Believing Cedric

by Mark Lavorato

  For my sister, Gina

  ( i )

  Reaching up to the frosted copper handle

  and opening the door to air

  so warm it stings the cheeks

  Supper steaming at the window

  with the sweet breath of fried onions

  Mittens drying on the furnace duct

  beside a lunchbox lined with breadcrumbs

  Being lifted impossibly high

  above the portrait frames and lamps

  the sandpaper scraping

  of my father’s stubble

  clenching my body tight

  with laughter

  I imagine there are questions

  and answers about school

  but these have all faded

  unlike the tactile

  The plump fingers of my

  mother’s hand on my head

  The wet of the dog’s delicate lips

  as he pulled the gristle

  from my fingers

  under the table

  This is what I would have told you

  if you’d asked

  what I remember first

  But you never did

  Melissa was seated neatly on her sofa, reading, her cat asleep on the cushion beside her, just out of reach, when a sleek car drove into view and turned with certainty into her driveway. She looked up from her book, sure that this car, which she’d never seen before, would reverse out and drive away in the opposite direction, something that happened quite often on the road where she lived, an almost dead-end lane in the small town of Haliburton, Ontario. But whoever it was had turned off his vehicle and was getting out, though with much less conviction than he’d had while pulling in. It was her father, Cedric, now slouching in her driveway, slamming the door while squinting through the front window, a hand held over his brow to function as a visor.

  Melissa’s lips hinged open. The last time she’d seen him was four years ago. He had gained weight since then, and had taken, she noted, to wearing a tacky gold watch. She closed her book, hesitated.

  Outside in the boreal distance, a chainsaw puttered out. A crow complained in the quiet left behind. In the sky behind Cedric, a myriad of individual clouds—the kind that are only seen here in autumn, small and shaped like blotchy snails with grey-bottomed bodies and white-furrowed shells—glided through the sky, all of them moving in the same direction, from one nameless place to another.

  Cedric made his way to the landing, where he gave two feeble knocks on her door. He waited for her to answer, glanced over his shoulder, looked at the clouds.

  November 5, 1957

  That morning—the morning it happened—Agnes O’Donnell was sitting in the window of her resource room, as she did every day before class, staring down into the schoolyard, thinking. This was her ritual. And though it differed very little from the rituals of other teachers at the school, it was something her colleagues consistently commented on. She would come in forty minutes early, pour herself a cup of tea, select one of the old Lethbridge Herald newspapers lying on the staff-room table, tuck it under her arm, and retreat into the tiny room attached to the front of her class. There she would sip from her cup and stare at the wide field, never reading, or even opening, the paper she’d brought along with her.

  It was a Tuesday, and a thin layer of snow covered everything but the places the children had trampled on Monday, snaking footprints exposing the brown grass and lumps of earth beneath. Beyond these erratic patterns, there wasn’t much distinction between where the school grounds ended and the closest farmer’s field began, except for the rows of yellow stubble scarcely sticking out of the white, raking lines into the horizon where they eventually swirled with the clouds. As usual, Agnes surveyed as far as she could.

  She began this routine soon after her husband died, after the initial wave of sympathy cards had subsided and were thrown away. Most of them she had barely read, folding them in half with a careless crease and dropping them into the garbage, knowing that her husband was the type of man who was neither loved, nor respected, nor likely to be missed by anyone at all. He had been a proud man: proud of his job, proud of the authority he held at the bank, and proud of the immaculate order of his tool shed, which he seldom used. They had met at a dance in the basement of a community hall only a month after she’d signed on at the school.

  She was drawn to his posture, how he held his neck with an almost comical erectness, craning to look down at the room around him, and she’d made a point to stand nearby, scratching at her nape, her hair draped over her hand. They danced twice, and on the second waltz, with the base of his wrist pressing into the small of her back, it crossed her mind that this would be the man she would marry. And, as it turned out, he had a promising future, along with being the only bachelor to have ever taken an open interest in her.

  When they’d made love he was swift and fervid, and she spent most of her energy, pinned below his rigid weight, attempting to calm him, to placate his mounting frenzy that bordered, in her mind, on dangerous, his expression fierce, eyes widening. He would finish by squeezing her shoulders tight with a sudden rush that seemed to drain him completely, flopping onto the sheets beside her afterwards, catching his breath in the dark. He was a man that never whispered, and slept deeply.

  She had imagined her life unfolding in the same conventional way as other teachers she knew, first Normal School and her certificate, then marriage, children, perhaps a stint as a housewife, and retirement. But two years after the wedding she still hadn’t fallen pregnant and had begun to be a little concerned. It wasn’t serious enough to warrant seeing a doctor; no; besides, she wouldn’t want her husband finding out she’d gone to see anyone, as they’d managed to carefully avoid the subject of pregnancy altogether, only having talked about it once, in the first week of their marriage. She was cleaning the plates off the table at the time, reaching in front of him to arrange the fork and knife so they wouldn’t slip off. “I’d like to have a couple boys,” he’d said. “One day.” He picked up a carafe and poured some water into his glass, drank it down, and clunked the container back onto the table without looking up. She put the plates in the sink and started to fill the washbasin, saying nothing. That suited her just fine.

