The Republic of Love (12 page)

“Here’s where I have to start paying attention,” Sammy said. “Fritzi said she’d be in front of the Richardson Building with the kids. Waving me on.”

Fritzi. Fritzi Knightly? Tom tried to remember what she looked like. Reddish hair. More blond than red. A heavy face for a woman. Big toothy smile. But sensual. He’d met her once, at a football game or something, and shaking her hand he’d thought: So this is the woman Sammy Sweet “couldn’t live without.” He remembered the phrase – how the force of Sammy’s rumored passion (relayed to him by Sheila) had gripped and puzzled him.

“I don’t see her,” Sammy breathed. “Do you see her?”

“No,” Tom said, looking to the right, “but there’s a lot of people.”

“Oh, Fritzi’ll be right out in front. She’s bringing a change of socks. It’s worth losing a minute for fresh socks, you can make it up. That’s one of the little-known truths of the marathon game. Fresh socks.”

“I don’t see her.”

“She must’ve got the time wrong,” Sammy said. He was panting faintly.

“Maybe she said
across
from the Richardson Building.”

“No.” The suggestion seemed to irritate Sammy. “She’s always in
front
of the Richardson Building. With the kids.”

“We must’ve missed her, then.”

“Or else she got the time screwed up.”

“That’s probably it.”

“But I can’t figure out why – ”

“Well, I’ll leave you here,” Tom said. “Best of British luck.” And he turned off – he was beginning to feel his heart chopping away – into the quiet Sunday stillness of McDermot Avenue, leaving Sammy Sweet running northward along the roadway with his light, rhythmic, arching steps.

I
DLY, LAZILY
, Tom looked at the Monday paper. Sammy Sweet was not listed as a finalist. He checked again. No Sammy.

Sammy was a harmless likable guy, so why should it give Tom
a flush of warm pleasure to see he hadn’t made the whole twenty-six?

He read on. The first-place winner this year was a thirty-four-year-old runner named Steve Fitzsimmons, from West Kildonan; time, two hours, ten minutes. Tom looked him up in the phone book and gave him a call.

“My name’s Tom Avery,” he said in his chummy radioland voice, “and I’m host of a late-night show here in Winnipeg, music, talk, guest shots, and so on, and we wondered if you’d be willing to come on the program and chat a bit about how it feels to win a marathon.”

“It feels great. It feels like about time. You know how old I am? Thirty-four. On the brink of middle age. Not exactly there, but for a runner I’m brinking, let’s face it. The fact is, I could be competing with the old guys with leaky hearts and varicose veins, doing fun runs, but no, I went into the marathon, with kids who’re maybe nineteen, twenty, kids in their prime, and I came out on top. I’ve trained five, six years. Every morning before work. It’s still dark, but I’m out there training. I’m an airlines reservation clerk. Mainly I just sit on my butt listening to beefs, not exactly what you’d call the world of the athlete, eh? At the end of the day I’m out there again, it’s dark, cold, but I put in another few miles of the hard stuff. You know how I see this victory? I see a twofold kind of thing going on. Age is immaterial, that’s the first point. Mind if I ask how old you are, sir?”

“Forty on the nose.”

“Secondly, perseverance pays off.”

“How about coming on the show tonight and talking about it.”

“Glad to. I’ve done some TV around town, and the way I see it, there’s a real message I can give. A, age is immaterial, and B, perseverance pays off.”

“This is radio,” Tom said.

“Radio?”

“Yeah. Late-night audience.”

“How late’re we talking about?”

“After midnight.”

“I don’t know. I need my sleep. I don’t know if you’re aware of it, but I’m going into the Boston biggie. I’m going to show those guys. Training never stops, know what I mean? You can’t let up.”

“Right,” Tom said. “Right.” And he hung up.

Prick!

S
AMMY
Sweet was dead. It was in the Winnipeg
Free Press,
the front page, but somehow Tom had missed it.

CITY REALTOR, 44, COLLAPSES DURING MARATHON

He had died on the north end of the Redwood Bridge, which would make it fifteen minutes, twenty at most, after Tom had turned off at the corner of McDermot and Main.

There they’d been, chugging along, shooting the breeze, the sun shining down, a nice easy May wind keeping things cool, and half an hour later, while Tom stood at the counter of the Scotsman Café raising a cappuccino to his lips, Sammy was stretched out in an ambulance, already dead. Dead on arrival, the report said.

