Believe Me Part 5

12.

Christmas Eve. Santa Claus was coming, and so was Bernice. I'd hummed an anxious little song about it that morning, as I'd rushed around the house trying to make everything look just so, recovering Bernice's medical gadgets and restoring some of her things.

"Can't see my chuckwagon," she announced right off the bat, as Calvin gingerly settled her into her easy chair by the fire. He himself had arrived only a few hours earlier, checked her out of the Regional and had yet to ease off his overcoat. Did Bernice think she couldn't see the chuckwagon because I had put a tree up, all twinkly and bright with nightgowns wrapped for her beneath, or was she making a broader comment about my rearrangements in the house?

"Momma hid it," Lester offered, from his perch on the arm of the couch. "She said it was a thing."

"Okay, what he means by that," I hastened to add, tucking a blanket around her, "is that I didn't want him playing with your things."

Bernice made no reply. She was staring over the fireplace. "Is that a statue of Satan you put on my mantelpiece, Nancy, beside the Christmas carol trio, or what is that?"

"Oh. No, that's a pliosaur, actually," I said, as my cheeks flared crimson. "It's uh ... it's one of Lester's prehistoric marine reptiles. He just-you know, he puts these things everywhere and I just lose track." Calvin chuckled, patting my back. He headed for the kitchen, saying over his shoulder, "Wanna cuppa tea, Mum?"

Bernice nodded weakly and Lester homed in on this new species, Satan.

"What's a Satan, Granny?" he asked, pulling lightly on her fingers, which hung limply off the edge of the armrest.

"Oh, don't worry about him, darlin'," Bernice said, still distracted by her own dismay, "he's just a fallen angel. The devil. You don't want him to know you, dear. No, not at all."

"Why?" Lester persisted. "Is he dangerous? Is he a meat-eater or a plant-eater?"

Bernice leaned her head on her chair back and laughed. Took off her gla.s.ses and rubbed her eyes. "Good Lord in Heaven, Lester, I don't know what the devil eats. But he takes souls. You just be good, don't listen to his voice, and he won't take yours."

Later, Calvin took Lester out to toboggan, and I found Bernice silently weeping in her chair. Was it the absence of Stan, I wondered, or the perturbation of pliosaurs and missing chuckwagons? Did she feel that her life was being dismantled and replaced? I can only imagine how distressing that sense of displacement would be. I hovered.

"Oh, go on," she said, waving me away, "you go on and fix up Lester's presents. I'm just tired, that's all."

It was unclear to me what Bernice noticed, or didn't notice about her house, and I found myself compulsively worrying over each small transgression. Did she register that Lester and I had eaten all of her toffees? Was that okay, since we were guests? Or had we been hogs? Had she seen that I'd opened and investigated a box containing a brand-new pressure cooker? Just looked. I put it back beside the box of knives. Did she think I wanted to steal it?

Certainly, she seemed to think that Dana had pinched a k.n.o.bby orange throw rug that no longer sat folded on the bureau beside her bed, and since neither Calvin nor I could locate this rug, after an earnest and irrationally guilt-ridden search, we had to agree that it had somehow exited the house. Later, we would learn that Bernice had sold it at a yard sale but forgotten. This wound up accounting for the lawn mower, too, and a number of other objects she'd been complaining about all autumn. But we hadn't been around to monitor the humdrum transactions of her life. We had no idea what was true. We were lost with her, self-conscious and under suspicion, in the fun house of her own forgetfulness.

"No need to buy a turkey, Nancy," Bernice had told me at the hospital, when I said I was headed to the IGA for Christmas dinner groceries. "Been savin' one in the freezer. Got cranberry sauce down there, too. Lots of it. The secret to good cranberry sauce is not too much sugar. Shirley always spoils it, makes it too sweet."

"Oh, okay," I answered, "that makes things easier. Will you eat potatoes, Bernice, if I buy some?"

"You go on and get what you want, dear, I'll eat what I can."

So I did, and then, surprise. I went down on Christmas Eve to pull out the turkey for thawing, and found nothing resembling fowl, not even a chicken, residing in those arctic boxes filled with soup and jam.

"Oh, Lord in Heaven!" Bernice exclaimed from her easy chair, when I broke the news. "Dana's stolen my turkey right out from under me!" She tugged at her white tufts of hair in distress and held a balled fist to her mouth to keep from crying.

"I didn't take no turkey," Dana retorted with a snort of derision when I phoned her at home, at Bernice's insistence, to say, "Merry Christmas and where's the bird, you robber."

