Come Back (12 page)

I’ve just read this letter over and it doesn’t make any sense

Some black men on the crowded night subway were singing, “Everythin’s gonna be all right now.” Singing together like crazy, no thinking visible, whole big body sing

DAILY PLANNER
1984:
September Friday 21

September Saturday 22

September Monday 24

September Tuesday 25

Paper like layered snow all over the basement floor. It never melted, never ran away leaving barely a stain.

“…  all my life I have always been alone, even with my family …” Gabriel, you wrote that. Did I know? Or Yo—did she know that? Of course we knew, how could we not? You were a solitary kid, okay, often very quiet and by yourself—but
always alone
? Not as a child tumbling around and so happy playing “Pretend” with Miriam, and then Denn—where was your aloneness? When did it come? How can
your young memory hold only that? “…  even with my family that I love …”

Hal lay on his back. The thick rug on the basement floor, once a bachelor apartment living room before he and Yolanda bought the house and rebuilt it; but the apartment kitchen cupboards were still there, the square outlet for an electric stove visible between boxes on the new storage shelves. Solid rug/wood floor on concrete, good for lying on your back, flat. Who was the Karen O travelling with Fred? Had she ever been in Edmonton? She cut Gabe’s hair, told him “Pure obsession”—ha, pure as untouchable stars—they must have talked some, why not more?—she left for Naples … ran perhaps … if only … obviously she had been travelling with Fred—was she still? A wife now, Karen and Fred kiddies, children that could be over twenty—avoid that, avoid.

Alone. With Rilke’s Paris “Einsamkeit.” What an implacable determination to everywhere, in every way, find not only “loneliness,” then deliberately change it to starker “aloneness.” And no fumbling Robert Bly translation either: where did Gabe find that beautifully direct “Aloneness [not quite the rhythmic ‘loneliness’] is like a rain … it climbs up from the world’s far distant prairie”—“
Ebene
” in Bly are plodding “flat places.” Must be Canadian, driving the long land and a narrow black rain comes on over the western horizon. And Ailsa, always—well, her child’s thundering silence. But even before any of that obsession the July 21 “Terror in Frankfurt,” and after that a smaller “Terror in Nice” August 2—those terrifying Rilke angels at train station arrivals, always alone? Was it the
echoing din of terminals, the slimy washrooms? People rushing nowhere? But not a hint of that (deliberate?) in later arrivals at Rome, Florence, Bologna, skipping Marseilles and obsessed Van Gogh’s Arles for obsessive Nabokov’s Montreux (was it
Lolita
? Never a mention), then Paris, the train and boat and train to London, no terrifying angels when he arrived in London? Walked the streets, Hyde Park … avoided?

Hyde Park, 1976. Gabe was fifteen … just days before the Montreal Olympics. Could that have been the first time?

Hal’s eyes had been open for a long time, the basement ceiling was pale stippled stucco; Gabriel probably often walked by this old house as it was then between Whyte Avenue and the North Saskatchewan River valley, though he was certainly never in it. After him they could not endure Riverbend where they had all lived together fifteen years with the outdoor hockey rink across the street, they had to move, away—in this basement ceiling there seemed to be the random pattern of a pool in the stucco trowel marks, a pool with edges swirled like the wading pool in Hyde Park, July 1976: Dennis dances along the concrete edge shouting at the top of his lungs, at last! space to bellow his everlasting Grade 2 song that has together driven them all both laughing and crazy south and north across Europe:

And slim Miriam, seventeen, sways behind him, her arms and body in supple rhythm with his celebration at one more release from their “cozy,” really “cramped,” English Commer camper, five of them squeezed together for 12,000 kilometres from London south to Paris and east down the Rhine and on south to baking Florence and Rome and Naples and back north to Ravenna and Zermatt and Marburg and Harlingen and Ayr and again to London, that astounding family journey with not one yelling confrontation from anyone:

Denn brays while Miriam dances. Yolanda is tracking them with her slide camera—“Watch the cobblestones!”—and Hal thinks, You’ve already taken a hundred with his mouth wide open and that crazy song! the air so English-London-park blue, sweet and cool as poet daffodils; but through the park trees he is watching something else: the squat bunker among the flowers and bushes where Gabriel has disappeared into the MEN. Behind the wall that shields the entrance. Gabe just said he needed to go, so why does he feel such growing apprehension, watching it?

But he was, Hal remembered that clear as the ceiling over him. And Gabriel suddenly emerges there, but does not come towards them, does not look towards the wading pool where he certainly knows they are all waiting for him, no, he walks very fast and angled away from Denn’s “Ko-kak! Ko-kak!” walks away as if none of them exist. He sees Gabriel so clearly at that instant, walking, that he jerked
erect to sit on the basement rug. In Hyde Park he is on his feet and walking too, but not too fast, not looking at the MEN or Gabriel, just staring between them and keeping them both at the farthest periphery of his sight, walks faster and faster so he has gotten between them when he abruptly meets Gabriel face-to-face, panting behind a high bush.

