Elizabeth and After (14 page)

Adam’s memories were both more vague and more general: he would be gripping his mother’s thigh between his knees and rocking back and forth, pretending she was a horse which was how he passed the time when she was in her Bible-reading moments, and his tongue would suddenly fill with butterflies, fluttering spluttering butterflies. His tongue would be rocking and fluttering and spluttering and then he would start to hum, as he often did, except that on these occasions he felt something growing inside his tongue, swelling it up, and as the butterfly fluttered and spluttered, the noise got louder and the wet underside of his tongue began to bounce against his lower lip fighting and exciting him until his body would start to shake as though that imaginary horse were galloping across rough bone-rattling ground—which was where it entered next, the bones—and for the last time he would open his eyes, or sometimes he thought he was looking right through the lids, and as the sounds took him over and he fell from his mother’s knee he would see Lorna Richardson or Jessica Boyce or Katherine Dean or Miranda Arnold or any of those dozen women who in varying combinations would gather in his mother’s kitchen, and as he fell there was this great rush of air as though he’d been sucked down into a tunnel only to be instantly spat out, writhing on the floor among the big heavy skirts that swayed like bottomless tents, airless odiferous tents swaying in harmony to the yabbering and jabbering of his gabbly song, and as he yabbered it and jabbered it his head would open up and bits of the lives of the Ladies of the Inner Circle would present themselves, complete with coy virgin blushes stolen kisses the voices the midnight couplings
the blood between the legs the trees pushing themselves up through the skulls of the dead the wild.

Afterwards Adam would be left lying empty on the floor, wet and ashamed, his bones aching; then Flora would pick him up and wrap her arms around him, rock him gently back and forth reciting: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

Eventually the news of Adam’s gift spread all the way to Toronto and an expert in such cases came to inspect. His mission was duly reported in the West Gull
Weekly Bugle:

Accompanying the article was a picture of the kindly and smiling Very Reverend White seated on the living-room sofa with Adam, who looked suitably abashed and ringleted. The Very Reverend had just asked Adam what went through his mind when he “uttered.” Adam, closing his eyes to conjure the moment, instead remembered that Katherine Dean’s shins were covered with a strange fine fuzz similar to mouse fur.

Within a year or two Adam began to listen more closely to his mother’s readings, though he heard not “charity” but “clarity,” which put him in mind of the sounding brass and the tinkling cymbal. Finally when he was eight years old and entitled to his own chair, as his tongue started to flutter and slap against his lower lip and its base began its painful tumescent tremble, the words “tinkling cymbal” made him picture two large shining brass plates ready to strike against each other. This distraction was what ruined it: instead of falling on the floor and babbling he got up from his chair to look in the refrigerator.

One of the items sure to be present was a pint-sized bottle with a flower-edged label reading Adam’s Deep Sleep. Adam’s Deep Sleep was an anti-colic medicine his mother used to brew from local herbs and sell in fancy little bottles. Adam’s Deep Sleep really worked. Or at least people thought it did because to begin with Adam’s Deep Sleep had been the mixture Flora used on her son, and everyone knew how deep were
his
sleeps. Amid the flowers of the label was an only slightly idealized version of Adam’s face, a little round cherub with fat blond curls and pink Cupid’s lips.

The Deep Sleep was how Adam had met Luke Richardson: a baby so cranky and tormented by colic that Adam never forgot him laid out in his pram in a pink dress, face and hairless skull wrinkled blood-pitch with pain and rage, gums wide
open as he howled. Flora would pick him up and give him a few mouthfuls of Adam’s Deep Sleep—the pint bottle in her refrigerator was a special codeine-reinforced supply she kept for emergencies. “You’re so well-behaved, such a good boy,” Luke’s mother would meanwhile praise Adam. “I hope Luke grows up to be like you.”

Instead Luke grew into one of the tough little boys at the West Gull Elementary, booting the soccer ball about in the spring and fall, in the winter taking his lumps playing hockey with the older boys on the outdoor rink. Adam was several grades ahead and didn’t pay much attention until late one winter afternoon. He was leaving the school after choir practice and a group of boys who’d been playing hockey attacked the choir with snowballs—a routine occurrence at the West Gull Elementary. This was the signal for the girls to run away so the boys could chase after and leap on top of them with much giggling and face-rubbing and sometimes kissing.

