The Island Walkers (21 page)

Now she was asking him to a party at her place, the following Saturday night. This was so unexpected — he was not a member of the North End gang — that he hesitated. She seemed provoked by this, for staring at him with those too-bright eyes, she purred, “
People
will be disappointed if you don’t come,” with such an insinuating emphasis on “people” that he felt pierced by some as-yet-undeciphered message and said, Sure, he’d be glad to come. After she’d trailed off, he stood dissecting that cryptic “people,” coming almost instantly to the conclusion that she was referring to Anna Macrimmon.

In the next class, English, he watched Anna reading her copy of
Macbeth
. For weeks now he had been aware of a deepening connection between them. Their conversations seemed to carry a more complex load of emotion. Their glances, he felt, increasingly hinted at the possibility of a mutual future. He was
almost
sure this was real and not just something he’d dreamed up, but he didn’t speak about it
in case he was fooling himself. Now he watched her as she read with deep focus, that absolute self-containment she seemed able to summon, to fall into, at any time. He had seen it during an assembly, while a comic skit was being performed on stage. He had looked over at her and discovered her — amid an entire gymnasium roaring with laughter — simply looking, neither amused nor disapproving nor oblivious. There was some force of calm in her, some mindfulness, that he admired and was in awe of, for he had never seen such a thing in anyone, except perhaps in Archibald Mann, though in Mann’s remoteness there was always something stern, as if he were dissecting or even judging what he saw. But in Anna Macrimmon there was no judgment: she was simply looking, her head a little lowered in that way she had, and in that looking, he felt, was more seeing than he could himself imagine. What was she thinking? Did she think them all fools? He had come to the point where she seemed superior not just to all the other girls but to himself as well. This was daunting — what could he possibly do to deserve her? And yet he pressed on, in his secret way, pursuing her.

He let two classes go by before he contrived to meet her in the hall. She seemed no more friendly than usual, chatting to him as they moved through the crowd, though when he asked if she was going to Liz’s party, she sent him a brief sideways smile, past the pale wing of her hair, and said, in a whimsical, sing-song voice, “Oh, I think so.” There was a flirtatiousness here, he thought, woven with shyness, at once hiding and disclosing something deeper.

Liz’s invitation tipped him towards buying the coat. He had been eyeing it for weeks, fearful it might disappear from Art Blostein’s show window: a windbreaker-style jacket with a body of rich chocolate suede and beige, knitted arms. Propped in front of the headless torso that wore the jacket was a little card carrying the silhouette of a rabbit’s head and the message:
AS ADVERTISED IN
PLAYBOY
. The coat, when he tried it on, seemed too large for him, but Art Blostein
assured him that was the style, and as he gazed at his three selves in Art’s triple mirror (each looking a little different, each claiming to be genuine), it seemed he had changed: he looked bigger, more relaxed, more in the know. “It’s you!” Art said happily, and his rubbery clown’s face sent a laughing smile of approval over Joe’s shoulder.

He crossed Shade to the bank. At the wicket, he couldn’t help looking around, worried his mother might come in. He had never taken money out of this account before, not since he and his mother had opened it ten years before. Wearing her best coat, a heavy English tweed (he could still see its houndstooth checking, its infinite repetitions like the interference swimming up a television screen), she had announced to the teller and anyone else who cared to listen (it had seemed to him that the whole bank was listening) just how well Joe was doing in school, how someday he’d go to university: that’s what this account was for, to save up all his allowances and gifts and payment for small jobs. Afterwards, she’d practically made a ceremony of handing him the little book with its stiff red cover. “This is your future,” she’d said. “Take good care of it.” He’d carried his future through the streets of Attawan, his hand sweating, it seemed so important. When they got home she’d relieved him of it and put it in her dresser drawer.

According to the book — which he now kept in the battered blue dresser wedged beside his desk — the account contained more than a thousand dollars, most of which he’d earned himself, working summers in the mill and filling shelves at the
A&P
after school. He took the money — four new twenties and a ten — back to Art’s, and Art folded the jacket into a box, turning two wings of tissue paper over it with the tenderness of someone burying a baby.