The obituary read:

Tom, hideously shaken, put a hand to his own chest, feeling sudden pain, constriction. He took several deep breaths – there, that was better – then replayed his last few seconds with Sammy. “Best of British luck,” he’d said stupidly, meaninglessly – a phrase
from his boyhood in Duck River – and what had Sammy said in reply? Nothing. Just flashed him a loopy undirected smile and pressed on his way.

Should he phone the police? The family? The hospital? Didn’t he, as the last person to talk to the deceased Sammy, have some moral, or even legal, responsibility? As usual when faced with a dilemma, he asked Ted Woloschuk down at CHOL for advice.

Talking to Ted was like talking to the drywall. Ted never interrupted. He never said, “Are you sure of that?” or, “Let’s go over that again.” He listened, nodded, poured more cold coffee into his cup, and finally, after thirty seconds of pure silence had elapsed, said, “Forget it, Tom, it’s over.”

W
HO KILLED
S
AMMY
S
WEET
? This was a necessary question.

He killed Sammy, who else? With the guilt of the survivor, Tom accepted full responsibility. First, there was that sneering billboard, which Sammy must have seen but was too decent to mention; and then he’d poisoned Sammy in his final moments by asking him how the market was doing – an incendiary topic – and topped that off with his bland agreement about the perfection of the weather. He’d failed to look into Sammy’s eyes, where he might have deteced signs of fatigue and stress. He’d raised Sammy’s anxiety level simply by being there, flapping along beside him in clumsy street clothes. That light urea smell of Sammy’s sweat: a warning he’d missed. The color and size of his pupils. There were questions he might have put to Sammy: Why exactly are you pushing yourself like this? What are you trying to prove? Why don’t you come have a cappuccino with me, we can have a real talk for the first time in our goddamned lives. About the really important questions that face us. The fact that we’ve both been married to the same woman, a woman called Sheila, we loved her and left her, how about that? We could talk about love. Passion. You could tell me about some of those things.

No, it was Fritzi Sweet who killed Sammy. Why had she defaulted on the clean socks, why hadn’t she been in front of the Richardson Building at the appointed time? It was for Fritzi that
Sammy was out there running. Fritzi – his sun and his moon, without whom he had not been able to live, Fritzi the culpable, the betrayer.

No, Christ, no, it was Steve Fitzsimmons, winner of this year’s marathon, who had sprung forward at the starting line, ten years younger than Sammy Sweet, leaner, better muscled, more disciplined, unfettered by love (probably), by children, by the plunging real estate market. Prideful Steve Fitzsimmons, who never once looked over his shoulder at those he overtook, who slept easy in his ignorance of the delicate springs of cause and effect, happy with his terrible guilt.

S
TEVE
F
ITZSIMMONS
gave Tom a call at the station.

“Steve Fitzsimmons here,” he said. “I’m taking off a few days from my training program and I’ve got a little more time than I thought, and, well, someone pointed you out to me yesterday, that humongous billboard, wow! And I hear you’ve got a pretty big following. So I just phoned to say that, sure, I’d be glad to come on your show, do a one-on-one interview kind of thing.”

“Well, that’s great,” Tom said, affable, smarmy, “but the fact is, I’ve got this week covered, and next week, too. But I’ll tell you what – give me a call after the Boston biggie, and we can rap.”

“Yeah, well, I might do that. Or then again, I might not.”

“Suit yourself,” Tom said, and then added, trembling, “and the best of British luck.”

F
AY WAS GLAD TO GET AWAY FOR A FEW DAYS, EVEN IF IT WAS ONLY
to Minneapolis. She’d had enough for one week with three funerals – first her Uncle Arthur, then John Brewmaster, and then Sammy Sweet.

Uncle Arthur was really her father’s uncle, a man with a heavy forward tilting belly, saturnine, monosyllabic. “We never expected he’d hang on for as long as he did after your Aunt Velma went into Eastgate Manor,” Fay’s father told her five minutes before the service at Westminister Church, a service attended by fewer than thirty people. “He depended on her, adored her. You wouldn’t remember this, but he used to have a pet name for her. He called her Cricket. He liked to buy her jewelry, gold chains and long ropes of pearls. Once he said to me – this was just after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s – ‘Your Aunt Velma has the most beautiful throat in the world.’ “

Fay grew up thinking of her Aunt Velma as a lump in a corner of a sofa, tutting and wincing over inconsequential items of news,
and now she’s a silent lump in a ghostly hospital bed. The possibility that she might once have stirred ardor in a man, even a man like Uncle Arthur, came as a surprise to Fay, the kind of surprise that made her smile inside her head. At the same time, suspicious of condescension, she is wary of extravagant, arcane tributes, especially those that attach to something as soft-tissued and nonthreatening as a woman’s throat.

