Flying a Red Kite

by Hugh Hood

  He felt an intense desire to look at the portrait of the com­edian to see if the eyes were moving. What the hell, he thought, you buy annuities, Blue Cross, insurance, furniture, houses, cars, clothing, indulgences, and you can’t in the end protect yourself against everything. It can’t be done. There’s always something else. He looked up at the picture of Fields, bravely meeting the sliding eyes, and the face was more opaque than ever.

  A royal flush in spades, thought Haggerty, and it isn’t doing him any good.

  “The con-duc-tor didn’t like Jews, George said. He made them wait in line while his father was sick and he wouldn’t help them. I don’t think he was very nice to them, do you? I like Jews because George is a Jew.”

  “You like everybody,” Haggerty said.

  “I don’t like Marisa.”

  “Well, except Marisa.”

  “What is a Jew?”

  Lord, he thought, this situation is banal, right out of Partisan Review, the liberal father and his innocent child. Lionel Trilling would love it; he’d want to put it in a sociology book, Lionel and Wystan and Jacques and all the boys down at Mid-Century. She was going to put the question again and he didn’t want to listen — there was nothing to be said, he wasn’t an anthropometrist but a painter and commercial artist. The Jews were some shadowy men whom he didn’t know well, and a bunch of white-skinned girls in their twenties on whom scarlet lipstick would go, lovelies all of them, he liked the black hair, white skin, scarlet lipstick effect. There was a Mrs. Greenwald in his class at the Museum who would never learn to draw worth a damn, but whom he encouraged to continue because he liked to look at her. Boy, was she beautiful and, boy, was she stupid. He meant to keep the Jews that way in his thinking, people to look at, not newsreels of charnel houses, not the mortal sin of the race, not Calvary. He stared at his daughter and knowing that it was an evasion, he put the question by.

  “Come and show your mother your legs and arms,” he said, “little old Boadicea.” She rose obediently and followed him to the kitchen where Helen was stuffing the washer with sheets.

  “That’s a ten-pound load?” he said incredulously.

  “A bit over,” she said guiltily, “but I’m not telling the machine about it. Maybe it won’t guess.”

  “Don’t torment the poor old thing,” he said amusedly, and then he saw that her eyes were full of tears. “What is it, what’s wrong?”

  “That damned George,” she said chokingly, “I don’t want to be bothered with stories like that.”

  “Oh, you heard?”

  “I was there when he told Sally. Did you get the whole story?”

  “I don’t know. What did you hear?” he said.

  They shared a particular hatred and horror of the notion of the sufferings of children, always gratuitous and unearned. Haggerty remembered that W.C. Fields is said to have hated and despised children, and he was sure he knew why the comedian had taken that line.

  “After they met the boat,” she began unwillingly, “his father started to feel sick and apparently he nearly collapsed when he found that his friends hadn’t made it, but he got George across town and into Grand Central; they had a meal of sorts and walked around the station for half a day, the father getting whiter and whiter. George says he can’t understand why his dad was so white. Finally they got in the lineup at the gate, they were sitting on their suitcases. Just before they opened the gate the father got up and left the lineup to move around. He felt nauseated, as if he were going to vomit, but he couldn’t. When he came back they had lost their place in the line and the gateman wouldn’t give it back to them. They waited at the end of the line for another hour and he had the attack just after the train pulled out.”

  “Why didn’t he get off and go to a hospital?”

  “How should I know? Maybe he didn’t know what to do with George, maybe he hoped to get home before it got bad. They didn’t know anybody in New York. Anyway they sat up together all night on the train and he went to Montreal General as soon as they got in.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know, but I wouldn’t bet money on it,” she said.

  “What was that stuff about the conductor hating Jews?”

  “George said he wouldn’t do anything to help his father, he just pushed them off in a corner or something. I don’t want to hear any more about it.”

  “But we will,” said Haggerty.

