The Early Investigations of Joanne Kilbourn (33 page)

I went into the granny flat, called the police and turned off the television. Then I went to the balcony, took the pitcher out of the cold dirt in the window box, sat on the top step and waited until I heard the sirens. The crystal vase was safe. I used the hem of my nightgown to rub the dirt from the deep lines of its pattern. I rubbed until I thought they’d have enough time to take him. I rubbed until it was safe again.

When I went in the house, Ali was making tea. Beside her was a tumbler of Scotch – neat.

“The tea’s for you,” she said. “There must be quite a chemical soup in you at the moment. I don’t think alcohol would be a smart move.” She turned her back to me,
swirled boiling water in the teapot. “Mort went to the police station with Rick. Mort really liked him, you know. I guess we all did.” She poured out the water and carefully measured tea into the pot. Suddenly, the kitchen smelled of oranges and spices.

“Does any of this make sense to you?” I asked.

Ali looked into my face. “Rick talked to me while we were waiting for the police. He wanted me to understand, I think. He and Andy were lovers for over twenty-five years. Then in the spring Andy suddenly left him. Rick hated Soren Eames for taking Andy away from him, but he hated Andy even more for leaving him. And so, he contrived to kill them.”

“His dark secret love/Does thy life destroy,” I said.

Ali looked concerned. “Perhaps you’re not ready to deal with this, Jo.”

“Maybe not,” I said, “but one more thing. Why would Rick drink the water from Andy’s glass if he didn’t want to die?”

“Subterfuge?” said Ali. “You were a lucky break for him, but if you hadn’t happened along, he could simply have pretended to drink. You told me there were five thousand people in the park that day. There would have been one credulous soul prepared to swear that Rick was innocent because he’d lifted that glass.”

“Smoke and mirrors,” I said.

“Time for tea.” Ali put her drink, the teapot and a cup on a little tray and walked into the living room. I followed her. When she sat on the couch, I curled up against her warm bulk and cried like a baby. She held me in her arms and rocked me until I fell asleep.

Writing this account was Ali’s idea. “Get it out,” she said, sitting on my bed one morning before she drove back to Winnipeg. “Give it shape then move along. You don’t need an analyst any more; you just need rest and a little time to evaluate. Besides,” she said, brightening, “a journal will give you something to do while you’re cooling your heels in all those specialists’ waiting rooms.” After the initial rounds, I ended up with just one specialist, a neurologist, a gentle man with a crewcut who explained in terms a lay person would understand what had happened to me. The pesticides had blocked the enzyme that governs the transmission of nerve impulses, so my nervous system was in a constant state of stimulation. That, directly or indirectly, caused all my symptoms.

“So what do I do now?” I had asked him.

“Well, stay away from organophosphates for a start,” he said seriously, then smiled. “Sorry, that was stupid. From what Ali tells me, I gather you didn’t exactly bring this upon yourself. Anyway, I’m not planning anything heroic here – some B-12 shots, a prescription for oral B complex, some
good food, lots of rest and an exercise regime. The
CFL
season’s over, and there’s a guy I know who’s a trainer for the Riders. He can help you with the exercising – muscle-strengthening stuff, some leg raising with weights, hamstring lifts. He’ll turn you into a jock, Mrs. Kilbourn. The only thing wrong with him is that he’s a Barry Manilow fan. He plays one tape after another.”

And that’s my life: vitamin shots, eating, resting, jock stuff and writing this. Ali says I should give myself over to invalidism for a while. And introspection. “But don’t let it go on too long,” she said. “Watch out for the Magic Mountain syndrome – taking your pulse every thirty minutes and checking out your
BMS
. New Year’s Eve seems a nice symbolic time to move along, but until then let the world dance without you.”

And so I do. The leadership convention came and went without me. The party elected a radical young farmer from the southwest of the province. He won’t win the election for us, but in the long run he may be what we needed all along. Craig Evanson nominated him. Julie was not there.

