The Lost Highway (12 page)

She had been beaten at an early age, forced to do housework, and what seemed worst of all, to this egalitarian group lead by Alex Chapman, forced to go to Catholic mass.

She rebelled against all this, she said, and began going with a man down the highway, who made her drunk and ambivalent to her own welfare, in those places of comfort long destroyed.

Then a moment came one winter night that year when she revealed to people that she had left her bastard child in the snow and ran away, covered still in the hot and tumultuous blood of birth, her legs shaking like a newborn moose, she scrambled to the river and fled, first in a canoe across the frozen water and then in a boxcar.

She broached this subject in a class on ethics, where Alex was the underdoctorate assistant professor, and watched the faces of the students go blank and twitch under the light, indecisively wondering how to respond.

“Yes, and I got myself away and took off to Toronto, got there with the blood still hard upon me crotch. I must have smelled some sweet!”

One callow boy laughed, then there was simply dead silence. Someone crumpled a paper. Another student stood and went to the washroom.

No one else wanted to speak.

“Everyone will think I am wrong,” she said.

But no one spoke.

No one blamed her. Not really. That is, most had forgiveness for her, forgiveness forever, for being a child in the snow. Yet forgiveness here at this moment was an outmoded concept to Alex, who suddenly and frankly concluded that they approved of her, as he did. They approved of this act and could therefore sanction it. This great naïveté overcame him.

“She proves everything,” Alex said later that night to Professor Scone, who almost instantly agreed.

For Alex, her past suffering became her greatest asset, and suddenly it became his. For some reason he wanted to take this asset and control it. And this is what he set out to do, even if he denied to himself he was doing it. For there was only one professor he wanted to impress and emulate now, and that was Professor David Scone.

“I will help her—I will write a column about her,” he told his new mentor that day.

It was as if, though not believing in God, God had sent her to him, to make the most of. So he set about doing that.

Therefore, Alex invented her over the next few months, and the more he did, the more her action was mythologized and sanctified, so professors would speak of her to him, and on some occasions relate the story he had taken and reinvented.

“I am staggered by her bravery,” one professor, his white beard offset by shining youthful eyes, said simply because he wanted the attention of having said it. And both Professor Scone and Young Chapman agreed.

Her dyed hair stuck out under the afternoon lights, her cheeks suffered rouge, her face, strong and opinionated, was soon enough a vague complaint against them all. And Alex became captivated by her. He wanted to show that he understood her suffering more than anyone else. In fact, he claimed her. He kept her captive for himself in his own mind.

And there was something else. In fact, it was the main thing. Alex, knowing who she was—June Tucker—believed he could hold her worth up against the worth of her younger sister, to show her younger sister up, and he did so by writing Minnie. The letter was simply a note of information, until the last paragraph: “You should look to your sister,” he wrote. “She might just put that Madonna of yours to shame, for she suffered as much—having to carry a child nine long months!” It was in a way a long overdue insult to Minnie’s child, who Minnie had carried. “So she left and you did not, and got away and you did not, and is now at university and you are not!”

He felt badly sending this letter, in the midst of a snowstorm, on a bleak cold day.

“Be careful,” Minnie wrote back. Short and to the point. He ignored it. And for a little while, things worked to his favor.

But then, after a time, Minnie’s warning became more and more credible.

One day, he hurried to class, his arms filled to overflowing with books, his corduroy jacket flapping behind him. She was sitting at the back near the door and he got the feeling that she suddenly understood he was saying things about her for his own benefit, and what was more, that she could use this against him. This was just a split second in that day, but he realized that his position with her had changed. Later that day she did not sit with him, but with Professor Scone. And seeing this as he entered the cafeteria, he felt a sudden betrayal.

Afterwards, June slowly and then more convincingly disapproved of and disliked him. At first he ignored this. He ignored that she was not his but the property of David Scone and a few others. But after a while, he tried to win her approval any way he could. In some ways he had created her, and wanted to take credit for it. In other ways what he had created was now more powerful than he was. For instance, she never once had to knock on Professor Scone’s door, as he did. And since he had championed her as being truthful, he could not now easily say she was being untruthful about him.

He had to carry on, because the situation he had produced was his own. So he helped her in the department with research. He even at points agreed with her sudden disrespectful remarks about him. He knew that some of these remarks came from Professor Scone himself. He felt that both she and Scone were ridiculing him. He now, too late, saw many things in her he disliked: a vulgar pride that her sister would be ashamed of, a rapacious ego that she managed to betray without qualms, although he could not say so. Because her sister had warned him and he did not believe it. He saw too late how she had used him, but could not say so either. Especially to Scone, who was now her protector, who had now as department head invaded Alex’s territory. That is, Alex tried to deny what he felt, and champion what he secretly disapproved of in order for her to sanction him. He realized that Scone resented his rise, and had created a pincer movement to stop it, or at least to make more of a case for himself. He could not believe anyone could do anything so obvious. He was enraged at June Tucker for playing her part as well. Why had he not seen it coming?

So by mid-winter—by the second week back from Christmas break—some people had a different opinion of him because of all this. He secretly resented and hated her, but pretended to himself and others that he did not. He knew this and tried the best he could to ignore it. He began to hope she would go away and not influence those he relied upon against him. But she did not go.

So he tried harder. But he was never able to try hard enough.

Then in early spring it was revealed that the U.S. assistant secretary of state was to be given an honorary doctorate. Alex had not thought of this as an important thing at all until June Tucker herself, with great style as she butted out her cigarette, said this was an awful capitulation of all Canada’s hard-fought values. She had just read this in the paper that morning, and only repeated it because it sounded wise.

She was sitting by Alex when she said it, and accidentally blew smoke in his face when she butted out her cigarette. It could have been forgotten.