  He was right. Sally kept meeting George at the bus stop or along the street and she kept hearing this or that, that his father was in a funny kind of tent, that his blood clotted too much or wouldn’t, after drugs, clot at all. The Haggertys felt acutely annoyed that their daughter, knowing nothing of the implications, so conscientiously transmitted these details. They did not care to be haunted.

  On a final afternoon towards the end of April she bounded in with the air of one filled with remarkable, even wonderful news, a sort of gospel.

  “George’s father died,” she said, and the way she delivered the line all unconsciously gave it a weirdly comic tone. “He’s dead,” she said, briefly and precisely.

  Peter and Helen looked at each other. Each realized that the other parent had talked to Sally about these things; but there hadn’t been any very close collaboration between them on the question of what to say and what to omit. Neither one wanted to speak first.

  “George says his father has gone away for good. He won’t see him again,” observed Sally, looking from one to the other of her parents. She had the damnedest way of knowing when she’d put them on the spot. Then she seemed to think over what she’d said — and she was certainly capable of some sort of reflection — because she said: “Are you going away?” addressing the question to them jointly.

  Haggerty broke first, shamefully. He went to his knees and crooked his finger at her, and she waltzed over happily and stood between his knees.

  “Are you going away?” she said, putting it directly to her father.

  He put his arms around her roughly, feeling the smart in his eyes. “Nobody’s going anywhere!” he said.

  “Won’t you die?”

  Ah, there it was at last, she’d heard the word before; she was growing up, three-and-a-half, you can’t hide it forever. Is three-and-a-half too young? Shouldn’t you hide it till they’re ready for it? Who’s ready? We’re never ready.

  “Yes,” said Haggerty, “I’ll die.” He heard Helen’s sharp intake of breath and felt a stab of irrational anger. I can’t lie, he thought. “All must die,” he said.

  “When?”

  “Not for a long long time, Sally, a very long time, so long that there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Will I die?”

  “Yes.” He said it gently.

  “Oh, but you’ll die first?”

  I wish she’d let it drop, he thought. “Yes.”

  “And Mummy will, too. I’ll miss you.”

  “It won’t be for a long time. Forget about it.”

  “Where do you go when you die?”

  Now what do you say? What do you do? Oh sure, they had a crucifix in the house and some pictures of the Infant Jesus and His Mother, and they had all been to Church together, which Sally loved. Are you filling them up with false hopes, crippling their little psyches, by teaching them a religion and the hope of immortality? If it be an illusion, is it a useful and healthy one?

  Of course, if it were true, there’d be no problem, he thought hopefully.

  Even if it isn’t, shouldn’t you inoculate them with hope anyway? Can’t it be untrue without being false, like a myth or a fiction? He took a deep breath and spoke bravely, taking the ir­retrievable step.

  “If you’re a good man or woman or little girl, like you, then you go to Heaven to be with God forever, and when you’re with God nobody ever leaves you again. George’s father is with God, and someday George will see
him again, and he won’t be sick.”

  He caught his wife’s sighing slow exhalation and guessed that he had gotten the story straight. Sally grinned. “In any case,” he said, driving the point home, “it won’t happen for a long time. Nobody’s going anywhere. So forget it.” He was sure that she would for maybe as much as a year.

  “I’m going to take my bike out and lend it to George,” she said.

  They helped her down the front steps and then hustled quickly inside so as to evade her friend. He’s too big for the tricycle, they thought, and soon it will be broken.

  Haggerty sat up late that night finishing off an assignment and afterwards monkeying around with some illustrations for a children’s book which he was doing on spec. He liked working with the clear vivid simple primary colours and found the illustrations, a horse, a carousel, red barns and white silos, falling perfectly into place under his hand. It was the first time in days that he had been able to do anything easily, so he sat on and on under the picture of the dead comedian till he’d finished six watercolour sketches. Then he smoked a couple of cigarettes and ate a candy bar before going to bed.

