“What do you think?” she said.
What did I think? What did I think? The mother I had known and loved was lost to me for good, that’s what I thought.
“Come. I’ll take you for a spin.”
A car like this in Trenton. Driven by a woman like her. The attention it attracted. Forget Gene Tierney, Doris Day. Mom was full-blown Jayne Mansfield. “I can’t promise Avon will give you tits like mine, nor am I promising they won’t.” Jayne Freaking Mansfield, the Avon Lady.
“What next, Mom? You gonna dye your hair blonde?”
“When will you stop being so mean to me?”
Episode 25
Bert sitting with Mom got to McGrath every time. “Careful, Bert,” he bleated, “she invites you to Sunday dinner, expect a main course of blue balls.”
Bert crumpled his bag of chips, pushed up from the table, smoothed his lawman mustache, and marched up to McGrath. “I’m sorry, Bryan. You’ve been a good customer, but unless you can be civil, you are no longer welcome here.”
McGrath drew deep, consigned a .45-caliber ember to the ash tray. “Tell me you’re joking, Levin.”
Bert pointed McGrath to the east. “There’s always the Skyline,” he said, referencing the larger diner up Dundas.
“I hate booths. Jukeboxes. I’m at home here.” Loss. Despair. It was strange to hear the likes of this from the likes of McGrath.
“Apologize to the lady.”
“I’m only watching out for your best interests, Bert.”
“Apologize, Bryan.”
McGrath’s eyes roved from his coffee to his pie to the steadfast Mr. Levin to Mom, radiant in her embarrassment. “I apologize, Mrs. Berry.” There was a sadness to his sincerity.
When McGrath had gone, Mom thanked Bert. “We were never more than friends. Bryan has no cause to be jealous.”
“Well, Emily,” Bert said, “and I don’t mean to put you on the spot, but I would be most honoured to give him considerable cause.”
Episode 26
The Courtship of Leo’s Mother was into its third season, no end in sight. “Marry him,” I nagged. “I’d like to have someone to call Dad at least once before I die.”
Mom laughed, set aside her paperwork. “I’m fine the way things are. We both are, thank you.”
“Is it because you’re waiting for another old man to come along?”
“Pardon me?”
“You like old men. Dad was an old man. Mr. McGrath. Is that why you won’t marry Mr. Levin? Because he’s only a little older than you instead of a lot?”
“You think you know it all.”
“I got eyes.”
“The Levins never divorced. And the way things are going, they probably never will. How about that?”
“There’s always Mr. Blackhurst waiting in the wings.”
“You manage your relationships, I’ll manage mine.”
“I don’t have any relationships.”
“Exactly. Now you know how much I value your opinion.”
Episode 27
Bert popped a Tab, took me aside. “A fellow I know, Clyde Neil, he’s looking for a couple of boys to help run the town marina this summer. You interested?”
“What’ll I have to do?”
“You any good at flirting with girls?”
Annie’s friend, Diana Klieg, passed by outside. Since moving up to high school, she wore her caramel tresses to the middle of her back. I sat behind her in geometry. I was flunking geometry because of her hair.
I needed the practice. My love life had not progressed beyond the lady in black and my right hand.
“Best part is, you’ll be working with Jack. He’s coming home for the summer.”
Episode 28
“What are you doing in here?” I said. The den had been mine, pretty much.
“Work stuff.” Mom ripped the page from the typewriter.
“I don’t want the job,” I said.
“Mr. Levin went out of his way for you.”
“I’ll find something else.”
Mom gathered up the papers on the desk and shoved them into the top drawer. “Whatever problem you have with Jack Levin, get over it. You are taking this job or else.” She locked the top drawer, put the typewriter in its case, and pulled open the middle drawer of the desk. She tapped a Du Maurier from its box. “The strangest thing,” she said, lighting up. “The more I smoke, the more cigarettes there seem to be in here. It’s the Shoemaker and the Elves story, but with cigarettes.”
“Or else what?” I said.
“No allowance. No TV. No Odeon. No books. No comic books. No records. No anything.”
