Famished Lover

by Alan Cumyn

  London. Stokebridge Street. Once upon a time I stood as a young soldier gazing at this lovely semicircle of row houses. Battle mud was still on my puttees. I carried a pack and rifle, for God’s sake. I’d travelled all day and slept out in the park like a barbarian, full of the juice of life, then walked the King’s Road all morning to get here.

  Now I am hardly standing. No bag to carry. A half-dead fannigan in someone else’s ill-fitting uniform, rustled up to replace my German rags. Standing at the gate of number thirty, the perfect middle of the arc. My hand is on the black metal gate. I am pushing at the latch. Inside will be Margaret and her sister Emily and my aunt and uncle. Their warm fire. I will see them and my sentence will be over.

  I am pushing at the latch but it will not budge. It’s frozen hard. I hit it with my hand but it will not move. And I am seized with the absurdity: I walked out of Germany but I can’t unlatch Margaret’s gate. My strength is gone.

  The door opens and I stumble back some terrible steps. A woman emerges, dressed in black. Even in the veil I know her as my Aunt Harriet. With her is Henry Boulton, the weedy man in a mourning suit. He is putting on his top hat and holding Harriet’s elbow as if she cannot walk. I know immediately that Margaret is dead. I have come too late.

  She has died in the Spanish flu that is taking so many of the healthy and the young.

  I stare, stunned, as Uncle Manfred emerges from the door, struggling with his own top hat. And Emily, the sister — my cousin Emily, whose portrait I painted, who has written me throughout the nightmare — walks out veiled as well and shuts the door behind her. Boulton gets to the gate and unlatches it with a smallish nudge of his left hand. That’s how weak I have become, I think — even Boulton can dislodge what I could not move.

  He holds the gate open for Harriet, who steps as if not far from the grave herself. And Uncle Manfred grips Emily’s arm — I can’t decide who is supporting whom.

  They are going to Margaret’s funeral. The realization burns inside me. For there is the taxicab waiting, its engine puffing. I didn’t even notice it before. Boulton holds open the black door and helps Harriet in.

  They’ve not seen me. I’m standing only steps away, but I’m a fannigan ghost.

  Now Boulton is helping Emily up the vehicle’s step.

  “Emily,” I say softly.

  She turns and looks at me, confused. “Did you know her?”

  It’s Margaret. Not Emily at all. She looks deep into my face, my eyes, in that way she has that breathes life into everything.

  But not this time.

  “Did you know my sister Emily?” she asks again.

  Not the least spark of recognition, even when she lifts her veil and looks full bore into my soul.

  I hurry off blindly. God knows where. If I ran my frame would shatter into a thousand shards. I can barely shuffle my feet. But no one comes after me. I do not hear my name.

  Seventeen

  We could not stay with Mrs. Campbell forever, of course, and eventually the prospect of having her own home again spurred Lillian on. She did much of the inside finishing during those days while I was off in the city. If there was no paint she cleaned; if there were no tiles she found old rugs and beat them into newer ones; if the furniture was incomplete she banged together crates and odd ends of scrap to make a dresser, a table, something for a child to sit on. And if she was not happy then at least she was not immobile in bed, staring off at nothing. I moved myself into the spare bedroom on the main floor, ostensibly because she slept so poorly now and I had to rise so early to catch the train. I remember my father telling me that separate bedrooms were the salvation of many a marriage — a truth I had not understood until now. Lillian had the farm, the garden and Michael at home, and I had my studio, where I confined my ghosts behind a door that locked, with cornering windows overlooking hills and fields, trees and sky. It was a truce of sorts, a truce that held as days played out and years stole by in a house of sorts, cobbled together from the remnants of past errors.