  Usually he had trouble falling asleep, when he’d worked late, his train of ideas continuing while his head bobbed from side to side on the unaccommodating pillow. Tonight he fell asleep instantly and at once began to dream — bright dreams in primary colours of overcoats, tricycles, trains, horses, and merry-go-rounds. Then he found himself seated before a card table, playing with somebody whose face he couldn’t make out, he was holding ten to King of a royal flush in spades and was trying to fill it. He couldn’t see his opponent’s face but he guessed who it was, and then he knew that he would draw the Ace, so he extended his hand, his good hand, his pencil hand, the left one, and turned up the emblem he’d wished for through his dreams.

  Flying a Red Kite

  The ride home began badly. Still almost a stranger to the city, tired, hot and dirty, and inattentive to his surroundings, Fred stood for ten minutes, shifting his parcels from arm to arm and his weight from one leg to the other, in a sweaty bath of shimmering glare from the sidewalk, next to a grimy yellow-and-black bus stop. To his left a line of murmuring would-be passengers lengthened until there were enough to fill any vehicle that might come for them. Finally an obese brown bus waddled up like an indecent old cow and stopped with an expiring moo at the head of the line. Fred was glad to be first in line, as there didn’t seem to be room for more than a few to embus.

  But as he stepped up he noticed a sign in the window which said Côte des Neiges — Boulevard and he recoiled as though bitten, trampling the toes of the woman behind him and making her squeal. It was a Sixty-six bus, not the Sixty-five that he wanted. The woman pushed furiously past him while the remainder of the line clamoured in the rear. He stared at the number on the bus stop: Sixty-six, not his stop at all. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another coach pulling away from the stop on the northeast corner, the right stop, the Sixty-five, and the one he should have been standing under all this time. Giving his characteristic weary put-upon sigh, which he used before breakfast to annoy Naomi, he adjusted his parcels in both arms, feeling sweat run around his neck and down his collar between his shoulders, and crossed Saint Catherine against the light, drawing a Gallic sneer from a policeman, to stand for several more minutes at the head of a new queue, under the right sign. It was nearly four-thirty and the Saturday shopping crowds wanted to get home, out of the summer dust and heat, out of the jitter of the big July holiday weekend. They would all go home and sit on their balconies. All over the suburbs in duplexes and fourplexes, families would be enjoying cold suppers in the open air on their balconies; but the Calverts’ apartment had none. Fred and Naomi had been ignorant of the meaning of the custom when they were apartment hunting. They had thought of Montreal as a city of the Sub-Arctic and in the summers they would have leisure to repent the misjudgment.

  He had been shopping along the length of Saint Catherine between Peel and Guy, feeling guilty because he had heard for years that this was where all those pretty Montreal women made their promenade; he had wanted to watch without familial encumbrances. There had been girls enough but nothing outrageously special so he had beguiled the scorching afternoon making a great many small idle purchases, of the kind one does when trapped in a Woolworth’s. A ballpoint pen and a notepad for Naomi, who was always stealing his and leaving it in the kitchen with long, wildly-optimistic, grocery lists scribbled in it. Six packages of cigarettes, some legal-size envelopes, two Dinky-toys, a long-playing record, two parcels of second-hand books, and the lightest of his burdens and the unhandiest, the kite he had bought for Deedee, two flimsy wooden sticks rolled up in red plastic film, and a ball of cheap thin string — not enough, by the look of it, if he should ever get the thing into the air.

  When he’d gone fishing, as a boy, he’d never caught any fish; when playing hockey he had never been able to put the puck in the net. One by one the wholesome outdoor sports and games had defeated him. But he had gone on believing in them, in their curative moral values, and now he hoped that Deedee, though a girl, might sometime catch a fish; and though she obviously wouldn’t play hockey, she might ski, or toboggan on the mountain. He had noticed that people treated kites and kite-flying as somehow holy. They were a natural symbol, thought Fred, and he felt uneasily sure that he would have trouble getting this one to fly.

  The inside of the bus was shaped like a boxcar with windows, but the windows were useless. You might have peeled off the bus as you’d peel the paper off a pound of butter, leaving an oblong yellow lump of thick solid heat, with the passengers embedded in it like hopeless breadcrumbs.