Episode 29
I poked a paperclip into the lock, jiggled, and the desk drawer slid open. Mom’s “work stuff” sat on top. Pages of it.
Lipstick Life
by Emily Berry
Chapter One
The best thing to have happened to Eloise Benson was her husband dying while she was young and beautiful. All married women deserve to be so blessed. Love, hate or indifference, no first husband is a keeper. Nor is a first child, for that matter, she thought, and frowned with displeasure at her reflection in the dresser mirror. So lovely on the outside, so callous on the inside. She loved her son. But Eric, a strange child in many ways, was resentful of her happiness and she, in turn, was resentful of him.
I threw the papers back into the drawer.
Episode 30
I followed Lloyd Gonna-kick-u-in-the-nuts and Vito from Italy out of the Odeon. I was far from my peak, my Ring magazine days behind me, but my rage was no less diminished.
The Great Escape was the best movie I’d seen since The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. I missed Jack right then. We’d have sat through two screenings, damn it. Steve McQueen and his motorcycle—oh, man!
I watched Lloyd and Vito ride off on their bikes, and brought wire cutters to every matinee thereafter.
Come Saturdays, I’d sit in the window of the Marquee before each showing and wait for Lloyd or Vito or any of the other bullies to show. For a Few Dollars More flushed them out. Double Al and Vito, anyhow. Crates was an unexpected bonus.
I could hardly believe the day had come. I dashed out and around to the side of the building. Coast clear. Six bikes in the rack. Four boys. Two girls. I cut through the spokes on the wheels of the boys. Clean cuts, as practised. Unlikely to be detected. Two spokes on each rim left intact. I didn’t touch the girls bikes.
I was late getting into the movie, but plodded out with the rest of the audience when the end credits rolled. Took my time, too, my popcorn to finish.
Double Al and Vito lifted their bikes from the rack, and wouldn’t you know, Crates’s bike was a girl’s, damn it. Still, there was much to entertain as the wheels collapsed, Al crashing onto Vito, Al’s face into the pavement, Vito’s face into the bike rack. They were hurt. Hurt bad. Al spitting blood and teeth. Vito down for the count, no sign of anything. And Crates, he was laughing so hard, you’d have thought he was watching Gomer Pyle.
People crowded around. Cars pulled over to watch. And I was happily one of many, munching my popcorn, as laid back and steely-eyed as Clint Eastwood would’ve been had he popcorn to finish.
And then the third and fourth kids retrieved their bikes. I didn’t know the boy, but the girl was Bonnie Priddy. Annie’s friend. Bonnie the polio girl, who at the beginning of tenth grade announced she was free of her leg brace, her friends cheering, and Bonnie doing a goofy dance in response. What the hell was she doing with a boy’s bike?
I wanted to warn her. But Crates was still laughing and Double Al was still bleeding and Vito was still down and adults were rushing to help and I wasn’t stupid.
Episode 31
Charles Dahl-Packer won the 1966 Ontario Science Fair. Big shiny medal. Big fat scholarship. Big news in the Record.
“His mother is one of my best customers,” Mom said.
Episode 32
Sometimes a kid just knows things.
The cards
were going to change my life.
My certainty was as much a mystery as the cards themselves.
When a kid knows, a kid knows.
The change would be for the better, at least.
Couldn’t get any worse.
Fifth Reel
One
1988 and Trenton frightened me
almost as much as I frightened myself
“Jack?” I called, but he was gone, pulled what I’d come to call his Orson Welles exit. Like Michael O’Hara in The Lady from Shanghai. Rita Hayworth, lovely, blonde, and duplicitous, lies bleeding to death on the floor, and he walks out the door.
I parked the Tempo in the lot of Loblaws supermarket, where the rail freight office used to be. Around the corner from the Record. Within shouting distance of the Odeon. Except the Odeon wasn’t the Odeon.
From what I gleaned later, the theatre was bought out in 1978 and renamed the Centre, the Marquee Café squeezed out to make way for more screens. This being Trenton, no one protested, I surmised. Least of all the Levins. They’d been gone longer than any of us by then.
