by Darren Greer
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every time i meet her, Deanny has a new boyfriend. I have met some of them. Without exception they are quiet, intense, intellectual, and often bespectacled. Her latest is a writer. He has won several awards, and the Internet is lousy with his name. Deanny often dates writers and artists. She is attracted, she says, to the artistic temperament, possibly because she has no artistic ambitions of her own. She likes inspiring people, but she isn’t inspired by them for very long. She never tells me what happens. The next time I see her, the guy I met last time is nowhere to be found. This time she’ll be dating a painter, or a musician.
I have no right to criticize. As much as Deanny seems engaged with a lifelong experiment in serial relationships, I barely have any at all. I am not, despite Deanny’s grumbling, an out-and-out virgin. When I first moved to Toronto I had a few encounters, most of them fumbling, awkward affairs that ended badly for me, for him, or for both of us. I was always afraid of sex. Not just because of aids, but because of the massive intimacy required. I just do not feel comfortable opening myself up to strangers, and my job keeps me too busy to date and get to know anyone before we jump in the sack together. Faced with this dilemma, I content myself with books, drinks with my colleagues, and my job. I cook, watch television, and occasionally go to a movie or play. It is not a bad life, even if it is not an easy one.
Deanny tells me she wants me to meet her latest, Richard, and to cook curry for them. She also tells me she is inviting another “friend” along for me to meet.
“This isn’t you playing matchmaker again,” I say. “That never turns out good.”
“But this guy is different,” says Deanny. “He’s the perfect match.”
“In what way?”
“He’s Russian, for one,” she says, as if that makes him instantly desirable.
“So?” I say. “There’s a whole country full of those.”
“He’s a schoolteacher.”
“I know nothing of teaching. I know nothing of schoolteachers.”
“He teaches high school math,” says Deanny. This is her pièce de résistance. “Surely that will give you something to talk about.”
“You expect us to have dinner with you, and talk about non-linear equations?”
“I don’t know what that is,” says Deanny. “But I bet Pavel does. That’s why he’s the perfect date for you.”
“Pavel?”
“Russian for Paul.”
“Okay,” I say. “But I’m not sure I want to meet anyone.”
Every time I come home Deanny invites me to Halifax to have dinner and tries to set me up. I rank them by profession. There have been doctors, lawyers, an engineer, an actor, a pharmacist, and an occupational therapist. We rarely made it to the next date.
I am not a traditionally good-looking man. I’m on the thin side, and my nose is too big. Calling it aquiline would be stretching it. Ski-slopish would be more accurate. I inherited it from my grandmother. And I have skin problems. Not acne, or eczema. Just a slight peeling around my nose and above my eyes. I apply a cream each night before bed, not unaware that my grandmother applies a similar mask as part of her nightly ritual.
This wouldn’t be so bad if the men Deanny picked for me to live the rest of my life with were not audaciously, universally handsome. I didn’t know where she found them. It was as if she had an Abercrombie and Fitch for professionals and intellectuals. I was usually so stricken by the looks of these men that I had no idea what to say. Dinner, whether out or in Deanny’s apartment, was awkward, and I was always quite surprised when they expressed interest and wanted to see me again.
Each man gave his number, but I never called. Deanny always complains about this. She says I will die old and alone and my body will be mauled by cats for a week before anyone finds me. I remind Deanny I don’t have any cats. That I hate them, in fact.
“You know what I mean,” she says.
In the end, I agree to another dinner, as Deanny can be tenacious and will not give in until I concede. It is this, I imagine, that makes her such a good lawyer.
“Wear something nice.”
“I don’t have anything nice,” I say. “Jeans and short-sleeves all the way. Unless you count the suit I brought for Grandnan’s funeral.”
“Just don’t sabotage it, is all I mean.”
“Do I ever?” I say.
“Very funny,” says Deanny. “Just try this time. Pavel is a good friend of Richard’s. He’s the most amazing person, Jake. I really think you’ll hit it off. So does Richard.”
“Richard has never met me.”
“He knows what I told him. So we’ll see you Saturday?”
“Yes,” I say, sighing.
My mother is in the kitchen with me, drinking a coffee at the table, and has heard the entire conversation.
“So you’re going to Deanny’s?” she says, when I hang up.
“Yes. Saturday. For a meal.”
She smiles. “And she’s fixing you up?”
“Again. She just won’t quit.”
“She’s just concerned about you. We all are. We think you spend too much time alone up there in Toronto.”
“I’m not alone. I have my co-workers, and clients. Some days it seems like all there is is people.”
“Deanny is concerned about your personal life. You’re not getting any younger, Jacob. You should start think about settling down.”
I’ve had this conversation, or one similar to it, a hundred times in my life. It is the ongoing theme of the continuing saga of the Life of Jake McNeil, as told by his family and friends. I hate it. I tell my mother I am tired, and she gives up, sighing as loudly as I had with Deanny on the phone. But she lets it go, and I go up to my room.
