The Matter With Morris (26 page)

He heard a soft noise that resembled a curtain being pulled back. He tried to imagine where his brother might be in his big house in Idaho with the three-car garage. Then Samuel said, “You miss him.”

“I do,” he said. “I do.”

And so, Morris thought, I am an idler. Like a million others who chafe and bother the system, I am merely a pebble in the grinding wheel. Would Ursula be amused to know that she too was an idler, along with her husband? But they were idlers with rifles and ammunition. They had paraphernalia. He imagined writing her to let her know that she was being watched. But this was paranoia, wasn’t it? His brother loved
spying, and of course he would say that everyone was being watched. That night, long after midnight, he stood by his balcony window and looked down onto the street below. A car passed by slowly. A man and woman stood on the sidewalk, talking. And then gone. A taxi idled at the curb for a while. Odd word choice, “idled.” Implying inactivity, futility, uselessness, empty thought. “Stop your idling, Morris”; this is what his mother would say to him as a young boy when he lounged on the couch at home, or lay on his back on the rug, staring at the ceiling. No time for daydreaming. Industry was essential. And so Morris had reprimanded his own son for idling.
Enough. Go. Be done with thee, Martin. Get thee to an army.
And what a getting had been got. He slid away from the window and walked into the kitchen. He surveyed the counter, considered making coffee, and then, with great and sudden intent, as if the notion had sprung from some involuntary bidding, he went to his safe, opened it, and removed Ursula’s gun. He put on a parka and a toque and pulled on his Timberland boots. And then, with the gun in his pocket, he walked outside and moved up the street towards the river. At three a.m. how quiet the streets were. The world was sleeping. His family was sleeping. A police car drove by and Morris looked straight ahead. Was he walking too fast? Too slow? The cruiser continued down the street and turned the corner. In the distance a train shunted cars onto a siding. He heard the bang of the cars and the squeal of the wheels. The engineer would be going somewhere soon. How easy it must be to know, as an engineer, that there is no choice, that there is only the single track, the two rails, and the hand on the
throttle. One of the extremes of moderation was madness, and for over a year now, ever since the death of Martin, he had lived on madness alone, bingeing on grief and anger. The last time he had seen Ursula, the day after she left him without saying goodbye, Morris had written her a letter in which he confessed that he had taken her gun.

I am not a patriot like you, Ursula. I do not understand the notion or the ideal, and I do not believe that we should have the right to carry guns in our pockets and purses so that we might protect our property and ourselves. You come from a civilization, Ursula. Act that way. Your son Wilhelm needs sensibility and love. He doesn’t need to be taught the parts of an assault rifle, how to break it down and restore it. I am not so naive as to believe that if I want to kill someone, I couldn’t do it with my bare hands, or with a rock that I pick up from the roadside. This has been done, but it is more intimate and real than a handgun or a rifle fired from a distance. If I had my way, I would melt all weapons into ploughshares.

And so on. Words that would fall on deaf ears. Morris the pontificator, Morris the nutcase. Unlike Bellow’s Herzog, Morris sent his letters. He wrote them by pen, sometimes he typed them, and then he folded the paper and slipped it into an envelope and applied stamps and walked up to the red mailbox, pulled back the handle, and dropped in the letter. He was a doer. An actor. And idler.

Up Osborne to the foot of the bridge and then right, down a path to the edge of the river. On the far bank, a fire burned and around the fire several figures huddled. Morris heard voices, low and indistinct, and then the laughter of a woman. Under-the-bridge homeless people. He stood and listened and watched. Then he took the gun from his pocket and threw it, like a rock slung from the hand of a young boy out into the middle of the river. He heard a splash and then nothing save the low voices and the traffic above him on the bridge. He stood for a long time looking out at the fire on the other bank. There was joy and drinking and comradeship. The sound of a bottle breaking. A voice lifting in song. Morris turned finally and walked back home.

4

L
ucille came to find Morris at noon, two days later. She knocked on his door, and when he opened it, she said, “Get dressed, I’m taking you for lunch.”

He was barefoot and wearing old corduroys and a muscle shirt. He hadn’t shaved for a number of days and his beard was growing in delicately. He was not man enough to grow a proper beard. He invited her in, asked to take her trench coat. She stood in the foyer and said that she’d made reservations at 529 Wellington. She motioned at the chair in the living room. “I’ll wait, Morris. You go shower and shave and find clean clothes. Make yourself handsome.”