The last Levin I’d seen in the flesh had been in Ottawa in ’80 or ’81. I was in the city with hopes of landing a government job, writing pamphlets on topics I had no interest in. I had a couple of hours to kill before the interview and was browsing the shops of Byward Market when a young woman approached. “Excuse me,” she said, her voice soft, apprehensive. “Your name wouldn’t be Gus, would it?”
She was tall and slim and bubbly, long dark hair under a tartan tam-o’-shanter, matching scarf at her throat. I tried to place her but could not. “I don’t get called that much, these days,” I said.
“Oh, my God!” she cried, like she had a fairy up her butt, and the fairy catapulted her into my arms. “I’m Abigail. Abby Levin. Jack’s sister. Jack’s sister. Oh, my God, it’s you, it’s really you.”
“And you,” I said, taking her measure, comparing her to the bratty kid stored in memory. “All grown up. I’d never in a million years . . .”
I asked what brought her to Ottawa (“Law school.”), how her parents were doing (“Good days, bad days.”), how her sister was (“Issie just got married!”), if she’d been back to Trenton (“Not for a dog’s age.”), and as many other questions as I could dream up to keep her from asking any of me. And when I’d exhausted all avenues, I fed her the line about my urgent meeting, parading my sad regret.
“I can’t believe it’s you. You’re going to laugh, but my sister used to have the craziest dreams about you—something about a graveyard and being chased by skeletons.” Abby lowered her eyes, her cheeks redder. “I had dreams about you, too. The funniest, strangest dreams. Like I was looking at you through cheesecloth, the kind my mother used to strain berries for syrup. Kids, eh?”
“I’m really sorry, Abby. I wish I could—”
“What about later? Do you think we could meet up? Please, Gus, please. There are a thousand things I need to ask.”
“Sure. Why not? I’ll be free after four. Name the time and the place.”
She did. Some Italian hotspot nearby.
“Oh, Gus, this is so wonderful. I can’t wait to tell my parents. They are going to be so happy. Imagine, after all these years, Jack’s best friend.” Abby hugged me tight, kissed both my cheeks twice.
I skipped the interview. Skipped dinner. Skipped the hell out of Ottawa.
Head down, collar up, I toured the town, grateful for the biting January cold, how it kept people indoors and out of my face.
Went by Dufferin, the snow too deep for climbing Pelion. By Hanna Park. By my old house, impressed by the makeover. By Jack’s house on Queen—a greenhouse where his Fortress of Solitude had been. Across market square, up King. Arthur Murray Dance Studio gone. Sure Press gone. By the Record building and the marina. Over the bridge. Up Marmora to Tompkins—Iris Lebel’s happy hovel supplanted by a mammoth architectural Escher. Looked down on the creosote plant by the river. Back across the bridge to the lawyer’s office on Dundas, near where the Gilbert Hotel stood, before the fire. “It’ll be worth your while,” the lawyer had said, as if anything could or ever would be.
Issues of collective memory aside, I prayed to God there were some who remembered Jack Levin. Surely, dear God, Annie Barker was not forgotten. Not by all.
Me. I hoped to God no one remembered me.
I’d keep the visit short. Quick in. Quick out. Get the will over with. Never to be seen or heard from in these parts again.
Love story. Horror story. True story. I wished I knew.
I said I know four people who drowned. I told you about Billy Burgess and Dottie Swartz.
Jack and Annie, they’re the other two.
Two
Damn you, Jack Levin
The Trenton Marina was a weather-beaten slab of mausoleum concrete at the mouth of the Trent–Severn Waterway and in the shadow of the old swing bridge. No larger than a softball infield, it was tucked into a corner off the main street, behind a couple of restaurants and a dress shop. There was a single gas pump at dockside, with bollards and cleats alternating up and down the right angles, interrupted only by a twelve-foot boat ramp down to the water. There were no slips. Overnighters berthed parallel to the wharf.
I showed up first morning intent on keeping mum. I’d make Jack regret every rotten thing he had or hadn’t done to me. I’d freeze him out, same way I’d punished Annie.