Those at the funeral attributed the small turnout to the fact that Arthur McLeod had outlived most of his friends, of whom it was said he once had many. This was one more thing Fay found hard to believe. Her uncle had been taciturn and top-heavy, bending stiffly from the waist when he spoke to people, though perhaps that was because of his deafness. She thought to herself during the singing of the final hymn how kind she had been to invite him to lunch recently, how thoughtful, but in the next breath castigated herself for her smug self-approval, then lightly forgave herself before the music had altogether faded.

About eighty people gathered to mourn old John Brewmaster. He had been not quite seventy years old, but the early onset of Parkinson’s disease had aged him dreadfully, and Fay always thought of him in that way – old John Brewmaster. He and his wife, Muriel, were old friends of Fay’s parents. Muriel had, in fact, been matron of honor at the McLeod wedding, and John had been best man. “The first of our crowd, to go,” Peggy McLeod said to Fay, shaking tears from her eyes.

Fay had been fond of John Brewmaster but had never known what to think of him. An insurance executive, he had possessed a smooth handsome face and silky manner but was unaccountably shy with women. He laughed rarely, which was a pity, because he had a vibrant musical laugh with a peculiar patterning of high and low notes. Fay remembers that when she and Bibbi were children, they were always trying to imitate “Uncle” John’s laugh. After the funeral people spoke of his ability at the bridge table, his golf scores, his generosity to charities, and how well Muriel was bearing up. This was true. Muriel was almost rosy at the reception that followed the service, pressing the hands of friends warmly. The
round pink transparency of her face, which always reminded Fay of a peony, held a social glow. Would she be staying on in her Oxford Street house? friends asked. Perhaps, she twinkled, perhaps not.

Several hundred people, family and friends, attended Sammy Sweet’s funeral at St. Ignatius, and many emerged from the church weeping. The sight of Sammy’s young daughters, four and two, their hands joined, was poignant. Rain fell heavily on the church roof and on the sidewalks and on the small trees that lined Corydon Avenue. Fritzi was brave and handsome, stepping along in a navy silk suit that set off her hair. Peter Knightly, Fritzi’s first husband, walked behind her with an umbrella, a gesture which a number of people found unusual. Fay searched his face for an expression of – what? Triumph? None was there, and she immediately felt ashamed.

“She’s totally broken,” Peter said to Fay the day after the funeral, his own face breaking into waves. “Devastated. It was a complete shock. Sammy was in perfect health, and then this.”

Fay seldom reads the death notices in the newpaper, but when she’s tired or dispirited or personally affected, as she was last week, she studies them closely. She likes the formalism of obituary language, what it suggests and conceals. Died suddenly while on vacation in Santa Fe, after a long struggle, after a difficult battle with, after a brief illness, as the result of a tragic accident, peacefully entered into sleep, into Our Maker’s arms.

This week, between the notices for Arthur Rutherford McLeod, eighty (suddenly), and John Brewmaster, sixty-nine (courageously), and Samuel Patrick Sweet, forty-four (tragically), there was a brief mention of the passing of someone called Winifred Noyes, sixty-five, who had “joined her Creator” and who would be “sadly missed by a niece, Edith Noyes, of New York City.” This fragment of kinship seemed to Fay to be miserably inadequate, as did the heart-cracking phrase that summed up the life of Winifred Noyes and brought the sting of tears to her eyes, tears she had not managed to produce for Uncle Arthur or old John Brewmaster
or Sammy Sweet: “Miss Noyes enjoyed her collection of salt and pepper shakers and was fond of attending garage sales.”

T
HE EARLY-MORNING
flight to Minneapolis was stormy. However, breakfast was eventually served – the usual soft unmeatlike ham pressed into perfect circles and a pale rolled-up omelet. But no coffee or tea was offered; it was too rough, too dangerous for the pouring of hot liquids. People stayed in their seats and read the harsh headlines of newspapers and kept to themselves. Fay had C. F. Whitehead’s
Myth and Anti-myth
in her briefcase, but didn’t open it. Instead she accepted a copy of
People
magazine and read about Liz Taylor’s brush with death, and a resume of her diet and exercise program, her secret past, the burgers and fries she once wolfed in private, the bottles of wine she’d tossed down.