Street Symphony (4 page)

A knock on the door woke him and he said, “Come in,” without thinking. And she came in, Ella, wearing a silky blue robe and trailing a scent of lavender. He shrank. He was afraid. But she looked shy – almost, he thought, virginal.

Ignoring the chair, she perched on the desk.

“You’re the only person I could ask,” she said, and unfolded a piece of paper. “I want to read this to you before I read it in the group. I think you’ll understand, you see, because you’re older. And these things
happen. It’s not very long.” She paused and took a deep breath.

“‘
It was when she began to ask

For an umbrella when she meant banana

That Rosemary knew

She was on the downhill run

To oblivion.

She hadn’t yet gone to the store

To ask for a bunch of umbrellas,

Non-organic, please,

I don’t see the point.

The big black banana

Over her head

Would keep her dry.

She was glad she’d stayed home.
’”
Ella paused. “I call it ‘Rain’.”

“Oh,” Roland said, forgetting he was a practical man who knew nothing about poetry, “it’s beautiful, it’s sad, it’s moving.”

She came towards him and kissed him on the forehead. He closed his eyes in dread, but when he opened them, she was gone. What kind of warning or blessing had the Ella-spirit brought him with her poem? He understood the words, but was she telling him that the way ahead was downhill and dark and therefore he might as well settle into the room in the home that was not his home? Or was it a call to action? A call to a small apartment near the sea, a call to go back to work or at least to volunteer at the Habitat warehouse? He only knew that he must reject the sacrifice of his loving daughter and thoughtful son-in-law, who were prepared to keep him in their embrace till he died. He had to get away from the echo of their unspoken nighttime thoughts:
He’s not much trouble. It’s time he invested the money from the house. We could get something bigger. I wish he’d stop looking at the basement walls like that.

For the final reading, they’d been asked to bring something different. Iain asked Roland to read a part in the play he was writing about his father. He recoiled. He’d never acted. Seen very few live plays, and TV didn’t count.

“It’s not that he dislikes his dad,” Iain said. “They live in different worlds, that’s all.”

“But there is only one world.”

“That’s a great line, Roland. Just a minute.” He sat there writing while they waited, then he handed over two sheets of paper and said, “There. Where it says
Dad
.”

He made it through the scene to his last line, “‘You know, son, you could get a job and write in your spare time.’”

“‘For fuck’s sake, Dad. You have no idea.’”

~ • ~

Roland took photos of the group,
together and individually, on his cellphone. Aritha took another picture to include him. He looked like a grinning giant beside tiny Marina, and wished he’d combed his hair. They’d all signed a thank-you card for Jody. Ella poured wine and they drank a toast to “words”. Iain, who no longer giggled, said, “Your story is great,” and thumped him on the shoulder. Marina presented Jody with flowers. And Roland realized that for a brief time, these people had been his friends, his mates, and had shared some of their inner thoughts with him. He hugged each one as they said goodbye. They couldn’t know what they’d done for him. For one thing, he now knew that he wasn’t a writer: Elsie and her father and brother would remain becalmed mid-Atlantic. He had the rest of his life to live and he didn’t aim to spend it perfecting the art of not getting in the way. He kissed Jody on the cheek and said, “Thank you very much. You’re right. As you said on day one, it’s the first word that counts.”

The rest of them remained round the fire chatting after dinner, but he was ready for bed. He waved from the door, but they were already caught up in a conversation. Only Aritha looked up and smiled at him. He was first down to breakfast next morning. Ilsa came and sat beside him and he told her he thought the house was very fine, and that he’d had a good time. “Ah,” she replied, “you didn’t stay up last night with the others?”

“I’m used to early nights,” he answered. And didn’t explain that he often went to bed before he was tired so that Dorry and Gord could have time to themselves.

Aritha and Iain had already left. Jody and Marina and Ella came to the table a little later and Ilsa asked if anyone wanted a boiled egg. They didn’t. She went out. No one spoke. The friendly atmosphere was gone. The cement that had held them together had already crumbled. Passing the toast was an effort.

On the way back to Vancouver, listening to Beethoven’s Fifth turned up high, Roland shouted out, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” when he turned on to the road that led to the home that was not his home. But then he wavered. If Dorry cried, if there was yelling, if there was a suggestion that he was out of his mind, what then? They might talk about Kate, mention the threat of ailments that quickly beset men of his age, call two doctors to certify him mad. He gritted his teeth and almost ran into Gord’s newly painted garage door.

“I’ve made your favourite for dinner,” Dorry said, bringing a dish full of chicken cooked with lemon and garlic to the table.

“Thank you, darling,” Roland said.

The others asked about the retreat, what he’d learned, what the other people were like. Gord told him about the latest development in the Middle East. Jon talked about his hockey coach. It was nerve-wracking. The chicken was sticking in his gullet. His knee was jiggling up and down under the table. He’d meant to wait for a quiet moment, but by the time they were helping themselves to fruit and cheese, the
first word
could be held back no longer.

“I learnt several things at The Grove, and the main thing is that I need a place of my own. You’ve all been very kind to me, but…”

A moment of silence. Dorry laid her knife down on her plate.

“I need space to write,” he lied as the weight of family care began to fall away from him. “I need space for my ideas. My pictures. And who knows, there might come a time, though not for a while, when I want to bring a woman home.”

Jon laughed and was shushed by his mother.

“Invite me to dinner now and then, please. And now and then I’ll take you all out for Sunday brunch.” He fished around for a satisfying metaphor but could only come up with a well-worn line. “The old leopard can’t change his spots.”

Dorry sniffled and smiled at the same time as she said, “We’re doing our best and I seriously, seriously think you should give it a while longer.”

Gord said, “We like having you here, really. I can make a space in the basement for you. Get a little desk.”