2
one little garden sculpture was a source of tension every year in our home. It was of a little black boy sitting on a wall, fishing. My grandmother always placed it dead-centre on the front lawn. She placed it herself, because my mother forbid me to do it. My mother did not want anyone to see me putting it there. Both she and Aunt Jeanette thought the sculpture thoughtlessly racist; they thought my grandmother should smash it and have it done with.
She refused.
“What’s racist about it? It’s just a little boy.”
“A little black boy,” said Aunt Jeanette.
“A little black boy then,” said my grandmother. “What harm is there in that? Little black boys exist, don’t they?”
“Surely they do,” said my mother. “And little black boy statues exist only on the lawns of white people. Black people don’t have them.”
“I fail to see,” said my grandmother, “how you two can find this offensive. No one has ever said a word to me about it.”
“Perhaps,” said my mother, “if there were some black people in town, you’d hear more about it.”
“And perhaps you’re forgetting,” said my grandmother, “about Henry Hennsey? He lives in town, and last time I checked he is as black as the ace of spades.”
It was true. Henry Hennsey was black, and he did live in town, in a small, butter-yellow house on Carfax Street in Mechanicsville. The Hennseys had moved there in the fifties from Halifax. At the time, according to my grandmother, it had caused quite a stir. There were no blacks — or any other person of colour, for that matter — in Advocate, besides the Natives, who had been neatly deposited on the reserve a hundred years before. Henry’s parents had died years ago and left him the house. No one knew how he supported himself because he didn’t have a job.
“Welfare,” said some.
“Life insurance,” said others.
One of the ways Henry made a living, albeit a small one, was to pick up items from the liquor store for those in town who did not want to be seen buying it. Henry would get it for them, deliver it to their house, and be paid a small stipend for the service. He would go walking up and down Main Street and across the bridges in all kinds of seasons and weather, a forty-year-old, slightly plump man with a w
icker basket on his arm.
The basket was to carry food and bottles in. He’d been carrying it since he was a boy, before he was old enough to go to the liquor store. It was said young Henry started doing this when his mother would send him to the grocery store and found the cashiers would not pack his groceries for him. They didn’t want to waste a bag on a “nigger.”
I was fascinated with Henry when I was boy, and not just because he was the only black face in our town. There was something beautiful about him, with his cocoa-coloured skin and opalescent teeth. The first time I saw a statue of Buddha I was reminded forcibly of Henry. He rarely ever spoke, and when it did it was a quick word of greeting or something practical related to his errand. He always wore green work pants with suspenders and a plaid shirt, and in winter an over-stuffed blue jacket and black and yellow rubber boots. Whenever I walked by he simply turned his pale eyes in my direction, nodded once slowly, and strode on. Occasionally he walked up Tenerife Street, and my grandmother always cooed and delighted in this, for this meant he was delivering booze to one of her friends or neighbours. I never saw him once look at our little black boy on the lawn.
Years before my uncle left home, he had struck up a friendship with Henry. My mother or Aunt Jeanette had not known about it. Neither did my grandmother.
To her frustration, she was also unable to get any information out of David about Toronto, or why he had decided to come home after all these years, or what he did when he went to town or why he was missing the last two weeks of school. Surely he had to oversee final exams. Mark papers. Draw up report cards. She knew he was going for coffee at the diner, because mother or Jeanette served him. But she didn’t know what else he was up to.
I think my grandmother was afraid he had a lover. She never said as much — I can’t imagine the circumstances necessary to force those words from her lips — but she asked him an undue amount of questions about where he was and who he was with, and she said to my mother and Jeanette he was “up to no good.”
“What on earth could he get up to in this town,” asked my mother, “that he couldn’t get up to in Toronto?” Both Jeanette and my mother knew Uncle David had a lover there, though he refused to talk about him. Nor did he talk about Toronto or his job.
“I don’t know,” said my grandmother. “But I don’t like having anyone living under my roof who refuses to give a complete account of himself.”
“Welcome to Gulag Tenerife,” said Jeanette. “I hope you find your stay comfortable.”
“I’m not running a prison, but neither is this a southern resort. I expect you all to carry your weight, and be responsible. And that includes letting me know what you’re up to.”
Jeanette had no response for this; later she told my mother, within my earshot, she was surprised my grandmother knew what “Gulag” meant.
David, for his part, ignored my grandmother. When Aunt Jeanette and my mother were at work, he’d stay in the tv room or his bedroom, reading and avoiding my grandmother until they came home. Then we’d have dinner and they’d sit and drink tea and talk. Otherwise he’d wander the streets.
It was Jeanette who saw him with Henry Hennsey when she drove down Carfax Street. She was going to get her hair done at Ilene’s Salon on Joseph Street — she always cut down Carfax to get there — and spotted him on the steps of Henry’s yellow house. Later that night, at dinner, she asked David about it.
“I used to visit him occasionally,” my uncle said, a forkful of mashed potatoes hovering near his mouth. “When I was younger. I quite like him.”
“What’s he like?” asked my mother. “I mean, I’ve said hello to him on the street, but I’ve never really talked to him.”
“He’s an interesting and intelligent man,” said my uncle. “Do you know he’s memorized, for every year since 1600, a single important event that changed the world?”
“What nonsense,” said my grandmother. “No one can know that many things.”