That evening, after he got home from the
A&P
, he smuggled the box up to his bedroom and hid it in the back of the closet. It was critical that his family not see the coat, which was like a new skin to him, tender and vulnerable. After supper, he felt he had to look at it again. His parents were watching television — the rumble of canned laughter was floating up the stairs — so he opened the box, slipped on the coat,
and went swiftly down the hall to his parents’ bedroom, where a full-length mirror hung on their closet door. In its icy rectangle, the coat looked fine, too fine, with its bulky arms like knitted chainmail. It outshone everything else: his green slacks with their shiny, shapeless knees, his tired desert boots, even his face. Yes, the coat was perfect, but his mouth was too thin and his ears stuck out. He gazed at himself suspiciously and disapprovingly, as if he had run into a disreputable cousin.

Leaving the room, he met his father in the hall. As they passed, his father threw out his hip in a friendly bodycheck.

His father seemed not to have noticed the coat at all.

“Say, Joe,” his father said. Reluctantly, Joe turned back to him.

His father looked tired these days, hollow-eyed — Joe’s mother had mentioned he wasn’t sleeping well — and now he drew back his lips in a kind of wince, as if his words had to be tugged from his flesh, like a sliver.

“You’re going on to university —”

The coat suddenly felt huge on him, almost clownish.

“That’s right.”

“I was wondering,” his father said, as he drew his hand over his balding head, “are you doing it for the money? I mean, is money your main purpose for going on — to make a lot of money?”

“Not really,” Joe said, bewildered. In truth, he had never thought about money per se. What he thought about, in that line, was a different way of life: a house with a library, maybe. But even
that
wasn’t the whole story.

His father’s eyes flashed out at him. There was something shy in his father, a youthfulness that had never grown entirely used to the world’s light. “It’s history, I guess, that attracts you?”

“That’s right.”

His father motioned with his hand, as if tossing away a fistful of sand.

“You love it, I guess.”

“Uh-huh.”

They were both uneasy now, at this mention of love. Joe was reminded of the time, years ago, when his father had tried to tell him about sex. They had both been mortally embarrassed by his “And you put your body inside the woman’s” delivered with grimly set jaw and averted gaze. Joe had already known
that
.

But now his father looked at him directly, and for a moment the blue eyes blazed out not in shyness but in strength and glad discovery.

“Good,” his father said. “That’s good.” And he nodded and nodded, in awkward, fond approval. “You keep on then.”

Joe went back to his room and stripped off the jacket. He did not understand what had just happened, but he felt like weeping. He felt like a fraud. His jacket was a fraud, and he was a fraud for thinking it might make a difference. His dad loved him. He hated to be reminded of it. The knowledge of this love flooded through him like a weakness, dissolving everything that a moment before he had been reasonably certain of. Who was he? What in hell was he doing? He stared at the new coat with remorse and hatred.

Two days later he went back to Art Blostein’s and bought tan slacks, a pale-blue, button-down shirt with faint pinstriping (just like the shirts Brad Long wore, he noted with satisfaction), and a soft, navy-blue cardigan. At Jarrod’s, down the street, he bought a new pair of Hush Puppies in chocolate suede. He hid these items in his closet, and on the evening of the party smuggled the new jacket, still wrapped in its box, into the trunk of the Biscayne. Then he went back to his room to change.

At nine o’clock, he was ready. Wearing his old poplin wind-breaker over the new sweater, he crept down the stairs. But his mother must have been listening. She came down the hall in a fluster of excitement to see him off. A week before, when he’d told her he was going to the McVeys’, she’d barely been able to contain her pleasure. A day later, she’d announced that she’d washed his best slacks and shirt; she’d even cleaned his church shoes.

And now she would see what he had done. He stood in the little entrance hall and watched her eyes — her wide-set eyes in which he
could read every nuance of her inner weather — watched them brighten as she took in the new slacks. And the cardigan, peeking out below his jacket.

“Joe, what have you done? Let me see!”

He was ready to do battle, to tell her, It’s my money, I earned every penny, but she was delighted.

“Oh Joe, open the jacket! Let me see!” She stood back, her gaze roaming and glowing.

“Yes, that’s wonderful, you’ve got wonderful taste. Where did you get them?”

