Homesick (26 page)

Vera saw this was going nowhere and mercifully brought the curtain down on the waltz. “I think maybe we ought to start with something livelier, something that has a stronger rhythm,” she
suggested, “just to get the music into your feet. How about we try a polka?”

Daniel was agreeable.

“First, let’s walk through it slowly,” said Vera. Humming, she deliberately guided Daniel through his paces, pausing to allow him to mark each transition. He moved as if in a trance, head bowed to the floor, eyes shifting from his mother’s feet to his own as she languorously stepped, turned, kicked her heels in a slow-motion dream polka. “Ready for the real music?” she inquired after they had practised for a time.

Daniel nodded.

“Now remember,” said Vera, lowering the phonograph arm on the appropriate number, “this’ll be a little quicker, in step with the music.”

She found herself snatched into frenzy. They were off. Plunging and lunging, galloping and dizzily whirling at breakneck speed. Daniel led her in a side-long charge directly at the television and then veered sharply off at the very moment that collision seemed an inevitability and bore down on the lamp-stand, feet slithering on the slick linoleum, heels tossing high in the air as they spun into a hairpin turn. The violence of the expression on his face rather alarmed her. The speed at which he swung her, the joint-cracking centrifugal force exerted on her, made Vera wonder if this wasn’t an act of revenge. But for what?

“Dear, not so …” she began to say, but lost the rest of her sentence when a wide, looping turn brought the coffeetable hurtling toward her legs. Only a severe, impromptu correction saved her from a kneecapping. Around and around the room they careened, flushed and gasping. Vera could feel her heart pounding like a trip-hammer. There was a look in Daniel’s eye which she associated with runaway horses. Whenever he spun her, crane-like legs thrashing the air in the wake of a reckless change in direction, his tie streamed over his shoulder like a prize ribbon flying from the bridle of a show pony.

It hit her. This wasn’t revenge. He was simply and completely in his glory, believing himself master of the polka. Daniel the Polka King. There was nothing for it but to pray they escaped a wreck and last it out.

That was what she did. The polka ended and they came to rest, bent over, panting, palms planted on their knees. Both felt oddly exhilarated for having survived an ordeal. Then the sound of clapping swivelled their heads to the doorway where Alec Monkman stood, smacking his hard palms together, laughing. “I believe I just saw a fight to the death between two dust-devils,” he declared.

“We were polkaing,” explained Daniel.

“You don’t need to tell me,” said his grandfather. “I know them all. When I was young I used to be a dancing fool.”

“I think I got the hang of that one,” confided Daniel, “but that waltzing is something else.”

“Nothing nicer than a waltz,” stated his grandfather. “It’s easier than rolling out of bed. Let me give you a few tips.” He made a perfunctory, mocking bow to Vera. “May I have the honour, daughter?”

Vera didn’t answer. She looked doubtful.

“We’re well-matched,” her father cajoled. “You’re winded and I’m old.”

“All right,” she said.

“Find us a waltz,” the old man said to Daniel.

“Turn it back to the beginning,” Vera ordered. “There’s one there.”

Strains of “The Tennessee Waltz” once more filled the room. The old man took his daughter in his arms, stood stock still and very upright for a full count of ten, drinking in the music. Then he launched them. Very decorously, graciously, he began to dance.

Vera had the strangest feeling. He was just as her mother had always claimed, an excellent dancer, miraculously light and easy on his feet for a big man, startlingly deft and spry for his age. But that was not the strange part. The strange part was how the two of them moved together, effortlessly. Vera had no recollection of ever
having danced with her father before, yet it was as if they had been partners for years. She had no sense of being led, or of following, but they danced as if they had one mind.

He was speaking over her head to Daniel. “Dancing is like swinging an axe. The man’s the axe and the music is what swings him. Once you accept that and stop fighting it – battle’s over. All you got to do is enjoy being swung.”

Daniel nodded solemnly.

