“For that long?”
“You’ll survive, won’t you?”
“I don’t know,” she said with quiet seriousness.
“Oh, come on, Erin!” I drew her close to me and kissed her concealed cheek, feeling a bit foolish as I did so. “By the way, the collection day had been changed. Please don’t forget to put the trash cans out on Wednesday this time.”
I suddenly became keenly aware how much I would miss her.
11
Monsieur Leblanc smiled in his vague way while smoothing his hair with both hands. It took me awhile to steer the conversation to money. “My dear, you’re making a great mistake!” he said in his thick French accent. “You’re only thinking about money? But it’s not only about money! Give me ideas too! You’re going to recreate the interiors of the great opera houses? Do you have any idea how much that would cost? You’d need an orchestra pit and an orchestra too. The addition of a pit requires a particular kind of interior structure, electrical wiring, and a good deal else besides. And, my God, how could one and the same building simultaneously contain La Scala and the Bolshoi and all the others? Or maybe you mean to change the architecture of your theatre every year? And you want to reproduce the original productions? But that’s impossible! To properly research, never mind replicate them? To duplicate the original costumes and sets? It’s just impossible.” He rubbed his thumb and index finger together in my face. “Where would you ever find the money for all that?” He stepped over to his front window with its view of the ocean, boats, and a lighthouse.
“But let’s say that you got whatever you needed. Two million? Five million? Who would your audience be? Young people? Older folks? Chinese seniors with money who are just dying to see historically accurate productions of European opera?” He broke into a long, dry cackle. I said nothing.
“Did you ever consider staging Chinese classical opera?”
“I don’t know anything about it. Besides, how many Chinese living in Vancouver would want to see a Chinese opera performed in English?”
“Those are the kinds of questions I want you to answer before you start.”
“I have a business plan . . .”
He made a sour face. “Documents, plans — not for me. You want my advice? Forget about opera. Start with something small. A theatre with 30 or 40 seats, no more. Contemporary plays that will appeal to a younger audience. There are plenty of good actors in Vancouver, and most of them are unemployed. You could hire them for a whole season for a fraction of what you would have to pay some diva for a single run.”
I left Monsieur Leblanc without staying over. I knew I wouldn’t see a cent from the old bore even if I downscaled to a one-man performance. Yet, watching the gulls dipping into the white foam of the ferry’s wake, I suddenly felt relieved. I needed Leblanc’s frank response to free myself from my absurd dream, from the strange nostalgia for a past I had never experienced. The snow-capped peaks east of the city glowed with the last light of the day. As darkness fell, they seemed more assertive, as if they were advancing on the little ferry taking me back home.
Who else could help? Monsieur Leblanc had been the last on my list of possible sponsors. There was my father, of course. I knew he loved me, even admired me, believing my nature to be superior to his. I could mimic people, recite poetry, draw, play musical instruments. That somebody like me could come from his seed — a man with dirt under his fingernails, with no more imagination than a carp (my mother’s cruel word, which he loved to repeat while roaring with laughter) — he could never fathom. But would his admiration translate into a million dollars? He would give me something, of course, but not that much.
12
I got home late that night. As I was pulling into the carport my headlights caught what looked like leaping, darting figures in the backyard. When I went to investigate, I found a long line of women, a human serpent whose tail reached the backyard fence and whose head seemed to swell around the alder. They were holding identical plastic shopping bags, which a strong gust of wind (a storm was coming) did its best to rip from their hands. I went back to the car to get a flashlight. When I returned, the women nearest to the alder were jumping into the air, screaming and howling, and even rolling on the ground. There was some bizarre, incomprehensible pantomime going on at the base of the alder tree, which the powerful wind seemed to be tearing apart, sending cascades of leaves in every direction. Competing for the leaves, the women jostled each other as they caught them in the air or bent over to pick them up and stuff them in their bags before departing without a word into the night.
I pointed the flashlight up into the tree, where I made out the figure of another woman in a loose white gown perched on one of its lower branches, her blond hair streaming in the wind. She was taking still more leaves from the lawn bag she was holding and throwing them down to the women below. My flashlight blinded her for a moment.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Don’t you recognize me? It’s Erythia.”
“Erin?” I took a closer look. “Is that really you?”
What I saw horrified me — a grotesquely deformed face with a tiny, misshapen jaw, enormous asymmetrical eyes with drooping eyelids that slanted downward at the outer edge, as if there were no cheeks to support them, and a gaping orifice for a mouth. Stripped of what I had taken to be a Muslim veil, my tender girl with the ethereal name was a monstrous freak.
“It’s me,” she said. “My real face.”
“But . . . but . . . it’s impossible . . .” Then I collected myself: “What are you doing up there? And who were those women?”
“Twice a year after the equinoxes they come to me to learn their fates.”
And then, suddenly, as if descending along the thread of her own words, she jumped down from the branch. I had barely reached her when she collapsed in a faint. The lawn bag half-filled with leaves fell to the ground beside her.
