Man Descending (6 page)

Then suddenly he said, “Evelyn.” He pointed to the upstairs window of the house and tried to get out of the back seat of the police car. But of course he couldn’t. They take the handles off the back doors. Nobody can get out unless they are let out.

“Goddamn it!” he shouted. “Let me out! She’s waving to me! She wants me!”

I admit that the figure was hard to make out at that distance. But any damn fool could see she was only waving goodbye.

Reunion

I
T WAS
a vivid countryside they drove through, green with new wheat, yellow with random spatters of wild mustard, blue with flax. The red and black cattle, their hides glistening with the greasy shine of good pasture, left off grazing to watch the car pass, pursued by a cloud of boiling dust. Poplar bluffs in the distance shook in the watery heat haze with a crazy light, crows whirled lazily in the sky like flakes of black ash rising from a fire.

The man, his wife, and their little boy were travelling to a Stiles family reunion. It was the woman who was a Stiles, had been
born
a Stiles rather. Her husband was a Cosgrave.

The boy wasn’t entirely certain who he was. Of course, most times he was a Cosgrave. That was his name, Brian Anthony Cosgrave, and he was six years old and could spell every one of his names. But in the company of his mother’s people, somehow he became a Stiles. None of them saw anything but his mother in him: hair, eyes, nose, mouth – all were so like hers they might have been borrowed, relatives exclaimed. Since his father had no people (at least none that mattered enough to visit), Brian Anthony Cosgrave had never heard the other side of the story.

“For God’s sake, Jack,” Edith Cosgrave said, “stay away from the whiskey for once. It’s a warm day. If they offer you whiskey ask for a beer instead. On a hot day it isn’t rude to ask for a beer.”

“Yes, mother dear,” her husband said, eyes fixed on the grid road. “No, mother. If you please, mother. Christ.”

“You know as well as I do what happens when you drink whiskey, Jack. It goes down too easy and you lose count of how many you’ve had. I don’t begrudge you your beers. It’s that damn whiskey,” she said angrily.

“It tastes twice as good when I know the pain it costs a Stiles to put it on the table.”

“Or me to watch you guzzle it.”

“Shit.”

The Cosgrave family had the slightly harried and shabby look of people who, although not quite poor, know only too well and intimately the calculations involved in buying a new winter coat, eyeglasses, or a pair of shoes. Jack Cosgrave’s old black suit was sprung taut across his belly, pinched him under the armpits. It also showed a waxy-white scar on the shoulders where it had hung crookedly on a hanger, untouched for months.

His wife, however, had tried to rise to the occasion. This involved an attempt to dress up a white blouse and pleated skirt with two purchases: a cheap scarlet belt cinched tightly at her waist and a string of large red beads wound round her throat.

The boy sat numbly on the back seat in a starched white shirt, strangled by a clip-on bow tie and itching in his one pair of “good” pants – heavy wool trousers.

“They’re not to be borne without whiskey,” Cosgrave muttered, “your family.”

“And you’re not to be borne with it in you,” she answered sharply. But relented. Perhaps it did not pay to keep at him today. “Please, Jack,” she said, “let’s have a nice time for once. Don’t embarrass me. Be a gentleman. Let me hold my head up. Show some respect for my family.”

“That’s all
I
ask,” he said, speaking quickly. “I’d like a little respect from
them
. They all look at me as if I was something the goddamn cat dragged in and dropped in the front parlour.” Saying this, he gave an angry little spurt to the gas pedal for emphasis and the car responded by slewing around in the loose gravel on the road, pebbles chattering on the undercarriage.

So like Jack, she thought, to be a bit reckless. A careless, passionate man. It was what drew her to him in the beginning. His recklessness, his charming ways, his sweet cunning. So different from what she had learned of the male character from observing her brothers: slow, apple-faced men who plodded about their business, the languor of routine steeped deep into their heavy limbs.

Edith Cosgrave glanced at her husband’s face. A face dark with furious blood, dark as a plum. He was right in believing her family didn’t think much of him. She could not deny it. A man meant to work for wages all his life, that was how her brothers would put it. She only wished Jack had not failed in that first business. It had been his one chance, bought with the little money his father had left him. He was unsuited to taking orders, job after job had proved that. Now he found himself a clerk, standing behind a counter in a hardware store, courtly and gallant to women, patient with children, sullen and rude to men. Faithful to his conception of what a man owed to pride.

