Glass Voices

by Carol Bruneau

  Folding the clipping carefully—it wouldn’t do to tear it—she slips it back where it belongs, then, listening for distress from Harry, tiptoes out and leaves the book on the landing. The house is haltingly quiet; the thought of sleeping with that book in her room makes her queasy. Like sleeping with a poltergeist, more to the point, a family of them; or worse, hanging around some place she’s broken into. For that’s exactly what it’s felt like, thievery, lapping up details of a stranger’s life. Gazing through a peephole, party to some reporter’s nosiness, and not so different from stealing the souls of grass-skirted natives by snapping pictures. Or maybe she’s just read too many National Geographics, anyway, she feels like a thief burdened with useless loot—loot that not only makes her feel guilty, but spooked.

  Died at home or in the water: by her own hand, drowned. God only knows what’s made that poor misguided woman, Miss Van Buskirk, the way she is. Tunnelling under the quilt, getting comfy, she can almost feel that oddness rising from the pages on the landing, and drifting in, a vapour. God save her from her imagination; but perhaps Harry’s felt it too, who knows.

  She wakes to his whimpering, a mewling sound, chilled by her dream. In it Harry’s been hollering, weeping, “Help me! Help me!” and lying there engulfed in the darkness, the watery streetlight creeping in, her mind fills with an image aflame with pain: a doctor tweezing glass from Harry’s pupil, giving up. A tiny glass ball rolling in bright, filmy red.

  “Darling!” Her mouth is dry, her voice weak. When she flips on the light, there he is, sleeping, a muscle in his jaw twitching peacefully, that surviving eye roving as quietly as the moon under its lid.

  WHISPERING A PRAYER, SHE MAKES herself take a gander before replacing the paper at the roadside. Page two has an elderly man’s account, his recollection of running to school with his brothers, one landing safely when the blast hit, ending up with a hole in his stocking. The other found later, missing his head. Curiosity killed the cat: better not to look.

  “Hey, Gran!” Travelling up the street, Robert’s shout startles her; where was he when she was hauling out the garbage? “What’s goin’ on?” he beams, dangerously cheery and a little out of breath, as if her life’s a circus and he’s scrambling to catch up. Sweet Dinah, kids today. A girl trots up behind him, smiling weakly. It is Sheryl, her hair parted in the middle and pushed behind her ears, her parka unzipped so you can see her top—like one of Harry’s old undershirts, or Jed’s on the Hillbillies. She hardly speaks when Lucy says hello; shyness, or just plain rudeness? She doesn’t look like a traveller, the kind who’d feed Robert those wild ideas of going west. At least not the way travellers look on TV, shows about tourists in exotic places. Not that Lucy’s spent much time with any, besides old Mrs. Slauenwhite on the train that time eating sandwiches. What she’d give to win that trip now; she’d camp out in that grand basilica at Sainte-Anne-de-Beaupré, and they’d have to tear her away from that withered wrist bone! She could kick herself for chickening out back then; slap herself upside the head, as Rebecca would say.

  Robert looks at her oddly, those eyes of his so like his father’s. Playfully he twists Sheryl’s arm till she winces, giggling. “I just wanna see Gramp for a sec,” he says vaguely, and it strikes her how early it is, early for teenagers to be on the prowl, early for poor Harry, too, who’s just been washed and fed and topped up with his medicines. Aren’t they supposed to be in school? “Day off, Gran.” He looks her in the eye, as the girl snickers, inspecting the ends of her hair so intently she could be looking for lice. And Lucy thinks how much like himself Robert sounds, Robert not so long ago riding the bus home from the fair: You sit there, Gran. And no kisses. Someone might see.

  “But the holidays are just three weeks away.” She’s not letting him off that easy, not today, smiling at Sheryl. Maybe it is shyness; if so, the least she can do is try. “You’ll still be with us then, won’t you? No trips planned?” But the girl just eyes Robert expectantly, and they tramp upstairs, Sheryl following him. Her little rear end wiggling a bit in those jeans.

