Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (18 page)

Before he hung up, Bob said he’d give it some thought.

But Donny never found out what Bob thought. Once again contact between them was broken. It was ages before Bob confessed that his long silences were the result of frequent hospitalizations. An idea had taken hold of Bob, not in the way ideas took hold of Donny, by taking root in his mind, but by invading Bob’s whole being, his brain, his blood, his gut, his nerves, his very sinews. Somewhere out there, Bob was certain, Carol and the child were waiting for him to rescue them. This was a fact as incontestable as the force of gravity. End of discussion.

At first this obsession didn’t interfere very much with Bob’s ability to hold some kind of menial, low-paying job, to get by in the world, but over time he drifted further from reality in the pursuit of his ghostly family. Where once he had had one person to save – Donny – now he had two.

Donny did everything he could to stay in touch with his brother. For several years, he used up all his vacation time paying visits to Bob, trying to talk sense into him, trying to
get him some help. But if he pushed too hard on that front, Bob was prone to head for the hills, to vanish.

When Donny married Anne, he was determined that his older brother be there to stand up with him as his best man. That meant driving all the way to Thunder Bay to collect Bob and then driving him halfway across the country after the wedding to get him back to Ontario. Anne accompanied them, although she says it wasn’t her idea of a dream honeymoon.

During the next three decades Bob became an ever more distant and shadowy figure in Anne and Donny’s lives. He neglected to come to either his mother’s or father’s funeral. Only one thing gave Donny hope: Bob had stopped mentioning his lost family to him.

But surely this was because Bob wanted to protect his younger brother, believing it upset Donny too much to be reminded of the tragedy that had befallen him. He knew that despite what Donny said about it all being in his head, deep down his brother recognized the truth of things, understood, and was suffering his terrible loss right along with him.

It was only when Donny’s oldest daughter, Janet, got married that Bob forgot himself and made a slip of the tongue. He was sitting at the head table in the new suit Donny had bought him when he leaned over and whispered to Anne, “I wonder if my little girl’s married now too.” Bob confessed to his sister-in-law that he always thought of his lost child as a girl, and that he always saw her as the spitting image of her mother.

It wasn’t long after that that Bob pulled his last vanishing act. Donny had no idea where he was until Bob was found on that snowy street in Edmonton, a frozen corpse, nothing
in his pockets but a wallet that held a carefully printed note identifying Donny as his next of kin.

Donny put his heart and soul into organizing his brother’s memorial service, but you could see how deeply disappointed he was by the sparse turnout. But Donny clearly wasn’t thinking straight. Most of those who once knew Bob have long gone. That’s the nature of a mining town. The price of ore falls and rises. When it goes down, people get laid off and strike out to find work elsewhere. They don’t return. There’s almost no one here who remembers Bob. Those who came to the funeral came out of respect for Donny.

When I speak about no one coming back here once they’ve left, I’m a contradiction to my own statement, an exception. Fifteen years ago when my father died, I returned to take over his law practice and escape a relationship that had gone terribly wonky and dramatic. I found out that with a minimum of stress you could earn a good living here doing property transfers, wills, the odd divorce and child custody case, this and that. But it was also mind-numbing, tedious work so three years ago I sold Fenton Law. I pass my summers here. The attitude of the town towards men like me isn’t what it once was. I am extended a grudging, cool tolerance. It’s all I can expect, but it’s not quite enough so I spend my winters in Thailand.

Donny himself conducted the memorial service, surrounded by gaudy banks of flowers and old snapshots of Bob that had been blown up so large that they suffered an
ominous, disturbing distortion. Believe me, Donny is no public speaker, and it was painful to hear him dully sing his brother’s praises, dab a muddled picture for eyes that had never seen Bob in the flesh, in his splendid prime. Of course, the service ended with Connie Francis singing “Where the Boys Are.” Donny had got Anne, who is far more tech-savvy than he is, to download it for him. It was a ghastly greeting card moment, but I wept, recalling where the boys were, Donny and Bob, so long ago. And me too, I suppose.