  He elbowed and wriggled his way along the aisle, feeling a momentary sliver of pleasure as his palm rubbed accidentally along the back of a girl’s skirt — once, a philosopher — the sort of thing you couldn’t be charged with. But you couldn’t get away with it twice, and anyway the girl either didn’t feel it or had no idea who had caressed her. There were vacant seats towards the rear, which was odd because the bus was otherwise full, and he struggled towards them, trying not to break the wooden struts which might be persuaded to fly. The bus lurched forward and his feet moved with the floor, causing him to pop suddenly out of the crowd by the exit, into a square well of space next to the heat and stink of the engine. He swayed around and aimed himself at a narrow vacant seat, nearly dropping a parcel of books as he lowered himself precipitately into it.

  The bus crossed Sherbrooke Street and began, intolerably slowly, to crawl up Cote des Neiges and around the western spur of the mountain. His ears began to pick up the usual melange of French and English and to sort it out; he was proud of his French and pleased that most of the people on the streets spoke a less correct, though more fluent, version than his own. He had found that he could make his customers understand him perfectly — he was a book salesman — but that people on the street were happier when he addressed them in English.

  The chatter in the bus grew clearer and more interesting and he began to listen, grasping all at once why he had found a seat back here. He was sitting next to a couple of drunks who emitted an almost overpowering smell of beer. They were cheerfully exchanging indecencies and obscure jokes and in a minute they would speak to him. They always did, drunks and pan­handlers, finding some soft fearfulness in his face which exposed him as a shrinking easy mark. Once in a railroad station he had been approached three times in twenty minutes by the same pan­handler on his rounds. Each time he had given the man something, despising himself with each new weakness.

  The cheerful pair sitting at right-angles to him grew louder and more blunt and the women within earshot grew glum. There was no harm in it; there never is. But you avoid your neighbour’s eye, afraid of smiling awkwardly, or of looking offended and a prude.

  “Now this Pearson,” said one of the revellers, “he’s just a little short-ass. He’s just a little fellow without any brains. Wh
y, some of the speeches he makes … I could make them myself. I’m an old Tory myself, an old Tory.”

  “I’m an old Blue,” said the other.

  “Is that so, now? That’s fine, a fine thing.” Fred was sure he didn’t know what a Blue was.

  “I’m a Balliol man. Whoops!” They began to make monkey-like noises to annoy the passengers and amuse themselves. “Whoops,” said the Oxford man again, “hoo, hoo, there’s one now, there’s one for you.” He was talking about a girl on the sidewalk.

  “She’s a one, now, isn’t she? Look at the legs on her, oh, look at them now, isn’t that something?” There was a noisy clearing of throats and the same voice said something that sounded like “Shaoil-na-baig.”

  “Oh, good, good!” said the Balliol man.

  “Shaoil-na-baig,” said the other loudly, “I’ve not forgotten my Gaelic, do you see, shaoil-na-baig,” he said it loudly, and a woman up the aisle reddened and looked away. It sounded like a dirty phrase to Fred, delivered as though the speaker had forgotten all his Gaelic but the words for sexual intercourse.

  “And how is your French, Father?” asked the Balliol man, and the title made Fred start in his seat. He pretended to drop a parcel and craned his head quickly sideways. The older of the two drunks, the one sitting by the window, examining the passing legs and skirts with the same impulse that Fred had felt on Saint Catherine Street, was indeed a priest, and couldn’t possibly be an impostor. His clerical suit was too well-worn, egg-stained and blemished with candle-droppings, and fit its wearer too well, for it to be an assumed costume. The face was unmistakably a southern Irishman’s. The priest darted a quick peek into Fred’s eyes before he could turn them away, giving a monkey-like grimace that might have been a mixture of embarrassment and shame but probably wasn’t.

  He was a little grey-haired bucko of close to sixty, with a triangular sly mottled crimson face and uneven yellow teeth. His hands moved jerkily and expressively in his lap, in counterpoint to the lively intelligent movements of his face.