I'll See You in My Dreams: An Arthur Beauchamp Novel (46 page)

Sound advice. Who knows what other loosely bound revelations lurk in, say, the original copy of the truncated memoirs? But rather than hiring someone, I ought to go to Ottawa myself. I have recent, bitter memories of that town – a contempt citation, a botch-up that made me a laughingstock – but I might manage to stay out of trouble for a couple of nights.

The librarian calls me to the phone. I'm abstracted as I rise, wondering what Margaret's reaction might be to my descending on her. I don't want to stumble in on … what?

Gertrude is on the line,
sotto voce:
“She's here.”

It takes me a moment to orient, to realize she's not referring to Margaret. I look wildly about for a hiding place, choose a narrow aisle of dusty old texts, grab one at random, bury my face in it, feeling pathetic because I know it won't take her long to ferret me out.

“Good morning.”

I peek over the book. Annabelle is standing at the other end of the aisle, bag slung over her shoulder, hand cocked on hip, tall and stunning, a blonde now. Today's featured ghost: Annabelle thirty years ago, looking more like our daughter, Deborah, than herself.

As she approaches I find myself admiring the artistry of whoever recomposed her face. “Annabelle, how delightful.”

“Don't tell me I look decades younger,” she says, still reading me easily after a dozen years apart. “I hate that even though it's true. You, however, are living proof that men age with more grace. You look fantastic.”

“There's fresh coffee in the lounge. Can you stay a minute?” Delicately imposing a time limit, though I must admit to being flattered.

“I'm late for an appointment. I just wanted to thank you for signing the book.” A continental kiss on both cheeks, the scent of something subtle and alluring. “Stop being so tense, darling. I'm not going to eat you.” She pats me on the cheek.

“No, it's just … it's been a long time.”

She pulls
A Thirst
from her bag, opens a bookmarked page: a photo from the seventies, the two of us arm in arm, she looking infinitely leggy in her mini. “Given my transgressions, I do come off rather entertainingly, don't I? The bad girl.”

“More creatively portrayed than I, by a landslide.”

“Not at all. I kept saying to myself, ‘Yes, yes, this is the man I loved, this complex, insecure, beautiful being, who when he's not mesmerizing a jury can walk into the General Store with poop on his pants.' ” She twists her head almost sideways to see the title of the book I'm holding.
“Eighteenth Century Origins of Modified Trusts
. How fascinating.”

“Ah, yes … only makes sense when read upside down.” With this feeble joke I return the book to the shelf right side up and usher her to the reading room, where she greets Riley, who rises and makes a pretence of bowing. The old fellow has been bent over tables for so long he can't stand straight anyway.

She protests but I insist on escorting her down to the parking levels. We are alone in the lift; I feel edgy, and in sensing her pull I am alarmed at its power. She is more assured and sexy than in her young womanhood, wiser, more confident.

She chatters on, confirming my reading of her postcard that hers was a divorce sans tears. “François was too immature, too romantically fascist, in love with Wagner.” Her settlement? “He loved me too much to fight over the spoils. I have the Lucerne chalet and the condo in San Remo, and he the Bayreuth property and the ridiculous ranch – I can't imagine what he was thinking – in Brazil. I'm extremely well-off.”

That sounds dangerously like an invitation to share. I take over with a sprightly updater about laid-back Garibaldi.

“And how is Margaret?”

“Constantly amazing.”

“You must be so proud of her. Given your obsessive dislike of Ottawa, it was probably smart to return to your poky little island. Marriage survives best taken in short dollops. It's more like an affair that way.”

“Deborah wrote that you and she shared some time in Sydney.”

“Yes, she came to see
Lohengrin
at the Opera House. There was a sort of mending, but I doubt she'll ever forgive my treatment of you. I am sorry, Arthur. I was quite wicked, wasn't I?”

I suppress a polite impulse to disagree and say nothing. By now we have exited the elevator at parking level A, where Annabelle has appropriated for her late-model Jaguar one of the firm's reserved stalls. “Who's the office stud who drives the extreme machine?” She's looking at the Mustang.

“That would be me, Annabelle.”

She tosses her hair, laughs at what she takes as an absurdity. “You're funny, Arthur. Look, they're throwing a do for me, a welcome-back party, next Friday evening. A lot of people you know will be there. Old friends, musicians, artists. They're all asking about you, of course.”

“I'm afraid I shall be on Garibaldi. I'm returning tonight.”

“If you find yourself wandering back, it's at the Orpheum, in the lounge. Saturday, seven to never. Ciao.”

Another kiss, but on the lips, friendly, not over-familiar. And suddenly she is in her car and pulling away.

My childhood passion for the priesthood had little to do with God. In our family, in our parish, one accepted a supreme power without thought or hesitation. God was just there, plunked right in front of you, solid, like the kitchen range
.

I have kicked my shoes off, am lying on my office couch with the memoir, reading with a newly jaundiced eye what I've read scores of times. A few pages ago Mulligan was mourning his sister, but this part is jaunty.

But, ah, the splendour, the glory of St. Joseph's Oratorio, of Notre Dame Cathedral. I was entranced by the grandness, the solemnity, the
gaudiness, everything that young eyes see as awesome, and mature and wiser eyes see as pompous. And the costumery. Not for me the plebeian blackness of a priest's habit; give me scarlet! I would be an archbishop, maybe Pope Dermot the First
.