  If you do not choose, that itself is a choice, and sometimes love, like a wild weed you fail to keep from your forgotten garden, roots itself and grows as fast as a child and for a time seems to lend its beauty to everything else, even though you’d meant to kill it in the beginning. Which is to say that what I should have put an end to in the city I didn’t. For Dorothy came alive then too. It was as if she’d been waiting for me for ages, and now that the terrible effort of patience was done she couldn’t contain all that she’d been holding back. She burned in her glances and I did not shy from them. A man too waits a whole life for a partner whose gaze sets the sky alight. There were days when I worked in a kind of fever, when the lovely feminine flesh that life had conspired to lay before my eyes fed me, fired me for hours. And I would look across and really begin to see, to know my Dorothy.

  Her face was smaller than my hand, unremarkable except for narrow-set, wary grey eyes that looked as if they knew everything, or at least everything they wanted to know. Her skin was pale. It reminded me of mushroom flesh from the darkest, wettest corner of the forest. When she smoked, which was most hours of most days, her wrist would bend as if under the weight of the cigarette. I would hold her hand sometimes just to look at the enormous difference: mine so thickly ribbed with work veins, my skin brown and ill-used, every nail cracked and beaten up. Her hands were as delicate as paper.

  Sometimes when I was with her I was nearly overcome with the feeling that I could crush her in a moment, like crumpling a leaf, and she would simply watch with her large eyes and let the rain blow hard against the window.

  For it always seemed to be raining: cold, harsh, bitter Montreal rain that was likely to freeze against the glass, to turn her street into a ruinous obstacle course. So often cars furiously spun their wheels halfway up the hill, angled sideways like horses helpless in mud. The tires whined as bystanders hopelessly pushed, trying to get any sort of grip on the pavement with shoes or galoshes.

  I would fight my way up Stanley like a hardened, desperate salmon, then through the doors and up those five flights. The initial staircase was wide and well lit, an inviting boulevard, but after the second and especially third floors, the stairs narrowed and the light cheapened. Like everything in those hard days it was strained through a lens of absolute necessity. Even the handrails narrowed, and the broad, generous oak of the first floor turned into mean, skinny iron painted black, cold on fingers already chilled in the freezing rain.

  Dorothy hated cold fingers. I would beat my hands against my thighs as I approached her door, down the gloomy hallway and around to the right. I imagined myself some sort of native warrior enacting an elaborate, perplexing ritual, a shivering, hand-slapping dance after climbing such slopes, the rivals — those whirring, feckless cars on the streets — left far below.

  She ate almost nothing — bits of toast with coffee, a meagre half-sandwich at her desk for lunch. Her bones felt hollow, the outline of her ribs showed through her skin. And yet her appetite for other things . . .

  It was the heat of her that was so impressive.

  I would be shivering like a child even after those five, hard-pulling flights of stairs. But there were days when she would fly straight at me, she wouldn’t even let me get the door closed. And if she wasn’t much for the eyes across a room, a desk even, she was overwhelming and radiant from close range.

  Sometimes she would order me straight into the bath, I was so cold. And those fragile hands would start to unbutton, to pull me free of my chilly clothes and soothe down my battered body.

  Once, that was all we had time for. She filled the tub and submerged me in the heat — her building had a good boiler, and you could usually count on hot water, at least — and we kissed and kissed until her face and hair and blouse were soaked.

  “My train,” I said. “I have to —”

  “Yes.”

  “Michael is in a show after school . . . I have to, really —”

  “Yes,” she said, and, st
ill clothed, climbed in on top of me, the water flooding onto the floor like something biblical.

  From a few inches she was incandescent. I’ve never known anyone else who could change that way, absorb in an instant so much of the wattage around her. Her eyes crimped half-shut and she smiled as if these were the moments of a lifetime, right now, this instant.

  I did know love.

  Love had a way with clocks, of burning through stolen hours like a gambler spending found cash. I remember fighting my way out of that bath and sloshing on the cold tiles, my feet suddenly pointed at the ceiling — those were high, shadowed ceilings — and my head slamming down. For a moment I thought that God Himself — Lillian’s God — had reached out to smash my brains for such behaviour.