Morris did as she commanded. He shaved, eyeing himself carefully in the mirror. Over the last while, when he did shave, he’d been cutting himself in his haste, or perhaps his hands were getting shaky. The onset of Parkinson’s or perhaps it was his agitated state. He couldn’t concentrate for long. He trimmed his eyebrows as well. Lucille didn’t like bushy eyebrows. Then he showered and towelled himself dry, imagining what he might wear. Standing naked before his closet, he felt reduced. He’d noticed in the mirror that
his biceps were thinner. He would look into purchasing a Bowflex. He chose a light blue shirt and black dress pants that he’d found at Harry Rosen. Alistair, his personal salesman, had said, “Morris, the fit is marvellous.” All flattery and flotsam. He put on his socks and shoes and presented himself to Lucille, who was peering through her reading glasses at a book in her lap. It was Cicero. “This is where you steal your words from,” she said. “And I thought it was you talking, Morris.” She laid the book on its face and stood.

“I have nothing original to say, you know that, Lucille.”

She approached him, looked him up and down again, and touched his shoulder. “Nice,” she said.

He ordered a six-ounce prime rib and Lucille ate rice and vegetables and a crème brûlée for dessert. She was full of energy, as if she’d gone to a shop somewhere and bought her youth back. Morris studied her. “You’re different,” he said. And she said thank you as if “different” was important, as if change were crucial. As Hamlet had spuriously spurned Ophelia, so had he spurned Ursula. Thrown her out on her ear. All this movement; to act or not to act. Lucille was wearing sunglasses on the top of her head. In this dimly lit room, amidst the hush of waiters, businessmen with mistresses, she leaned towards him and said that she had something to tell him, though she wasn’t sure how he would respond. Startled, he tried to appear calm. Perhaps she had a new lover. They had driven to the restaurant in her Passat, shiny black. She had many bracelets on her right wrist that clattered as she shifted. He loved women, envied their accoutrements, their clacking heels, swaying hips, their inwardness, their need to talk themselves
towards intimacy. He had wanted to touch Lucille’s wrist where the bracelets lay, but he restrained himself. Flanking the restaurant was the Shaarey Zedek Synagogue, at which a funeral was taking place. Parking-lot attendants waving their orange sticks, a policeman at the entrance. Morris, climbing from the car, had said, “When I die, I want a Jewish funeral.” He said that he had made an appointment to see the rabbi of this synagogue, and then cancelled. He planned to read the Torah. He said that what so many Jews had forgotten was that the Torah was more important than the state of Israel. “They’ve got their priorities mixed up.” Lucille listened to him and smiled affectionately. She did not believe anything he said; he was extremely impetuous, his head full of fantasies. And now, tapping at her crème brûlée, she was remarkably confident. She said, “Remember I told you about the letter I received from Tyler Goodhand? Well, I phoned him, and then on Monday I drove to Shilo to meet him. Oh, Morris, what a sweet boy. And all along how I hated him. But he’s a boy, just like Martin. And he’s suffered so. Are you upset?”

“Why would I be upset?” He was astounded, in fact, at the power of the written word. His written words. “It was the letter then.”

“That. And then the phone call. You were right, he’s innocent and vulnerable. And I was so harsh.” She said that she’d spent an hour alone with Tyler, just the two of them. A beautiful boy. “I felt so close to Martin. It was a mistake, Morris. A terrible accident. Tyler’s been incredibly brave. And I should have known that, but my sadness was too great.”

“And now?”

“Oh, Morris, it’s still big, but there’s a corner of my heart that has been set loose. I should have done this months ago, when he called you.” She dipped her long head downwards, towards her dessert, and said, “I’m stubborn sometimes.”

“What does he look like?” Morris asked. He felt jealous.

“Short. Stocky. He’s got that smooth head all army boys seem to have. Cropped, like Martin when he left for Afghanistan. And I saw his tattoo. It’s on the inside of his left wrist. Martin’s name in small script. He showed it to me and I cried.” She removed her sunglasses from the top of her head and blinked. The relief on her face made her look younger. Then she leaned forward and touched his arm. “There’s one other thing. Tyler said that the charges against him are going to be dropped. Something about the charges being contrary to the Criminal Code and the National Defence Act.” She removed her hand from his arm.

“So he’s free,” Morris said.

“He is. He said that he wants to go back to Afghanistan.”

