The Douglas Kennedy Collection #2

by Douglas Kennedy

  I really didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing. We fell silent for a few moments. Vern kept fingering his empty whiskey glass.

  “I’ve talked too much,” he said.

  “Not at all.”

  “I don’t have much in the way of company, so . . .”

  “How did you and Jessica get together?”

  “Not tonight. I’ve already bored you with the half story of my life.”

  “It’s hardly boring. Anyway, you shouldn’t be apologizing to me, when I’m the one who caused the scene on the street, in the bar, in the cab . . .”

  “You had just cause to do that, given that it was a year ago today.”

  Now it was my turn to stare down into my whiskey glass.

  “You’re well briefed,” I said.

  “It’s a small place, the Central Public Library.”

  “You saved my ass tonight.”

  “There was no choice in the matter.”

  “Still . . . you did that. For me. And I’m very grateful.”

  “I just know what that first anniversary is like. When I had to commit my daughter, Lois . . . it was April 18th, 1989. And since then . . .”

  Silence.

  “Her schizophrenia is of a type that never seems to be cured. Even if she wanted to be let out of the institution where she’s lived since then, the state wouldn’t let her. She’s considered a danger to society. And that’s that.”

  Again his index finger began to rub incessantly against the whiskey glass.

  “What sort of meds do they have you on?” he asked.

  “Ever heard of Mirtazapine?”

  “It’s been my constant companion for the past five years.”

  “That’s a long time on one drug.”

  “I sleep because of it. That’s something I didn’t do for years.”

  “Oh, it does make you sleep.”

  “How many milligrams are you on?”

  “Forty-five.”

  “I’ve got a spare room top of the stairs to the right. It’s even got its own en suite bathroom.”

  “I’d rather go home.”

  “And I’d rather you not hurt yourself tonight.”

  “I’m OK now.”

  “I jumped out of that moving car an hour after I assured a friend I was OK. You wait here until I get the pills, then you go upstairs and sleep. There’s a radio by the bed and some books. But the pills should do their stuff—and when you wake up tomorrow, that anniversary will be behind you.”

  “I’ll still feel terrible.”

  “That’s right, you will. But at least you won’t be obsessing about the day in question.”

  He returned a few moments later with the pills, a glass of water, and some towels. Part of me told myself: This is all too weird. Another part of me wanted to simply bolt out the door and into the night. But there was a small rational voice still operative inside my jangled brain that counseled: Take the drugs and go to sleep. You just don’t know what might happen if left to your own pitch-dark thoughts.

  So I accepted all that he offered and went upstairs. The room had the same sepia floral wallpaper and a sleigh-style bed, decorated with dolls. There were several framed portraits of a young girl, taken when she was a baby, a young girl, a teenager. Was this Lois? Were these her dolls? Was I about to sleep in the room of his lost daughter, a room she herself had never slept in, as Vern had only moved here after she was committed . . . ?

  Again I wanted to flee. Again I told myself: It’s just one night and—unless I’ve misjudged all this entirely—he’s not the type who’s going to strut in here naked at three a.m. I downed the pills, thinking: That’s decided the matter. I used the bathroom. I climbed into the elderly pink floral sheets. I switched off the light. My watch glowed in the dark. It was only eight p.m. The bedtime of a child. But tonight I was a child sent to bed early in the room of a child who never lay in this bed, and whose presence hovered above me as the pills did their magic and . . .

  It was five thirty a.m. That’s what my watch told me. Nine and a half hours of sleep. I couldn’t complain—even if it was disorienting to wake up in this strange bed in this strange house, wondering if the loud rasping sound I could discern nearby was Vern snoring.

  I got up and used the bathroom, then dressed and remade the bed with great care. Once downstairs I found a phone in the kitchen and called a taxi company and asked them to send a cab to . . .

  I actually remembered the address and told the dispatcher to inform the driver that he shouldn’t ring the doorbell when he pulled up. The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was from another era. The fridge must have been thirty years old. There was a linoleum table with photographic placemats depicting “Great Canadian Scenes of Natural Beauty.” There was no dishwasher, no microwave, no fancy espresso machine, and the front-loading toaster was one of those lost-in-time jobs that was made from tin. Vern spent thousands on the most up-to-date stereophonic equipment, but ignored all mod cons elsewhere. We all have our priorities, I suppose.

  I scribbled a note on a pad that he had picked up from a local Realtor’s.

  I slept so well I was up before the dawn. You were extraordinarily kind and decent to me at a moment in time when I didn’t merit such decency. I hope you will now consider me your friend—as I do you.

  See you later today at the House of Mirth.

  My best

  I got into the cab. It headed up 29th Street, passing the Cancer Center of the Foothills Hospital. Was this where Vern was treated?

  The driver must have been reading my thoughts. As we passed it, he said: “Every time I drive by that place and see the words ‘Cancer Center,’ it gives me the willies. ‘There but for the grace’ and all that stuff.”

  “Know what you mean.”

  Back in my little apartment I took a hot shower and changed my clothes, then went to Caffè Beano for breakfast. When I reached the library at my usual start time of ten Ruth greeted me with a look of concern.

