The Favorite Game (4 page)

Breavman stared at Shell and described Lisa’s sunny room, dense with expensive toys. Electric hobby-horse which rocked itself. Life-sized walking dolls. Nothing that didn’t squeak or light up when squeezed.

They hid in the shade of under-the-bed, their hands full of secrets and new smells, on the look-out for servants, watching the sun slide along the linoleum with the fairy tales cut in it.

The gigantic shoes of a housemaid paddled close by.

“That’s lovely, Lawrence.”

“But it’s a lie. It happened, but it’s a lie. Bertha’s Tree is a lie although she really fell out of it. That night after I fooled with my father’s fishing rods I sneaked into my parents’ room. They were both sleeping in their separate beds. There was a moon. They were both facing the ceiling and lying in the same position. I knew that if I shouted only one of them would wake up.”

“Was that the night he died?”

“It doesn’t matter how anything happens.”

He began to kiss her shoulders and face and although he was hurting her with his nails and teeth she didn’t protest.

“Your body will never be familiar.”

A
fter breakfast six men entered the house and set the coffin down in the living-room. It was surprisingly huge, made of dark-grained wood, brass-handled. There was snow on their clothes.

The room was suddenly more formal than Breavman had ever known it. His mother squinted.

They placed it on a stand and began to open the cabinet-like cover.

“Close it, close it, we’re not in Russia!”

Breavman shut his eyes and waited for the click of the cover. But these men who make their living among the bereaved move noiselessly. They were gone when he opened his eyes.

“Why did you make them close it, Mother?”

“It’s enough as it is.”

The mirrors of the house were soaped, as if the glass had become victim to a strange indoor frost corresponding to the wide winter. His mother stayed alone in her room. Breavman sat stiffly on his bed and tried to fight his anger with a softer emotion.

The coffin was parallel to the chesterfield.

Whispering people began to congregate in the hall and on the balcony.

Breavman and his mother descended the stairs. The afternoon winter sun glimmered on his mother’s black stockings and gave to
the mourners in the doorway a gold outline. He could see parked cars and dirty snow above their heads.

They stood closest, his uncles behind them. Friends and workers from the family factory thronged the hall, balcony, and path. His uncles, tall and solemn, touched his shoulders with their manicured hands.

But his mother was defeated. The coffin was open.

He was swaddled in silk, wrapped in a silvered prayer-shawl. His moustache bloomed fierce and black against his white face. He appeared annoyed, as if he were about to awaken, climb out of the offensively ornate box, and resume his sleep on the more comfortable chesterfield.

The cemetery was like an Alpine town, the stones like little sleeping houses. The diggers looked irreverently informal in their working clothes. A mat of artificial grass was spread over the heaps of exhumed frozen mud. The coffin went down in a system of pulleys.

Bagels and hard-boiled eggs, shapes of eternity, were served back at the house. His uncles joked with friends of the family. Breavman hated them. He looked under his great-uncle’s beard and asked him why he didn’t wear a tie.

He was the oldest son of the oldest son.

The family left last. Funerals are so neat. All they left behind were small gold-rimmed plates flecked with crumbs and caraway seeds.

The yards of lace curtain held some of the light of the small winter moon.

“Did you look at him, Mother?”

“Of course.”

“He looked mad, didn’t he?”

“Poor boy.”

“And his moustache really black. As if it was done with an eyebrow pencil.”

“It’s late, Lawrence …”

“It’s late, all right. We’ll never see him again.”

“I forbid you to use that voice to your mother.”

“Why did you make them close it? Why did you? We could have seen him for a whole extra morning.”

“Go to bed!”

“Christ you, christ you, bastardess, witch!” he improvised in a scream.

All night he heard his mother in the kitchen, weeping and eating.

H
ere is a colour photograph, largest picture on a wall of ancestors.

His father wears an English suit and all the English reticence that can be woven into cloth. A wine tie with a tiny, hard knot sprouts like a gargoyle. In his lapel a Canadian Legion pin, duller than jewellery. The double-chinned face glows with Victorian reason and decency, though the hazel eyes are a little too soft and staring, the mouth too full, Semitic, hurt.