"Bernice don't even cook turkey for Christmas," Dana added. "Stan always wanted meat pie. You don't believe me, ask Shirley. Shirley brings over her turkey leftovers, sometimes, so's Bernice can make that rice soup she likes!"

"Alright," I said, trying to mollify Dana, "don't worry about it, I just promised Bernice that I'd ask. It's hard to tell what's true in what she says, you know."

"That's just because you ain't been around," Dana countered. "Otherwise it would be clear as the nose on your face."

"I know, and I'm sorry. It's confusing. Listen, have a Merry Christmas."

I hung up feeling desperate for a scotch. Lester and Calvin were in the kitchen, arranging a plate of Peek Freans to leave by the fire for Santa. "Are you sure Santa will know that we're here, and not home?" Lester pressed his father. "Are you sure?" He was very worried about it, as I had been the day before. ("Are you sure you remembered to buy Lester all the stuff I suggested. Are you sure?") I brought Bernice another cup of tea and sat down across from her chair. When I relayed Dana's protestation of innocence, she rolled her head away from me, and closed her eyes. A tear began to wander down her withered cheek.

"It wouldn'a happened when Stan was alive, all this thieving and lying. Taking advantage of me."

A silence settled between us, and at length I reached for the remote and turned on the TV.

Calvin hated having Lester bear witness to his mother's fear.

"This is c.r.a.p," he said, as we lay down on the pull-out couch in the living room and stared at the ruby lights of the tree. "You spend so much time convincing your child that the world is a safe place, you know?"

I knew.

"And then my mother blows it all to h.e.l.l by announcing that in fact, in fact, the world is really out to kill you and rob you blind. Oh, and watch out for Satan."

"She doesn't mean any harm," I said quietly, flinging one arm up over my head, exhausted from the lastminute blitz of present-wrapping and stocking-stuffing.

"Maybe we shouldn't have brought Lester here," Calvin said. His tone was bleak, belligerent. Characteristic of Cape Bretoners-fatalistic Scots and doomed Acadians who arrived in the new world desperate and f.u.c.ked, and never got over it, just took refuge in their wonderful, mordant humor.

"We should have brought him home for Christmas," he continued. "We're freaking him out. I'll tell you what: I can't stand parenting at both ends-trying to keep one end from completely alarming the other."

"Well, it could be worse," I ventured, turning to press my nose into his flannel-shirted side, which smelled of deodorant and Christmas pine, and ever so faintly of scotch. "We could be living at any other time in history, when families stayed together until the bitter end, all the different generations in one hut, having to do everything, you know? Fart in front of one another. Make love. Die. The children saw all of that. And then the dead bodies would hang around in the parlor with flies on them for a while."

"Huts don't have parlors."

"Well, you know what I mean." I cuffed him lightly. "Like that time I spent those three months in Cuba, and there was a dead dog outside on the road one day, it must have been hit by a car. Did I ever tell you about this? So you think, oh that's grim and sad. The way you would think in Canada. But then it just stayed there. n.o.body removed it. They didn't have a department of sanitation, or whatever, in that town. Plus, it was the dry season, it never rained, so the body took an extremely long time to decompose. So, eventually the sentiment shifts from 'Oh, that's grim and sad' to 'Hey, I wonder what state of decay that German shepherd is in today? Has the tongue fallen out of the skull yet?'"

Calvin raised himself up on his elbow and twisted around to stare at me in amus.e.m.e.nt. "And your point is?"

I sighed. Defensive. I rolled onto my other side. "It's not funny, Calvin. My point is that you can get used to anything. It's just how far removed you are from trying times that makes you worry about Lester. He's better off learning how to makes sense of the world now, for good and bad, than in expecting nothing to happen but sunshine and Santa."

"Oh, you have been thinking," Calvin murmured, sliding his arm around my waist and nosing into my neck. "I try not to do that on holidays."

We were still in bed the next morning, drugged with sleep, ruffled heads immovable beneath the floral quilt, when I heard Bernice and Lester chatting in the kitchen as Christmas dawned.

I couldn't make out what she was saying-she spoke in such a rasping whisper these days-but I certainly caught my own boy's chipper Boy Scout sing-song. "It's okay, Granny," he told her, "you don't have to worry about the devil. He doesn't live in Canada."

13.

Monday morning. Freezing rain. Hunkered down and glowering, I rode the crowded streetcar to work after a long month's absence, squished between two strangers talking on their cell phones. Bernice had returned to the Regional, unable to procure twenty-four-hour nursing until she'd been "signed over to palliative," as Dr. Richardson explained it, which n.o.body seemed prepared to do. So we flew home to resume our lives in the uncertain light of her illness.