  “You had me worried yesterday. I was going to suggest taking you out last night, but you were gone by the time I came looking for you.”

  “I just went home.”

  “You shouldn’t have been alone last night.”

  I said nothing.

  Later that day, Babs came up to me in the staffroom and also asked how I was doing.

  “Just fine,” I said quietly.

  “Well, if you ever feel in any way like you want a shoulder to cry on—”

  “Thanks,” I said, then quickly changed the subject. People want to be kind. People don’t know what to say. In turn, you don’t know what to say to them. What can you say? What can be said? Just the usual bereavement banalities—and the acknowledgment that it’s all still so awful. After that . . .

  There was no solution. There was just work—and I threw myself into it. I chased down a Bodley Head edition of the complete Graham Greene for a bargain $2,300. I asked Marlene—now functioning as head of children’s books (and endlessly grumpy)—if she would like to spend $20,000 on updating her collection.

  “Will I have carte blanche to do what I want with it?”

  “Did you ever give anyone else carte blanche when you were in charge of acquisitions?”

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  “And you’re evading mine. But I’ll cut to the chase. Yes, you can have virtual carte blanche—insofar as you can draw up your dream list of how you plan to spend the twenty thousand. Unless I seriously object to anything on the list, you can go ahead and order all that’s there. Fair enough?”

  “What exactly would you ‘object’ to?”

  I sighed a long sigh—and stopped myself from saying something genuinely angry, like: Why do you have to be so goddamn contrary? Why is everything a problem in the making for you? And I could have added to this the thought: Why is every workplace a minefield of petty politics and smoldering resentments? It’s as if people need to turn their own insecurities and boredom into something malignant and
displacing. Internal politics are all bound up in the ennui of the quotidian—and the terrible realization that there is only a finite amount of interest to be found in what you do from nine to five every day; that, like it or not, it’s meaningless. So why not turn the banal into the melodramatic by finding people to dislike, by sniping at your coworkers, or by getting paranoid about what they might be saying about you . . .

  Vern had the right idea. He came to work and rendered himself invisible. He did his job. He did it well. He remained cordial but distant from his fellow workers. He went home—and immersed himself in the music writing that, I sensed, gave his life the passion it otherwise lacked . . . or that he no longer wanted.

  Vern. After that night at his house, he simply greeted me with a courteous nod in the hallway or a fast “Hello, Jane” the few times I saw him in the staffroom. He seemed to be avoiding me, as if he had said too much about himself that evening, revealing more than he wanted to. Though it struck me that all that stuff about his secret writing life should be known and celebrated, I also understood why he kept it to himself. In a small world like our little library, everything can be taken down and used against you—especially if you show initiative above and beyond our own prosaic horizons.

  “And he really thinks himself a music critic? . . . Who in their right mind would commission a textbook from him?”

  No wonder Vern lived in a sort of internal exile. When life has so conspired against you—and you find a little something that re-establishes your sense of wonder—you have to guard it fiercely. Because malignancy is all around you, and kindness is not as commonplace as we so want to believe.

  Vern. A week went by—and still nothing more than a monosyllabic greeting. Fair enough. A second week went by—and I had a request from him, via email, about purchasing the Complete Mozart, a one-hundred-and-fifty-disk set on Philips. He wrote:

  If I had my way, I’d buy each work individually—but that would be bad waste of public funds. The set is on special offer for $400. It strikes me as great value—and an essential addition to our collection. They’re all very credible readings of the Mozart oeuvre.

  I hope you will approve this.

  Vernon.

  I wrote back:

  Approved. Aren’t there also complete Bach and Beethoven and Schubert sets? At the price you mentioned it strikes me as a steal. Please investigate and get back to me.

  You well, by the way?

  He wrote back:

  The Bach and Beethoven and Schubert are also $400 each and, as such, excellent value. The Beethoven and Schubert piano sonatas, for example, are performed by Brendel, Kovacevich, Lupu and Uchida . . . the major league of contemporary pianists, so to speak. So yes, these would be ideal recordings for us.

  PS. I have two seats for the Angela Hewitt concert next Thursday night. Might you be free?

  My God, Vernon Byrne was inviting me out. I didn’t know how to take this, except to think that Angela Hewitt was the greatest Canadian pianist since Glenn Gould. And she was going to be here in Calgary and Vern had an extra seat, so . . . why the hell not?

  I wrote back:

  The Bach and Beethoven and Schubert Collected Works are approved for purchase. And yes, I’d be delighted to go to the Hewitt concert with you. But let me buy dinner.

  He wrote back:

  No, I’m buying dinner. I’ve reserved Teatro at six p.m. on the night. See you then.

  I must have bumped into Vern half a dozen times between his invitation and the dinner itself. Every time I saw him he tensed and simply nodded hello. I felt like telling him: It’s just a dinner and a concert. Stop acting like we’re having an affair and I’m married to a trigger-happy, alcoholic, wildly jealous Marine . . .

  “You know, I believe that Vern is intimidated by you,” Ruth said to me on the day before the concert.

  “What makes you think that?” I asked.

  “The way he averts his eyes every time you come into his field of vision.”