Afterwards, Anne and Donny had a few people over to their house for snacks and drinks. When the place cleared, Anne and I sat in the kitchen talking quietly and drinking margaritas. I’m her ear to whisper into. She went on about how traumatic all this had been for Donny, how she feared he might never get over it. “He’s so depressed,” she said. “He loved his brother so much.”

“Bob was easy to love,” I said. “Years ago I had the most tremendous crush on him.” The words took me as much by surprise as they did her.

Immediately, Anne looked startled. She gave a glance over her shoulder to make sure we were alone. I knew what she was thinking. How dreadful it would be if Donny ever heard me say such a thing. But having confirmed her husband was nowhere in the vicinity, she relaxed. “Why, Pal Joey,” she said, grinning with mischievous delight, “the things you say. Just make sure Donny never hears you talk like that. You’d never get in this door again if he knew you had once had designs on his brother.”

I was mildly offended that Anne had misunderstood what
I was saying. “It wasn’t
lust
,” I told her. “It was just that Bob was so kind. When the other boys started picking on me, he would say a few quiet words and it would end. It wasn’t that they were afraid of him; he had
presence
. And Bob liked being needed. Bob liked taking care of people.”

She gave me a puckish look. It was as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “So now I know why you’ve been pumping me for stories about Bob and Donny for all these years. You are still lovelorn.”

Who could resist Bob Peel’s beauty and kindness? I couldn’t. Even though I always knew that he was up a blind alley in my heart, unreachable.

This was nothing I wanted to talk to her about. So I said, “Lovelorn? Maybe for July of 1967. A month is my expiry date for carrying a torch.”

Disguising my pain and grief with flippancy worked. Anne laughed and I smiled, poured myself another splash of tequila, and thought of the two of us, Donny and me, keepers of the memory of Bob Peel, the boy who had never wanted or asked to be admired, only loved.

WHEN TONY JAPP ARRIVED
without an appointment at his agent’s office to announce he was finished with the business, Probert squirmed uneasily in his high-back-mesh-executive ergonomic chair until an opportunity came for him to break in and ask, “So is this about Betty?” Betty, Tony’s wife of thirty-five years, had died three months before. The question was not unreasonable, given how cut up his client had been by his loss.

All Japp said was, “No,” sounding as if he meant it. But then he was an actor.

They talked for a few minutes more, Probert looking understanding and empathetic, Japp stoic and resolute – like Brutus before he threw himself on his sword. Tony had once played that role at Stratford to good notices. At last, his agent sighed and murmured, “I know you, Tony. Six months, twelve at the outside, and you’ll be asking about jobs, audition calls. Acting’s in your blood.”

“It was,” said Japp. With that they shook hands and Tony left, feeling only a little disappointed that Probert hadn’t tried harder to dissuade him from laying to rest his old life.

Probert’s prediction was wrong. It took almost a year and a half before Tony Japp, in a way neither of them could have foreseen, climbed back on the acting horse. By then he was living on the Qu’Appelle Valley property that had been bequeathed to Betty by her parents, frugal, industrious people who had left her pretty well off when they died. Nine months after Tony gave Probert the news that he was kicking the acting-can down the road, he made another decision that left his friends and colleagues in Toronto wagging their heads in disbelief. He moved to Saskatchewan.
The guy’s unmoored by grief
pretty much summed up their reaction.

Tony suspected
unmanned by guilt
came closer to hitting the mark. After all, he had never grasped Betty’s sentimental attachment to her family’s cottage in the Qu’Appelle Valley. His wife had always claimed to have been happiest there – although Tony had trouble believing anything even remotely pleasant could have taken place in that godforsaken setting. By July, the lake floated leprous-looking archipelagos of blue algae; the barren, parched hills surrounding this toxic puddle left Tony feeling as if he were residing on the site of some nuclear disaster that had blasted every living thing with a lethal dose of radioactivity. He thought of the place as “Chernobyl,” a nickname he was careful never to let escape
his lips when his wife was within earshot. She would have gone ballistic.

As soon as Betty got her hands on the property, she began a relentless renovation and expansion of the cottage. The work dragged on for five summers and Tony was luckily absent for most of the construction since he had gigs at various summer drama festivals. When he chanced a few discreet remarks about the expense and practicality of Betty’s home improvement frenzy, he got a tart rebuttal: “God isn’t making any more lakes. The value of recreation property will only go up with time. It’s an investment.”

