Leave Me by Dying

by Rosemary Aubert

  “Don’t worry so much!” he called after me as I slammed the door of the Jag and headed up the driveway to our kitchen door.

  My mother grew up in an Italian village with fewer homes than on our side of Clinton Street. She never saw a toilet, a banana or an object made of plastic until she was a teenager. But in the two and a half decades she’d lived in Canada, she’d become the match of any Canadian woman on the block. Like them, she had a television-watching regime as strict as the first-year law curriculum. No doubt her routine had been disrupted by the appearance of the American president, but she was now back on schedule, watching I Love Lucy. She got up to give me the supper she’d saved and to tell me the good news she’d received while I was out.

  “Wash your hands, Angelo, then sit down and say grace.”

  I did what she commanded while she bustled around the small kitchen, talking nonstop as she opened the oven and took out the various dishes she’d set aside for me. We always ate far too much during Lent because to my mother, fasting meant that meals could be mammoth as long as they contained no meat.

  She put before me a thick slice of homemade pizza crusty with browned mozzarella, parmesan and romano cheeses, from beneath which oozed bright, spicy tomatoes she’d canned herself. “I’m going to be the Blessed Virgin Mary in the Passion play at Mount Carmel. Me! Imagine that, Angelo! They don’t pick Bruzzese, but they did this year!” Despite her modern ways, like most Italians my mother was hypersensitive to imagined slights about the region of Italy she’d left behind. “I get to wear a costume and . . .”

  Despite my best intentions, I found I wasn’t listening to her excited chatter. I kept thinking about the morgue. Why had Gleason been so nervous? Surely not because he was concerned about his law project. He didn’t care about minor infractions, perhaps because he knew his father would bail him out of any real difficulties he got into—even failing at school. Still, it must have taken a lot of trouble to get an appointment after hours. And what had overruled the protests of the reluctant guard, who clearly had wanted us out? A person who enjoys a mystery would have welcomed the challenge of solving tonight’s puzzle, but I couldn’t allow myself to be distracted. I was studying to become a lawyer, not a police officer or a coroner.

  I had no illusions about my disadvantages—or my advantages, either. Since the age of ten I had never been other than the top student in my class. But except for my uncle Salvatore, I had no relatives rich enough to fund a chair at the university, as Gleason had. From the first moment I’d sat in Sheldrake Tuppin’s courtroom in the opening weeks of law school, I’d made up my mind that I would be his intern, that I would learn to balance just as he did the requirements of the law with the needs of ordinary people. But I understood from the start that Tuppin was no grassroots demagogue. He wore hand-tailored suits. He ate lunch every day either at the Windsor Club or in the Barristers’ Dining Room. He was a wily, wise, sophisticated man whose family was as blue-blooded as Gleason’s. There had been, I was sure, many times long ago when Tuppin’s father, like Gleason’s, had the connections—or the gift—that would ease his son’s way. Gleason could afford to drop into the morgue a month before an assignment was due and decide on the spot that it might be cool to do homicide for a project. I did not have that luxury. I did have, it bothered me to realize, more curiosity about the pathetic victim than was comfortable. I could still see her in my mind’s eye. I thought about the pathologist’s hand poised over the shabby skirt. He had hesitated for a fraction of a second. As though he couldn’t bear to cut. Or, I suddenly thought, as though he were waiting for that phone to ring.

  “What’s a four-letter word for guitar?”

  I looked up from my supper, which now included a generous portion of the breaded fish I’d seen earlier, plus a heap of pasta in a creamy white-cheese sauce. My sixteen-year-old sister, Arletta, had joined me at the table. She held a torn-out piece of the Toronto Daily World up to her pert face. Before I could answer, she was joined by my brother, Michele, a first-year sociology student at the university. His hair, I noticed, was getting ridiculously long. Dark ringlets covered the top of his ears and brushed the collar of his shirt at the neck. “Folk,” he said to Arletta. “F-O-L-K.”

