“I’ve been on the phone to various band councils.” April clicks a remote and a wall screen lights up. “I finally had some luck with the Pelican Lake band. They’re a people of the woods and lakes. This is from my camcorder.”
A man at a microphone. A high school teacher, April explains, addressing some kind of forum: “Over many years, the children of Pelican Lake were regularly taken hundreds of kilometres away from their parents and their homes, to the town of Torch River, to the hell they still call Pie Eleven.”
He recites a litany of injustices: children treated like herds of sheep; one-size-fits-all instruction; denial of free speech; kids with welts on arms and backsides, black and blue and bleeding, forced to sign happy letters home that they copied from blackboards. I’ve heard similar and worse from Gabriel Swift, and more recently in the press, so such accounts no longer shock. But I didn’t want to believe that Dermot knew this was going on.
April pauses the tape and draws a chair close to me, her solemn eyes studying me for reaction. “They emailed me statements from three elders, all in their eighties, who remembered Dermot Mulligan from those years. Only one woman had a memory that was sharp. Ethel Brière, who is eighty-three. It’s she I went out to see. Are you comfortable, Arthur?”
“Becoming less so. Please don’t tease – lay it out.”
“She was fourteen in 1942. Her best friend was a girl named Caroline Snow, same age. In early June, in a whispered exchange in the girl’s dormitory, Caroline told her … Well, you will hear.”
She fast-forwards. Ethel Brière is sitting on a sofa, a sturdy, clear-eyed woman with a weathered face and flowing white hair. Around her neck, a silver chain and crucifix.
April’s voice: “Who else have you told this to, Mrs. Brière?”
“Only the lady over there from the band office.”
“You had kept it to yourself until then?”
“Caroline asked me to swear, and I did. In God’s name. For years I kept that secret.” A sigh. “She was such a pretty girl. The most beautiful, the smartest. So pious. But she is long gone, and times have changed.” She sits up, a firm set to her chin.
“And she didn’t report it?”
“She was ashamed. She was afraid. You would have been too, miss.”
The image wobbles. “Oops, I almost lost you.”
A third voice, off-screen: “Ethel, can we go back a bit?” The camera pans toward a young woman whom I presume to be a band counsellor. “Tell us what used to go on in the discipline room – isn’t that what you called it?”
“Yes, in the basement. There was a table there. That’s where the nuns used to strap us down to get whipped for speaking Indian. They used to force us bigger girls to hold a little girl on the table while they strapped her for … it might be bedwetting, or you got lickings for not doing the bed, not eating, being late. The boys who ran away got punished in front of everyone. You also got strapped for lying if you complained about the sex they forced on us.”
“Thank you.”
That was a kind of public service announcement, but far from irrelevant. April’s voice again: “Did Caroline talk to you about this incident more than once?”
“A few times, when we were able to get alone. But earlier I saw what started it. We were on recess in the schoolyard and a monitor heard Caroline talking Cree, and she was reported to the principal and sent to his office after school.”
I feel queasy as Ethel recounts Caroline’s confidences. “It started off as a scolding for speaking Indian, and then Mr. Mulligan told her he didn’t want to punish her if he could avoid it. And then he began touching her, and she didn’t know what to do.”
I am aghast, yet an emphatic inner voice tells me I should have expected something like this. Evil, he wrote. Unforgivable evil.
April’s assistant enters with a tray and silently serves us tea as I listen in utter discomfort to a predictable tale of touches and fondling and the victim’s frozen lack of response. All efforts to disbelieve this elder are bound to fail. I can see the truth in her eyes, her gestures, as she recalls Caroline Snow’s account of standing rooted to the floor while Mulligan undid her buttons, bizarrely caressing in turn each item of clothing, playing with her brassiere and panties.
“And so the principal laid Caroline down on the rug, and that’s where he did it to her.”
April presses pause, and the image holds on the doughty Mrs. Brière snorting into a hankie. That inspires me to do so too, out of sadness in large part, but also out of need, to expel the shock that seems to have clogged my throat and nasal orifices. Rome has fallen.
