Advocate

by Darren Greer

  My grandmother wanted to give me a small photo of the pope, but my mother wouldn’t let her. She said she didn’t want this to be political.

  “Political?” said my grandmother. “What’s political about a little boy showing his devotion to his faith?”

  She had forgotten that technically I was not a Catholic. I had still not been baptized. My mother insisted I could make that decision for myself when I was old enough. “And what if something happens in the meantime?” my grandmother often said. “Are you going to be responsible for the direction of his soul?”

  Ironically, the Lemon/Orange Day parade — the most religious celebration in Advocate — held the least religious tension, both in our family and in the town, of any holiday. We all had a good time. I remember the marching bands, always dropping my lemons, the hotdogs from the Ladies Church Auxiliary booth, Aunt Jeanette trying to win stuffed animals for me at the dart-and-balloon game and failing until the man took pity on her and gave her a small one. Because of my grandmother’s conditioning, I was at first nervous about crossing the bridge to the Protestant side, which my mother and Aunt Jeanette always did to spread their money evenly around the town. But there was no difference, other than they wore orange shirts instead of yellow ones. The Protestants seemed to be having as much fun as we were, and there were just as many people.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  i remember very little rain that summer. It was one of the hottest on record. My grandmother predicted, based on her trusty Farmers’ Almanac, we would have a drought. Each day the farmers and the gardeners hoped for rain, but none came. Skies dawned blue and remained unblemished by cloud morning, afternoon, and evening. Water holes and mud sloughs dried up, and the level of water in the river fell dramatically, exposing banks and fluvial beds.

  My mother and Jeanette looked forward to work because the diner was air-conditioned and my grandmother’s house was not. They knew better than to ask her to buy one. She said they ate kilowatts the way elephants ate peanuts, and an oscillating fan and a drawn blind were as much a defence against the heat as anything else.

  My grandmother didn’t seem bothered by the heat. In a blue sun hat, white cotton blouse, and long slacks, she’d spend hours in the garden on the hottest days, barely breaking a sweat. She mowed the lawn at high noon. When my mother complained she was pushing herself too hard, Grandnan only waved her eldest daughter away. “These temperatures are nothing,” she said. “When I was a child we got them every day in summer for a month, and we were still forced outside to do chores. Hot and cold, Caroline, are no deterrent to hard work and discipline. Things must be done, and they don’t get done themselves just because of a little weather.”

  Deanny and I had taken to rock hopping — making our way across the river from rocks to hard deposits, exposed by low water level. Our goal was to see if we could make it the entire way across without touching water.

  My grandmother heard of what we were doing, and warned us to stay away. Not just because we could fall in and drown — which was unlikely, since we stayed upstream where the low water meant little current — but because the standing water was filled with mosquitos and germs. “Beware the dog days,” said my grandmother. This was the name given by old wives to that time of year when the water was at its lowest and potent with disease.

  Deanny and I didn’t care about germs. We only wanted to see who could make it to the Protestant side without falling and stepping in mud up to our knees. Deanny usually won. She could leap from rock to rock with impressive balance and grace. Once, because of the way she landed on one foot on a rock and managed to hold herself there, teetering back and forth, never falling, until she steadied and brought her leg down, I said she should have been a ballerina.

  She didn’t like this.

  She scowled at me.

  Deanny didn’t like to be told she could do anything feminine, even in a contest such as this. I was an ape, she said. I had the balance and grace of a box of nails. I could fall in and drown in duck shit for all she cared.

  I never called Deanny a ballerina again.

  I should have said she looked like a samurai. That would have suited her better.

  2

  my uncle was in hospital several times that summer. Once, when infections surged in his body and his temperature rose to 104 and he became delirious; another, when he caught pneumonia. Each time, the ambulance came. Each time he stayed a few days before he was sent home. My mother and Jeanette questioned Dr. Fred as to why he was not being kept longer. He was getting worse, they said — shouldn’t he be at the hospital where better care was available?