“Gabe! What happened?”

His tall son seems shrunken; does not look at him. He says, more softly,

“What?”

“A man was looking at me.”

“You didn’t use a cubicle?”

“He was in the next one, with a mirror.”

“Mirror!”

“I saw it, it poked under the wall, and drew back, twice, I …”

“Did you see him, a face?”

“His hand, and I stood up and pulled up my pants quiet and jerked the toilet paper loud and the mirror came again and I kicked it so hard, his hand, he yelled and I ran out …”

Sitting on the basement floor, Hal remembered. Heavy as the file boxes and lamps and worn hats and brief cases and discarded computers piled around him, heavier than his avoided but merciless memory, he felt the whispered beauty of his lost son: slender, light-brown hair curly but not yet shoulder length as it would be, no moustache yet above the perfect part between his perfect teeth; fifteen, and within the year fully as tall as he.

No need to hide his weeping. There was no one here to touch him, to attempt a stupid comforting word. He could wail, scream, howl, laugh—what thundering angel would hear him? God, that eternally suffering Rilke! Gabriel bought the
Duino Elegies
in July 1984 to take on his journey—always alone even with my family—a journey he gradually grew to disdain as deeply as the life he would return to without hope in suburban Edmonton, on October 18. Within the first four elegiac lines:

But in Frankfurt, in Athens he was no slim teenager: he was six foot three, 165 pounds, broad chest and legs and arms taut as steel … what does the beautiful have to do with muscles?

There was always a box of tissues in the basement bathroom, as in the two others, thanks be Yolanda of sacred memory. Hal would not look in the mirror as he tugged three tissues out; he knew every one of his liver spots. Owl must be about the same three-quarters of a century but the Dene man looked so much better; at least the skin of his face and hands, which was all he had ever seen. Maybe never sleeping inside a White building helped. He had
invited him often enough, “I’ve got seven, eight, rooms on two floors, plus a basement and an open, soft-carpet attic, come, sleep wherever you like.” Owl smiled and looked slightly embarrassed, black eyes shifting, so Hal didn’t say it any more. Once in February when he trudged home along 104th past the funeral house thermometer flashing “-26 °C” he noticed two metal shopping carts between cars behind the Blessed Redeemer Church, and then the hump of sleeping bags beside the back door. Snow drifting down, ice driven in gusts of wind and Owl sat there with his knees up and head propped against the brick wall, wrapped in double hoods and sleeping bags. An electrical cord led from the car plug-in beside the door and disappeared under his pyramid of blankets, but his face was bare, serene as Nelson Mandela in the slanting snow. The faint hum of a hairdryer? Hal stood for a long moment, watching: yes, Owl was breathing; asleep.

Owl and The Coffee Shack’s blah coffee, the accidents … the Orange Downfill. The Edmonton City Police, he needed to contact them to see what—no no, not yet, time enough—now he needed to walk in the moist April air of melting snow, he needed coffee, he needed anything but accidents and this empty, crammed basement. And before he could think to stop, his eyes lifted: in the mirror a gaunt, grey-bearded man stared at him. He could not … comprehend … that as himself. Momentarily he had no memory of this face as personal, not even when he touched it with what he recognized instantly as his hand … face folds and hollows and lank white hair curling at the

Hal, really, you don’t
have
to look like that. There are fifteen barbers on Whyte

Thank you
miene scheene
Yo, ever with me, my only and ever beautiful love you forever.

The telephone rang. Like a prayer always with him which he never spoke—police! No, they’d be at the door. Good to move, move! He hoisted himself up stair by stair on the banister to the kitchen phone call display. Ontario, Dennis thanks be to God work number in Toronto, he could collapse on the desk stool.

“Hey Dad.”

“Hey Denn.”

“How’s it going?”

“Okay …”

But quick Dennis had caught his tone. “What, what is it?”

“The usual … no no, it’s okay, okay … maybe I made a mistake …”

“What? What’d you do?”

“Oh I saw a … I … I looked in Gabriel’s boxes, the ones in the basement.”

A silence; Dennis’s voice shifted from concern to his careful neutral: “Why did you do that?”

“It’s the end of April, and it started snowing overnight … it’s mostly gone already.”

“That’s Alberta, it snows whenever … sometimes September too.”

Neither said anything for a long moment. They did not speak of Gabriel often, and not since Yo’s funeral. They talked flat day-to-day facticity: his back and thigh aches, his right side, the birds singing along Denn’s Don Valley bike route, Double Cup Ben endlessly unscrambling Mennonite family trees online and, “sweet little muffin”—as Dennis
called his daughter Emma—watching a spring worm ripple itself together and withdraw into the earth. Hal realized, once again, that he had never yet dared to ask Dennis: Do you ever think … how you found him, when I wasn’t …