Christmas is two weeks away, and although I have a nice stack of invitations for holiday parties, I am not taking part in what Ian used to grimly call “the mulled wine and salmonella season.” Mieka and Greg will be home next week, and Ali and Mort will arrive on Christmas Eve. Mort made reservations for Christmas dinner at a splendid old hotel downtown. This will be the first year since I was married that I haven’t cooked a turkey. Somehow that seems significant.

Peter and Angus are doing most of the cooking around here, so we’ve been through the take-out list a couple of times. For the first week or so after the “incident in the granny flat,” as my friend Millar Millard calls it, the boys were unnervingly solicitous, but we’re back in our familiar grooves now. They come, singly or together, and throw
themselves on the bed to pass along the news or gripe about each other, and I ask them why they can’t get along better and complain about no one recognizing my need for peace and quiet. We’re all relieved to pick up the old roles and the old lines.

I find it odd to be an outsider. Everything I know about other people comes from Christmas cards. In the normal course of things, I’d pick them out of the mailbox, rip them open and glance at the signatures, but this year I’m reading the cards carefully, looking not just for news but for subtext.

There are some beside me now that I keep coming back to. There is a lithograph of Osgoode Hall in Toronto from Howard Dowhanuik. The card came tucked inside a silk scarf. He is staying in Toronto for the holidays but will be back early in the new year. Not a word about Marty.

Terry Shaw from the correctional centre writes a note of thanks for a small gift I sent and says that she is “not hopeful about Eve’s chances of psychological recovery but after all this is the season for miracles.”

Hilda McCourt’s card is hand-done, a brass rubbing from the tomb of the Venerable Bede (“Something I did for some special friends when I was overseas”). With her card, she encloses a letter in which she details the contributions “gays” (her word, carefully chosen) have made to the arts and asking me not to be embittered by “one tortured boy.”

Lori and Mark Evanson’s card is a conventional and pretty nativity scene. Inside, behind a cutout oval, is a picture of Mark and Lori and their son, Clay. Mark stands behind a chair with his hand on his wife’s shoulder. Clay is on his mother’s knee with his face turned toward her. As she looks down into her son’s face, Lori Evanson’s look, dim, radiant and trusting, seems to me eerily like that of the Madonna on the front of her card.

There is one final card, a large and handsome one on which a grey dove with an olive branch flies against a pale grey sky. Inside in raised letters is a printed message:

If I hadn’t gone back to change my shoes, it would have been me instead of Izaak Levin who found them dying. But halfway to the Loves’ cottage I started worrying that shoes with heels would make me too tall to dance with, and by the time I got back to the Loves’, Izaak was standing in their doorway with the dazed look of a man on the edge of shock. When I pushed past him into the cottage, I saw why.

I was fifteen years old, and I had never seen a dead man, but I knew Desmond Love was dead. He was sitting in his place at the dining-room table, but his head lolled back on his neck as if something critical had come loose, and his mouth hung open as if he were sleeping or screaming. His wife, Nina, was in the chair across from him. She was always full of grace, and she had fallen so that her head rested against the curve of her arm as it lay on the table. She was beautiful, but her skin was waxen, and I could hear the rattle of her breathing in that quiet room. My friend Sally was lying on the floor. She had vomited; she was pale and her breathing was laboured, but I knew she wouldn’t die. She was thirteen years old, and you don’t die when you’re thirteen.

It was Nina I went to. My relationship with my own mother had never been easy, and Nina had been my refuge for as long as I could remember. I took her in my arms and began to cry and call her name. Izaak Levin was still standing in the doorway, but seeing me with Nina seemed to jolt him back to reality.

“Joanne, you have to get your father. We need a doctor here,” he said.

My legs felt heavy, the way they do in a dream when you try to run and you can’t, but somehow I got to our cottage and brought my father. He was a methodical and reassuring man, and as I watched him taking pulses, looking into pupils, checking breathing, I felt better.

“What happened?” he asked Izaak Levin.

Izaak shook his head. When he spoke, his voice was dead with disbelief. “I don’t know. I took the boat over to town for a drink before dinner. When I got back, I found them like this.” He pointed to a half-filled martini pitcher on the table. At Sally’s place there was a glass with an inch of soft drink in the bottom. “He must have put it in the drinks. I guess he decided it wasn’t worth going on, and he wanted to take them with him.”