But these dreams dissipated when I fell in love with teaching …

This style, this lightness of prose, seems forced. It's foreign to the professor's other writings and, as I recall, his lectures. He never joked, rarely smiled. Maybe he was trying to loosen up with this memoir, in contemplation of death and freedom from guilt.

Glancing up, I jump. April Wu is standing three feet away, smiling in her subtle, secret way.

“Come right in,” I say.

“Forgive me, I'm neurotically snoopy.” She bends her willowy form over the desk, recognizes what I'm reading. “I don't recall any thoughts of suicide in there.”

“Let's assume he repressed them until he was no longer able to, and then the dam burst. How could he write about Pie Eleven without that memory flooding back? To escape the pain, he takes a great notion to jump in the river and drown.”

“He who is drowned is not troubled by the rain.” April perches, birdlike, on a chair and removes a file from her bag, two inches thick. “This is the life of Sebastian Snow.”

“A busy one.”

“A desperate one.”

I leaf through her documents. The first several are copies of social welfare records from the 1950s, sections of which April has highlighted with a marking pen. They mention exchanges of correspondence between Caroline Snow and her son up to 1957. That year, after Sebastien turned fourteen, she sent him bus fare for a visit to Vancouver. He left Regina in August and after reuniting with her didn't return. It was assumed he remained with her until she took a hot shot of heroin in December.

“You won't see a mention anywhere of Sebastien's father.” April can't sit still, goes to the window, admires the bold view of city and
sea and mountains. “They use phrases like ‘paternity unknown' or ‘undetermined.' Nor is there any indication that Sebastien knew who his father was or that he was conceived from rape.”

Sebastien must have lived on the street after Caroline died; there's no record of his doings until an arrest, at eighteen, for a break and enter in North Vancouver. There followed a series of convictions for theft, nuisance, assault, and narcotics, the usual pattern of those broken by the despairs of childhood trauma and poverty. Making the file weighty are the many reports from police, probation officers, and parole services.

“Let's find a typical pre-sentence report.” Her smile is unaccountably impish. She gets behind me, leans close, locates a report from 1971. The offence: malicious damage. On the last page, the probation officer's summary is highlighted.

Mr. Snow presented himself politely throughout and seemed completely aware of his circumstances. Though over-cynical and clearly depressed, he is obviously intelligent, and his school grades confirm that. It's unfortunate therefore that his life has been so entirely unproductive
.

His early difficulties in a strict foster home have been discussed above, as was the panic and the sense of hopelessness he suffered when his mother died suddenly. Despite the pity one might feel, given these antecedents, it cannot be denied that all previous rehabilitative efforts have failed, and at 28, Mr. Snow has an unenviable record of convictions. The crime is a senseless act, but I'm unable to advance any reasons why he should not be given the usual custodial sentence
.

Senseless act
 … here it is: seven counts, a drunken windshield-smashing spree. I am suffering a kind of déjà vu, flickering old images. The closeness of the playful, feline detective, her hand on my shoulder as she flips a page, adds a further disorienting element.

I am staring at a brief transcript of the sentencing on the seven counts.

MAGISTRATE SCOTT
: I am unswayed by your eloquence, Mr. Beauchamp. Nice try, but if this man is capable of reform, pigs can fly. Two years less a day
.

There'd been so many legal aid cases, a dozen every week. I am again feeling my age. I'd hoped my body would go first, that I'd be allowed to keep my brain intact, but it seems this isn't being allowed.

A welcome reprieve from these thoughts comes with the aid of a mug shot, a memory of a skinny man in prison garb, handsome but scarred and aging fast. I'd interviewed him, read this probation report, but the prostitute mom, the tragedy of her death, was lost to me.

Suddenly I'm rewarded with a snatch of conversation. I had asked Sebastien why he'd done it. “It seemed to be the most sensible thing to do at the moment.” A line I'd taken a fancy to, an odd, wry comment about a pointless act.

I repeat it to April and add, “Odd what one remembers. Odder what one forgets.”

“A bird does not sing because it has an answer. It sings because it has a song.”

I try to parse her aphorism, can't get a good grip on it.

She unhands me, gives me a sympathetic pat, glides away. “You may have swayed Sebastien, if not the judge. After he got paroled he turned things around for a while, dried out, went back to Cree territory for a new start.”

So it appears that old bugger Scott did get it wrong. Pigs can fly.

April retrieves her bag. “I have to run off and follow someone. Skip to the last report, from Native Counselling Services.”

In summary, Sebastien, a treaty Indian, was accepted into the Fox Lake Reserve in Manitoba, where he tried to live the traditional life, trapping and fishing, even marrying and raising a daughter. That lasted for nearly a decade, but the pattern of drink, drugs, and petty crime re-emerged. In 1985, after his wife died of complications from
a miscarriage, he committed suicide in Stony Mountain Penitentiary.

When I look up from this tragic ending, April has vanished as silently as she came.

As I head off to the Ritz to get my bags and check out, my mind is whirling with lives destroyed, Caroline and Sebastien and a former man of faith who fell disastrously from grace. Whose sin was such an affront to Jesus's teachings that he abandoned Him, abandoned Rome. Mulligan could no longer believe, because that would mean believing in eternal hell. As a monstrous side effect to the suicide, Gabriel, whom he had loved, was jailed, brutally maimed, and after his escape banished from his homeland under threat of returning to serve his time.