“Erin! Get up, get up!” I shouted, but it made no difference. “Erin!” When she still didn’t respond, I lifted her up, taking care not to look at her face, and carried her to the basement, pushing open the unlocked door with my foot. I found her captain’s bed and laid her down on it. It was no warmer in the basement than it had been outside. I turned on the space heater and tried the light switches, but nothing worked. The power seemed to be off. Since I still had my flashlight, I checked the fuses, which were all fine. But still there was no electricity. I looked out the window. There weren’t any lights to be seen outside either. Apparently there had been a power outage from the strong wind. It was unlikely they would be able to repair it during the night, so what was I going to do with Erin in the meantime? It was already October and chilly at night. At least upstairs I had two fireplaces. If I made fires at once, the upstairs rooms would be warm in half an hour. I moved towards the staircase. My feet made a rustling sound as I did so. I pointed the flashlight around and saw leaves everywhere: on the floor, on her desk, on the chairs.
13
Ten minutes later, I returned to the basement, flashlight still in hand. I found Erin where I had left her on her captain’s bed. But her face was now covered again with the piece of triangular cloth I recognized, the wider part of it held in place with a string stretched across her face over the bridge of her nose. Only her eyes, now closed, were visible. Had she been able to get up and then fainted again? I leaned over her, listening to her breathing. The wind had started to die down and pale moonlight illuminated the room through the white muslin curtains drawn over its windows. The rhododendrons outside seemed to be coated with a milky film, and the shiny dark-green leaves of the Portuguese Laurel emitted a spectral glow.
A bird called from inside the alder and then was silent. I sensed that Erin was watching me. I went over to her again. She held out her pale hand to me. It was ice-cold.
“Can you get up? I’ve made fires upstairs. We’ll have some tea and you’ll feel better.”
“Wait till my erythania passes.”
“Oh . . . that again.”
“It’s a sort of sickness of compassion I get. We disclose secret knowledge and are overcome with erythania.”
“Listen, I’m not going to leave you down here to freeze. There’s been an outage and I doubt they’ll be able to restore the power tonight.”
She was too weak to walk. I picked her up into my arms, amazed once more at the lightness of her body. She pressed her head against my chest, and weakly wrapped her arms around my neck. I tactfully averted my face from hers.
My fingers felt the silk of her loose garment. Very likely she had been freezing up in the tree.
“What a beautiful place,” she sighed as I carried her upstairs and lowered her into the leather recliner, inherited from my maternal grandfather.
I got an afghan and wrapped it around her. I lit some candles on the mantel and a chest under my collection of Noh masks. The heat of the fire and the soft light from the candles revived her.
“What kind of tea would you like?”
I found some crackers in the cupboard and some honey. I made the tea and put everything on a tray table next to her. But she wouldn’t touch any of it.
“I saw your face, Erin. I can look away, if you want, but you need to drink something hot.”
“You won’t love me any more. I know that,” she said in a barely audible voice.
“How do you know that? And what if you’re wrong?” I tried to keep my irritation in check. But she had sensed the truth. When I saw her face, my desire for her vanished. Call me a low creature, a moral coward, but I couldn’t love a woman with an ugly face, even if she should have a heart of gold and the most brilliant gifts of imagination. I just couldn’t, and I don’t apologize for it. The sudden revelation of her face was so shocking that I resented it.
“Don’t be hard on yourself,” she said, as if reading my mind. “You’re not the only one. My face is repulsive to most people.”
She lifted the bottom of the triangle and drank some tea, while I gazed into the fire in distress and listened to the tapping sound her spoon made as she stirred the honey into her tea. The sound’s peaceful repetition brought with it another revelation. She had deceived me from the start and had been doing so for seven months, and I was her willing victim.
“I feel better. Thank you for the tea.” There was another tap of the cup as she returned it to its saucer on the tray table.
“What you saw is an untreated case of Treacher-Collins syndrome,” she said. “I was born with it. I have no cheek bones, and poor hearing too. I get by reading lips mostly.”
Ah, so that’s what it was, her curious way of talking, both odd and charming; a hidden question mark at the end of each sentence, as if she were never sure of what had been said . . . A veil was a deception forced on her by something beyond her control. The wretched girl was hiding her misery.
“I’m very sorry.” I paused for a moment, not knowing what else to say. “Couldn’t your parents . . . Well, maybe, you know . . . while you were still little? Couldn’t they try to treat it with plastic surgery?”
I knew nothing about the plastic surgery, of course. I was just trying to say something positive that would hide my aversion.
“My parents abandoned me soon after I was born,” Erin said in a matter-of-fact tone.
“I didn’t realize that.”
“Of course you didn’t! How could you?” she replied, now sounding almost cheerful, as if I had in fact said something nice to her.
“So that’s the only reason why you’ve been wearing a veil. That is, you’re not a Muslim, are you? And didn’t the veil make things more difficult for you in another way?”
She sighed and pulled the afghan more tightly around herself. She was still shivering, even though the room was already quite warm.