But this time Luke and two of his friends came directly after Adam. Bigger, careless, still thinking of Luke as the squalling brat in the carriage, Adam reached down to scoop up some snow. His fingers found a chunk of ice. He threw it with all his strength and it caught Luke in the face. With a roar of rage Luke leapt on Adam., fists swinging wildly. While the others gathered about, he took Adam down to the ground. As Adam raised his arms to protect himself, Luke’s mittened fists crashed into his nose. There was a sharp intense pain between his eyes, he felt the blood gush out, heard his own howl of helplessness and rage. He was curled in the snow, crying, nose streaming blood while Luke, a boy four years younger, kept pounding to the cheers of his friends.

The next day at school Luke approached him in the yard. “Guh-day,
Adam
. How you doing?” He clapped Adam on the
arm as though they were old cronies, equals, and stuck out his hand. Adam was twelve years old, four grades ahead of Luke and half a foot taller. As they shook hands Luke said in an unbroken boy’s voice that made his words sound even more unpleasant, “Sorry about yesterday, Adam. From now on, you can count on me. Anyone gives you shit, I’ll kill him.”

By the next year, Adam’s last at the West Gull Elementary, Luke was almost his height and his voice had turned to gravel. No one took runs at him playing hockey any more; he was growing big and strong the way Richardsons did. Just the sound of his skates carving up the ice was enough to turn the others into quickly fading ghosts.

Sometimes after choir practice Adam would pause at the rink on the way home, watching Luke and thinking that after eight years at school he had no real friends—just one enemy—and Adam would feel a stone in his heart. Sometimes Luke would see Adam, wave to him as he glided by. “Adam, how’s my man?” Then Adam graduated and started taking the bus to high school. He would see Luke only occasionally on the street, and Luke would always come and greet him, shake his hand as if already campaigning to be elected.

After he was killed, a photograph of Hank Goldsmith appeared on the polished walnut corner table of the living room of the house he had bought with Flora. It showed him in his airforce uniform, tall and lanky, the handsome big-beaked face his son inherited looking at the camera as if this posing for eternity was just an elaborate hoax. A second photo in Flora’s bedroom, a signed picture enclosed in a gilt-edged frame, opened up like a book and contained a message:
To Flora, from her lonely pilot, Hank
. The picture presented him in half-profile, his bony face romantically shadowed. The pictures had been
sent from the Golden Memory Studios in London, England, a week before he was killed in an air raid.

“Hank liked it that way,” Flora Goldsmith would say about such things as cooking the peas with the roast or mowing the lawn for the last time on Labour Day. It was Hank this and Hank that and Hank’s closet full of Hank’s clothes—some of them wrapped in their dry-cleaning plastic from twenty years before—waiting for Hank to come home, along with Hank’s section of the bookcase and in the basement, neatly arranged, Hank’s fishing tackle, Hank’s golf clubs, Hank’s hunting rifle and hanging from a nail, too perfect for any foot, Hank’s fancy waterproof leather hunting boots, which had been Flora’s last present to him, the one she bought for his homecoming. Once or twice when Adam came back from school he caught his mother in the kitchen, slightly drunk, her dead husband’s boots spread out on newspapers on the table, getting a polish.

The war had left the town short of men; most who remained were quick to volunteer for double duty. And the Inner Circle was not lacking in widows who left their children at the Goldsmith house for a few days while they took a recreational trip to Ottawa or Toronto. But Flora never made such trips; no embarrassed suitors ever showed up at the door, there were never unexplained visitors or absences. There was just “Hank liked it this way” and Hank’s pictures and Hank’s boots and her visions that she reported to the Inner Circle of the Church of the Unique God. And of course work: she had her widow’s pension and a trickle of income from Adam’s Deep Sleep, but eventually Flora had to start nursing again. Often this meant she would be out all night leaving Adam to fend for himself. But his mother’s calm abstinence and devotion to duty found their mirror in her studious young son. Or perhaps he’d had
his orgies young—not in bed but wherever it was he lived with the voices, taken over by their rantings, their wild songs, their unending excesses as much as one person’s flesh can be taken by another. Or so Adam decided. By the time the voices withdrew he had been so exhausted and humiliated by them he was relieved to be beached far from the storm, happy to stand aside while others began compulsively twitching their hormonal dances. He watched. He had girl friends but friends were all they were. His odd distance made it easy for them to confide and sometimes they used him to try their perfumes or even their wiles. But whatever he was missing he didn’t miss it. When he left his mother’s house to go to university in Ottawa, his aloofness gave him a new role: in the student residences he became a kind of priest—a confirmed abstainer to whom everything could be confessed.