“It’s not as bad as all that,” she said. “Don’t get your Irish up.”

He smiled suddenly, a crooked, delighted grin. “If one of them, just one of them, happens to mention – as they always do, the bastards – that this car is getting long in the tooth, why, my dear, that Stiles sleeps tonight cold in the ground with a clay comforter, I swear. Who gives a shit if my car is nine years old? I don’t. Nineteen forty-six was a very good year for Fords. A good year in general, wasn’t it, mother?”

“You’re a fool,” she said. It was the year they had married. “And whether it was a good year or not depends on how you look at it.” Still, she was glad to see his dark mood broken, and couldn’t help smiling back at him with a mixture of relief and indulgence. The man could smile, she had to grant him that.

“How long is this holy, blessed event, this gathering of the tribe Stiles, to continue?” he asked with the heavy irony that had become second nature whenever he spoke of his in-laws.

“I don’t have the faintest. When you’re ready to leave just say so.”

“Oh no. I’m not bearing that awful responsibility. I can see them all now, casting that baleful Stiles look, the one your father used to give me, certain that I’m tearing you against your will out of the soft, warm bosom of the family. Poor Edith.”

“Jack.”

“What we need is a secret signal,” Cosgrave said, delighted as always by any fanciful notion that happened to strike him. “What if I stamp my foot three times when I want to go home? Like this.” He pounded his left foot down on the floorboards three times, slowly and deliberately, like a carnival horse stamping out the solution to an arithmetic puzzle for the wondering, gaping yokels.

Brian laughed exuberantly.

“No, no,” his father declared, glancing over his shoulder at the boy, playing to his audience, “that won’t do. If I know your mother she’d just pretend to think that my foot had gone to sleep and ignore me. I know her ways, the rascal.”

“Watch the road or you’ll murder us all.”

“What if I hum a tune? That would be the ticket. Who’d catch on to that?”

“Goodnight Irene,” his wife suggested, entering into the spirit of the thing. “You used to sing it to me when you left me on the doorstep when we were going out.” She winked at Brian. He flung his torso over the front seat, wriggled his shoulders, and giggled.

“Mind your shirt buttons,” his mother warned him, “or you’ll tear them off.”

“My dear woman, you must have me confused with what’s his name, Arnold Something-or-other. He was the type to croon on doorsteps. I was much more forward. If you remember.”

“Jack, watch your mouth. Little pitchers have big ears.”

“Anyway,” he carried on, “ ‘Goodnight Irene’ isn’t it. How about ‘God Save the Queen’? Much more appropriate to conclude a boring occasion. Standard fare to bring to an end any gathering in this fair Dominion. After all, it’s one of your favourites, Edith. I’ll pay a little vocal tribute to Her Majesty, Missus the Duke, by the Grace of God, etc. How does that strike you, honey?”

He was teasing her. For although the Stileses’ hard-headed toughness ran deep in his wife, she had a romantic weakness for the royal family. There was her scrapbook of coronation pictures, her tears for Captain Townsend and the Princess. And, most treasured of all, a satin bookmark with Edward VIII’s abdication speech printed on it. She had been a girl when he relinquished the crown and it had seemed to her that Edward’s love for Mrs. Simpson was something so fine, so beyond earthly considerations, that the capacity for such feelings had to be the birthright of kings. Only a king could love like that.

“Don’t tease, Jack,” she said, lips tightening.

Brian flung himself back against the back seat, sobered by the knowledge she meant business. The game, the light-heartedness, were at an end.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” his father said testily, “now we’re offended for the bloody Queen.”

“You never know when enough is enough, do you? You’ve always got to push it. So what if I feel a certain way about the Queen? Or my family? Why can’t you respect that?”

The car rushed down into a little valley where a creek had slipped its banks and puddled on the bay flats, bright as mercury. The Ford ground up the opposing hills. Swearing and double-clutching, his father had to gear down twice to make the grade. A few miles on, a sign greeted them. Brian, who read even cornflakes boxes aloud, said carefully: “Welcome to Manitoba.”

The town was an old one judged by prairie standards and had the settled, completed look that most lack. Where Brian lived there were no red-brick houses built by settlers from Ontario, fewer mountain ashes or elms planted on the streets. The quality of the shade these trees cast surprised him when he stepped from the car. It swam, glided over the earth. It was full of breezes and sudden glittering shifts of light. Yet it was deeper, cooler, bluer than any he could remember. He threw his head back and stared, perplexed, into a net of branches.