  Two years later she was finding it hard to fall asleep after he had rolled off of her, feeling the sweat of his sides cool and become clammy against her forearms, wondering if she was doing something wrong, or not doing something right, missing out on some important step. She wished she had a woman in her life close enough that she could ask these things. Her sister, who was single anyway, and happened to be a horrible correspondent—capable of answering even the longest of letters with an aloof postcard—had moved to Saskatoon, and her mother was gone, and had been since she was eight.

  Agnes told herself she would wait another year before going to the doctor, which amounted to 1932 in its entirety. The months seemed to dawdle out in front of her, to slow down, and even, on certain Sunday evenings, to stop. The local news inched along on its sluggish orbit. There were strikes and the threat of communism; the Ku Klux Klan set a cross on fire in a neighbouring town, while in another, rabbit roping was introduced to their rodeo, and still there were no cells amassing in her belly. She buckled before the year was through and made an appointment, arriving at the clinic an hour early. When the test results came back a few weeks later, she went to a different physician, who came to the very same conclusion. He was sorry. He really was. But there was nothing anyone could do.

  She told her husband at breakfast, the radio crackling in the background with a local show that neither of them really liked but still tuned into every morning. She spoke suddenly. “I can’t.” He was chewing his toast at the time and his jaw slowed to do the pr
ocessing, trying to piece together what she might be talking about. Then, as suddenly as she’d said it, he understood. She went to the kitchen window to stare out of it while he readied himself to leave for the day. She heard him use his copper shoehorn, hang it back on the hook where it belonged, straighten his tie in the mirror, and walk out the door. She stood there for a long while, the announcer listing the city’s events and advertisements from the Philco in the corner. There was a sale on car batteries.

  The following months found her spending the odd night on the chesterfield in the living room, the lamps turned out, watching the slats of light from the street standards tint the carpet, gradually brightening, then fading again as the dawn blanched the sky. And through these nights Agnes began to feel, physically, that her body had changed in some way, that it was missing something, something she would have described as being the size of a stack of nickels, and as heavy, in the space above her stomach, just before the bones of her rib cage began. And what had filled that space was a kind of hunger, which, she had found, it helped to sleep with her hand over, to have the warmth of her fingers on the skin just above. She would eventually grow used to it, and used to the way that it sometimes clinched tighter, becoming a sudden knot below her sternum that would have her standing still until it passed—in line at the grocery store, erasing the chalkboard at the end of the day, arranging flowerpots in the backyard—a hand pressed tight below her breasts, waiting.

  Through the years her husband dutifully sidestepped the topic of children, even avoiding the mention of her students, but Agnes felt that it was always there, between them, a kind of onus that weighed on her side of the scale and lightened his. And adoption seemed to be out of the question for both of them, for him because the idea of raising a stranger’s offspring (that no one else seemed to want) was somehow perverse, while for Agnes it was an unspoken fear that held her back, the fear of not being able to devotedly bond with a child that hadn’t come from her own body, the fear that she would feel the same way toward him or her that she felt toward her students, which is to say very little. So then, a childless marriage was just something they would have to learn to live with, or through, around. Accordingly, their home became a place of hushed civility. They adopted habits that circumvented each other, moving to different parts of the house whenever the other person entered the room. And Agnes increasingly felt that they did this not because they wanted to avoid conversation, but because they simply had nothing left to say. They had reduced their lives to the efficiency of gestures and motions, to the common understanding of wants and needs.

  Until one sunny spring day in 1953, when she came home from school to find him in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet lid, staring at the towels in front of him, waiting for her to ask what was wrong. His answer was multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer whose prognosis was “bleak at best.” By the following week he had stopped work at the bank and was receiving treatment, which, as far as Agnes was concerned, did nothing but speed up the process of his death. He deteriorated rapidly and within a few months was bedridden, and she had to take a leave from work to look after him.

  She rearranged the house so that everything, in one way or another, served to make him more comfortable, to minimize the stress of his pain. He reacted to this care and attention to detail with a kind of distant animosity, which affected her very little.

  She had to be counselled on matters of nursing, to administer some of his medication and keep both his body and bedpan clean, which made her think of her mother—or what little she could remember of her—who’d been a nurse. And the more Agnes got into the routine and rituals of caring for her dying husband, the more she was inclined to recall everything she’d learned about the events leading up to her mother’s “going.” (That was the word her father had used to describe it. Gone. Your mother is gone.)

  It had all begun with an argument, just before the mild winter of 1918. Agnes was eight years old at the time, her sister ten, and they were leaning out over the banister in their nightgowns, watching their parents in the front room below. Their father, always a nattily dressed businessman, had just come in the door with some news that had upset their mother to a degree they’d never witnessed before. She was agitated, a few fingers against her lips, pacing around the room in her “waist,” a simple and elegant dress that was in vogue at the time, which swept out from the hem at her ankles with every turn she made. While she moved, her head remained fixed on her husband, who was standing near the closet.