  Dr. Fred admitted he should, but there was opposition at the hospital over my uncle’s presence. The nurses refused to touch him and even the doctors were nervous. They continued to burn everything he touched, and wore Hazmat suits when they went into his room. Dr. Fred began to administer medications himself, setting up his iv. Once, he carried in Uncle David’s tray when the orderly refused. Fred believed my uncle was better off at home, where at least my mother and aunt were willing to look after him. Even the ambulance attendants were afraid to touch him. They too wore gloves and gowns and facemasks and handled him as little as possible. Dr. Fred said it made him angry, that these people who had sworn an oath to heal couldn’t get past their own prejudice to attend to a patient. It made him, he said, want to give up medicine and become a water polo instructor. Dr. Fred was resigned to the problem, however, and he taught my mother and Jeanette how to care for my uncle.

  He admitted he had called a friend from medical school who worked in Toronto to ask how they were dealing with similar patients. The problem, he was told, existed there as well — this unreasoning fear by the medical professional that in caring for an aids patient they themselves would get it. Fred figured it was worse in Advocate, because this was their first case. “Though,” he told my mother, “if I know anything, David won’t be our last.”

  After the incident on Tenerife Street, my uncle seemed to withdraw into himself. Though the door to his room was always open, so he could call out in case he needed anything, he came out less often. From my glimpses as I walked by, it was like a hospital in there, with trays and piles of extra blankets and the smell of camphor Aunt Jeanette rubbed on my uncle’s chest when he had trouble breathing. Most times he lay on his bed, reading a book or resting. Sometimes he saw me and waved. Other times he didn’t notice me at all. When my mother and aunt asked specifically what was wrong with him, Dr. Fred listed off a half dozen illnesses. These seemed to change from day to day.

  By the middle of the summer my grandmother had given up hope of finding him his own place. No one wanted to rent to him. His condition had become common knowledge, and our neighbours and the townspeople wished to contain the problem to our house alone. My grandmother complained of this at every meal, after the ritual of preparing a tray that my mother or Jeanette would carry up to my uncle.

  My mother would go in to see my uncle again before she came in to say goodnight to me. When I asked how he was, she would sigh and shake her head. She should have lied and said he was fine, but she was unable to keep up the charade. “Not well,” she would say, or “Bad tonight.”

  The mood of the house became more somber with each passing day. The deeper my uncle sank into the swamp of his illness, the further we descended into the bog of our own despair. There was little laughter, and less relief. The canned gaiety of the television sounded tinny and false, and normal conversation was dampened by what was taking place upstairs.

  My mother and Jeanette and even my grandmother became focused on petty details during this period. They set before themselves small tasks that could be accomplished in the face of the insurmountable.

  My grandmother became obsessed with cleaning and rearranging things. She started wiping down walls, and moving furniture, and clearing out the garage and the basement. She corralled Deanny and I to assist her. We spent one afternoon polishing every piece of silver in her dining room cabinet, an
other mopping already spotless floors. With the promise of payment, and under her supervision, we went through every box and bag in the garage as she told us what to throw out and what to keep. She trusted us with red paint to redo the fence in the backyard as long as we didn’t get any on the grass or her row of hostas.

  My mother and Jeanette were more direct in their efforts. They fussed constantly over my uncle so that even he, as sick as he was, must have been driven to distraction by their constant presence.

  I was able to escape these assignments by playing with Deanny for hours on end at the old mill or in the river, or riding beside her on my bike. Until I met her, Deanny hadn’t owned a bike. My mother bought her one. She was wise enough not to get a girls’ bike, without the crossbar and painted some hideous colour like purple or pink. This bike was black, with no speeds, and it looked rather mean. Deanny loved it. We ranged all over the town, usually with Deanny in the lead, shouting at me to catch up. She was impetuous, maniacal. We raced across bridges, dirt roads, and sidewalks. We flew through parks, narrowly missing mothers and babies on blankets. Deanny once wanted us to ride on the rails of the train tracks to see how far we could go before falling off. I took a spill after twenty feet. Deanny went nearly a hundred yards before she toppled off, laughing. We raced around and around the silos and ponds at the old mill, and the more muck she could find for us to slog through the happier she was. I came home coated in filth, and my grandmother screamed at me not to step foot in the house until I had washed myself off with the garden hose.