As if in prayer I say, “Lord, what am I to do with this?” It’s hearsay, strictly speaking, inadmissible, but I am dizzy with the deeper implications. None of this was known in 1962. How differently I would have handled the case had this outrage come to light. The naissains d’huîtres are rebelling.
“There’s more. There were consequences,” April says. “Have some more tea. It’s herbal, very soothing.” A brutally suspenseful pause as she pours. “Mulligan impregnated Caroline Snow.”
I nearly choke on the soothing herbal tea.
“I’ve written all this down, but let me summarize. Caroline didn’t return to Pie Eleven after learning she was pregnant, and Ethel Brière did not hear from her for two and a half years. They chanced on each other in Regina at the end of the war. Caroline Snow was then seventeen, working in the sex trade, supporting herself and her toddler. Sebastien. Sebastien Snow.”
I lean back in my chair, feeling the colour drain from my face.
“And what ultimately became of Ms. Snow?”
“After Social Services took her son into care, she had a breakdown and had to be restrained from making noisy, unwelcome visits to the foster home. Ultimately she let her pimp take her to Vancouver, where she died in December 1957, at twenty-nine, of a heroin overdose. The band council located her death certificate. They are perusing Sebastien’s foster care records. It appears that when he was fourteen he ran away, apparently intent on finding his mother. That would be not long before she died. No one back then seems to have bothered trying to trace him.”
She touches my hand gently. “Are you okay?”
“I’ll be fine.” But I’m shaking.
“I’ll have more in a few days. Apparently Sebastien has a police record. So, now tell me how I can help you with your prowling ex-wife.”
I laugh hollowly. Numbly, as a distraction, I tell her the bare bones: Annabelle’s return, my fear that she will make mischief, disrupt my life. “I’m looking for a safe house for a few days.”
She suggests the Ritz, just a walk away, where Chinatown melds into skid road. I vaguely recall it as a Main Street dump with a pub, but April has heard it’s been done over nicely into suites, the area gentrified.
Outside the Ritz, a skinny man with a sad, lined face extends a palm. “Can you help a friend out with some bus fare?” His breath sour with beer. In his sixties, about Sebastien Snow’s age were he alive today. Indeed, there is a resemblance to Mulligan. Put horn-rims on, imagine him with more hair … I’m seeing phantoms again.
I give him a couple of loonies. “God bless,” he says. “When my ship comes in, I’ll pay you back.”
The small lobby is clean, the clerk polite. As she checks me in, I put my glasses on to read a poster pinned to a notice board. “Have you seen this girl?” The missing fourteen-year-old, Kestrel Dubois: a new photo, taken only two days ago, in colour but not sharp. She wears a brown jacket and carries a small pack. Long hair, tied back. She is leaning over the railing of a B.C. ferry, contemplative. “Anyone seeing this person or who saw her aboard the Queen of Coquitlam on its Vancouver-to-Nanaimo run between ten a.m. and twelve-thirty p.m. on Tuesday, September 6th, please call 911 or contact GIS RCMP, Nanaimo.”
The picture has also been in the newspapers, a blown-up cellphone image taken by someone unaware, until she showed it to friends, that a search was underway for this pretty girl. Kestrel
disappeared from a Cree reserve at Lac La Ronge in Saskatchewan, and that has piqued my interest. It doesn’t seem a typical case of flight from an unhappy home; her parents are obviously caring and quite distraught. A high school teacher and a nurse, they’d given Kestrel six hundred dollars for supplies and clothes for the coming school term and put her on a bus to Prince Albert for an overnight shopping trip. They haven’t heard from her since.
My assigned room, though flashy – the style is bordello light, florid curtains, red sheets, pink pillows – will do for a short sojourn, a few days of boning up on the law with old Riley. But I haven’t time to pop back to the office; I tarried too long with April Wu, reviewing her reports and interviews – an afternoon of sheer masochism, lashing myself as I recreated Mulligan in this new and awful light. My white, polite, bourgeois brother, you worshipped him too …
Had his rape of a child finally, after twenty years, devoured his will to live? Had he no longer been able to stomach his own perversity? Fondling the girl’s undergarments … And now, of course, I go spiralling back to 1962, those pink panties tangled in tree roots on the banks of the Squamish. And I remember Gabriel’s claim: Whatever his atrocity, whatever his guilt, I can’t believe I would not have forgiven him. But this was a sin beyond forgiveness. I can’t believe Gabriel had knowledge of it.