  “You must understand,” he’d said, “I’ve made an investment here.” He hung up his hat, lifted a hanger for his blazer. “If the theatre doesn’t show the play, I . . . we—our family—loses money. A lot of it. And at a time, as you know, that we can’t afford to. The Victory Loan drive’s coming; we’d agreed to buy as many bonds as we can . . .” He shook the hanger to settle the shoulders of his jacket onto the wood, hung it in the closet. “And the boys down at City Hall have already given it the go-ahead. I’m afraid it’s running. I’m sorry.”

  Their mother stopped pacing, considering something. “Well then . . . I would like very much for you not to go.”

  “Please,” he said. “Be reasonable. I have to.” He ran his fingers along the chain of his pocket watch, which drooped gold against the black of his vest.

  When Agnes’s father returned from the theatre that evening, on October 11, after having congregated with hundreds of people despite the order issued that morning by the Medical Health Officer, banning all forms of public gathering—schools, churches, galleries, markets, stadiums—he took off his creaseless clothes and kissed his wife an apology on the forehead. She was probably feigning sleep.

  The next day saw a cataclysmic rise of Spanish influenza cases admitted into the temporary hospitals and a myriad of houses placed under quarantine. It was so dire that the city was calling for clinical volunteers to help with the epidemic, and though her mother hadn’t worked as a nurse since the girls were born, she told her daughters that she would have to leave the house for a spell, “to help some people out.” She readied the household for her absence, cramming the medicine cabinet: oil of eucalyptus, antiseptic throat gargles, nasal douche, formaldehyde atomizers, liver pills, iron pills, gin pills, and “miracle” vegetable compounds. She made the girls promise to stay inside, and to never let any of their friends through the door. She kissed them goodbye, strapped a piece of cheesecloth over her mouth and nose, and left the house with a small suitcase.

  Two days later, with the breaking news that an armistice of some kind was to be signed, the city erupted into what would turn out to be a premature celebration of the end of the First World War. More than half the population left their houses and quarantines, flooding the streets to parade with every noise-producing mechanism that could be found on hand. When the next three days saw a helpless increase in the number of cases, it was announced that the entire city would be placed under quarantine, trains forbidden to open their doors while passing through, and police controlling all points of entry, permitting only dairy and mail beyond their barricades. Before it could take effect, Agnes’s father drove her and her sister to the train station and told them they were going to Taber, where their aunt would be taking care of them for a while, until the flu had passed out of the city. It was safer there, he’d said. If need be, they’d be able to leave that town, to go to another one, a safer one. If need be.

  The girls returned two months later but to a very different father, a man who was withered and sunken-eyed, who had sat depleted in his armchair as soon as they got through the door, his hat dangling from his fingertips. He told them the news with little delicacy. “Your mother’s gone. She was . . . around it all day. Said she even napped downstairs, with the corpses. Said it was the only place to rest and . . .” His hat accidentally dropped from his hand and he leaned tiredly forward to pick it up. “And she’s gone.”

  Agnes doesn’t remember mourning her mother’s death as much as she remembers moments of her c
hildhood when she distinctly felt her absence. She found there were experiences that she didn’t want to share with her schoolmates, or father, sister, just with her mother, which meant that, sometimes, there were events in her life that went untold. She had also never thought about the particulars of her mother dying, about what their home might have looked like in those months that she’d been away. But while caring for her husband, that all changed. She considered the understanding that her mother must have had, after watching so many vigorous people die from the same sickness she’d contracted. As well as thinking of her father, wondering if he’d nursed her while she was slipping away; if, like Agnes, he had put all of his dedication and energy into caring for her, given himself wholly to her state of decline, to a decay that worsened, always worsened, regardless of anything he did, or of anything that was in his power to do.

  There was a day during her husband’s disease when, in only a few hours, their marriage changed. Agnes had brought him some lunch and had sat down beside him to help him eat when she realized that the frustration over his illness had reached a kind of critical point. He was scowling at the end of the bed, at his feet bulging under the covers like two dormant volcanoes, long, deliberate breaths hissing through his nostrils. When he turned to look at her, it was with an indignant expression, as if she had snuck up on him, as if she had been spying on some private moment where she wasn’t welcome. Impulsively, he reached over and pushed the tray of lunch onto the floor. Both the plate and glass shattered, shards sticking out of the food, a finger of milk jutting under the dresser.

  Her reaction surprised them both. She stood up, slowly, with the marked sensation that she was becoming lighter, somehow released. Then she spoke in a low, commanding voice, not unlike the one she used to discipline her pupils. “Well then. That’s what I made for you. If you don’t like it, you know where the kitchen is.” She looked out the window. “Now. I’m going for a walk.”