His mother took him by the hand, and, his father following, they started up the walk to what had been her father’s house and now was her eldest brother’s. A big house, two storeys of mustard-coloured stucco, white trim, and green shingles, it stood on a double lot. The lawn was dotted with relatives.

“They must have emptied the jails and asylums for the occasion,” his father observed. “Quite a turnout.”

“Jack,” Edith said perfunctorily as she struggled with the gate latch.

Brian could sense the current of excitement running in his mother’s body and he felt obscurely jealous. To see the familiar faces of aunts, uncles, brothers, and the cousins with whom she had idled away the summers of childhood had made his mother shed the tawdry adult years like a snake sheds an old and worn skin. Every one of them liked her. She was a favourite with them all. Even more so now that they felt sorry for her.

“Edith!” they cried when they hugged and kissed her. Brian had his hair rumpled and, in a confusion of adult legs, his toes stepped on once. An uncle picked him up, hefted him judiciously, pretended to guess his weight. “This is a big one!” he shouted. “A whopper! A hundred and ninety if he’s a pound!”

Jack Cosgrave stood uncomfortably a little off from the small crowd surrounding his wife, smiling uneasily, his hands thrust in his pockets. He took refuge in lighting a cigarette and appearing to study the second-storey windows of the house. He had spent one night up there in the first year of their marriage. But never again. That same year he had come to his father-in-law with a business proposition when the shoe store failed. A business proposition the miserable old shit had turned down flat. None of the rest of those Stileses needed to think things wouldn’t have been different for Jack Cosgrave if he had got a little help when he really needed it. If he had, he’d have been in clover this minute instead of walking around with his ass practically hanging out of his pants and nothing in his pockets to jingle but his balls.

“Brian,” said Edith, her arm loosely circling a sister-in-law’s waist, “you run along and play with your cousins. Over there, see?” She pointed to a group of kids flying around the lawn, chanting taunts to one another as they played tag. “
Can’t catch me for a bumble bee
!” squealed a pale girl with long, coltish legs.

“Just be careful you don’t get grass stains on your pants, okay, honey?”

The boy felt forlorn at this urging to join in. His mother, returned to her element, sure of the rich sympathies of blood, could not imagine the desolation he felt looking at those children’s strange faces.

“Bob, dear,” said Edith, turning to a brother, “keep an eye on Jack, won’t you? See that he doesn’t get lonely without me.” They all laughed. Among the stolid Stileses Edith had a reputation as a joker. Jack Cosgrave, looking at his wife’s open, relaxed face, seeing her easiness among these people, felt betrayed.

“Sure, sure thing, Edith,” replied her brother. He turned to Cosgrave, seemed to hesitate, touched him on the elbow. “Come along and say hello to the fellows, Jack.” He indicated a card table set under a Manitoba maple around which a group of men were sitting. They started for it together.

“Jack,” said Bob, “these are my cousins from Binscarth, Earl and George. You know Albert, of course.” Jack Cosgrave knew Albert. Albert was Edith’s youngest brother and the one who had the least use for him. “This here is Edith’s husband, Jack Cosgrave.”

“Hi, Jack, take a load off,” said one of the men. Earl, he thought it was. Cosgrave nodded to the table, but before he took a seat his eye was caught by his son standing, arms dangling hopelessly as he watched his cousins race across the grass. The boy was uncertain about the etiquette of entering games played by strangers in strange towns, on strange lawns.

“Pour Jack a rye.”

“You want 7-Up or Coke?” asked Albert, without a trace of interest in his voice.

“What?” The question had startled Cosgrave out of his study of his son.

“Coke or 7-Up.”

“7-Up.” He sat down, took the paper cup, and glanced at the sky. The blue had been burned out of it by a white sun. No wonder he was sweating. He loosened his tie and said the first thing that came to mind, “Well, this’ll make the crops come, boys.”

“What will?” asked Albert.

“This here sun,” said Jack, turning his palm up to the sky. “This heat.”

“Make the weeds come on my summer fallow. That’s what it’ll do,” declared Earl.

“Don’t you listen to Earl,” confided Bob. “He’s got the cleanest summer fallow in the municipality. You could eat off it.”

“Is that so?” said Jack. “I’d like to see that.”