There was no need to explain the pronouns. My father and I knew what he meant. At the beginning of the summer Desmond Love had suffered a stroke that had slurred his speech, paralyzed his right side and, most seriously, stilled his hand. He was forty years old, a bold and innovative maker of art and a handsome and immensely physical man. It was believable that, in his rage at the ravages of the stroke, he would kill himself, and so I stored away Izaak’s explanation. I stored it away in the same place I stored the other memories of that night: the animal sound of retching Nina made after my father forced the ipecac into her mouth. The silence broken only by a loon’s cry as my father and Izaak
carried the Loves, one by one, down to the motorboat at the dock. The blaze of the sunset on the lake as my father wrapped Nina and Sally in the blankets they kept in the boat for picnics. The terrible emptiness in Desmond Love’s eyes as they looked at the September sky.

And then my father, standing in the boat, looking at me on the dock, “Joanne, you’re old enough to know the truth here: Sally will be all right, but Des is dead and I’m not sure about Nina’s chances. It’ll be better for you later if you don’t ride in this boat tonight.” His voice was steady, but there were tears in his eyes. Desmond Love had been his best friend since they were boys. “I want you to go back home and wait for me. Just tell your mother there’s been an emergency. Don’t tell her …”

“The truth.” I finished the sentence for him. The truth would make my mother start drinking. So would a lie. It never took much.

“Don’t let Nina die,” I said in an odd, strangled voice.

“I’ll do all I can,” he said, and then the quiet of the night was shattered by the roar of the outboard motor; the air was filled with the smell of gasoline, and the boat, low in the water from its terrible cargo, began to move across the lake into the brilliant gold of the sunset. It was the summer of 1958, and I was alone on the dock, waiting.

* * *

Thirty-two years later I was walking across the bridge that links the university community to the city of Saskatoon. It was the night of the winter solstice. The sky was high and starless, and there was a bone-chilling wind blowing down the South Saskatchewan River from the north. I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition of the work of Sally Love.

As soon as I turned onto Spadina Crescent, I could see the
bright letters of her name on the silk banners suspended over the entrance to the Mendel Gallery: Sally Love. Sally Love. Sally Love. There was something festive and celebratory about those paint-box colours, but as I got closer I saw there were other signs, too, and some of them weren’t so pretty. These signs were mounted on stakes held by people whose faces shone with zeal, and their crude lettering seemed to pulse with indignation: “Filth Belongs in Toilets Not on Walls,” “Jail Pornographers,” “No Room for Love Here” and one that said simply, “Bitch.”

A crowd had gathered. Some people were attempting a counterattack, and every so often a voice, thin and self-conscious in the winter air, would raise itself in a tentative defence: “What about freedom of the arts?” “We’re not a police state yet!” “The only real obscenity is censorship.”

A
TV
crew had set up under the lights of the entrance and they were interviewing a soft-looking man in a green tuque with the Hilltops logo and a nylon ski jacket that said “Silver Broom: Saskatoon ’90.” The man was one of our city councillors, and as I walked up I could hear his spiritless baritone spinning out the clichés for the ten o’clock news: “Community standards … public property … our children’s innocence … privacy of the home …” The councillor’s name was Hank Mewhort, and years before I had been at a political fundraiser where he had dressed as a leprechaun to deliver the financial appeal. As I walked carefully around the camera crew, Hank’s sanctimonious bleat followed me. I had liked him better as a leprechaun.

When I handed my invitation to a commissionaire posted at the entrance, he checked my name off on a list and opened the gallery door for me. As I started through, I felt a sharp blow in the middle of my back. I turned and found myself facing a fresh-faced woman with a sweet and vacant smile. She was grasping her sign so the shaft was in front of her like
a broadsword. She came at me again, but then, very quickly, a city cop grabbed her from behind and led her off into the night. She was still smiling. Her sign lay on the concrete in front of me, its message carefully spelled out in indelible marker the colour of dried blood: “The Wages of Sin is Death.” I shuddered and pulled my coat tight around me.