  Today, Arletta’s hair was piled in a cluster atop her head. She had the same dark curls as my brother, and me, too, if I’d not kept my hair meticulously cut. She calculated, wrinkled her nose, shook her head and said to Michele, “Can’t be.”

  “B-A-S-S,” I offered.

  Arletta stared at the crossword again. “Yeah,” she said. “Right on.”

  “What are you wasting your time for? I thought you hated crosswords,” Michele said.

  My mother laughed and put a dish of salad in front of me. Lettuce, plum tomatoes, black olives, artichoke hearts—all drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with dried basil from her summer garden. “Arletta wants to see the Fab Four,” she said, giggling.

  “Yeah,” Arletta concurred. “If I can get all the answers to this crossword right and I mail it in to the World, I get a chance to win two tickets to the Return of the Beatles concert in August. People are already lining up for tickets. Some of them stay out all night but—”

  “August! That’s five months away,” I said.

  “Yeah. Five months to pray that I win. I wish!” Arletta crossed the fingers of both hands, stuck out her pointed little chin and rolled her eyes toward the ceiling.

  “You study. You forget silly contests.” This from my father, who sat in a corner of the warm room sullenly studying his Corriere Canadese. We ignored him and went on with our conversation as my mother showed me a plate of sliced roasted red and green peppers glistening in olive oil and mixed with slivers of garlic and celery. I shook my head and she took the plate away.

  “I need to talk to you about something really important,” Michele said intently, sitting beside me and elbowing away an empty dish. “We have to go someplace when you finish eating.”

  “I’m done,” I said, “but I’m not going anywhere. It’s already after nine and I have to work on my project. I’ve already wasted the whole evening.”

  “You’re wasting your time anyway, burying yourself in books. The action’s not in books, man. It’s in the street. How do you expect to impress anybody with stuff you read in books?”

  “Leave me alone, Michele. By the time I meet Shel-drake Tuppin, I’ll have read every word he ever wrote. Every judgment. Every—”

  “Look, Angelo,” Michele persisted, fixing me with his near-black, pleading eyes, “I met this guy in one of my field studies. He’s got a problem and I want to help him with it, but I can’t do it by myself. I need you.”

  I stirred sugar into the coffee my mother slid onto the table. “Michele,” I said, “if you’re going to study sociology, you’re going to have to learn some objectivity. You can’t help everybody whose sad case comes to your attention.” The image of the dead woman at the morgue came un-bidden to me, and as if to mock my own words, I felt a stab of pity, the dawning of a desire to right the unfairness of her grotesque fate. Nobody deserved to die so sadly, with a burlap bag wrapped around her head. But I followed my own advice and pushed the thought away.

  Michele leaned closer to me, his body tense with emotion. Unlike me, he was wiry and lean. At that point in my life, differences were more important to me than similarities. I was forcing myself to learn to differentiate, to decide between one way and its opposite. To make distinctions. So when I thought about my brother, it was to think about how dissimilar we were. There came a time, many years later, when Michele was the only person in the world I could trust to save me from myself. Even then I did not see what I see now—the characteristics that made my brother and me the same: empathy, passion, determination, blood. He said softly, “I went down to Bleecker Street . . .”

  “Greenwich Village, New Yawk City?” Arlette joked.

  Michele didn’t hear her. “I met a man there I have to do something for. He’s got a serious legal pro
blem. I told him my brother’s in law and can help him out.”

  “Michele,” I answered with annoyance, “that sounds like I’m a lawyer. “You can’t go around telling people I’m a lawyer. I’m a law student.”

  “Man, Angelo, that’s all the better! It means you’re not going to be co-opted by the system. You’re still free to do your own thing because the establishment hasn’t got its hooks into you yet. You can still set things right.”

  It bothered me that a person of my brother’s obvious intelligence could be so won over by catchphrases that meant nothing. “Forget it, Michele.”

  A look of sorrow crossed the strong features of his olive-toned face, but then he hardened his square jaw and stared at me defiantly, the way he used to when we were children and he had to defend himself against my superiority as the eldest. “You can pander to people like your law professors and that Judge Tuppin you’re always on about, but you know in your heart that this is no time to ignore the underprivileged. Caring people must act.”