The fierce moustache presides over the sensitive lips like a suspicious trustee.

The blood, which he died spitting, is invisible, but forms on the chin as Breavman studies the portrait.

He is one of the princes of Breavman’s private religion, double-natured and arbitrary. He is the persecuted brother, the near poet,
the innocent of the machine toys, the sighing judge who listens but does not sentence.

Also he is heaving Authority, armoured with Divine Right, doing merciless violence to all that is weak, taboo, un-Breavmanlike.

As Breavman does him homage he wonders whether his father is just listening or whether he is stamping the seal on decrees.

Now he is settling more passively into his gold frame and his expression has become as distant as those in the older photographs. His clothes begin to appear dated and costume-like. He can rest. Breavman has inherited all his concerns.

The day after the funeral Breavman split open one of his father’s formal bow ties and sewed in a message. He buried it in the garden, under the snow beside the fence where in summer the neighbour’s lilies-of-the-valley infiltrate.

L
isa had straight black Cleopatra hair that bounced in sheaves off her shoulders when she ran or jumped. Her legs were long and well-formed, made beautiful by natural exercise. Her eyes were big, heavy-lidded, dreamy.

Breavman thought that perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.

They grew tired of games in the field beside Bertha’s Tree. They did not want to squeeze under someone’s porch for Sardines.
They did not want to limp through Hospital Tag. They did not want to draw the magic circle and sign it with a dot. Ildish-chay. Ets-lay o-gay, they whispered. They didn’t care who was It.

Better games of flesh, love, curiosity. They walked away from Run-Sheep-Run over to the park and sat on a bench near the pond where nurses gossip and children aim their toy boats.

He wanted to know everything about her. Was she allowed to listen to The Shadow (“The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows, heheheheheheheh”)? Wasn’t Alan Young terrific? Especially the character with the flighty voice, “I’m hyah, I’m hyah, come gather rosebuds from my hair.” Wasn’t the only decent part of the Charlie McCarthy programme when Mortimer Snerd came on? Could she get
Gangbusters
? Did she want to hear him imitate the Green Hornet’s car, driven by his faithful Filipino valet, Cato, or the Whistler? Wasn’t that a beautiful tune?

Had she ever been called a Dirty Jew?

They fell silent and the nurses and their blond babies reasserted their control of the universe.

And what was it like to have no father?

It made you more grown-up. You carved the chicken, you sat where he sat.

Lisa listened, and Breavman, for the first time, felt himself dignified, or rather, dramatized. His father’s death gave him a touch of mystery, contact with the unknown. He could speak with extra authority on God and Hell.

The nurses gathered their children and their boats and went away. The surface of the pond became smooth. The hands of the clock on the Chalet wound towards supper-time, but they kept on talking.

They squeezed hands, kissed once when the light was low
enough, coming golden through the prickly bushes. Then they walked slowly home, not holding hands, but bumping against each other.

Breavman sat at the table trying to understand why he wasn’t hungry. His mother extolled the lamb chops.

W
henever they could they played their great game, the Soldier and the Whore. They played it in whatever room they could. He was on leave from the front and she was a whore of DeBullion Street.

Knock, knock, the door opened slowly.

They shook hands and he tickled her palm with his forefinger.

Thus they participated in that mysterious activity the accuracies of which the adults keep so coyly hidden with French words, with Yiddish words, with spelled-out words; that veiled ritual about which night-club comedians construct their humour; that unapproachable knowledge which grownups guard to guarantee their authority.

Their game forbade talking dirty or roughhouse. They had no knowledge of the sordid aspect of brothels, and who knows if there is one? They thought of them as some sort of pleasure palace, places denied them as arbitrarily as Montreal movie theatres.

Whores were ideal women just as soldiers were ideal men.

“Pay me now?”

“Here’s all my money, beautiful baby.”