can’t move. Lizette doesn’t move either and I become aware of the ticking of the clock on the wall.
“I think we should go on a holiday this year,” she says.
All right, I say. At least, I think I say it. I’m not sure, but I don’t say it again.
The Creech Sisters
THE SUMMER THE CREECH SISTERS tried to seduce my father turned out to be the last that we spent on the island. It was a very small island in Georgian Bay, all eight cottages clustered near the beach, ours closest to the water and the one belonging to Mrs. Creech the farthest. To reach the island we had to take a ten-minute boat ride. There were a couple of men on the mainland who used their boats as unofficial taxis for the cottagers. Mrs. Creech, who was not only heavy but an invalid (a word still used forty years ago), had to be lifted in and out of a boat by her two daughters. Three or four kids always hung around gawking, just in case the boat finally capsized and Mrs. Creech was plunged into the lake.
During this fourth island summer I had no inkling it would be the last and so no sadness or first taste of nostalgia. I am in my early fifties now; that July I was twelve-and-ahalf, a middle son. My brothers were fourteen and nine and the three of us had already explored the island with a freedom that we were not allowed back in the city. The interior rose gradually and stunted evergreens grew up between the rock plates. We sometimes found the remains of a campfire, or a shotgun-blasted coffee can, or a condom. The night was especially eerie because in the city there was no real darkness, while here the night skies were awash with stars. I never had bad dreams sleeping in the cottage, as I often did in Toronto, perhaps because at the end of those long days in the fresh air I was simply too tired.
MY FATHER DIDN’T LIKE BEING in the country. Born in Warsaw, he had spent his youth in Vienna, Brussels, Paris — wherever his merchant father took his family. He had entered Canada on a student visa in 1942, Jewish refugees no longer being permitted into the country, and was proud to have been the youngest graduating lawyer in his class. In the years that followed he lost his accent (although there was a non-native’s precision to his speech) but never his European air of sophistication. He was the only father I knew who liked to wear his overcoat draped on his shoulders, and when as a young adult I finally did see someone else looking so suave it was Jean-Paul Belmondo in a French film. My father was short but did not seem to know it, and he had a beautiful ease with people that I was just beginning to notice. Women were especially drawn to him. I once had a French teacher named Mrs. Lupenski who loved to hear his Parisian accent when he spoke French and once, in front of my class, called him a “dreamboat.”
My father thrived on the pleasures and obligations of city life, and spending three weeks on the island was like waiting out a prison sentence. He needed newspapers and magazines, opera, cocktail parties. He loved to take my mother to expensive restaurants where there was a band for dancing. But he had been given the right of occupancy of the cottage when one of his clients could not pay his legal bill. I’m sure my father would have preferred to forgive the debt, but when my mother heard about the offer she insisted that we take it.
My mother never liked the city, although by then she had already lived in Toronto for almost twenty years. She was a small-town Episcopalian who met my father in the University of Toronto infirmary, where she was a volunteer nurse to the new army recruits being billeted in tents on the campus lawns. Her parents had been against her going for fear that she would be undone by some private about to be shipped overseas, but instead she fell for my father. He came into the infirmary with one eye swollen shut, having hit himself with a badminton racquet while playing in the Hart House gymnasium.
Even if my father had wanted to practise law in my mother’s home town, as a Jew he would not have found many clients. So she got used to the city, taking us to visit her parents every Christmas where a tree and presents awaited. My father always stayed home, to clear up paperwork, he claimed. When my mother sometimes brought up the subject of buying a cottage he always said that it would be just another property to look after when he hardly had time to take care of the house. Actually, he didn’t take care of the house at all; it was my mother who called the plumber or electrician when something needed fixing.
When the offer of the cottage came up, he could think of no good reason to refuse her.
IN THE EARLY MORNINGS MY mother took her coffee down to the beach to watch the sun play over the water. Then she roused everyone out of bed and made pancakes or French toast, which we ate while still in our pyjamas. During the day she went for walks with my father or alone, watched us swim, baked pies in the wood stove. In the very late afternoon when the beach was usually deserted, she went for her own swim, doing the crawl out to the floating deck and back several times. She was not fast, but she had a fine form, as my father liked to remark, and hardly left a ripple on the surface. She would walk dripping onto the beach again and, ignoring our pleas of hunger, take a shower as she hummed to herself before dressing again to finish dinner.
