by Darren Greer
“Don’t go starting anything,” my mother warned.
“Mom,” said Jeanette. “If you go off half-cocked ...”
“Seriously wrong,” said my grandmother again. “A world of ever-loving trouble.”
▪ ▪ ▪
the day deanny and I are to go shopping for the ingredients for our Indian meal, she meets me in her lobby. Richard is writing, she says. He can’t be disturbed.
“So he’s living with you?” I ask.
“Yes,” says Deanny. “For about a month now. The apartment’s big. There’s plenty of room. I gave him one of the spare bedrooms for a den.”
This surprises me. Of all Deanny’s amours, she never let one live with her before. Perhaps this is serious then. I want to ask her, but I know I won’t get a straight answer. As invasive as she can be while infiltrating my life, she is often very private about her own. I never complain about it. It is just one of those Deannyesque inconsistencies I have to accept about her.
I drive. Jeanette loaned me her car.
We go to an Asian grocery on Quinpool Road. It is small compared to some of the shops in Toronto I frequent, and it is more expensive. It takes a half hour to buy the ingredients and it is only noon.
I figure Deanny and I will spend the afternoon at her apartment while I cook, but she wants to give Richard a few more hours. “He finds it almost impossible to write when there is anyone in the apartment. It took him a month to get used to me.”
So we decide to go to Citadel Hill. It is a beautiful summer day. Hot, but not too hot. It will be cooler by the water. For all the times I come to Nova Scotia I rarely spend time in Halifax. Deanny usually comes to see me. If I come to see her, we stay at her place and cook or go to a nearby café for lunch.
Halifax is small compared to mammoth Toronto. The traffic and pedestrians on Spring Garden Road are quaint; most parts of the city are within walking distance of each other. I’m reminded of the days I thought Halifax was big, when my mother, Jeanette, and Grandnan referred to it as “the city,” as if it were some great metropolis. My grandmother still thinks of it that way, and she rarely accompanied Jeanette and my mother on their occasional shopping trips.
“I get enough crush, fuss, and bother in downtown Advocate,” she said. “I don’t need the stink and noise of it all.”
That my grandmother would ever consider tiny, contained, genteel Halifax as busy or crushing seemed very naïve to me. That I could have once thought of it thus seemed almost as naïve. I was a denizen of Toronto now. The big smoke. My own neighbour-hood, near the gay village, has more people in it than downtown Halifax. In the crush of Dundas Square a person really is in the midst of my grandmother’s “stink and noise.” I think I like Toronto so much because no one notices me. I am as faceless and nameless as the concrete in the streets, the blocks of stone in the buildings.
Going to Citadel Hill is Deanny’s idea. In college, she says, she’d often come up here at night before a big exam. Gazing down on the lights of the city and the boats in the harbour comforted her.
“I don’t know how you stand Toronto,” she says. “Whenever I go there for my work I can’t wait to get out. It’s not solely because it’s big, though that’s part of it. Everyone is so tired-looking, and cynical. And all those skyscrapers. Toronto is built to make people feel small.”
“Toronto gets a bad rap,” I say. “If you like plays, and art, and music, it is the best place in the country to be. Energy. All the time. Everywhere you look. Each corner of the city is another story.”
“And how many plays and concerts do you go to?”
I don’t answer. She knows very well I don’t go to any. I go to work. I stay home. The most adventure I do is shop the ethnic groceries on Gerrard Street East.
We reach the top of Citadel Hill. Halifax’s downtown lies below us. Its few tall buildings, tiny compared to Toronto, bristle in a bunch to the north against the flat blue of the harbour. Sailboats dot its surface, tacking and heeling in every direction. Toronto has a harbour too, and sailboats in the summer. But the one area where Toronto cannot compete with Halifax is its waterfront. Halifax has a magnificent harbour, and a strong clear line to the sea. Toronto has a dirty lake. I tell Deanny this, but she is no longer listening.
“I want you to try with Pavel today,” she says. “Get to know him. Don’t cross him off your list before he has a chance to speak.”
“I will,” I say.
“That’s what you always say, and then you turn to stone.”
“I’d just rather meet people in my own way,” I say.
“Right,” Deanny says. “If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t meet anyone at all. Richard is at least expecting you to be nice to Pavel.”
“I’ll try.”
Deanny sighs. “It would be nice to be on the water today.” She says we should be getting back. “We can start dinner, and Pavel will arrive in an hour. Remember. Be nice.”
It is my turn to sigh. I am always nice to the men Deanny tries to hook me up with. And they are nice to me. It’s just that we rarely find anything in common to talk about. My only subjects are poverty, hiv, and homelessness. What they are interested in often seems remote, academic, and pointless.
Once, Deanny told me I had been damaged by the world. “You have seen the absolute worst of life,” she said. “You hold everyone and everything up to that. By that measure, nothing can compete with your sorrow.”
She was right. I knew she was right, which is why I at least tried to strike up some kind of conversation with the men she introduced me to, if only for an hour. Yet we both know that in the end I will reject them, or they will reject me, or both. I only go along because I don’t want to hurt Deanny’s feelings. She has far more invested in these meetings than I do.