Sebastien Snow, born March 1943, therefore sixty-eight now. Unless, like his mother, he met an early death on desolation row. Rendered to Saskatchewan Social Services as an infant, presumably put into foster care, so it’s not likely he knew who his father was. Equally unlikely that Dermot Mulligan knew of his son’s existence.
I must ponder how to relate this history in ways that will intrigue their lordships. If old Riley can find a way to wiggle around the rule against hearsay, and if the court buys it, then I can file Ethel Brière’s affidavit and video. I must persuade them that Mulligan, ultimately overcome by guilt and self-hatred, took the easy way, the path darkly lit by Camus, Sophocles, Nietzsche, Shakespeare.
I check my cellphone messages. A lilting, husky voice too well remembered: “I just wanted to say hi, I’m here. No callbacks, please, darling, I know you’re terribly busy. Ciao.” A final punctuation mark: the soft pop of puckered lips.
All the old obsessive love and measureless pain come welling up. Why so much distress? I’m too old, too wise, too damaged to fall under her sway again. It’s not as if she’s some kind of omnipotent, spell-casting witch. She’s more like a train wreck. How captivated I was – her masochistic prisoner, her slave. Hurt me, my love, punish me … Ah, but there’s nothing there any more, Annabelle. Believe me, whatever it was (mindless infatuation, compulsive bondage?), it died many years ago.
With that firm pronouncement I am able to do my business, and I wash up and return to my messages. Hubbell Meyerson, reminding me of the dinner date at Hy’s this evening. I barely find the strength to text him that I am sick and must decline.
That cathouse in Grandview? You were making out with that tawny little knockout …
I remember.
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1956
Was Caroline her name? A tiny preserved nugget of memory tells me it was that, or just Carol. In her late twenties, I assumed, though maybe the makeup hid a few years. The dark, haunted eyes hid everything else.
Law school was on break and it was my birthday, so my roommate, Hubbell, even then a prodigious partier, had insisted we celebrate with a trip to Vancouver’s seamy side. This was not his first visit to the Grandview bootleg bar, but it was mine, and I was partaking only of its watered-down drinks, unable to brave the tantalizing terror of bought sex.
Hubbell had no such constraints. Promptly on entering, he began engaging the sex workers, jibing with them, coming on to them – as if he needed to. But the satyr liked to enact his fantasies of male seduction.
We were the sole customers. A house madam ran the bar and three young women were languidly arrayed on a sofa. A fourth – I’ll call her Carol – was across the room, sitting on the shag carpet, hugging her knees. She looked frail, was wearing a long-sleeved blouse, presumably to hide the needle marks.
“Don’t know which one of you ladies I’m in love with the most. What’s your name again, honey? Charlene? Lovely name. And this can’t be … Grace Kelly herself! Hey, Arthur, offer some companionship to that little lost soul over there. Cheer her up.”
We had bar-hopped our way there, so I was well oiled, sitting unsteadily on a backless barstool. Fearing I might tip over, I ejected from it and wobbled my way to a safe landing on the thick carpet near Carol. She was making no overtures, so I didn’t feel threatened. I thought to entertain her, so for the next twenty minutes I recited to her the entirety of Fitzgerald’s translation of the Rubáiyát. Then I moved on to Keats, and Byron.
Hubbell emerged at some point from his private session and stood about for a while, hinting we should take our leave, but I was only vaguely aware of him, mesmerized by Carol’s rapt, delighted smile. I was in fine form. Maid of Athens, ere we part, / Give, oh give me back my heart!
Hubbell finally wandered off and I spent the night with her, reciting, talking, never touching. At dawn I rose from my prostrate position at her feet and paid her everything I had in my wallet – fifty dollars – for the pleasure of her audience.