“Another pointer. You steer your partner as much with your hands as your feet. Always give her a little warning as to where you’re headed. Just the least pressure on the small of her back means come this way – relax it a little means go that way. But light, Daniel, light. No pulling and shoving. Easy so they don’t realize they’re being steered. There’s the trick to it.”

Having delivered his advice the old man fell quiet. Father and daughter revolved about the room. How gentle it all was. Dusk stood at the windows and shadowed the room. When the waltz finished, Vera stepped back and curtsied ironically. Daniel, imitating the actions of his grandfather earlier, noisily clapped his hands and then threw the light switch.

13

E
very year it happened. With the arrival of November, Vera felt her mood going sour.

It had taken her a long time to realize that it wasn’t just the dreary, zinc-coloured skies, the listless spatters of rain, the necessity of switching on the kitchen light at four o’clock in the afternoon that was to blame for turning her temper sharp, dark, short, like the days themselves. It wasn’t weather that was at the root of her irritability and heaviness of spirit.

She knew it wasn’t fair to anyone around her, but she couldn’t help herself. Maybe what she had was catching. Her father had gingerly risked a comment just the other day.

“You and Daniel make quite a matched pair, one as glum and cranky as the other. You two eating something I’m not?”

The old man was right about the boy and her worries over Daniel had done nothing to improve her disposition. Two months into the school year and there were still no signs that her son had made any friends. Vera had hoped that the much anticipated Hallowe’en Dance might mark some kind of breakthrough, but the way Daniel moped around the house the next day, she had
gathered the occasion had not been a success. But being Daniel, he had not given much up under cross-examination.

“So did you have a nice time last night?”

A non-committal shrug of the shoulders.

“You were home early enough.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“But you had fun?”

“Sure.”

He hadn’t had fun and Vera knew it. If Daniel had had fun he wouldn’t be spending all his time with an old man, watching
TV
.

There was no getting around it, this was a miserable time of year. Miserable because Vera could not forget that November was the month she had set her sights on Stanley, made up her mind to have him. Miserable because, year after year, she went through it, sad and filled with longing. Longing for that room Stanley had led her to, up that steep, narrow flight of stairs the night that Thomas had smashed Stanley’s window. She missed that room dreadfully, ached for it in the cold of November. She could still see it as clearly as if it were yesterday. Books stacked along three walls, still more piled on windowsills and chairs, heaped on tables. To take a seat on the chesterfield it had been necessary to disturb two dictionaries, one English, one German. In the few feet of available wall space not crammed with books, up near the ceiling, Stanley had thumbtacked portraits of important men and women. Some Vera had recognized: the Roosevelts, Franklin and Eleanor; Charlie Chaplin, Einstein. Others she had been unfamiliar with. Mixed in with the portraits were reproductions of paintings. One took Vera’s fancy because it reminded her of Saskatchewan. A flock of coal-black crows floating in the sky above a yellow field of grain.

It made her sorrowful and lonesome to think of that long-ago night, Stanley busying himself with coffee in the kitchen and she moving excitedly about the living room, stopping every now and then to pick up and examine a book, to read a title or an author’s name on a spine. Gorky,
Arrowsmith
, Saroyan,
An Outline of
History
, Odets. Vera had felt buoyant, intoxicated. Maybe it had been the music on the phonograph, exuberant music composed of strange clashing, jangling sounds. It had made her disdain the very thought of sleep.

When Stanley came in carrying the coffee pot, Vera had asked him about the books. The question had no sooner left her mouth than she was afraid he might consider it rude. It was obvious that he didn’t. He had seemed delighted to talk about such things. Stanley had said that it was from his father he had inherited a passion for music, for reading, for collecting books. “In the old country my father was a tailor,” he had explained to Vera, “and tailors and cobblers had a reputation for learning. Their work was quiet work and in the large shops they sometimes pooled their money and hired a poor student to read to them while they sewed, or they took turns reading to one another. That was how my father came to know the Torah practically by heart. Not only the Torah, but also George Sand, Hugo, Dickens, and many of the Russians, writers who were popular with the socialists in the shops.
‘Toireh iz di besteh S’choireh,’
he used to say to me. It’s Yiddish and it means that learning is the best commodity. I suppose I took him at his word,” Stanley had said, looking around him.