  I knew what was coming next. There had been an unseen presence in our house for days now. He seemed to stand beside Michele like a ghost, though he wasn’t dead. Not yet, anyway. “Don’t quote Martin Luther King to me, Michele. Just don’t start.” I stood up, made a pile of the empty dishes in front of me and carried them to the sink. Michele dogged my steps.

  “Right this minute,” he said to my back, “there are five hundred men and women with the God-given right to vote battling for that right against the troopers and sheriff’s deputies in Alabama—”

  “Michele, lay off. What do you know about Alabama? You’ve never been farther south than New Jersey!” I turned around to face him—he was the same height as me, putting us eye to eye. “Besides, it appears that a significant aspect of this Selma matter has escaped your attention. We’re Canadian, Michele. We’re not American. Not citizens of the good ol’ U.S. of A. Have you got that, man?”

  He sank back as if defeated, but only for a moment. “Didn’t you ever hear of the Underground Railroad? Canadians have been helping American Negroes for over a hundred years. What difference does distance make? Yesterday at the capital in Ottawa five thousand people marched in support of what Dr. King is doing in Selma. That’s the biggest demonstration in our history— Canadian history.” He paused. “But it’s nothing,” he mused. “It’s nothing compared to what’s coming. Selma is one thing. And Vietnam is another.”

  “Oh, come on, Michele! Don’t start on Vietnam. I haven’t got time to listen to this. You do your school projects. I’ll do mine. I’m busy.”

  My brother reached out and put his hand on my arm. “Please, Angelo. This guy just needs advice, that’s all. Legal advice. Only an hour or two of your time. Besides, you’re looking for a law project. Maybe Billy Johnson could be it.”

  “Michele, Sheldrake Tuppin was born, raised, educated and called to the bar and bench in Canada. Why would he be interested in the issues you’re interested in?”

  “Maybe he’s not as limited as you are.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t get mad, just listen. If this judge guy is so great, won’t he be into the latest issues? The whole world’s changing, Angelo. People can’t just think about their own bag anymore. What if you came up with something bigger than just us? Something . . . I don’t know . . . international?” He hesitated. “I want to keep people happy. As many people as possible. Not because I particularly care about their happiness, but because I care about my own.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “That’s not me, it’s your judge. It’s a quote from B. Shel-drake Tuppin himself.”

  I glanced at the clock. “Michele,” I said, “it’s almost ten. And it’s Monday. Where would we be going to meet somebody now?”

  He smiled his broad, face-warming grin. “I knew you’d help, Angelo. I just knew it! We’re going to Yorkville. Come on. Dad’ll let us have the truck.”

  The thought of going anywhere in the old wreck my father used for hauling his bricklaying supplies to construction sites made me cringe, but it didn’t seem to bother Arletta. “Yorkville!” she shrieked. “Let me come! I want to go, too!”

  My father put down the Corriere, rose from his chair in the corner, walked over to the table and stood beside Arletta. For a short man he had a remarkable ability to give the effect of towering over other people. “A letto,” he commanded, “to bed.”

  My sister looked up at him and wrinkled her nose, but that was her only protest. She could manipulate my father and get him to thank her for it when she wanted to, but perhaps she’d calculated her chances of our taking her with us and decided to save my father’s favor until the stakes were higher and the payoff better. She folded up her crossword and went to bed. Reluctantly, I headed to Yorkville with Michele.

  If Toronto had had a Greenwich Village, Yorkville would have been it. We parked the truck three blocks away and walked to Cumberland Street, a narrow thoroughfare crowded for this late on a Monday night. Tall brick town-houses that must once have been the staid homes of prosperous Victorians were now brightly painted and divided into shops, galleries and cafés. Though the night was cold, below street level doors stood ajar, and from the establishments behind them spilled the sound of folk music. On the street young people hung out, all dressed in a studied Bohemian style. I couldn’t imagine what sort of underprivileged person Michele expected to find here.