  Harry’s lying there stroking the accordion’s smudged case. Glancing up, startled, he waves to the visitors, as if Lucy’s invisible. “How’s your music, dear?” she asks brightly, too brightly. That need to buffer him, to put herself between him and the world now, no matter how harmless. As if guests are intruders and should be frisked first; glory, she’s been watching too much TV! “Look who’s here,” she says; Lord knows what to do with Sheryl, as wordless as Harry. Some Scripture runs through her mind: He maketh the deaf hear and the mute speak. Good luck with this crowd, she thinks.

  Robert silently fingers the keyboard, till Harry drags it away, flexing his good hand over the ivories. Yankee Doodle, he spells out on his cardboard, and looking relieved, Robert plunks the instrument onto Harry’s lap.

  “Careful—you’ll hurt him,” she starts to say as the boy wiggles an arm around Harry’s shoulders and somehow, ingeniously, works the bellows. In and out they wheeze, Harry glaring at first, impatient, that hand of his signalling for a smoke. Then it drops to the keys again, and slowly, painfully, presses out the tune’s bass. Robert’s girlfriend gazes at the pink splotch on the bedspread, twiddling her hair. Clapping, the sound of her applause echoing from the walls, Lucy stares at the window to compose herself. The girl yawns, mugging helplessly at Robert, who ignores her. Are those tears in his eyes too? “Way to go, Gramp,” he nudges Harry.

  “How come he don’t talk?” Lucy hears the girl murmur when she flees to blow her nose; the last thing she needs is anyone, least of all Harry, seeing her discombobulated. “Sick people creep me out, Buck,” Sheryl whispers hoarsely, tripping ahead of him down the stairs. But you only just got here, Lucy wants to call; if he were alone she’d waylay him with—what, cookies? It’s as if he can hear her, anyway; as if the little invisible string connecting them has never been cut.

  “Gran?” he yells up, a little too anxious, maybe, to please her, or to make up for Sheryl. “I’m gonna come and do the fence. I mean it.” Then he says there’s a book he’s supposed to get for his ma. “Something about dirt?” Yes, and paint would sooner freeze now than stick. But traipsing up from the landing, she finds a bag, glad to unload the book but uneasy about trusting him with someone’s treasure. The fence, he says again: “I mean it this time.” She doesn’t care that Sheryl’s watching when she plants a kiss on his cheek, where, up close, there’s the start of another tiny patch of beard. Like the hairs on poor old Ida Trott’s chin, she can count them.

  And she thinks of him with his slingshot, the marble inside that precious pink cup, and how, the cup spared, Jewel had almost become a casualty. Demonstrating with a cat’s-eye, Robert had aimed the toy right at his dad; if Jewel hadn’t ducked he’d have got it in the temple, like Goliath. A thundering, blundering giant—like Christmas barrelling down on everyone.

  When the newspaper arrives, the ads are full of things like windup snowmen. She barely has time to skim it when there’s a bang, a choking sound. God in heaven, if the man could just lie still and keep out of trouble! When she rushes to investigate, there’s a drawer upside down on the floor, and Harry’s clenching his one good fist in the throes of a tantrum.

  That night she wakes to the same sound, his crying a cross between a hound softly baying and someone sawing wood. Harry trapped inside that useless body, the sobs of a prisoner claw at her. Instead of jumping up, she struggles for air, the voice inside her begging Take him, yet in the next breath ready to strangle herself for being hard. If the league ladies knew what went on inside her head. That knick-knack advice circling through her: Give me the strength to change what I can, and accept what I can’t. There’s not a thing she can do to free him.

  1970

  CHRISTMAS COMES AND GOES. AS soon as the turkey disappears, so, it seems, do Jewel and Rebecca, the days and nights slurred together in a dusk of feeding, bathing, care. The comfort of food thins to the comfort of
light, the tiny stretches between late afternoon and twilight. Her quiet time: I’m going downstairs for a bit, dear. No Marg Osburne, though, no Charlie Chamberlain. The last thing she could abide is that brief peace cluttered with anything but the sound of the TV upstairs babysitting, the sound that carries the stillness. It’s the winter light that keeps her going: the sun’s hard glow on the snow and the deep orangey blue of the sky. The only time of day that offers solace. Warmed by that fading light—Do not disturb!—momentarily she’s a little speck of nothing surrounded by the greasy kitchen, the window wet with the steam of boiling turnip. Drifting on a raft of silence, she thinks of Rebecca’s cleaning lady in that floating shack almost but not quite jammed in by ice. It’s not hard to imagine Ida Trott’s crazy offspring warming himself by a fire fed with trash, while that poor creature stirs tinned spaghetti. God knows how they get along. But it’s not her worry. Besides, God’s already had an earful fielding her pleas to heal Harry. Of what, though? His condition is a growing list of complaints. Okay, up there. Pick a problem, she adds to the chit-chat in her head, any problem. But it’s like banging her fists on a steel door, asking God to change his stubborn mind. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