FOUR
■
for weeks my grandmother complained bitterly about my uncle’s decision to stay in Advocate. She pestered him daily over meals, and in between, to give her his real reasons. She did not buy that he had just quit his job.
Unbeknownst to my mother and Jeanette, she had found the number for his former school from directory assistance and called Toronto to see if she could get more information. They would give her none, citing Uncle David’s privacy. My mother and Jeanette wouldn’t have known she called at all, if they hadn’t seen the Toronto exchange number on a pad in the living room phone table in my grandmother’s handwriting. Out of curiosity, Jeanette called it and the school answered. She and my mother confronted my grandmother.
“What?” she said. “I told you I would be getting to the bottom of this. And that’s what I’m doing.”
“It’s none of your business,” said my mother. “Leave it alone.”
“The boy is under my roof again. So it is my business! Besides, I don’t think he’s telling us the truth about his position. The man I talked to there said David had resigned, but he had underlying tone. I suspect they let him go. Perhaps he acted inappropriately with a student.”
“Mother!” cried Jeanette and my mother in unison.
But there was no talking to my grandmother. She was on a tear, and there were many sumptuous arguments about it between her and my mother and Jeanette. Practically every day she mentioned pointedly how crowded the house was getting.
This was untrue, of course.
The house had held five people when my grandparents were raising their family. We were five now. But it was not in my grandmother’s nature to let an issue go. She waited and hoped my uncle would get off his duff and do what he had promised by getting an apartment in town. She even checked the Advocate Gazette for places to let, though even she had to admit there was precious little available. Advocate was not a transient town. Most people were there, like my grandmother, to stay. My uncle made a number of calls concerning apartments that first week, but nothing suitable had arisen. He had begun talking about looking for a place in Trenton, to which my grandmother wholeheartedly pledged agreement. This would get him out of the house a
nd thirty miles out of Advocate. Both my mother and Jeanette cautioned him against this. “Just be patient,” they said. “Something will come up.”
Something did.
That Friday, my uncle was not feeling well again. He begged off supper and stayed in his room. We were sitting down to dinner without him when my grandmother announced triumphantly she had found him a place to let.
When the Catholics first came to Advocate in the 1700s, the Protestants, mostly Lutherans, had already begun settling one side of the river. The Catholics settled down on the other. The Irish and Scottish Catholics hated the Lutherans because the British, in an effort to annoy the French by peopling the province with subjects loyal to the crown, had granted them land, even though they were German and spiritually if not genetically related to that spawn of the devil, Luther himself. The town was named back then, when a Lutheran minister preaching against the Catholics peopling the other side of the river told his congregation they must be advocates for the faith. The Catholics tried to name their side of the river Assumption but the Lutherans won out, and the town was incorporated as Advocate in 1811. The division on either side of the river was a ridiculous situation that persisted for more than a hundred years. By the time I was born, there was no longer any name-calling or religious schism, but the old alliances remained. If you came to town and were actively Catholic you bought, built, or rented on the east side of the river. If you were Protestant, the west.
It was telling my grandmother would find my uncle a place in a small house on the Protestant side of the river. It was a place she would never consider living herself. The bottom half of the house, she said, was vacant, as the former tenants had bought their own house in one of the subdivisions. My grandmother had called the landlord just before supper. It was available at the end of July.
“Another three weeks,” she said. “But at least there’s an end in sight, thank goodness.”
My mother and Aunt Jeanette ignored this. “Did you see it?” asked Aunt Jeanette.
“Of course I didn’t,” said my grandmother. “I’m not going to be living there. David is. And you know I never go over there, except to the grocery store.”
“What if he doesn’t like it?” asked my mother.
“He will,” said my grandmother. “He can look at it in a couple of days, when he’s feeling better. I’m told it’s perfectly serviceable, with two bedrooms, one of which he can turn into a den. It’s supposed to be clean, with good sewage and water systems. I’m certain he’ll like it just fine. I’ve already told him about it.”
“Let’s not rush things,” said my mother. “He may not be in any state to move out for a while yet. He’s still sick.”
My grandmother didn’t seem to like this, but she remained silent. My mother and Jeanette began wondering aloud once more, as they had been doing lately, if there was something wrong with David’s health.
“He’s sick all the time,” said Jeanette.
“I don’t like how he looks,” said my mother.
“Why worry?” said Grandnan. “It’s just a cold. If there was something wrong, wouldn’t he go to the doctor like everyone else?”
“He’s already been to see him,” said my mother. “Several times.”
“He most certainly has not,” said my grandmother pointedly. “I would have known about it if he had. Dr. Willis tells me everything, and I just saw him the other day on Main Street.”
“He has, though. I found an appointment card on the table with one scheduled two days ago.”
“Did you ask him about it?” asked Jeanette.
“I didn’t think it was any of my business.”
If it wasn’t anyone’s business, my mother should have thought twice before mentioning it out loud.
My grandmother was instantly stricken with curiosity at why Uncle David would be going to see Dr. Willis — who we usually called Dr. Fred — so often. She told my mother she would ask him at the first opportunity.