“When I’ve found an apartment,” he said, “I’m going back to Italy. I’ll get a Eurail pass and stop here and there. I never saw the Giottos in Padua because Kate was sick. And I’ll go to Dubrovnik too and get a boat and go further.” The name of the small hotel in Venice where Aritha was planning to stay for two weeks in July was inscribed in his cellphone, on his laptop and in his mind.

Dorry began to say, “You could travel without moving…”

Gord interrupted her. “If it’s more shelves you need…”

Katy said, “When you go, Grandad, can I have your little TV, please?”

And Roland went to her and hugged the child, loving her for understanding that his first word on the subject was also his last.

Dinosaurs

Ella decided to go to the museum
and look at the dinosaurs because they were older than she was, and besides they were leaving town in two weeks. She tidied the kitchen, made the bed and took her dark green skirt and white top from the closet. The elderly woman in the mirror dressed in blue jeans and loose sweater was not a pretty sight. She pinned on a brooch, a handmade sunflower in enamel and gilt, to hide the wine stain on the lapel of her jacket. For gilt, read guilt. It was a gift from Donna, whose very name… Click went her right hip as she bent to tie the laces of her comfortable black shoes.

“Don’t worry about money,” Graeme said after the funeral. “Dad would have wanted you to spend it.” But Dad most likely wouldn’t have, and she did worry. She worried about how long she was going to live and what would happen if the annuities ran out. Most of all, she wanted to leave something towards Evan’s and Lisa’s university fees. She would try to be frugal for the sake of her only grandkids, Holly’s sweet twins. So the cost: Return bus fare, using senior tickets, three dollars. Admission to the museum, zero because she had a membership card. Soup and coffee in the café for lunch, ten dollars. Make it a day out. No, half a day. How long could you stare at bones, even bones cleverly reconstructed to form an outsize extinct animal? If a dinosaur ever suffered from arthritis, it would have been torture for the poor beast with all that cartilage to wear away.

The great creatures ran, they ate and slept. They laid eggs, and therefore must, incredibly, have had sex. It conjured up a grotesque image: Two fifty-ton beasts lurching towards each other with romance in mind, but no worse, perhaps, than the mating of humans if seen by another species. And did the dinosaurs’ hatchlings move away from their parents to other parts of the earth and rarely visit? But it wasn’t research into the lives of sauropods that was driving her to set out on this rainy day to the museum – it was Paul and his suggestion that they share a room on their trip to Seattle.

Yes, it was economically sound to share a room. Yes, she liked him. But hotel rooms contained beds, and the pleasure of their weekly meetings for coffee or drinks could be spoiled by the memory of two contemporary ancient bodies grinding together between the sheets.
Are we there yet?
Nothing would be the same after that. Even “I know you like my muffins” would acquire a subtext that hadn’t existed before. She looked at the clock on the stove. Quickly, she wrote down the lines that had come to her that morning in bed,
Phonemes freed from the lexicon, Fell around the kitchen floor, And assembled themselves, Into new expressions.
Words to be worked on later.

Set the alarm. Lock the door. Forget umbrella. Go back inside. Get umbrella. Repeat security procedures. Exit.

The bus drew up at the stop by the Rainbow Care Home and the driver lowered the ramp for a man in a motorized wheelchair. The man’s head was tilted to one side and it took him a long time
to move the brake lever with his crooked fingers. Once he was in place, the driver called out, “You okay?” and the man replied, “Okay!” in a deep, painful voice. His eyes were bright and Ella smiled
at him, her heart aching as she admired his courage in venturing to
the city alone.
He was clearly hanging on to his independence, perhaps by a fingernail.

And that was it. Independence! Four syllables that created a space, a place of one’s own in the world, a castle with keep and moat. For the past five years, she’d used her widowhood as a shield and thrown the words “my late husband” into conversations as a talisman. Not that there’d been much need for boiling oil so far. Only two knights had made serious attempts to cross the drawbridge. Glen had needed a nurse, and nursing, as she well knew, could best be done when there was love. Herb had offered much in the way of pleasing vacations, but to places where there was a golf course. He was noisy, his voice as loud as the pants he wore when he played. She could foresee a jolly final stretch to the last green with him, but his handicap was blinding self-admiration. And besides, as she assured Graeme and Holly and Donna, their parents had enjoyed a happy and wonderful marriage – a fiction – and there could be no replacement for their father.

At The Grove, she’d slightly considered Roland-the-builder, healthy looking, no apparent creaking joints, but he was too lost, too unanchored and not ready to move on. He shied away when they met each other in the hallways. He talked about his late wife, Kate, as if she’d just stepped out and would come into the room at any moment. Ella had tried to
nurture
him, if that was the right word, and felt able to share her poem with him because he was in a sensitive state, almost raw, and would understand. When he said goodbye, he’d hugged her and whispered into her hearing aid, “Thank you very much.” For what? They’d agreed to meet without setting a date or place. As promised, she’d sent him the rest of
The Rosemary Sequence
by email. And that was that. No reply. After that awful last evening, she knew she’d hear nothing from the others. She’d tried to put the image of Aritha dripping wet and shrieking about her hair right out of her mind. When a person is hysterical, water often helps, and the only thing to hand, to Ella’s hand at any rate, had been her glass of Coke. Ilsa had supplied the water. Playing the truth game at night was dangerous.

She got off the bus and crossed the road to stand for a quiet moment in front of the Carillon Tower. A gift from the Dutch community to Canada in gratitude for their country’s liberation, the bells were a reminder of those who had suffered and died. Dwarfed by the great totem poles, Ella tried to imagine the forest as it had been, centuries ago, undisturbed, unravished. The carved poles had stood outside homes and villages as warning, as narrative. Uprooted from their natural place, they served now as a welcome to the Royal BC Museum.