  Their lives were shrinking while mine was expanding. Though I did not always feel as exhilarated as Deanny did sailing thirty kilometres an hour down a hill — there was always a little fear in me — at least I was spared the soul-killing routine maintained in my grandmother’s house, this insistence on doing something small because nothing larger could be done. I stayed out of the house from waking until dusk, and only came home for meals and when it was time for bed.

  Once Deanny was gone, I dreaded stepping back into the silence of the house. I usually went straight to my room and played video games until it was time to sleep. I had strange dreams. One was about sailing on a ship. Somewhere in the hold was a casket with a body. I could not get this out of my mind. In another, I was on a snow-covered plain, surrounded by wild dogs that wanted to tear me apart and eat me. I would wake up in the dead silence of the house, the pitch dark of my room, sweating, terrified. Some nights I barely slept at all.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  when cameron and I were friends, we used to go to the Saturday Matinee at the Carlton Theatre all through the summer. Admission was a dollar. All the town kids went. The ticket-taker was a fat, grey-haired lady named Hilda. She smoked incessantly and she hated kids. She was constantly telling us to hold our horses and not to make a mess inside for someone else to clean up. We filed by her kiosk respectfully, in case she took it in her head to ban us for the day, which she would do with little provocation. Once inside, there was no such compunction. The kids laughed and talked and joked and flattened cardboard popcorn boxes and sent them sailing through the air. We booed and hissed in the event the projector broke down, which invariably it did, and we talked right along with the movie and made the dialogue coming from the small, tinny speakers in the theatre difficult to hear.

  It was a zoo in there. Though I never threw popcorn boxes and didn’t talk to anyone besides Cameron, I enjoyed the chaos of it, the one chance in the week for the inmates to run the asylum. The movies always started with a Hinterland Who’s Who, a short documentary about a Canadian wild animal. Cameron liked these, but rarely got to hear them. The kids booed and catcalled throughout these as well. They did not, above all things, want to be educated about sandpipers, snowy owls, or wolves on a Saturday afternoon. They howled and pretended to be monkeys. Cameron said once it was like being locked in a room with a troop of troglodytes. I had to look the word up to find out it meant chimpanzees.

  Deanny, however, did not like movies, and since our friendship began we hadn’t gone. But when she discovered that Cujo, starring Dee Wallace and Danny Pintauro, was playing, she decided she wanted to go. Later I would joke about how the last movie we watched at the Saturday cinema had to be about a contagious St. Bernard.

  My mother didn’t want me to go. Jeanette had already seen it, and she had read the book upon which the film was based. She said it was disturbing. “The little boy dies,” she told my mother. “I can’t see how anyone can make a film where a little boy dies. It’s hard to watch.”

  “Did he die in the book?” asked my mother.

  “Yes,” said Jeanette. “But it’s harder to take on film, for some reason.”

  “I think it’s all twisted nonsense,” said my grandmother. “There’s plenty enough going on in real life without going to see some string of horrors concocted by some man down south with too vivid an imagination and no sense of moral decency.”

  For once my mother agreed with my grandmother, and tried to talk me and Deanny out of seeing the film. “Aunt Jeanette can take you both to the beach, or even into the city for the afternoon, right Jeanette?”

  “Right,” Jeanette said. “It’s not a very good movie, anyway.”

  But Deanny didn’t want to go to the beach or the city. She wanted to see Cujo. Deanny didn’t read, except what was required in school. She was not much for the suspension of disbelief either. She didn’t want so much to see the movie to see the little boy die at the end, as to see how the sick filmmakers could make the little boy die at the end. In this sense she was not so far off from the perspective of my grandmother, except Deanny approved of it. She wanted the guts. She wanted the gore.