I hadn’t asked her a single question. She had ventured few words, though she seemed often on the verge of tears. I learned nothing about her but was somehow persuaded she was one of the nymphs beholden to the goddess Diana. I never saw her again.
All of this may be irrelevant to my narrative. In truth, I haven’t the faintest idea if my rapt listener was Caroline Snow. I want it to be her, crying to listen to the words of dead poets, and maybe remembering my kindness as she took that last, mortal hit into her arm. I want to believe I gave her one night of happiness.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2011
I awake from a hideous dream into a strange place – a tarty bedroom, pink and frilly. Cognition comes slowly … I am in my room at the Ritz, my third morning here. The dream began in the Grandview cathouse but morphed into a vast library, an A-frame, Annabelle seductively undressing and offering herself to Dermot Mulligan, he in bra and panties. Irene drifted past us, ghost-like, and disappeared into a looking glass, and I fled for the Squamish River. My dreams are growing more freakish as the appeal date approaches.
I hope to get my work done today and make the last ferry back home, so I energetically complete my bathroom rounds, dress, pack up, and arrange for a late checkout. I am still flabbergasted over the bombshell from April Wu, and have instructed her to remain in steadfast pursuit of Sebastien Snow. Putting it in her cautious way, she has found “some further interesting details.” She is to come by my office this morning.
Outside I try to detour around the skinny man who falsely conjured up the ghost of Dermot Mulligan. I know his name by now – Conway – as each of the last three days he has approached me for bus fare, having decided I am a mark. I unfailingly succumb.
He senses me behind him and turns. “Any chance you could help a friend out one more time?”
“Bus fare, Conway?”
“If it’s not too much.”
“Where do you go on this bus?”
“To visit my old probation officer. He ain’t got no other friends.”
This sounds so unlikely as to be true. I fish out a toonie. “God bless,” he says, reaffirming his pledge to pay me back when his luck changes.
No longer sore-footed, I have been walking to Tragger, Inglis, and might have done so on this sunny morning, but I want my loaner handy for a fast getaway to the island. It’s in a parkade, and my route there takes me past a pitiable skid road landmark, the streetfront where, as resident alcoholic, I defended down-and-outers for a few years, an interregnum from Tragger, Inglis memorialized in a few of A Thirst’s more depressing chapters.
My former building is boarded up, ready for demolition. A sign advises that something called the Downtown Eastsi
de Recovery Centre will be built here. Gone will be a slice of my past. Annabelle supported me in my mission to serve the poor, I have to give her that. She must have had a social conscience at one time.
Neat car, says an anonymous note on the windshield of the Mustang. Each time it powers into life seems a miracle, probably because Stoney has burned me so often. Maybe the rapscallion has turned over a new leaf. Probably not.
Gertrude lays Annabelle’s copy of A Thirst on my desk, open to the title page. I fiddle with a pen. Fondest regards. Too strong. Welcome back to Vancouver. Too sterile. I settle on something complimentary but distant: You come off admirably in these pages. As indeed she does. A sexy, passionate, scandalous social butterfly in contrast to the dull moth flapping around the lampshade.
“Any word from her?”
“Arthur, I’m sure she has lots of other people to catch up with. I imagine that’s why she hasn’t called. You may not be the centre of her life.”
I’m not surprised Gertrude is siding with her; they always got along. “My sole concern is not to be caught up in one of her outrageous scandals.” I feel bad, though. Perhaps I should not be so pitiless to a woman newly divorced.
“To business. Please fetch me a clean copy of Dr. Mulligan’s memoir.” I intend to spend some time reviewing it, seeking clues to the other Mulligan: the stranger, the violator of innocence. I wonder if there were others.
She produces a ring-bound copy, dusts it off. “Old Riley is waiting.”
I turn to an early chapter, relating the trauma caused by his sister’s youthful death. There followed a wretched time – years, it seemed – when I ached for the smiles and hugs and words of comfort that Genevieve had unsparingly bestowed on me. One would need a sage analyst, a Freud, to link Dermot’s intense attachment to Genevieve with his ravishing of a child of similar age. A mad misplaced impulse to recapture that love?
I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel Page 31