“Occasionally people would make snide comments, but usually they would just glance in my direction and then quickly look away, as if they hadn’t seen anything unusual. Some of the customers at the thrift shop complained about it, which eventually got me fired.”
“So they did fire you.”
“I thought you knew that.”
“Not really. You told me you had lost your job. Remember?”
“All the same, the veil was better than walking around with . . . with a face like mine. It frightens people, children especially. I was always bullied and teased at school.”
“You never saw your parents after they’d abandoned you?”
“Only once, two years ago. I finally found them. You know Selkirk in Manitoba? That’s where they live. A beautiful house right on the river, a dog, two healthy kids. They turned out to be of Ukrainian descent.”
“Is that why you went to the Ukrainian Catholic Church?”
“How do you know that, Matthew?”
“I saw you on 16th and Ash.”
“Were you spying on me?” I could tell by the tone of her voice that she wasn’t angry. “Yes, I go around my birthday to pray for Helena and Paul Vashuk, my real parents. My birthday must be hard for them, especially my mother. Remembering how she gave birth to a deformed little girl and then abandoned her. I pray for her suffering to end.”
“But how do you know they’ve been thinking about you all this time?”
“I don’t know. But if she’s trying to forget all those years, it would be even harder on her, wouldn’t it?”
Erin stuck her hand out from under the afghan and pointed to the black and white photograph above the mantel, her wide sleeve falling back as she did so.
“Who’s that?”
“Samuel Beckett, a writer. Do you know him?”
“No. And what’s that?”
“It’s Kafka’s house in Prague. Where he was born. You’ve heard of Kafka?”
She shook her head.
“All these masks you have and pictures of different theatres. They must be old.”
“They’re lithographs that belonged to my great-uncle, who helped to restore some of the theatres.”
“That’s so beautiful!” The familiar naïveté in her voice made my heart sink again.
“Your parents must have been happy to see you after so many years.” I was instinctively looking for something good in her life that might match the comfort and ease of my own. But I was obviously looking in the wrong place.
“Oh no!” she exclaimed lightly. “As soon as they realized who I was, they didn’t want to have anything to do with me. They made me leave right away.”
“Rejected you for a second time?”
“I don’t really blame them. They have a good life. Two other children, both beautiful. I was an unpleasant reminder of what they did once. Nobody likes that.”
Her selflessness amazed me. “I wouldn’t be able to forgive them, let alone pray for them,” I said.
“It wasn’t their fault they gave me away. They had no choice.”
“We all have choices. Even if it’s a difficult one, it’s still a choice.” I heard my mother’s voice say through me.
“Like Abraham, they couldn’t have disobeyed. They followed the order and rule. I pity them just as I do Abraham.”
I felt the same vague unease somewhere in the pit of my stomach. “What rule, Erin?”
“No sibyl may be raised at home. A sibyl has to be turned over to the world, and as soon as possible.”
“A sibyl?”
“Yes, I’m a sibyl of the Erythean line in the 30th generation. My real name, as I told you, is Erythia. The first generations of sibyls were beautiful young women, just as Michelangelo painted them. That was before we asked the gods for immortality but forgot to ask for eternal youth too. Though I myself don’t think that’s what actually happened. I think that’s just a beautiful myth. Already by the fifth generation, deformity had become the mar
k of our calling. Our destiny is to foretell the future, but when misfortune strikes, people blame us, the oracles. Revenge and fear guided their hands when they threw stones at us. Gradually, over the centuries, every stone thrown, every scratch inflicted, was embedded forever in our faces as a memento. We’ve paid dearly for our prophecies.”
14
I listened to her melodious voice speaking those words devoid of any intelligible meaning, and was overcome with panic. My little tenant, my ethereal, mutilated angel was clearly insane.
“When did you find out that you had this gift, Erin?” I asked.
“I don’t remember exactly. Somewhere around twelve, I think. Until then I was a miserable child from all the bullying and teasing. I would save money from my breakfasts to buy presents for the kids who were the most hateful, but it never worked. Adults can hide their emotions, but children are naturally cruel, so they don’t bother to pretend. There was a little girl named Amy who was the only exception. For some reason she wasn’t repulsed by me and didn’t mind playing with me. So I said to her once: ‘I’m going to do something nice for you since you’re being so nice to me. Tell your father to reschedule his flight to New York for a later one. The plane’s going to crash.’ Her father was a businessman and travelled a lot. After I said that I fell ill with erythania for the first time. I had no idea what it was then. It’s like dying together with the people whose deaths we have foreseen. Erythania seals the truth of our predictions.”
The Punchinello puppet she had given me, on a settee next to the fireplace, seemed to be listening to her ravings, his pointed hat tipped over onto one shoulder and his crudely painted mouth stretched wide in a smirk.
I wish they’d turn the damn power back on, I thought. Or else what am I going to do with this fruitcake? I was dreading the prospect on a long night filled with her babble, since I certainly couldn’t send her back down to the freezing basement.
Expulsion Page 4