He told her the story. She stood close to him, too close, really, for comfort, gazing at him in a fever of admiration and picking microscopic bits of lint off his sweater, pushing his hair off his forehead. “I got a new jacket too,” he told her sheepishly. She made him fetch it from the car. She seemed less delighted with the coat — he thought her face darkened when he told her the price — but the tide of her enthusiasm could not be stopped. Suddenly leaning up, she planted a kiss on his cheek. For a moment, smelling her familiar smell, feeling her lips brush his skin, he sensed the vanished world of the 1930s come flooding up in her. His mother, too, might have been eighteen.

The streets of the town were lit with bonfires, where householders had raked leaves to the curb. Some of the piles flared as he passed in the Biscayne; others smouldered till the gust from the car fanned them, sending bright sparks tumbling across the road. Occasionally, a heating chestnut popped. Smoke rose in tottering pale columns, and the smell of it at his open window was the joy of the world burning, life-giving and sharp. He parked on Robert and walked past a dozen other cars towards the McVeys’, glancing at the open garage where the windshield of the Lincoln gazed out with imperial calm. The car was one of the chief shrines of the many he had created wherever Anna Macrimmon had sat, walked, spoken to him. In his chest another fire burned.

A small window gave a view into a large hall covered with an Indian rug. He saw the flowing, curving base of stairs carpeted in deep green and a long, panelled hall leading towards the arctic glow of an empty kitchen. Music pulsed distantly — he thought he heard Diana Ross’s voice cakewalking to heaven — but no one answered the rap of the heavy knocker. He was wondering if he should try the back of the house when the door opened and Doc McVey stood before him in a silky black-and-red dressing gown, worn — Joe found this odd — over his shirt and trousers. At his throat was a dark-blue ascot, in his hand a glass filled to the brim with ice.

“A late reveller,” Doc said in his mild, slightly fey voice as he peered with cheerful irony through his round glasses. He was a tall man with a babyish face and a habitual look of playful bemusement, slightly scornful. He was a doctor, and though he no longer practised, he kept his old office downtown at the head of steep stairs over Maggie’s Beauty Parlour. He had inherited money — Joe had this from his father — and made a great deal more investing it in the stock market, as well as buying and selling properties in the area. For several years — this was an open secret in the town — he had been having an affair with a woman called Babs Wilcocks, who worked as a secretary in Bannerman’s General Office.

“Aren’t you Alf Walker’s boy?” Doc McVey said, ushering Joe in.

Suddenly his past, his family, seemed all too vividly present, as if they had trudged in behind him. The music was much louder now, but he could see no signs of a party.

“Your dad and I went to school together. He was very fast on the track, your dad. He gave me a lot of trouble in the hundred.”

“Is that right?”

“Oh yes, he was fast,” Doc McVey said suggestively, as though some scandal were associated with his father’s speed. As his large eyes — magnified, it seemed, by his glasses — fixed Joe with a look of amused watchfulness, Joe had the sense he was being tested, as though Doc McVey were waiting to see if this interesting creature,
Alf Walker’s son
, might perform a trick or two. Joe looked away
down the hall. Sally, Liz’s younger sister, was approaching with a bowl of popcorn. She acknowledged Joe with a shy smile and, sticking her neck out awkwardly as if to facilitate her escape, started up the stairs, followed by a fluffy white cat. Doc McVey was still looking at Joe. “Down there, through the kitchen,” he drawled, gesturing with the ice.

As Joe reached the kitchen, Liz McVey climbed from a dark room sunk beyond it — from a babble of voices and the wail of Dion complaining, once more, about Runaround Sue.

“Joe! I was afraid you weren’t going to make it!” She came towards him with that overly intense look of hers, almost tragic, and leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. He caught a whiff of something musky, arousing. Taking his coat, she tossed it over several others on a chair; as she turned away, the pile toppled to the floor. “Can I get you a drink?”

While she rummaged in the fridge, he restored the coats to the chair, hanging his own over the back, and turned to the doorway that led, he saw, to a large room packed with shadowy bodies. The only light came from the kitchen and from the outdoor lights shining through a wall of French doors, from the deserted patio. He could not see Anna Macrimmon.