He blushed, stood, and left the room. “Wait and you’ll see,” he said to her, believing this was a direct challenge to himself.

Alex, to win back the approval of those whose approval so mattered to him, started a campaign to try to have this granting of an honorary doctorate reversed and rescinded on the ground of modern Canadian moral principle. He hoped Scone would be forced to join him. But Scone said nothing at all.

It was at first an argument interdepartmental and contained, which no one paid much attention to. Each day as the students left the buildings, and the dry lights shone on the old hallways and crooked doors of lost offices, he pedaled about his applications and petitions. He asked June Tucker to help him, but she refused, so he recruited two young women with pierced tongues whose names he did not know. They went about each day with this petition.

Scone suddenly stopped all communication with him. This was the most unusual counteroffensive he had ever seen. Then Scone and June Tucker and others simply did not recognize him as he passed them in the hall. It was very painful, to wonder whether he should stop and nod or engage them in conversation. He did not. June looked hurt, as if he had done something very unpleasant.

He was stopped one April day on the steps by the vice-president of the university, a square-headed crewcut man with a heavy chest and a limp who took him aside quietly and indicated he was on the bubble for tenure.

Alex, seeing his position challenged, said he would resign from the department if the conferral happened.

“Well, that is unfortunate,” the vice-president said, fidgeting in the dry cold spring wind and the smell of ice breaking in the river.

“Yes, it is,” he countered.

This statement unfortunately was repeated to his students the next day and found its way to the paper, and he was interviewed on the CBC, which in the way of journalists egged him on. The president finally weighed in, saying he would be sorry to see Chapman leave—no one was a better professor, but he would not change university policy because of someone else’s posture. The assistant secretary of state was a fine human being and would be honored, and any disruption would only make this conference more necessary.

“Posture, is it?” Alex said.

All the while, June Tucker was on his mind. All the while, he was furious at Professor Scone’s pilfering of her. All the while, he wanted to prove that he was deserving of her approval.

For whatever reason, he could not stop now.

At first, many students backed him, and talked very bravely about it all. He clung to the two young women he had recruited, in hopes of revitalizing his stature.

But in the end none wanted to stay away from their own graduation. He found out, in fact, once he started this, how many actually disliked him. Some people saw him to be exaggerating and self-important.

The assistant secretary of state received his diploma on May 11, and spoke of tolerance in the conducting of our lives, the benefit of foreign service. Sincere or not, he was given a standing ovation.

Alex had stayed away, and was alone. Frightened of having overplayed his hand, and suddenly realizing what was at stake, he wanted to hang on to his job. But he felt forced to carry out what he said he would. So, on the verge of tenure, when all things were his, he resigned on May 12—and no one noticed. A month later, at the end of June, he tried to get reinstated, but his job had been given to a colleague of his. He tried to start a petition on his own behalf and began to show up in the department speaking of a lawsuit; finally, he was put off campus.

Alex tried other universities to no avail. Finally, he came home, at the urging of his aunt, and once again lived in the same small icehouse on Old Chapman’s property.

For five months he did nothing at all.

Then he decided to become a sculptor. This, after all, was his first love. Could he not do it? He used his uncle’s grand old junkyard as his inspiration. An inspiration into the beauty and degradation of human existence. All those pieces set up like proletariats struggling under the winter sun.

Blowtorches and steel and iron, and his sculpted pieces cried out, lying twisted in the snow, naked men and women convulsed and staggered like Frankenstein’s burnt creatures asking for love.

One day the priest, Father MacIlvoy, saw him, and engaged him in conversation. Alex was still bitter about what had happened to him at the seminary and at the university, and felt both were conspiratorial. MacIlvoy took his arm and leading him aside said: “Do you remember if the phone rang in the booth along the highway that night?”

Alex said nothing, stunned into silence.

“It was me—trying to warn you about old Plante finding out money was missing. I thought you could get it back—I wanted to help you—but I must have been too late. Something must have happened in your soul to want what you wanted.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, nothing happened to my soul. You’re cutting wood near my property,” Alex said, “and I won’t feed my hemlock to a church.”

Yet the next day his aunt asked him if he could sculpt a grotto of the Virgin for the church—that Father MacIlvoy had seen some of his work and had asked. He was in fact simply too poor not to say yes. It was commissioned for $1700 (his own price) and he did it in four weeks day and night—the flares of the torch seen in the dark wood, against the shale and pitiless dead machines of our age. He was once again happy. Not only this but the idea that he had come back home as a prodigal, also a little enticing to him, alleviated by this idea of the romantic artist. The idea that there had been an enormous falling out between him and his uncle, between him and the priest, helped him in this one regard—to hold on to his self-esteem. People watched him as he worked, and realized he was a man of some talent. And sometimes at night, finishing work, he would look like all artists somehow look: the loneliest man in the world.

Yet over the last two weeks of his job, the face of the Virgin eluded him. For he hadn’t believed in her since he was twenty. She was a myth out of the offensive mouths of centuries and centuries of opulent, vulgar men.

He walked and walked in the snow—he did not pray, for there was no one to pray to. He had, as James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus said, forged out of the smithy of his soul some other implantation, and these were in the statues and corroded figures of men and women in twisted and longing agony at his feet. However, he did worry that the whole piece would be lost without the right tempo in her face. Some noticeable characteristic, once elusive and yet forever permanent. And he did not know how to achieve it. Looking in books of pictures did no good. Her divinity had been captured in the pictures of old, but they did nothing for him. Her face always startlingly beautiful and yet humble. Each night under the moon, he walked down to the end of the giant yard and saw his Virgin, arms reaching out toward him in love, yet without a face, the wind blowing cold off the bay. But Alex could not give up. He worked on, as if something that wasn’t in his own hands was prodding him forward.