  “Froggie Went a-Courtin’,” I blabbered. “I said I’d be there. Michael is playing the cornbread.”

  I scrambled up, towelled and dressed myself in a panic. I’d lost a sock. I searched on my knees, underneath the chesterfield, by the umbrella stand near the door, while Dorothy laughed, her clothes soaked and her face still flushed with desire and heat.

  “You’re never going to make it!”

  Under the coffee table and through her closet and behind the radiator upon which she kept an ancient row of African violets. I upset one with my sleeve and caught it awkwardly, spilling half the earth onto my wet trouser leg.

  “Get going!”

  “I can’t go with just one sock!” I yelled at her, as if determined the entire building should know what we were up to. She was normally obsessed with secrecy, but the madness of the moment had taken us both over.

  “Why not?”

  As I ran out I glanced back to see her framed in the doorway, her blouse half-torn from her shoulder, bathwater dripping down her hair and face and legs. Her skirt was plastered to her slight frame but her expression was Amazonian, as if she could take on all the storms of the world and blow them off in a dozen directions.

  I sat on the train with my chest heaving from the exertion of making it to the platform, and crossing and then uncrossing my legs, ashamed of my one bare ankle. I was convinced that everyone on that crowded, smoky car knew every black mark smudged and etched on my soul.

  Seconds after I got home Lillian asked, “Where’s your sock?” She saw my bare ankle all the way across the house from the kitchen.

  “It was soaked and I took it off,” I said, too quickly. “I put it in my pocket but it must have fallen out.”

  She pressed her lips into a flat, unimpressed line. When I’d left early in the morning she’d been at the dishes, and here she was still, with her hands plunged in suds as if she hadn’t moved the entire day.

  “I put your dinner aside,” she said. “Was the train late again?”

  She looked steadily a few feet to my right at some invisible thing of interest on the floor.

  “Work was piled up, so I took a later train. Where’s Michael?”

  She motioned over her shoulder. The upstairs had been finished for some time and I knew she had given him permission to range around my studio. I pulled off my hat, shook the rain from my overcoat, fought down the rising anger. Lillian’s face was headache-pale. The right thing would have been to embrace her in the middle of the kitchen, to take her hair in my hands.

  Instead I walked up the stairs, terribly conscious of my sockless foot. She took a step towards me and I lengthened my stride, ascended two stairs at a time.

  I entered the studio. “What are you doing?” My voice was harsher than I wanted. In the north corner, where there was a little floor space, a train set I’d bought for the boy was partially assembled. But he was on the south side and half the canvasses I’d done since the fire were ranged out on the floor.

  “Stand up!” I said as I stamped towards him.

  “I’m sorry. Papa, I’m sorry!” Already Michael was in tears.

  He was playing among landscapes, nothing he shouldn’t have seen — a frozen field in late fall, the furrows raggedly ploughed; a skier cutting through the bush in winter. But I was mad with the tension of the moment, with what he might have dragged into plain view.

  I pulled him several feet away from the paintings. He was six years old, small for his age but getting stronger.

  “I told you!”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Papa!” he blubbered.

  “He didn’t hurt anything!” Lillian said.

  My hand was raised above him and I felt my whole body shaking.

  “Ramsay, let him go!”

  I dropped my arm and staggered off a few steps. It’s all right, I thought. Walk softly, and maybe this house will not explode.

  “I’m sorry, Michael,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  He ran to his mother, of course, and buried his face in her apron.

  Later I sat alone and quietly read the newspaper, close to boiling. Lillian was fiercely mending by the fire, the silence welding our jaws shut. Eventually I rose and slipped into the boy’s room and ran my hand through his soft, soft hair. He opened his eyes and gazed at me the way I wanted him to — with the gentle trust of half-sleep.

  “Forgive me, Michael. How was it? Were you a terrific cornbread?”

  He nodded his head sleepily.

  “Was there a big crowd? Can you say your line for me now just the way you did in front of everyone?”