  She would be disappointed. Though we never actually saw Cujo at the cinema, we eventually watched it on video. Deanny pronounced it a dud and not worth the effort we had put ourselves through to see it. Tad Trenton did not die horribly mangled in the jaws of a rabid St. Bernard. He died of heat exposure in a car or an asthma attack, she could never figure out which.

  Years later, Deanny said she could never watch Pintauro as a sweet little kid on tv’s Who’s the Boss without expecting a large dog to spring out of the closet to tear him to pieces. She said this long after Cujo and Pintauro had faded into obscurity, and reruns of Who’s the Boss were off the air. I had to remind Deanny it was us, and not little Tad, who’d been torn to pieces that day. Though she never liked to admit it, she knew I was right.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  my mother takes Saturday off so she can look after my grandmother. She encourages me to get out of town, and elicits the help of Deanny, who calls me up and invites me for brunch. I borrow the car from Aunt Jeanette, who says I’m to take as long as I want. She can walk home from the diner.

  I should have smelled a rat.

  I drive into the city to meet Deanny at a café on Spring Garden Road, and am surprised when I find Pavel sitting beside her. The last time I saw him was at Deanny’s dinner party, when he walked me to my car and gave me his number.

  I hadn’t called.

  If anything, Pavel is more exuberant than Deanny, though it’s tempered by his masculinity and his Russian accent. When he sees me he stands up and smiles broadly. He shakes my hand vigorously, then sits back down. I shoot a glance at Deanny, who refuses to meet my eye.

  “I ran into Pavel on the street and asked him to join us. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Of course not,” I say, knowing this is a lie. “Where’s Richard?”

  “Writing.”

  A waiter comes to take our order before I can say anything else. We all order a generous breakfast. Before it arrives, Pavel talks mathematics. He does so naturally, without guile, not trying to impress me. It is what he knows and loves, and he knows I love it too. Deanny takes a backseat, acts demure, listening and smiling, saying nothing. Before long, we are knee-deep in it. I relish the discussion because it is impassioned and lively, and I enjoy coaxing from my memory formulas and concepts I haven’t given a thought to
since university. Before long, we have forgotten about Deanny entirely.

  At the end of the meal she excuses herself to go check on Richard. “Why don’t you two go for a walk together,” she suggests. “I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Despite knowing the entire day has been engineered by Deanny to throw Pavel and me together, I agree. Once she is gone, we take a stroll down Spring Garden Street towards the waterfront. For a while we have nothing to say. To break the silence, I ask Pavel if he misses Russia.

  “Of course I do,” he says. “It is my mother country. The source of me, in some way. And Moscow is a great city. Dirty, vile, fast, and rude. I love her very much.”

  “Do you ever think you’ll live there again?”

  “Perhaps,” says Pavel thoughtfully. “Maybe at the end of my life I will move back again. But for now, Canada is my home. Little baby Halifax my new city. And what of you? Do you miss Advocate?”

  I laugh. “Hardly,” I say. “It’s not the same, is it? Advocate is one tiny little town, not a country. And there’s really nothing to miss, besides my mother and aunt.”

  “But it is a part of you, is it not? The way Moscow is a part of me?”

  “Perhaps,” I say. “But if it is, it is not a good part.”

  Pavel shrugs. “I would like to go there someday. Perhaps you will invite me.”

  “Perhaps,” I say, surprised at his boldness. We spend the rest of the day together, and Deanny, the sneak, does not meet up with us. I realize halfway through the afternoon that I like Pavel, in ways I hadn’t liked the other men Deanny introduced me to. Perhaps it is because of his nationality, his bizarre energy. Perhaps it is because of his stunning looks. Or maybe it’s just because we both like math, and I find him easy to talk to. I tell him about my grandmother’s request for a eulogy just to hear what he has to say. I haven’t even told my mother this much.