Jack trotted right up to me, damn him, mock-punched my shoulder, messed with my hair. “Spiderman or Fantastic Four?”
I was a model of self-restraint.
“Ginger or Mary Ann?”
Of all the people to have a beef with, Jack was the lousiest.
“Kinks or the Stones?”
I missed this most, the back and forth. I held firm. I would not confuse missing with forgiving.
“Dr. No, From Russia with Love, or Goldfinger?
I turned my back, shuffled to the ancient picnic table by the canteen. We’d been told Clyde Neil, our boss, would meet us here under the tree. He knew Jack a little from the Marquee, but he’d hired me sight unseen on Bert Levin’s reference.
Jack persisted. “Leafs or Canadiens?”
“Goddamn, you know the answer. Canadiens. Canadiens.” They’d just won their seventh Stanley Cup in eleven years. It wasn’t because they were hockey’s Yankees I liked them. I liked the Montreal Canadiens because every other idiot in town loved the Toronto Maple Leafs. And when the idiots in this town loved anything en masse, I ran the other way.
“Wow. I thought for sure you’d cave without me. Mighty daring, Gus, a solo Habs fan this deep in Leafs territory. You got guts, man. I always knew.” And just like that, the grudge I’d nurtured for three crappy years showed signs of cracking. I wanted nothing more than for his assertion to be true. You got guts, man.
“You just left on me,” I said.
“You got my note.”
“You told Annie.”
“C’mon! My list wasn’t better than some corny goodbye?”
“All the times you visited your dad—”
“Once, I swear. Two days. It was my dad who always came to visit us.”
“You could’ve told me to my face. You should’ve told me. Before Annie, at least.”
“It was sudden, Gus. Honest.”
“Not so sudden. No way.”
“What do you want me to say? ‘I’m sorry?’ Okay, I’m sorry. I thought for sure the list and letter would do.”
My own sorry stuck in my throat.
We stewed in our respective pots atop the picnic table, feet on the bench as we gazed out upon the silky fabric of the Quinte, seagulls on patrol, mewling high and low. The dock manifested an odd sort of quiet in the days leading up to summer, the ambient sounds of traffic, industry, and nature blended into Muzak. This didn’t change, not even when July brought the tourists. The dock was The Bermuda Triangle of cacophony.
“So, any luck?” he said.
“With what?”
“Our mystery?”
“Which one?”
“Take your pick.”
“McGrath hasn’t gone anywhere, you know?”
“Still giving you trouble?”
“I keep out of his way. Dirty looks is about it—since your dad put him in his place.”
“My dad and McGrath? Really? They’re like friends?”
“McGrath had been giving my mom a hard time. Your dad made him back off.”
“Wow. Good for my dad.”
I was leading him up the garden path, set to drop him hard, sucker-punch him with the news his dad had been sleeping with my mom.
“Let that jerk start up with us again. Let him try. It’s different now, Gus. You’re bigger, I’m bigger. You’re smarter, I’m smarter. Did you hear, I got my brown belt in judo?”
“That supposed to impress me? Like your dopey Beatles haircut?”
He sniffed. “Annie warned me. She says you’ve been a misery the whole time I’ve been gone.”
“Yeah? When she tell you that?”
“You might as well know, Annie and me, we’ve been writing letters.”
“What now, you’re boyfriend and girlfriend?”
“You have a problem with it?”
“Not as long as you got your brown belt in Judo,” I said, and Jack nearly split a gut. I hadn’t meant it as a joke. I mulled who to kill first, him or Annie.
“Hey, take it easy. I was teasing. Annie and me, we’re good friends, same as you and me. Same as I hope you and Annie will be again. What do you say, Gus—time to move on?” He threw out his hand, and I fell for the ploy, snagged it firmly in mine (consciously unfishy) and we shook, not like we were sixteen and seventeen, but like men—any two of The Magnificent Seven. Except Lee, the crazy weenie. The Robert Vaughn part. Before he got his balls back and went to work for U.N.C.L.E.
Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels Page 25