Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Moira sighed. She’d invited her father to lunch at Richard’s—“my treat”—so she could tell him her news. She’d finally found time to get to the drugstore for the pregnancy-test kit. No doubt about the results. And now that she’d had a few days to get used to the idea herself, she was ready to face her father. Richard’s was the city’s latest “in” restaurant, an airy, glass-walled dining room on the ground floor of Halifax’s newest waterfront condo project. Richard’s boasted not only hyperbolic descriptions of its otherwise undistinguished nouvelle cuisine but also—and more importantly—a spectacular, 180-degree snapshot of the waterfront, including a direct view of Todd’s soon to be even newer and better condominium project rising up across the harbour in Dartmouth.

  Todd knew his father-in-law disliked him, though he had no idea why. Which was the reason he’d mistakenly insisted Moira take her father to lunch at Richard’s today. “My treat,” he’d said grandly, and then called the restaurant’s owner to tell him to forward the bill directly to his company. “I can write it off,” he explained to Moira. His hope was that Moira’s father would regard lunch at the city’s most expensive restaurant—not to mention its view of Todd’s fortune-making work in progress—as compelling evidence that Todd could provide, and very well, for both his only daughter and his soon-to-be grandchild.

  What Todd couldn’t seem to comprehend, but Moira knew full well, was that Todd’s well-intended gestures would be a red cape to her father’s raging bull, exacerbating Patrick’s already barely veiled hostility toward him. Which is why Moira had told her father lunch was her treat. And why she’d made sure her father was seated with his back to the harbour and the view of the imposing skeleton of Harbourland Estates, Todd Eldridge, Esq., proprietor. “Daddy’s not like you,” she’d told Todd with uncharacteristic understatement the first she took him to meet her father.

  Patrick Donovan fancied himself a socialist and claimed—wrongly, according to a former colleague Moira met at a party soon after she began working as a journalist herself—that he’d been fired by the Tribune for trying to start a union. “Is he still retailing that bullshit story?” The guy, whose name was Saunders, snorted derisively when Moira mentioned it in passing while introducing herself as Patrick Donovan’s daughter. “He wasn’t even a member of our little union-organizing cabal,” the man told her, “but, for some reason, the bosses thought he was, so they fired him. And, ever since, he acts like he was some sort of fucking Eugene V. Debs.” Suddenly realizing who he was talking to, he backtracked. “No offence. I mean, I like your father. He’s a good guy most of the time—except when he’s drinking, or when he claims he was the one behind the union drive. He wasn’t even part of it.”

  The union-organizing/firing incident, which had occurred when Moira was barely a year old, had been one of the touchstones of her childhood. Her father referred to it often. If I hadn’t got fired for trying to organize that union, I’d still be married to your mother, he would confide during almost every one of the two weekends a month they’d spent together during her childhood. Inevitably, of course, he would be drunk when he told her this, which perhaps also explained why he told her exactly the same story so often and in almost the same words. I could have been the editor if I’d been like some if my so-called colleagues, if I hadn’t stood up and been counted. But sometimes you just have to stand up and be counted. Moira’s mother told a different story. She blamed the collapse of their marriage on Patrick’s drinking—“It started long before that union thing, and don’t let him convince you otherwise”—and his frequent absences from home. “He was always working and, if he wasn’t working, he was out drinking.” Her one piece of advice to her daughter: “Never marry a journalist.”

  Moira had become one instead. What, she often wondered, would her mother have said about that? She had died of breast cancer nine years ago, while Moira was in her first year of university. Her slow and painful death was probably what lit the match to her father’s last and longest full-blown bender, a two-week spiral into alcoholic oblivion that finally ended only when one of his fellow nightside editors at the Daily Journal bailed him out of the drunk tank. He’d been arrested for attacking a bartender who’d refused to serve him more drinks. By then, he hadn’t shown up for work in more than a week. In the old days at the Trib, the editor would have fired him immediately; the enlightened management at the Daily Journal shuffled him off to Human Resources for employee assistance counselling instead. His counsellor made it clear his future depended on getting his drinking under control. So he did. He joined Alcoholics Anonymous and attended his weekly meetings faithfully until the day two years ago when the new publisher called him into his office to offer him his Hobson’s choice: take a buyout or be laid off. He’d never been to an A.A. meeting since, but he hadn’t started drinking again, either. “I wouldn’t give those bastards the satisfaction,” he told his daughter.