  Maybe if she went to Mass…though that would mean arranging something for Harry. It’s as if God’s gone deaf: maybe he should follow his own example and heal himself of exactly that! Thy will be done. But the only things that change are the destinations in the travel ads, places with hot sun and beaches. Which remind her of salt, and whatever it is in each grain that keeps water from freezing, leaving an escape route open even to the likes of a Miss Van Buskirk. But an escape to where? She has to wonder. Not that it’s her concern. As for Mass, it’s not like Harry would perish, left alone for an hour. The truth is, the last time she went, the new priest, Father Langille, said some things that cheesed her off. Things she’d rather not be reminded of: how it’s sinful to judge and stupid having faith without the gumption to act.

  18

  ON THE FIRST WARM NIGHT in spring—spring? she marvels when it finally comes—Robert arrives with paint. She happens to look down from Harry’s room, and there he is scraping the pickets. Don’t-let-yourself-grow-weary, says its scratchy rhythm rising through the salty air, above the TV. Not till Harry dozes off does she venture out. Robert doesn’t notice her at first, smiling to himself. When he sees her he waves, then asks if he can use the radio. Setting it up on the steps—what a relic, caked with dirt and old batter—he plays it so loud it’s lucky Mrs. Chaddock’s lost her hearing. A choir of tipsy angels and a lippy voice moaning about getting, or not getting, what you want. When she asks him to turn it down, he yells back, “You’re kidding? Don’t you know who that is?”

  It seems he’s just gotten started when he quits, leaving the fence half-done. “First thing tomorrow,” he promises. Before she can ask about school—as far as she knows he’s still going—he disappears into the budded twilight, his gangly shape swinging down the street. But he doesn’t turn up next morning, or the next. After a couple of weeks the rain washes flakes of old paint into the gravel, and the fence gets shabbier. At least it’s half-scraped instead of half-peeled, she tells herself, sitting up with Harry watching a replay of last summer’s moon landing. The astronauts bounding over the pocked surface remind her of a Nature of Things close-up of germs exploring a patch of skin.

  Later, falling into her narrow bed, the TV’s pale light flaring then fading in the doorway, she feels a tingle through her chest—a sensation that moves from her heart and makes her flush. It’s a crazy feeling that the kingdom of heaven mightn’t be so far off—that is, if people can walk up there on the moon. Downstairs, the fridge just hums along as usual, but oddly the sound ignites a spark of joy, tiny, but more than she’s felt in months.

  The next evening, as she’s sorting the pill bottles on Harry’s bureau, something makes her turn down the volume. Shifting, Harry points at the screen. “Bippy,” the word bleeps out of him, like the first time Jewel uttered ma. Wheeling around, she finds Harry eyeing her, a grin lifting the strong side of his mouth. She can’t believe her ears, yet, doubting, stunned, has to fight an urge for precision. “Hippie, dear?” The tingling starts in her chest again, almost painful. “Harry?” “Bee-bee,” it sounds like the second time, the repetition enough to make her drop a vial. Watching her, he opens his mouth and speaks again, more slowly, but clearly. “Swe-eet bip-py.” The look on his face is one she’d almost forgotten. Edging towards him, she feels his hand brush her hip. “Bet your sweet bippy,” she recites, such a foolish phrase, but who cares? Even so, she blushes as Harry beams, reminding her of Jewel—or Robert—tickled to death at spelling his own name.

  “Say it once more, for Lucy,” she can’t help murmuring around the thickness in her throat. A doubting Thomasina, she imagines the league ladies snickering.