The week after his graduation Adam flew to London in search of Golden Memory Studios. He found it in Earl’s Court, a run-down shop with a dirty counter up front and in the back a little room that smelled of tobacco and stale aquarium water. The curtain was a dark moth-eaten disaster Adam recognized from his father’s picture. He sat on what must have been the same stool, posed in semi-profile the same way, lit a cigarette to produce that careless swirl of smoke. Adam remembered his father as lean and tanned, the kind of out-doorsman featured on the covers of magazines. But his father’s last photographs had shown a gaunt middle-aged man pale with the romantic tragedy of the forties, his thoughtful eyes filled with the horrors of war.

He was staying in a hotel near Hyde Park. He discovered that the British were an odd race: their television, their sausages, their brown sauce, their habit of looking at you as though to ask what you were doing there. Adam’s only answer was that
he was searching for his dead father. When he went back to Golden Memory Studios to pick up his portrait he asked the owner, a man who looked eligible to have survived all the wars since the Restoration, if he remembered Hank or Henry Goldsmith.

“Hank or Henry Goldsmith? Which was it?”

“The soldier. He had his picture taken here during the war.”

“During the war?”

The next week Adam returned to Canada to take up a job at the Kingston tax department. He moved into a downtown apartment building, a one-bedroom furnished with a truck-load of worn second-hand furniture he bought one Saturday morning at Turk’s Antiques. The upholstery was all red-ribbed velour, popular at the time, the dining-room set was peeling oak veneer, the bedsprings were edged with rust. At his mother’s insistence he bought a new mattress to avoid germs. Nights he would come home, cook himself something out of a can, read the books he spent his lunch hours borrowing from the library. Occasionally he would work up the courage to go to a movie where, standing alone in line and feeling like a freak from the psychiatric hospital, he would hide behind his newspaper until he got his ticket, then huddle into his seat grateful for the dark. After his second month he sacrificed his movie nights to begin saving in a separate account with the plan to eventually go back to London and take a graduate degree in economics.

Flora Goldsmith believed in the powers of love and coincidence: star-struck destinies, first meetings, chance encounters, fateful slips on the ice.
Testimonies
, she called these significant stories. In the Inner Circle, participants were encouraged to
relate their testimonies: what they had witnessed, where they had been, how they had experienced the crucial moments of their lives.

Another coincidence: when Elizabeth gave her testimony Adam happened to be at the house. He had a day off from the tax department and was in the basement stacking lengths of maple for the big wood furnace.

Years later, Adam would ask Elizabeth, “How could you tell them all about yourself just like that? How did you have the courage? What even made you go to the meeting?”

“It was Dorothy Dean’s idea. She was subbing that day and after school she invited me to go to your mother’s. She made it sound like a game, not a religious ceremony. Your mother—she had such a calm face, yet you sensed that beneath the calmness was some kind of wildness, or understanding of wildness. And at the time I was feeling so … out of place here. Stranded. What was I doing living with a farmer in the middle of nowhere? Or not nowhere at all, but a very specific somewhere where everyone had known and been related to each other for a million generations. I had nothing to go back to, no way forward. When your mother asked me to talk about myself it was the first time in the five years I’d lived here that anyone showed any interest. Real interest.
Tell us about yourself
. She asked as though she really wanted to know and I thought, well, Elizabeth, here’s your chance, right in front of everyone, blurt it all out; maybe it will make things easier. And once I got started I couldn’t stop.”