Tony knew that his wife was not really intent on upping the value of the property; what she was busy doing was feathering them a nest for their golden years. Winterizing it so it could be occupied year-round was what tipped her hand. Betty’s plan was for them to retire there when Tony finally came to his senses and agreed to give up acting.

Telling Probert that his forsaking stage and screen had had nothing to do with Betty had been a bald-faced lie. Before she had fallen ill, Betty had been able to talk about little else. “You’ve had a good run, Tony. Take it easy now, enjoy life. What Mom and Dad left us put our money worries to rest. Face it, you’re never going to top
Aid
or get back to where you once were. It’s just not in the cards,” she would say, giving him a little tough-love, truth-telling lecture that always sent him into a three-day sulk.

Aid
had been the highlight of Tony’s career, a
CBC
series in which he had starred as Bobby Casgrain, a legal aid lawyer whose dyslexia had pinned the
stupid
label on him as a boy, the child of an unmarried welfare mother whose drug
habit had landed him in the care of stern foster parents. These psychic scars had turned Bobby into a social crusader, a righteous defender of down-and-outers, a rule-flouting lawyer often cited by judges for contempt, a legal bad boy affectionately supervised by his wise, matronly boss, Alice Dawe, the supportive, nurturing Mommy he had never known. Casgrain was the quintessential Canadian Perry Mason, a defender of the marginalized, the scourge of heartless Crown prosecutors and prejudiced cops.

The moderate success of
Aid
during the early 1990s had earned Tony tepid Canadian fame, although that had now cooled to the point where only occasionally, very occasionally, did somebody passing him on the street throw him a puzzled glance as if to say,
You look familiar. Didn’t we go to school together?

But Betty’s death had left him with concerns other than giving a boost to his sagging star. He was nagged by feelings of guilt, feelings that he had an obligation to appreciate what his wife had loved, to take a stab at accepting what Betty had spent so long preparing for them. A retirement home in the valley.

But before he could do his duty by Betty, the condo in Toronto needed to be sold, loose ends tidied up, and arrangements made to ship his belongings halfway across the continent. All of this took much longer than he expected, the result of which was that he had arrived in the Qu’Appelle Valley in late autumn, winter ready to pounce. Which it did shortly, with a vengeance. Soon howling blizzard followed on the heels of howling blizzard. On the days when the sky didn’t blanket everything in sight with a pall of snow, the
wind came shrieking down from the hills to thud against his doors, to lament in his roof vents, to groan in the throat of his chimney.

Suddenly Chernobyl had gotten much worse. Chernobyl had frozen solid. Yet as relentlessly white and empty as the landscape had become, it was nothing compared to the void within him. After his wife’s death, Tony’s friends had talked him into seeing a therapist. But he had given up on counselling because, as far as he could see, it wasn’t doing him any good. Now he wondered if maybe his therapist, a very pleasant, sympathetic, capable young woman, hadn’t been able to get through to him because there had been nothing for her to reach, that his core was a blank, had always been a blank.

Perhaps that had been the root of his bewilderment on those occasions when other actors talked about recognizing some part of themselves in a character, of using that bit to begin to flesh out a role, to add layers to the onion. They had been talking about working from the
inside
out, which had always seemed strange to him. A notion he distrusted. Because Tony Japp had always been an
outside-in
actor. He began with the words on the page, although they had never been all he needed. He had always required something more, something tangible, something real and solid, something he could touch and handle. He had needed to hold the onion, and for Tony Japp the onion had always been the right costume, the right prop.

In
Aid
the onion had been Bobby Casgrain’s lawyer’s robe spattered with “two all-beef patties, special sauce …” and Tim Hortons doughnut-glaze stains. Bobby’s grubby appearance had been a recurring joke worked and reworked by the
showrunner. But for Tony that greasy rag wasn’t a joke; it
was
Casgrain, not just camouflage that lulled prosecutors and judges into underrating him, taking him for an incompetent mook. The robe was Casgrain’s history, a messy life made visible.