“He does,” said my uncle. “I quizzed him.”
“What did he know?” asked Aunt Jeanette.
“I said ‘1692,’” said David. “He told me, quick as a flash, ‘Salem witch trials began. Fourteen women and five men hanged in that year. It was also a leap year.’”
“That’s amazing,” said my mother.
“That’s nothing. He can do it for any year. You should try it with him next time you see him.”
My mother laughed. “I can just see myself. Running into him, saying ‘Hi Henry. What happened in 1717?’”
“He reads a lot,” said Uncle David. “We have that in common.”
“I don’t see what else you have in common,” said my grandmother, moodily silent for most of this exchange. Everyone looked at her. “Well, don’t stare at me,” she said. “I’m not referring to his colour. Henry Hennsey delivers booze. If people see you at his house they’ll think you’re buying liquor.”
“So what if they do?” said my uncle. “I care not what people think.”
“You don’t live here,” she said. “You just come and muddy the waters.”
There was much clicking of cutlery against plates and shifting in seats, but very little other sound. After dinner, David went up to his room. Grandnan went to the sink to rinse dishes, my mother cleared the table, and I took clean dishes out of the dishwasher and put them on the counter for Jeanette to put away.
My mother asked Grandnan why she had to be so difficult.
My grandmother shook her head. “I’m not being difficult. I’m speaking the truth. I don’t care if you like it.”
“You don’t have to be so cruel. He’s having a hard enough time as it is.”
“What hard time? Seems to me he has it easy! Home on vacation. Free room and board. Not a worry in the world!”
“Something’s wrong,” my mother said. She stopped moving dishes and stood in the centre of the floor. “Don’t you know that by now? He would never have come home otherwise.”
“What then?” my grandmother asked. “I don’t hear him saying anything.”
“He will.”
“Well, until then — and after, for that matter — I’ll say what I want in my own house. If you don’t like it, you can look for alternate arrangements. How many times have I told you girls that?”
“You’re impossible,” my mother said.
“I know,” my grandmother said. “You’ve told me countless times.” And with that she marched out of the room, the last of the dishes rinsed and set in the sink for me to place in the washer.
A few minutes later my uncle came into the kitchen to steep a cup of tea. My mother and I were finishing the dishes. She apologized for my grandmother’s comments.
“No need,” said my uncle cheerfully. “You didn’t make them.”
“I’m curious,” said my mother. “What else do you and Henry talk about? Does he ever say what it’s like for him to live in Advocate?”
My uncle was rummaging around in the cupboard above the dishwasher for the Tetley. My mother edged him out and found it for him. “Not really,” said Uncle David. “We just talk about books, mainly. And history. He’s really quite a remarkable man. I went to school with him, you know. He was a grade or two ahead of me.”
“Did he say what was the most important, world-shaking event of 1984?” my mother said, smiling. “Was it that David McNeil moved back to the town of his birth?”
He didn’t look at her. Instead he busied himself with the kettle and cup and saucer in front of him. “I didn’t ask,” he said.
My mother’s smile melted. I knew the look she gave my uncle. She has this talent, inherited from God-knows-where, of always being able to tell when a person is lying. Many times if I had told a fib I would see my mother grow still and serious all of a sudden and just stare at me gently until I told the truth. It works on Aunt Jeanette too, who has been known to be less than truthful about certain minor things if the need suits her.
I could see my mother knew David was lying about some
thing.
She said only that she was going to watch tv, and told David to meet her there when his tea was made. He said he would.
At seven o’clock my grandmother came down to watch Dallas, her favourite show and the only one she watched regularly. Jeanette and my mother hated it, but stayed to watch it with her if only to be near David, who had never seen it.
“What do you mean, never seen Dallas?” said my grandmother. “It’s the best show on television.”
“I don’t watch tv as a rule,” said my uncle.
“Neither do I,” said Aunt Jeanette. “It’s an idiot box, as far as I’m concerned.”
“You only say that because you’ve never lived in a time without it,” said my grandmother. “If you had, you’d appreciate it more.” This had a certain weird logic no one bothered my grandmother over.
It was an unusually peaceful evening, given my grandmother’s comments at dinner. No one mentioned Henry Hennsey the rest of the night. At bedtime my uncle put his head through the doorway to wish me goodnight. I had not warmed up to him since he had come home, which he didn’t seem bothered by. But I was stricken with curiosity about Henry Hennsey. I wanted to ask my uncle questions, trapped between my dislike for him and my fascination with Henry.
My uncle saw this, and stepped into my room. “What is it Jacob?”
I cleared my throat and asked him, softly, why he didn’t ask Henry Hennsey what the most important event of this year was going to be.
“He’s not a prognosticator, Jacob,” David said. “I can’t ask him what hasn’t happened yet.”
“A prognosti-what?”
“A fortune teller. A seer of the future.”
“Oh,” I said.
“It’s likely the most important thing of this year hasn’t happened yet. It’s only June after all.”
And suddenly my resentment towards him was forgotten, at least for the moment. “So of all the things that happen in a year, how do you tell what’s most important?” I said.