“Don’t you dare,” said my mother. “It’s his business. Not yours.”
“He lives under my roof. What he does and where he goes is my business. If there’s something wrong with him, I want to know.”
This was my grandmother’s default argument — that by sheltering us, providing us with shingles over our heads, she had the right to know everything about us and dictate every facet of our lives. Usually it brought on an argument, as surely as mentioning separatism in Quebec, or First Nations land claims. This time, however, it did not. I think, for once, my mother and Jeanette wanted to know as much as my grandmother did why our uncle would be going to see Dr. Fred so often.
After dinner my grandmother went up to Uncle David’s room to ask questions, but came down ten minutes later disconcerted and irritable. “He acts like I asked him how much money he had in his bank account,” she said.
“You did ask him how much money he had in his bank account,” said my mother.
“You know what I mean,” said my grandmother. “How did I raise such secretive children?”
That was no mystery. If we weren’t secretive with my grandmother, we were exposed to her endless criticisms for practically every action we took. We would, in a phrase she often used herself, “never hear the end of it.”
My mother, watching television, asked her what she had found out. My grandmother scowled and said, “He told me some story about vitamins and immune systems and this health diet he was on in Toronto. I don’t buy it for a minute, and I think I’ll ask Dr. Willis about it.”
“He won’t tell you,” said my mother. “Patient-doctor confidentiality. You should know.”
“He’ll tell me,” my grandmother said. “Don’t you know yet, my poor girl, that in this town there is no such thing as a secret?”
About this, my grandmother, as in many things concerning small-town life, would be proved correct.
▪ ▪ ▪
one afternoon, when he started feeling better again, Uncle David took me to the diner for cheesecake and a Pepsi. It was an effort, perhaps, to get me to warm up to him. No matter what I thought of him, I couldn’t refuse. Like most eleven-year-olds, I was a slave to my gut.
My mother sat us in her section and served us, then took ten minutes to sit with us. No one interfered with her taking an unscheduled break. The owner, Mr. Byrd, rarely came to the diner. My mother and Jeanette were his senior servers, and managed the place when he wasn’t around.
I talked to my mother, but spoke little to my uncle, cheesecake or no cheesecake. But he talked to me when my mother went back to work. I found myself listening with interest as he talked about his childhood growing up in Advocate. He seemed stuck on this one subject, consumed by it, and I wondered why he was so set on recollection when my mother and Aunt Jeanette rarely mentioned their childhoods.
He recalled the passion with which he went fishing in the log pool, in the river just before Kobetook Lake, looking to catch yellow perch and catfish and slink. These fish my grandmother called “junk fish” because she considered them for the most part inedible. But my uncle said the goal was not to catch something to eat, but to see how many could be caught, and who caught the biggest ones. He called them “fishing derbies” and said practically every weekend there was a derby competition among the town kids. He won a few of them. I asked him what he won.
“Bragging rights,” he said.
“No money?”
“Not everything is about money, Jacob. That’s your grandmother coming out in you.”
On another occasion, as we were coming back from the diner, he pointed to the Carlton Theatre on Main Street as we passed.
“When I was a kid,” he said, “you could get in there with a piece of brass.”
“A what?”
“A piece of brass. You know. The metal? It started during the war, when they were low on metals and instead of charging the nickel to get in the owner would take pieces of brass which they used for bullets. The owner, the father of Milo who runs it now, found he could
still make money from brass once the war was over. So if you didn’t have the twenty-five cents to get in during the fifties when I was a kid, you would scrounge a piece of brass from somewhere and pay your admission with that.”
I pretended I didn’t hear, and didn’t respond to his story. And yet, I did think it was cool that, in those dark dim days of my uncle’s childhood, an old piece of metal could get you in to the Carlton. Years later, as a teenager and trying to be smart, I carried a brass pipe to a movie with one of my friends. I explained the tradition to the bewildered ticket seller and said it was a perfectly valid way to buy a movie ticket. She disagreed. So did the owner. The price of movies had gone up, and the value of brass had gone down.
A few days later, over breakfast, my uncle asked if I wanted to go with him to visit Henry on the following Sunday. My grandmother dropped her fork and said she disapproved. When everyone stared at her, she shook her head and said it was not because he was black. Only that it was unseemly to make casual visits on the Sabbath, especially to those like Henry Hennsey who did not attend Mass.
My grandmother was all about Mass. She constantly pestered us to attend with her, with little result. My mother went occasionally, if only to keep the peace. Jeanette attended for Christmas and Easter. David, since he’d been home, refused to go. The only concession he made towards his mother’s religion at all was a St. Jude’s medallion he always wore on the inside of his shirt around his neck. He joked that since he was, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, a lost cause, he might as well advertise it.
But my grandmother wasn’t buying this. “Anyone who lives under my roof,” she blustered, “should be forced to atone for themselves. This is not a spiritual kindergarten, where everyone gets off scot free.”
My uncle, who seemed to be practising some type of psychic detachment from my grandmother until he could move into his own apartment at the end of the month, made no answer. He remained silent but cheerful, ignoring her pointed looks and asking my mother to pass him the butter for his toast.