"Hey, Jim. Wha.s.sup?" the man to the left of me suddenly barked. "Yeah, I'm on my way to the office. I did go skiing. Yeah. The powder was awesome." To my right, a young woman with blue-tinted hair sang out gaily, "No way! That is such a hoot! What do edible panties taste like?"

"Excuse me," I said, as the streetcar rolled sluggishly toward my stop. Engrossed as they were, neither of the strangers heard me. I thumped the woman lightly on the back, fueled by that momentary and ridiculous panic one feels that one will not successfully exit the vehicle. "I need to get past you, please."

"Do you mind?" she retorted, with startling indignation. "I'm on the phone."

Several pa.s.sengers, including me, stared at her for a beat and then laughed at the sheer witlessness of what she had said. I elbowed my way to the exit and stepped down onto the icy street in a much better mood.

Thankfully I did not dread returning to work, the way I used to when I held clerical jobs, just out of college. I used to sit at my desk completely mesmerized by the tick of the clock toward five. My pay hadn't improved much since those days, given that the Review couldn't attract high-end advertisers like Gucci, say, to flash wares between reviews of "Abortion: A Social History" and "The Bosnian Experience in Canada." But the work absorbed me and the s.p.a.ce was quiet. In the renovated warehouse on Adelaide Street that held our modest office-a converted slaughterhouse with exposed-brick walls-Avery and I mostly sat in companionable silence.

Our loft was sparely furnished. Along one wall stood a slanted design table for Goran, our Croatian art director, who strolled in for a week or so at the end of each month to put the magazine to bed, otherwise devoting himself to designing Flash files for display on the Web.

We had a couple of rickety shelves for our books, and for us, two schoolteacher's desks that faced each other across a vast expanse of maple flooring. Ma.n.u.scripts fanned out around each desk like plumage as we picked through the upcoming books we were going to a.s.sign for review. Avery and I consulted one another as if we were husband and wife dining at either end of a long, invisible table.

I told Avery about Lester's new acquaintance with religion, and he responded by quoting the comic Eddie Izzard, who he'd just seen performing at the Opera House, on the subject of how G.o.d made the world in seven days.

"On the first day he created light, and air, and fish, and jam, and soup, and potatoes, and haircuts, and arguments, and small things, and rabbits, and people with noses."

Avery spoke in a deep ba.s.s with crisp, scholarly p.r.o.nunciation. If you were to hear him on the telephone, you might imagine a man of great physical presence and immaculate attire, an MI5 man perhaps, like James Bond's boss. But in fact he seemed rather tubercular, so slender his chest appeared to be concave. He wore dingy white dress shirts that billowed out at the front where his size-two pants were cinched with a belt, and more often than not, his shirt worked itself free and hung over his gray flannels like an ap.r.o.n. His chin was piquant, his cheeks sallow and his eyes enormous. He might have been beautiful, if he weren't so awkward.

Avery's looks had nothing to do with tragedy at Moulin Rouge and everything to do with the fact that he ate nothing but turkey. He was impossible to go to restaurants with, really, because he shunned almost all foodstuffs. If there wasn't turkey, which there rarely was, he would settle for minestrone soup with saltine crackers. Failing that, he would eat dinner rolls and sip ice water. Avery was the picky child whose mother had died when he was three, freezing him in the business of being picky; his father had never addressed his refusals and corrected them, and he'd grown to manhood with these peculiarities of diet, about which he was totally unselfconscious. Hand him a package of Maple Leaf turkey slices, and he would settle down as cheerfully as if he had a feast before him.

In spite of this malnutrition, he never lacked for energy. His arms were intriguingly elastic-they waved and twisted snakishly whenever he grew animated in conversation. Calvin had turned this unique display into a noun, which he called "Avery-ness." n.o.body else waved their arms this way, or subsisted exclusively on Thanksgiving dinners, or revealed such a strange absence of awareness about all things twenty-first century. Avery wrote by hand, possessed neither a cell phone nor an answering machine, and didn't know how to drive. Instead, he pedaled around town on bicycles which were frequently stolen, because he tended to lock them to portable objects.

He was the sort of person to whom things happened, good or ill, entirely due to his Avery-ness. Once, for example, he got thrown out of the Drake Hotel, a chic bar very much consumed by its own image, because he hogged the bathroom for half an hour-by an oversight on Avery's part, it happened to be the women's bathroom-seated on the toilet reading the last chapter of his Pushkin novel, as if he were at home. He was unable to dispel the bartender's conviction that he had either barfed and pa.s.sed out, or was in there snorting lines. I tried to rescue him to no avail, and he was summarily escorted out the door.