  He sat up and thrust out his chest importantly. “If you want any more you can sing it yourself!”

  “Excellent!”

  “Everyone laughed!” he said. Then he got very thoughtful.

  “Do you think, one day, when we all have our own planes, there will be runways everywhere instead of roads?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “And would there have to be flags flying in the air to show us where to go?”

  “Maybe.”

  He closed his eyes and I thought he was going to drift back into sleep. Then he opened them again. “They would have to be suspended from balloons.”

  “What would?”

  “The flags,” he said. “Did Mummy tell you about the letter? Three cousins are coming. But I can’t remember their names. Except for Alexander. That was the boy.”

  “Cousins?”

  “And two girls. Mummy was reading it. I read some words too. They’re coming for a visit.”

  He finally drifted back to sleep, and I found Lillian staring hard at a pair of Michael’s trousers worn through the knee. I asked her about the letter.

  “It’s from Rufus,” she said curtly. “He wants to bring her here.”

  “Who?” I stayed standing where I was, the blood now pounding to my brain.

  Lillian got up abruptly and walked to the desk at the other end of the room where we kept the family papers. She picked up the letter, returned and threw it at me.

  “It was addressed to both of us. That’s why I opened it. I’m going to bed!” Then she marched off to her room. I glanced at Rufus’s writing.

  3 March 1937

  Dear Ramsay and Lillian,

  How we used to regret Father’s lack of letters when he was off draining the swamps of Nicaragua, and yet here I am pursuing some interesting travels of my own and can hardly find time to write. Well, to remedy that, I can say that Vanessa and I are just back from London, where besides a spot of business now and again I managed to hook up with some of the English relatives. Uncle Manfred and Aunt Harriet both send their love, Ramsay — they remember you so clearly as a young private. Though frail, of course, they are both in fine form although Manfred has lost most of his hearing and rails at top voice about the communists and the government and of course about this pipsqueak Hitler who thinks he has become so important in the world. Harriet does her best to reign him in. Manfred that is, although I imagine she could do a fine job on Hitler too if given the chance!.

  I also met the Boultons, who came for a rollicking luncheon that stretched on for hours and then turned into a walking tour of Chelsea with Henry Boulton giving a r
unning commentary of amazing depth and perspicacity (he did go on somewhat). His wife Margaret is our cousin, Ramsay, whom you met when you stayed with the family during the war. I suppose you must have told me at some point about all this but I’d quite lost track and so was surprised (and somewhat embarrassed) when Margaret plied me with so many questions about you and seemed to assume that you must have told me all about her.

  Perhaps you know this already, but her health I’m afraid is not all that it should be, but she soldiers on with remarkable fortitude. They have three children — Alexander, Martha and Abigail — and by the time we needed to take our leave she seemed quite convinced that they would all be making a family trek to North America this summer to visit. She was particularly adamant about stopping in to see you. I suppose in the course of several conversations I had described somewhat the beauty of your surroundings, with those lovely hills and fields and such, and she became smitten with the idea of a visit.

  I assured her it was a splendid plan and that you would all be thrilled to meet the English side of the family and renew old acquaintances. Dates and so forth have not been set, but is there a time in the season when it would be most convenient? I told her that your rooms are not large — she was fascinated by my account of the fire and your extraordinary rebuilding — and she said they are quite happy to sleep on floors and have a truly wilderness experience.

  Well, what a quaint idea of Canadian life the British can have sometimes.

  I will write again with more details as they emerge.

  Yours as always,

  Rufus

  “What a luxury a cup of tea is,” Dorothy said, and she looked into hers. She was in her light gown, which was not quite pulled around her, and it was afternoon — the sun was streaming through her window and through the smoke of her cigarette, and her legs were crossed and her hair was free and we were both flushed still. There was a sense of the day having sunk into resin, that it would remain a quarter to five for hours if not weeks, and the steam from her tea would fill her eyes, and if we willed it we might even retract some minutes and again be joyfully skin to skin.