  My brother led me along Cumberland Street, up Avenue Road, along Yorkville Avenue. We peeked into a dozen crowded, smoky clubs with odd names. The Purple Onion. The Devil’s Den. The Penny Farthing. The Night Owl. Café El Patio. The Half Beat. The Green Door. Eventually we ended up climbing to a second-floor place called the Hawk’s Nest. Despite the decor that seemed to have been lifted from the armory of a medieval castle, the place appealed to me. Although everybody there seemed to be closer to Arletta’s age than to mine, they were neatly dressed, the girls extremely slim and sharp in fashionable little two-piece outfits with short boxy jackets and knee-length narrow skirts, the boys in jackets and ties. On the gleaming dance floor, a number of couples gyrated to one of the Beatles songs my sister listened to incessantly, “Eight Days a Week.” I hated the whiny singing but was becoming captivated by the beat when Michele rudely pulled my sleeve. “Waste of time,” he hissed. “Let’s get out.”

  We went to the truck and got in. I was relieved to think he’d given up and that I was spared the trouble of helping his friend. But I was wrong. He pulled into a dark alley south of Yorkville, jerked open his door and signaled for me to come with him toward a dingy-looking, two-story warehouse tightly sandwiched between two taller buildings. The alley was lit by a single streetlight that cast its meager glow on a door with a window in it the size of a playing card. Michele knocked. There was a delay about long enough for someone to have looked out that little window and sized us up.

  The door opened. Michele handed the man who stood there a couple of dollar bills. Ahead of us was a dim stairway. My brother went ahead. I could hear nothing at first. No music. No voices. Fear made my legs tremble as I started up the stairs behind Michele.

  Of course, given Michele’s consuming interest in Dr. King and the march in Selma, Alabama, I more or less assumed that the person we were looking to help must be a Negro. I had met very few Negroes in my life—Toronto had no Negro ghetto, of that I was sure—and the ones I had met were mostly religious, polite, well dressed.

  Michele got to the top of the stairs and stopped. He was blocking my view, so I could see little except his back. Then I realized that someone had approached him. I heard a few whispered words of welcome. “Hi, Dave!” Michele answered, and Dave, whoever he was, said that as soon as somebody he called Marnie finished, Billy would read.

  I didn’t know what they were talking about. By the time I got to the top of the stairs, the slender, dark-haired man who must have been Dave was walking toward a stage, which was really nothing more than a spot of light shining on the only empty�
��or nearly empty—piece of floor in the place. The club was jammed and all eyes were on the skinny woman sitting in that patch of light. She seemed immobile. Her pale face, her catlike eyes, the curly fringe of her soft brown hair, even her lips seemed incapable of movement, though she was reading from a piece of paper. Her voice was more toneless than the sound that accompanied her, the soft, slow, sure beat of an Indian drum.

  Both Dave and Michele seemed as fascinated by this woman as the rest of the audience was. As they stared, I checked out the scene. Unlike the crowd at the Hawk’s Nest, there was nothing sharp about this gang. The men wore blue jeans and I was surprised to see some women in them too. Both genders sported sweaters and sweatshirts, one of which, I could make out, was emblazoned with a portrait of Beethoven. There wasn’t a jacket in the place, except, of course, the one I was wearing. The girls had hair to their waists, hanging free. A couple of the men had beards and every man in the club had hair longer than my brother’s.

  It was hard to see much in the dimness, but what furniture I could see looked worn, shabby. The poet, for it was poetry this skinny woman was intoning, sat on a battered wooden stool, behind which was some sort of bedsheet pinned to the wall under a banner in labored lettering that read, “Send a poem of protest to the Pentagon.” The sheet was covered with black scrawls in what looked like hundreds of hands.

  Marnie finished her reading. A sturdy round of applause continued until Dave came into the spotlight and announced that after a short break, there would be a special treat for lovers of literature.

  “What are we doing here, Michele?” I asked. But before he could answer, a man, a stranger, materialized out of the crowd and stood in the shadows beside us. “Billy,” Michele said, extending his hand, “this is my brother, Angelo, uh, I mean, Ellis. Ellis Portal from law school.”