  “Maybe he has better things to be looking at.”

  “Maybe he has a crush on you.”

  “Maybe you should stop acting like we’re all still in high school. He’s a shy man, end of story.”

  He was a very nervous man, fingering an already-poured shot of whiskey as I entered Teatro. It was one of Calgary’s big-deal restaurants—located only a block from the library and opposite the Jack Singer Concert Hall, where Ms. Hewitt was to play tonight. I’d passed by it a few times and never looked inside or glanced at its menu—big-deal restaurants not being something that was ever part of my life, even in those brief Freedom Mutual days when I was making stupid money. But I had dressed nicely for the evening out—a longish black skirt and a black turtleneck and black boots. The fact that I had come to work in these clothes made Babs and Ruth immediately quiz me if I had a “heavy date” that night.

  I just smiled and said nothing. But as the restaurant’s maître d’ escorted me down past the very swish Manhattan-style bar and into a dining room that looked like a design-magazine spread, all I could think was that my “date” tonight could easily pass for my father. Vern was dressed in the same tweed jacket, tattersall shirt, and knit tie he wore every day, and was nursing a small measure of whiskey.

  “I bet that’s Crown Royal,” I said as he stood up to greet me. He shook my hand shyly, then held my chair for me as I sat down.

  “You want one yourself?”

  “I was thinking about a gin martini.”

  “I used to specialize in gin martinis. What kind of gin?”

  “I’m not that picky.”

  “Bombay’s the best.”

  He lifted a finger and a waiter showed up.

  “Straight up, with olives?” Vern asked me. I nodded. He ordered the martini.

  “You’re not having another?” I asked, knowing that I was venturing into tricky territory.

  “I can’t. Two drinks a night is my limit. Granted, sometimes I exceed that. But when I do . . .”

  He opened his hands flatward, like someone trying to ward off a deluge.

  “Were you in AA and all that?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes. Four years of AA. My sponsor still calls me regularly to see how I’m bearing up. He doesn’t like the idea that I drink at all. They’re all a bit doctrinaire and Jansenist, the AA. But as I had basically lost my career to the booze—and was also on the road to cirrhosis—I decided I could put up with all their Higher Power stuff. But Charlie—that’s my sponsor—worries I’m going to backslide if I keep having the two every night.”

  “Abstinence is an overrated virtue.”

  “My thinking exactly—but only if you don’t exceed the limits you’ve set for yourself. So . . . two drinks are better than no drinks. But three drinks . . .”

  “You said you were teaching music back East. When did that start?”

  “Around a year after I was finally allowed out of the hospital. But you don’t want to hear about my little life . . .”

  “Actually I do.”

  “Because it’s so messy?”

  “Whose life isn’t?”

  “True.”

  “I’m just interested . . .”

  “Let’s order first.”

  He pointed to the menus that had been placed beside us. I opened mine and was shocked to discover that a main course cost anywhere between twenty-eight and forty-two dollars.

  “We have to split this,” I said. “It’s far too expensive.”

  “I just got a check in from the Gramophone yesterday. It will cover the entire evening—especially as the pound is still two-to-one to the Canadian dollar.”

  “But I’m sure you could use that money for something more important than—”

  “Let me be the judge of that.”

  My martini arrived. We ordered. I took a sip and shivered pleasantly as the superchilled gin numbed the back of my throat. Opposite me, Vern started fingering his whiskey glass, clearly debating whether to order another one now or wait until the food arr
ived.

  “Your wife . . . Jessica, wasn’t it?” I asked.

  “You have a good memory. Yeah, she was the ward sister in the hospital where I was . . . placed.”

  Over the next hour and a half, I heard the second part of the Vernon Byrne story. As he talked, the narrative details took shape. The breakdown in London brought about by manic depression—but which was diagnosed wrongly as “causal” rather than chemical. The three years of incarceration in a series of bleak Canadian hospitals. The electric shocks and mind-numbing cocktails of Librium that neutralized him, but also killed any ambition to ever reattempt a concert career. The bland music-teacher job in a bland second-tier city. The nurse who wanted to mother him—and became a shrewish wife. The daughter he adored—but who, from an early age, was also showing signs of instability. The drinking that he and his wife engaged in—and the ferocious drunken fights that became a staple of their marriage. His wife finally running off with a local cop and never seeing their daughter again. Vern being determined to steer Lois out of the schizophrenia that had begun to claim her when she was eleven years old. The way this “dementia praecox” (he used the actual clinical name) led Lois into attacking a teacher with a pair of scissors and then cutting her wrists after breaking a windowpane in the police station where she was first brought after the attack (“and she was only thirteen at the time”). Vern having no choice but to commit her. His escalating drinking. His leap from the car. The termination of his teaching job. Having to move back to Calgary. His mother taking him in—and in her own quiet, tough way, forcing him back into the land of the functioning. His landing the job at the library. The gradual return to some sort of equilibrium—to the point where, when the doctors told him his daughter was never going to have a life again outside a supervised living facility, he managed to handle it. The way he made a point of flying East four times a year to spend four weekends with her. How, before she died, his mother made him promise that he would try to play the piano again. How . . .