For all of his oddities, Avery was a man of great common sense and sly perceptiveness. Last year, he came up with the name for the new start-up magazine down the hall from us, when the editors were standing about scratching their heads and gnawing their pen tips.

"I have an idea," Avery had offered, not bothering to explain that his idea came straight out of a Mark Twain story about dueling, back-stabbing, gun-fighting broadsheet editors in the Confederate South. And the editors cried, "That's a great idea!" So it was that they unveiled Canada's first ultra-conservative magazine as the Moral Volcano.

It was a very important niche magazine, the Moral Volcano, for it swiftly became a must-read every week for the nation's conservatives. I had never met the proprietor, Frederick Dunst, but Avery's father had taught him Latin at private school, and thus Avery knew that Frederick was heir to the Dunst chocolate-peanut fortune. Further, Avery had heard that the younger Dunst once got three sheets to the wind with George W. Bush, at a party in Palm Beach in the mid-eighties. He developed such a nostalgic adoration for this magical night of slurred opinions, and held-at any rate-such similar views about h.o.m.os.e.xuals, Cubans and French politicians-that he eventually bankrolled a magazine to rally the Canadian right to the Bush cause. Naturally, he staffed it with like-minded thinkers, who I often ran into in the stairwell. We had this huffing, stair-climbing sort of pa.s.sing acquaintance, in which we'd nod in recognition, but I didn't know anyone by name until I met Hilary. She was the managing editor, whose son Niall had been in kindergym with Lester.

"Why don't you come take a peek at our s.p.a.ce," Hilary invited me one day after we ascended to the second floor together, chatting about how much preschoolers liked trampolines. Hilary was a moon-faced blond with wide-set green eyes and a penchant for wearing slimming black suits. Her husband, Brad, was a banker, she told me, which enabled her to afford monthly sprees at Holt Renfrew in spite of her editing salary. She had a big, robust laugh and a flair for hospitality.

Unlike our big empty rectangle of an office, the Volcano divvied up its half of the second floor into cubicles. There was a common lounge at the end, with an overstuffed leather couch and a coffee table piled with copies of the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. On the wall, someone had posted a large photograph of the United Nations, at which the editors threw suction-cup darts when they needed some downtime. "So that's a lot of fun," Hilary said. "And the other thing we do is, every Friday we break out the c.o.c.ktails and destroy something French." She smiled and gave a mischievous wink.

Ah, so that explained it. I had wondered, once, when I was working late and walked down the hall to the bathroom, why the Volcano staff were chortling and hooting as they stomped on a baguette.

Hilary's description raised more questions than it answered, but I was too self-conscious to ask them. I didn't know how to bring it up as stairwell chat, because what I wanted to know, rather than being casual and jokey, would by necessity be pressing. "What is the deal with your hostility toward Gauls and multilateralism?" It was easier to confess all my sins to Father McPhee than to ask a loaded question like that.

14.

This much I owed to Lester, and to Father McPhee. I would take my son to St. Stephen's, the little brick church down the street from us in Toronto, last refuge for a smattering of Anglicans in a community now dominated by Portuguese Catholics, Vietnamese Buddhists and Goths, so that Lester could wrap his mind around Heaven and h.e.l.l and I could kneel down on a pew with my parka bunched around my waist and think nice things about Bernice.

I suppose I might have chosen a different church, if I'd had the faintest clue how to shop for churches in a city with hundreds of them. St. Stephen's won my allegiance by dint of being so close; off we went in our snowsuits while Calvin remained a lump in the bed, recovering from a night of sin and debauchery at a viola concert at Ma.s.sey Hall.

Sunday school at St. Stephen's took place after a procession, two prayers and a hymn, which children shared with the general congregation. After that, a handful of kids would rise and straggle toward the choir door, leaving behind a dozen adults scattered thinly across the pews. I found it a bit disheartening to attend this church, for it was not unlike being part of the meager audience at a poorly reviewed play. Nevertheless, having decided that this was my spiritual community, I dutifully accompanied Lester on the trip downstairs. This was our new routine, our new leaf turned, him and me going to church.

Down we went to the bas.e.m.e.nt room full of toys, pots of paint and a piano, feeling righteous and simply curious, respectively. Following the lead of others, we sat down on teensy plastic chairs arranged in a circle. Three acne-scarred teenagers stood around alertly-a Christian youth trio here to a.s.sist Andrew, the teacher.