My father appreciated her contentedness, even if he couldn’t stop himself from pacing the small cottage rooms, picking up and putting down the days-old newspaper, going outside in the hope of finding someone to talk to. Every few days he would take the boat back to the mainland and spend a couple of hours on the phone to his secretary and various clients, after which he would be calmer for a while. My mother said that he didn’t have to stay with us for the whole three weeks, that he could go back for the middle week, but he wouldn’t hear of it. At the time I thought it was because he didn’t want to leave my brothers and me. He played Monopoly and Clue with us and soccer games on the beach. I realize now that he didn’t go because he didn’t like to be away from my mother.
THE CREECH SISTERS WERE HARDLY old but they were “mature girls,” as my father called them. Ellen, the elder sister, was past forty and Louise was three or four years younger. Unlike my mother, they both had jobs, Ellen as a veterinarian’s assistant and Louise as a speech therapist, one of the first in the province. Both of them continued to live with their mother, which my mother said was the root of their problem. I couldn’t exactly see that they had a problem except for their rather plain faces and that they seemed to smile only as a
nervous habit. My father, who knew my mother was one quarter Scots, joked that they had dour Scots blood and that was the root of their problem.
Despite my always thinking of them as a pair, the Creech sisters were not quite so alike as all that. Ellen seemed more sombre and uneasy around people; she usually walked on the paths between the cottages with her eyes cast down. She had long black hair that she kept done up unless it was wet. When my father greeted her, remarking on the “sumptuous” weather or asking if she had seen the Canada Geese overhead, honking like “Manhattan taxi-cabs,” she always blushed. Louise, the younger, was not quite so timid. She sometimes chatted with my father and seemed to feel at ease with him. Louise had the better figure and moved in a more feminine manner, although both sisters were busty and wide-hipped. I tried not to appear to watch them when they took Mrs. Creech down to the beach in her wheelchair and then splashed about in the shallows. I sometimes had to tear my eyes away from Louise’s very white thighs. Once my mother put her hand on my shoulder and said if I had nothing better to do she knew of plenty of chores around the cottage.
Some nights, I didn’t fall asleep immediately. Instead, I lay in bed and thought about the Creech sisters and became hard. I was still a couple of months away from discovering how to relieve my own arousal and just lay on my side, towards the wall and away from my brothers, and tried to keep still. It never occurred to me that my older brother might have similar thoughts. He never looked at the Creech Sisters. I suppose if there had been any teenage girls on the island, we would have had crushes on them, but there were only little kids. So the Creech sisters became the object of my rapt attention and reveries. No doubt that was why what they did to my father seemed so exciting and lurid and appalling.
IT RAINED ONLY ONE AFTERNOON during those three weeks. The sky clouded over and the rain came almost instantly, a true downpour. We fled up from the beach, screaming with pleasure, and stood breathlessly on the porch as the lake vanished in the mist. Inside, my mother said that the sun was waiting behind the clouds and the storm wouldn’t last long. So my brothers and I started a game of Monopoly, which I always lost because my older brother managed to trade me out of my best properties. Only my father was missing; he had gone wandering off as usual and my mother was starting to look concerned when the door opened and he came in, soaked to the skin, half-covered in mud, his face flushed from the exertion of running.
“Don’t you come in with those wet clothes,” she commanded, and while he stripped on the mat she brought him a towel and robe. Then he fell into a beat-up easy chair and said to no one in particular, “Well, the damnedest thing just happened to me.”
This was not my father’s usual mode of expression, which was why I turned my head away from the game board to look at him again. He was trying to sound folksy to indicate that whatever had happened ought not be taken too seriously. I cannot remember precisely any of his other words; instead, I can “see” what he described almost as if I had witnessed it myself, no doubt because of the countless times I imagined the scene afterwards.
My father had been taking a walk and, preoccupied with one of his client’s legal problems, hadn’t noticed the clouds overhead. When the rain began he was a hundred or so yards beyond the last cottage, wandering among the small stand of birch trees that were scarred by kids pulling off the bark. He started to run, but he was almost instantly soaked through and, peering through the rain, he saw Louise Creech waving to him from the back window of her cottage. There must have been a lamp on for him to see her.
The Creech sisters often asked my father to do small favours around the cottage, since neither of them, as Louise said, was “very handy.” While he himself had virtually no practical skills, my father’s pride did not allow him to admit it, so he would go off with a screwdriver or wrench from the toolkit the restaurant owner kept under the sink and come home again looking triumphant for not having made the problem worse. Well, he saw Louise Creech wave from the window and he ran through the rain to the front of the cottage and up the slippery porch steps. Louise opened the door. She was wearing a raincoat and he guessed that she had been about to come fetch him. Their mother was napping, she said, and then told him that a leak had started in the roof above the sisters’ bedroom and they didn’t know what to do. “How about praying for the rain to stop?” my father joked, but Louise didn’t smile and he followed her inside. He took off his shoes and socks, whispering that he would be just a moment, and this time Louise giggled. “You don’t have to whisper,” she said. “When our mother naps she’s dead to the world on account of the painkillers.”