Inexplicably, he felt disappointment and rage. “So he can shoot some more of our young men.”

“Morris. Morris.” Lucille watched him carefully.

He waved a hand in the air and looked across the room to where two men in suits were sawing at their meat. “It’s a surprise,” he said. “Your sudden change of heart. The dropping of charges.”

“Yes, I know. As long as I was angry, you could be forgiving. You know what Tyler told me? He said that Martin

wanted to be there. Martin told Tyler that if he had to choose again, a hundred out of a hundred times he’d choose Afghanistan. The army. You’d prefer to think it was your fault, Morris. That you forced Martin. You didn’t. He was a big boy.”

“This is not helping, Lucille. So Tyler, with his bullet-shaped head, tells you what Martin wanted, and you believe him? These are young boys caught up in the adventure of war. The army needs naive boys who move easily from video games to real warfare. They count on it. And now you’re good friends with Tyler?
I
wrote that letter, Lucille. I wrote it for Tyler. It was to help
you.”

“Oh, Morris, I know. Tyler told me. You did a good thing. You’re a wonderful writer.”

And what to say? Such smugness: “you’re a wonderful writer.” But she was not mocking him. She was not skeptical or cynical or full of doubt like he was. She knew his intent before he himself knew it. Whereas he would have resented her writing that kind of letter, she saw it as a good thing. A good thing, Morris. He had done a good thing. He imagined this might be a form of love, that Lucille still loved him, that she was
making an effort to form a friendship, due to an impression of beauty.
What did Cicero say?
If such a love exists in the world—one without worry, without need, without care, without sighing—then so be it!

For the rest of that day, and into the next, his thoughts ranged far and wide. In his determination to be rational he failed and he found himself slipping downwards. He willed himself to be happier. This proved impossible. He washed his car, inside and out. He scrubbed the tires and rims.
Everything gleamed. He walked down by the river and watched the last of the ducks preparing to fly south. There was one family of six, and the ducklings were so small that he feared for the young ones’ lives. How could something that tiny fly five thousand miles south? The parents had been irresponsible; they had bred too late in the season. A week later, at dawn, he again walked down to the river and found ice forming near the shore. The ducks had fled, poor things. His heart was constricted, as if it sensed the possibility of rejection, of falling into the hands of someone irresponsible. A man on a bicycle passed. Morris nodded hello.

That afternoon he met Libby and Meredith at Viva on Sargent. They shared a large soup and ordered sizzling shrimp. Both girls talked and talked. Libby said that Shane had tried to contact her. She’d hung up on him. She laughed lightly as she said this, wrinkling her nose as if she’d tasted something slightly off. Meredith wondered what was more repulsive, a young man with an older woman, or vice versa. “It’s more acceptable for an older man to have a younger lover. But I don’t understand the girl. Where’s the attraction? That old flesh? Yuck.” Libby said it was the mind. She’d loved Shane’s mind, the way it worked. “He was way more mature than any boy in high school.” It was as if their father wasn’t present, Morris thought. These girls, talking, not asking for his valuable opinion. And then, as if the scene had been preordained, Leah entered the restaurant. She was with a man who might have been her cousin. They stood at the counter, ordered, sat and waited for fifteen minutes, and then walked out with two bags of food. Morris saw her, she
didn’t see him. She was dressed plainly, she wore no makeup, and she looked very young. This was the way of the world. He was shaken by the sight of her. His heart ached briefly and he imagined, absurdly, that he might still be attractive to her. Meredith noticed his agitation and wondered if it was the conversation. “Too much for you, Dad?” she asked. She was different from Libby. She saw only herself and would never have been able to imagine her own father having sex. “Talk on,” Morris said. “You both sound so wise.”

“Daddy.” This was Libby, who knew she wasn’t wise, and this made her wiser. Meredith was talking about Harvey, their mother’s ex-lover. She said that he had had money, lots of it, but she’d never understood what their mother saw in the man other than his fat wallet. She lifted her eyes and fluttered them at her father. Crass girl, thought Morris. She had a loose mind, like her grandfather when he descended into senility. She rarely visited her grandfather; she said he smelled old, and besides, she had a child to care for. She was handsome, bigger boned than Libby, and though she wouldn’t admit it, she’d been devastated by Martin’s death. Morris had always wondered if that was why, for a period of time, she hadn’t allowed Morris to see Jake. She was punishing her father.