  Today, Moira watched as her father took a long swallow of his San Pellegrino mineral water. “What’s wrong with tap water?” he’d scowled at the waiter who had responded to Patrick’s request for water with a list of bottled brands. Now he scanned Richard’s noon-hour crowd of business types and lawyers with such a pained expression he could have been drinking sewage-polluted water from the harbour itself.

  “They must be paying you pretty well if you can afford lunch at a place like this,” he said finally. “Newspaper wages gone up since my day?”

  Moira ignored his challenging barb. “Morton says to say hi,” she said. “Said to tell you they still miss you on the night desk.”

  “Hmmpf,” he replied, employing what Moira instantly recognized as her father’s all-purpose expression of disgust. She’d forgotten. While Morton had not been the one to give him the boot two years earlier, Patrick had never forgiven the editor for standing by in silent acquiescence while the new publisher did the dirty deed on behalf of unseen owners half a country away. “Ah, yes, Massah Morton, the man with no balls.”

  This was getting worse. There was nothing for it but to plunge in. “Daddy,” Moira said, “you’re going to be a grandfather.”

  That stopped him. There was a long silence while Patrick did his best to make sense of this unexpected announcement. “Is this what you really want?” he asked finally.

  “It is,” she said, nodding her head in the affirmative and ignoring his unsubtle unhappiness at her news.

  “Well, then . . .” he said in a flat-lined voice. “Congratulations, I guess.” He raised his glass. He took a long swallow. Moira knew her father would have preferred to hear he was going to be the father of an editor than the grandfather of an infant.

  “So I guess you’re going to stay with that guy then.” Her father rarely ever referred to Todd by name. Todd was too obsessed with making money, Patrick believed, too caught up in his work to be a good husband or father. The problem, though Patrick would not have put it in those terms, was that Todd was far too much like himself. How long before Moira found herself a single mother with a kid to drag her down, keeping her from ever—?

  “Of course I am.” Moira smiled, kept her tone light. She’d mastered the art of domestic peacekeeping during those teenage, post-divorce years when she’d been called upon to serve as the diplomatic envoy between her warring parents. “Daddy,” she added, squeezing his hand in hers, “why can’t you just be happy for me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “I am, I really am. It’s just . . . you’re just so damned smart and talented. You’re going to make a great editor one day and I don’t want to see you get sidetracked by—well, you know . . .”

  Time to release the second smart bomb to her father’s heart. “I’m not even sure I’m going to stay at the paper,” she said. “Todd wants me to come work for him, market his condos. And the fact is I am tired of being stuck covering courts. I’ve been on that beat for too long. Most days, I feel like I need a shower when I come home. Just to get rid
of all the shit I pick up during the day.”

  “But you don’t have to quit,” Patrick replied. “I mean, you could go to Morton, get him to put you on the desk. That would be a good step up the ladder. Then maybe go for a section editor job and then—”

  “But Daddy, I’m not sure any more it’s what I want to do. Todd says—”

  “What the hell does he know about newspapers?” he cut her off “He’s a . . . dee-veloper, for God’s sakes. He builds buildings. You’re a newspaper person. You’re a different breed from him.”

  “You’re a different breed,” Moira corrected him. “I’m not so sure what I am. I like writing but I’m not passionate about journalism, not like you. Maybe marketing would be okay. Or maybe, you know, I could write a novel. Remember when I wrote that novel when I was a kid? You were so proud.”