She took him down the hall, past Mrs. Creech’s closed door behind which he could hear her snoring as deeply as a man, to the bedroom at the end. The door was ajar and Louise paused in the narrow hall so that my father would enter first. When he did the first thing he saw was the elder sister, Ellen, lying naked on the nearest bed. She was on her back and her eyes were closed, her arms at her side and her large breasts flattened by gravity. Without opening her eyes, Ellen said something. “Bake me” was how it sounded to my father, although after he realized she must have said, “Take me.” Looking down on her, my father was at a loss what to do. I don’t believe he felt any sexual stirring at all, not the way I did when I later imagined the scene. He turned to the younger sister for help only to see that Louise had let the raincoat slip from her shoulders. She wore only a pair of white underpants. She looked right into my father’s eyes and smiled.
I don’t think he got a good look at Louise because she was standing so close to him. I do remember what he told us next: “I got the hell out of there.”
Which he did. It was his lawyer’s instinct not to be caught in a compromising situation. Mumbling a pardon under his breath, he carefully edged past Louise and almost sprinted in his bare feet down the hall. He stuffed his wet socks into his pocket, stuck his feet into his squelching shoes, and was out the door. He slipped on the stairs and though he managed to grab the rail he still landed on his behind, bruising his tailbone. On the sloping path to our cottage he slipped a second time, going down in the mud. He slowed a little for the rest of the way, although I don’t think he felt safe until our door was closed behind him.
ONLY YEARS LATER DID IT occur to me to wonder whether my father ought to have told my mother, or if he needed to, why he didn’t wait until they were alone. Why, in front of his three young sons, would he relate an amusing little story out of two women trying to seduce him? Perhaps he thought that the more witnesses to his story the better. Or that if he made light of it in our presence, our mother would see it the same way. Perhaps he believed us too young to know what he was talking about. Or simply wasn’t thinking. My younger brother certainly didn’t listen and my older brother gave no reaction. As for my mother, she stopped kneading the bread dough on the table, but did not look up. Her face had gone as white as the flour on her hands. When my father finished speaking, she washed up in the kitchen sink, took off her apron, and went into their bedroom, shutting the door behind her. The ball of dough sat on the table for the rest of the day and into the next morning, when I tentatively poked my finger through the hardened skin that had formed over the still-soft centre.
THE RAIN DID NOT RETURN, but it might just as well have. A pall seemed to fall over our cottage. My younger brother noticed the least, although even he seemed subdued in his play. My older brother began spending more time alone, walking along the shore and poking a stick under rocks. While my father pretended to be his cheerful self, I could see he was concerned about my mother. I often caught him looking at her; sometimes he would go up to whisper something in her ear or try to take her around the waist, and she would turn passive, neither responding nor pulling away. He did not take the boat to the mainland again, as if afraid to leave her. Before this I had no awareness that my parents had a private life, an ongoing emotional drama that existed separately from their relations with us.
I could not understand what my mother was upset about.
After all, my father had refused the Creech sisters and had even told us about it. When we saw the sisters now, which was unavoidable, he alone greeted them as he had always done. My mother seemed to blame him, as if he was not only responsible but had given in to the temptation. Otherwise, why would she look so wounded?
My own feelings about what had happened were decidedly confused. I found thinking about it far too exciting to be wholly glad that my father had refused. Or maybe I wished that it had happened to my father, except that he wasn’t my father but someone else, such as me ten years in the future. I just couldn’t help wanting to know what exactly might have happened if the person who wasn’t my father, who was me, hadn’t run away. The possibility of one man and two women had never occurred to me. On one hand it seemed almost a waste, considering that I could barely imagine dealing satisfactorily with one. But on the other hand ... well. In some way I was disappointed by my father’s honourable retreat. How could he not have felt his resolve weaken in the presence of Ellen Creech, amazingly naked on the bed, her black hair undone (as I pictured it) and fanning out around her head. Or Louise Creech in her underpants (which I had seen hanging on the washing line), gazing into his eyes? If I was my father I would not have been able to resist. I would have kissed Louise on the mouth and put my hand on her breast. I would have lain down on top of Ellen even in my wet clothes!
At the end of the week our holiday was over and we went home again. Then my parents did something that I could remember them doing only once before: they went on a trip without us. A woman named Mrs. Kratzuk came to stay with us for what seemed like a month, but couldn’t have been more than a few days. She was a vile cook and we survived largely on bread and peanut butter. I can’t remember where they went, only that my father arranged it all and that my mother — as he expected — resisted going but finally gave in.