Vera had not been sure what Torah or Yiddish were. All she knew was that they were Jewish. She didn’t ask for fear of appearing stupid and ignorant.

The two of them talked late into the night or, more correctly, early into the morning, drinking lots of coffee sparingly anointed with whisky. Stanley seemed to naïvely regard himself as something of a devil for offering a lady whisky, and measured hers by the thimbleful. Vera liked him for that. She liked him for being softly spoken and for carefully and deliberately forming his sentences before delivering them. His thinking through them showed on his face. She liked him for the encouraging way he had of listening to what she said; a way which never suggested that this was a trade-off, part of a bargain which contracted that she was obliged
to listen to him. She actually saw him brighten when she told him she was from Saskatchewan. “Tommy Douglas!” he exclaimed, as if the one name couldn’t be said without the other. He questioned her about the
CCF
and she found herself acting as if she and her family had always been supporters, even though she knew very well that her father was a Gardiner Liberal. She did this because Stanley told her he was a socialist. “Eugene Debs,” he said, pointing proudly to one of the photographs on his wall.

Vera did not ask him who Eugene Debs was. She believed she could guess what general category he fit into.

Vera found herself telling Stanley about her work at the theatre, spicing her story with anecdotes about Mr. Buckle. She liked Stanley Miller for the ironic laughter that greeted her tales about the manager. She filled him in on her woeful experiences with Thomas. She liked him for not laughing at these. Several times she interrupted herself, saying, “But you must be tired …” He always dismissed the suggestion. “Remember, I’m the all-night reader. The regular night owl.”

Vera noted how thin he was. That he smoked too much. That he drank too much coffee. That he was at least forty-five, maybe older.

Some time after four o’clock, Stanley ran out of coffee and they switched to tea. He brewed it in a thing he called a samovar, the way his parents had. Both of them were dead. He had no brothers or sisters.

Stanley demonstrated how his father had drunk his tea, sipping it through a sugar cube clenched in his front teeth. He urged Vera to try. She was game. It wasn’t the whisky either, she hadn’t had enough.

Even though she kept consulting her watch and saying she must go, she didn’t. It was nearly eight o’clock in the morning before she left; Stanley had to open his doors in an hour. Then came the only awkwardness of the entire night, when they shook hands and said goodbye, Vera hesitating, waiting so that he would have the opportunity to suggest they meet again. He didn’t.

But Vera had no intention of letting it fizzle out and end so lamely. She reasoned that an old bachelor like Stanley probably lacked confidence with women, that’s why he hadn’t dared to ask her for a date. A little nudging might be required, to show him he was on safe ground. And the smashed window provided an excuse, a plausible reason, for her to make amends for bringing this misfortune down on his head.

During the course of the evening, Vera had asked Stanley who his favourite writer was. When he had told her it was someone whose name sounded like Mountain to Vera, she had nodded her head and done her best to appear knowledgeable. Setting out two days later to buy a thank-you present for Stanley, she went in search of a book by that particular author.

“Mountain?” the lady who clerked in the snooty bookstore with all the tall bookcases had said. There were four female clerks in the store and Vera could scarcely differentiate one from the other. They all appeared to have been stamped out by the same cookie cutter. Tightly waved grey hair, tweed skirts, sweaters, brown oxfords, and glasses which hung on thin chains, dangling against insignificant bosoms, were common to all four. “Mountain?” said the woman again, eyeing Vera up and down as if to suggest she had her nerve, wasting a person’s time. “And what does Mr. Mountain write?”