  “But what do you need to write a novel for when there’s so much more interesting real life you can write about? I mean, look at that story you covered last week about that black guy, the one who claims he stole all that money as reparations for Africville. You can’t make that stuff up. You want to write a book? Reparations is a big deal in the States these days. I’ll bet some publisher in Toronto or New York would pay a lot of money for a book about that. You could take a leave of absence, write the book and then, when you come back, you’d get promoted, maybe get your own column—”

  “But Daddy, I’m pregnant!”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to roll over and die, does it? I mean, I could help you. I used to do court stuff. And I knew those guys. Justice, Melesse, both. Back in the day before anybody even knew who the hell he was, I had Justice by the short and curlies. If it hadn’t been for publisher politics, I’d have nailed him.” He saw Moira’s look of impatience. “No, seriously. It’s true. And Carter, he was my source. He had it in for Justice. There’s lots of dirt I could dig up for you.”

  Moira tried to stay calm. It wasn’t easy. “First of all, I’m not sure a publisher is going to be interested in a story from here, especially not one about a bookkeeper who steals money and then blames it all on racism. And second, I don’t think you heard me. I’m pregnant. I’m already falling asleep at the dinner table every night. I just don’t have the energy to write a book right now.”

  Her father steamrollered over his daughter’s protests about her pregnancy as if, by refusing to acknowledge its reality, he could make it disappear. “I think you’re wrong about the publisher. Think about it. You’ve got Carter—I mean Melesse—as the kid’s lawyer. His name may not mean much to you, but he was big into black power back in the seventies. A lot of book editors my age would remember him. And he’s up against Justice. He was a big name when he was a politician. And those two, they have a history. Back in the seventies, Carter nailed Justice trying to buy votes from black families. Had him cold. Pictures even. I was going to write about it but the Trib wouldn’t publish it.” He stopped, as if remembering. “But that’s another story. The point is, back then everyone thought Justice was going to be premier, maybe even prime minister. And you’ve got your storyline: thirty-how-many-years-later, they face each other in a courtroom. Black power versus racist judge.”

  “Whoa, Daddy. What do you mean, ‘racist judge’?” This didn’t sound like her father talking. “Why? Because he’s white?”

  “No, no. It was in your story. The way he treated Melesse in the courtroom—”

  “But you know yourself judges do crazy things in court. That doesn’t mean they’re all racists.”

  Patrick Donovan smiled. “Ah, yes, my darling daughter. Which is why you need your father’s help on this story. I just happen to know a few things about the good judge. Like the time when he was still a politician and he was guest speaker at the press gallery dinner. You know, one of those off-the-record, let-loose, nothing-gets-reported events we used to have before everybody got ethics. He gets up and he’s as drunk as the rest of us, and then he starts telling this joke, this nigger joke—”

  Moira blanched. “Daddy! Not so loud. People will hear.”

  “My point exactly,” her father continued as if he’d been expecting just such an interjection. “What would people think if they knew the judge in the most important human rights case in Nova Scotia history—isn’t that what you quoted that Dalhousie law professor as saying?—if they knew that judge had a habit of telling nigger jokes in public?”

  Patrick Donovan paused, took another drink of water, let his shimmering lure work its magic.

  “What was the joke?” Moira asked finally.

  “I don’t remember now,” her father confessed. “It was a lot of years ago. But I’ll bet Danny Thompson would. He was president of the Press Gallery Association. He would have been the one to invite Justice to speak. I remember he was pissed off after. Thompson’s still around. Took early retirement from Canadian Press. Lives on a farm up in the Valley. He wouldn’t be hard to find.”

  “But would he talk? Didn’t you say yourself that it was all off the record?”

  “There’s got to be a statute of limitations on that,” her father replied. “Besides, Thompson wanted to write about it. He told me he even filed the story but his bureau chief wouldn’t put it on the wire. So I don’t see why he wouldn’t be willing to tell you the story now.”