You wonder, sometimes, who becomes a Sunday-school teacher. Whether they have a facility with children, or they feel obliged, or what. Because certainly in this day and age, it isn't a totally obvious thing to volunteer for. Andrew, I noticed, seemed decidedly uncomfortable. In some ways, he was an absolutely cla.s.sic Canadian WASP of the church-going variety: mild-mannered, stiff-jointed, possessing not even a wisp of charisma, attired in corduroy pants and plaid shirt, and struggling visibly with the mission of interesting small children in lessons from the Bible. But was he innately impaired in his teaching, I wondered, or was it the result of his ambivalence? Did his wife make him do this?

In any event, at the start of each cla.s.s Andrew invited the children to light candles for his miniature altar. He handed a wooden match to the first child in the queue-for all children will instantly line up for the opportunity to play with fire-and then went rigid with fear, convinced that the church was going to go up in flames. He bent over each child with his two hands clutched like chicken claws around the match, visibly sweating, and then repeated the ritual seven times.

I like to imagine Andrew coming up with this idea of the candles and feeling almost giddy with relief at discovering something creative to do with children, before actually undertaking the task. Once the altar had been lit, Andrew generally launched into a Bible reading, upon which basis he would then have the children do some sort of craft. Here I should append a note to parents considering Sunday school: the vexing surprise is that there is no official Day One. The story never unfolds in chronological order. Your know-nothing child doesn't get to start at the beginning, with G.o.d creating the world. He dives, instead, into baffling, out-of-context lessons and discussions about mysterious characters who primarily engage in agriculture.

"Boys and girls?" Andrew would begin, experimentally testing his command of the room. "Today we're going to talk about Job and the fig tree.

"Lo, and G.o.d said to Job ..."

Afterwards, I'd have to explain to Lester what "lo" means, and who Job was.

Perhaps the language of the Bible should be updated a touch, if only for the sake of our children. I only say this because words dating back to the reign of King James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots, do tend to complicate simple tales for children more used to reading Walter the Farting Dog. Consider the word "lo," which doesn't come up that often in modern conversations. I'm not even sure that I know what it means. I told Lester that it was the ancient version of "yo," but I wouldn't defend that to a theologian. With nineteenth-century cla.s.sics, like Mother Goose, I can simultaneously translate as I read, turning six pence into a dollar if I need to and that sort of thing. But biblical language defies me. After a few Sunday-school sessions, I tried using biblical language around the house to see if I could just get used to it, like practicing French, or a c.o.c.kney accent. In this manner, I would relay the day's events to Calvin: "'And lo,' I said unto Lester, 'thou shalt not make a triple-decker sandwich with cream cheese and icing sugar, because thou wilt not eat it, and it will wasteth the bread.'

"And Lester said unto me, 'Yea, though I shalt not eat it truly, I shalt give it to Daddy as a present.'

"'No-est,' I saith. 'Daddy will not want it. He dost not like sandwiches made of cream cheese and icing sugar, and thus he shall cast it away as boxes of Tuna Helper upon the waters of the Nile. And there will be no bread for toast tomorrow, before daycare.'"

"Are you taking Lester tomorrow, or am I?" Calvin would reply, watching hockey on TV and not listening to me at all.

Andrew was frequently interrupted by his own son, John, an exuberant ten-year-old who obviously knew Bible stuff inside and out and had an instinct for livening things up. This made Andrew furious.

"John?" Andrew would say, his voice as taut as a mountaineer's cable, "There's only one teacher here today ..."

"John? Please face the right way in your chair."

"John? If you don't settle down, you'll have to stay here while the others go into the kitchen and make the cookies."

Each remonstration was enunciated in a voice so deliberately soft, so forcibly sing-song that you just knew Andrew wanted to explode into violence. Particularly, you understood this because his son was barely obstreperous by anyone's standards, and could mostly stand accused of sensing his father's insecurity and choosing to push the big red b.u.t.ton in his psyche marked DO NOT PUSH.

"Momma," Lester asked me after Sunday in February, "why can angels see G.o.d, but I can't see him?"

"Well," I answered, having wondered that very thing myself, "people do still see G.o.d, honey, I'm pretty sure. It's just that, ever since we left the garden and got lost in the woods, it seems like it's harder to find him."

"I bet I can find him," Lester said, taking on the challenge. "I'll leave food out for him, like we did for Santa."

"Okay, hon." I squeezed his shoulders through my mitts, game to entertain his sense of hope. My mind flew to the to-do-list challenge of remembering to eat whatever food Lester left out for G.o.d in the kitchen tonight. Who needs cocaine to make reality precarious? Try being a parent. Pile lies upon lies, artifice upon wish, Tooth Fairy upon Santa Claus upon G.o.d, all of them whisking away their proffered gifts at midnight until the time, the one time, Momma plain forgets and the cosmology comes crashing down.