  Harry closes his eyes, swallowing like a little kid dreaming of outer space. “Loocy—henrikpsen.” Henry Gibson, it sounds like he’s saying. Squeezing his wrist, she rummages wildly for his card, pressing a pencil into his hand, her eyes on his. Coaxing. He lets the pencil roll away. His next words, a question, take forever. “Whhhat time, Bippy?”

  Her reply—“nine o’clock”—could be from the moon. The smallness of words and what they mean measured against the wonder of speech. Not for another hour, she hears herself say, her hand trembling wiping drool from his chin. Only then does it really hit her, the hugeness of what’s just happened. A giant leap for Harry, barely a blink for mankind. It’s as if she’s caught his disability, struggling for words to match the occasion, kissing his mouth. “Jesus Murphy. Oh my God and all the angels in heaven!”

  Jewel and Rebecca arrive bearing a mickey of rum. She lets Harry have a thimbleful, raising her cup of tea in a toast. After one drink Rebecca gets gabby, setting the Don Noble on Harry’s lap and hugging him, as if expecting him to play a jig. “Gosh,” she says, “Elinor oughta be here.” Lucy has to scour her brain for who Rebecca’s talking about. But Rebecca rattles on, oblivious, about getting the skinny on her. “Turns out she’s musical, Miss Van B.” Last time she came, she brought a mouth organ. A harmonica, Lucy winces inwardly; probably Benny’s, used—by many, a multitude of blowers.

  “Shhh,” Harry slurs, waving his hand when Laugh-In starts, Henry Gibson’s face blooming in the middle of a daisy. Rebecca keeps yakking, as if they’re hanging on her every word. Prattling on, how Elinor took piano as a kid, how her parents gave her everything, to make up for…“Everything,” she says dramatically, “well, till the crash. Of ’29? When the old man, you know…Couldn’t’ve been easy.”

  Harry raises his fist to shut her up—jokingly, Lucy hopes, and raises the volume. Not that Rebecca gets the hint, rambling on about what “the poor thing” went through after the father “hung” himself. “Not that she remembers. What happened before. I guess she looked like a tar baby getting off that train. That’s what they told her, anyways,” Rebecca sticks her chin out, as if they don’t believe her, muttering how “the old man felt so bad seeing all those bloody people” that he grabbed her, then and there at the station, and took the kid home to his wife. Disgusted, Harry thumps the mattress, and Lucy quits trying to make sense of what she’s on about. But there’s a reason Robert calls his mom a motor mouth. “The mother, well,” she sighs, saying how the woman was quite the queen bee always having tea parties, and didn’t want another kid, since she already had a son. “Not an acorn off the old tree,” Rebecca gossips, as if they should give a hoot, “not like his father.” Finally Harry draws a finger across his throat, making a noise like it’s being slit. “Dear,” Lucy nudges her, “it’s one of his few pleasures, this show.”

  But Rebecca won’t be silenced, saying how the girl must’ve been some spoilt. “Nice clothes, music lessons, the whole shebang,” she says in a clipped voice. Yap yap yap, Lucy imagines Harry cutting in, if he could, like a goddamn French poodle! “Not that that�
�s a bad thing,” Rebecca blathers. “’Magine, that poor little kid on that train with all those people, some with their eyes half out. Cripes…” Mercifully a toothpaste ad finally steals her attention, the jingle bouncing off the walls.

  Tapping his glass against Harry’s empty thimble, Jewel smirks, offering his dad another shot. Measuring out a spoonful of rum, he grimaces. “So how the hell do you go from that to being a bag lady?” His tone makes Lucy bristle, but just then Lily Tomlin—Ernestine, the telephone operator—fills the screen, licking her lips in her prissy way and dialling. Rebecca could take lessons from her, all the world a party line.

  “She’s not a bag lady, hon,” Rebecca jumps in, fending off Harry’s groans, when she calls the woman a “maintainer.” A keeper upper.

  “Geezhushchrisht!!” he finally explodes. It’s not like him to be short with her, but it does the trick. Even so, Lucy can’t help thinking, maybe the miracle of speech is a mixed blessing.