  “But even assuming this guy remembers, it would be just his word against Justice’s,” Moira said. “Morton would never go for that.”

  “Ah, but once again, your daddy to the rescue. I happen to have in my files in the apartment a list of all the members of the press gallery for those years.” He grinned at her. “Among the names on that list is one Allen Morton, then the other legislature reporter for the Tribune and now the managing editor of the Daily Journal and therefore your boss.”

  “You’re kidding—”

  “Would I kid? But wait. It gets better. There was a CBC sound guy who did the audio for the dinner every year. Lambie. He was so into sound he recorded everything. And a pack rat, too. We used to joke he kept every piece of tape he ever recorded. He even had a special room in his basement—”

  Moira had already taken her notebook and pen from her purse. “What did you say his name was again? And how can I get in touch with him?”

  “See, I told you.” Her father leaned back in his chair, smiled smugly, as if he’d mapped out this entire conversation and then followed its predetermined route to its inevitable conclusion. “You are a newspaper person. You’d never be happy as some marketing flunky for what’s-his-name. And besides, there are way too many goddamn novels.” He stopped then, continued to smile at her. “Moira, my love . . .” He stretched out each word to drive it home. “You—are—a—newspaper—person. “

  “Okay, okay,” she said, allowing his gloat to go on a little too long before she answered. “I take your point. So how do I find this guy anyway?”

  He reached into his sports jacket pocket, took out a clipping torn from a newspaper, slid it across the table to her. “I thought you’d never ask.” He really had planned it all, she thought in amazement. “That story,” he said, pointing to the clipping in her hand, “appeared in your Sunday paper last fall. Lambie was about to retire, sell his house and move to Florida, so he donated his entire personal audio library to the Public Archives.” He looked at her. “And, before you ask, I already checked. The Archives lady says there are no restrictions on access. Lambie probably doesn’t even remember what’s on all those tapes.”

  “But why—?”

  “I clipped it because I was going to try to get in touch with him before he left for Florida. But I never got around to it. And then he was gone. When I saw your story last week, I thought I could help my little girl get herself a big scoop. So I dug around and I found it in my junk drawer. Can’t help it. Just like you can’t help being a newspaper person. It’s in the genes.”

  Moira looked down at the clipping in her hand and at the st
eno notebook on the table. She’d reached for it instinctively. Perhaps her father was right after all.

  Chapter 3

  1964

  Ward Justice was Elroy Face. He turned his head to the left, stared down Bobby Richardson. Elroy’s vaunted pickoff move scared the Yankee slugger back to first base. Satisfied, Elroy swivelled his head toward third base, his eyes closed, his body still. To his left, ninety feet away, Roger Maris was crowding the plate, waiting for him to serve up a fat one he could pound out of the park.

  It was the bottom of the ninth. The Pirates were leading by one run. There were two outs, Richardson on first. The count was three and two. The series was on the line. It was all up to Elroy now. If the Pirates won, the World Series title would stay in Pittsburgh. Where it belonged.

  Inside his glove, Elroy splayed his index and middle finger around the circumference of the ball. Ward’s hand was too small for the tennis ball; he could feel a burn in the crook of his fingers. But the fork ball was Elroy’s signature, his go-to pitch, so Ward had to throw it.

  Elroy brought his arms up over his shoulders, the ball hidden inside his glove, pumped his left leg in the air, leaned back on his right foot and fired the ball as hard as he could. As he opened his eyes, Ward heard a thunk as the tennis ball caught the sweet spot in the V of the concrete step leading up the hill to his father’s workshop. It rebounded high into the air.

  A fly ball into shallow centre, just beyond second base. Bill Mazeroski waved the other fielders away. This one was his. He leaped into the air, extended his arm higher than it could possibly reach. But he snared it, the ball slapping hard against the top inside webbing of his glove.

  Ward fell backwards then, landing hard on his bum in a yellowed patch of tall grass just beyond the official backyard border his father had finally demarcated with his lawn mower last summer.