Quebecois.”
“Daniel, our
“I don’t have a bone to pick with anyone,” said Joe.
“Vive Quebec libre,” said the bearded boy from Chatham drunkenly.
Daniel smiled. Joe saw that he was embarrassed for the rest of them. But they couldn’t see it. They continued.
“To what do you owe your success?” said the Chathamite. “Why are you, as Rose suggests, so together? So Quebecois?”
It isn’t funny, Joe thought. They think it is, but it isn’t. He is serious. It seemed to Joe that Daniel was speaking directly to him.
“What is the secret of our success?” said Daniel. “We’re like the Irish, or the Jews, or the South of the Confederacy. We don’t forget. Anything. The good or the bad.” He laughed. “You can see it in our faces.” He pointed to Joe. “We all have mouths like that.”
“And that’s the secret?”
“Yeah,” said Daniel, suddenly becoming irritable with the game, “that’s it.
“Well, that seems simple enough,” said the bearded boy. “That’s easy.”
No it isn’t, thought Joe. He felt a little panicky. It isn’t easy at all. He finished his drink, picked up his coat and spoke to Mark.
“I think I’ll be going now,” he said. He felt he had to get out of there.
Mark was alarmed. “Jesus, Dad,” he said, “is there something the matter? Are you feeling okay?”
“Fine,” said Joe. “I feel fine. I’m just tired. I’m too old for this party.” He smiled. “Everybody here is too quick for me. I’m out of step.”
“No you’re not,” said Mark, holding on to his coat sleeve. “Don’t go.”
“I’d better.”
He left Mark at the doorway. In the hall Joe pushed the timed light switch that would illuminate the stairwell for a minute so that he could get down to street level. As he moved downward through the thick smells of curry and cabbage, something caught his eye. On the wall of the stairwell, scribbled in felt pen, was written, “Punk Rule OK!”
What a long way I came for this, Joe thought.
He took a pen out of his breast pocket and, directly beneath the slogan, wrote in his neat, schoolmasterish script Blake’s line: “Albion’s coast is sick, silent; the American meadows faint!”
The light in the stairwell clicked off and he was left in darkness. The penalty for tardiness and vandalism. But at last, hidden in the dusty, narrow tomb of the hallway, hidden in utter night, he found himself whispering it. I remember. I remember. Now I do.
She was a long time dying. Two years. But neither of them had admitted the possibility. That was foolish. In the early days after she had been diagnosed they would load the car and drive down to the ferry to fish for goldeye. They would drive their rods into the soft sand strewn with flood refuse and sit huddled together watching the bright floats riding the oily dark water. That might have been the time to say something. But the sun polished the heavy water, sluggish with silt, and the breeze tugged at their pant-legs and they were full of expectation, certain of a strike, eager to mark a plunging float. The magpies dragged their tail feathers along the beach and the earliest geese rode far out in the river along the flank of a sandbar. Nothing could touch them, and they pressed their shoulders together hard as they leaned into a sharp breeze that came off the face of the water.
At the end, of course, it was different. He spent every night in the armchair in her hospital room. Instead of watching a bright float, he stared at the intravenous bottle slowly drain, and when it emptied he called the little blonde nurse who wore too much make-up.
By then Marie was out of her head, wingy as hell. The things she said, accused him of. Poisoning her food, stealing her slippers, lying to her, sleeping with her friends now that she was sick – even of sleeping with her sister. The doctor explained it by saying that the cancer had spread to her brain. That was true. But why did she think of him in that way? Had she drawn on some silent, subterranean stream of ill will he had never sensed for those crazy notions? How had she really seen him all those years they had spent together? Had she read in his smoothly shaved face some malignancy?
And that of course was his difficulty. Who was he? Everything had changed since her death. His son didn’t recognize him. He hardly recognized himself. Had he been lost for thirty years, in expatriate wandering? Had all those hot classrooms been exile? Was he a harder man than anyone had imagined? And had his wife known that? Was he a breaker of jaws? A drunkard who kicked at strangers in the streets, a man who punished his son by giving him pictures of his dead mother?
Or was he the man who had dreamed of water, who had sat quietly on a stretch of ashy-grey sand and watched a gently tugging line, huddled with his wife?
He began to cry in that dark passage, his first tears. He felt his way down the walls with shaking hands. Why had the light been so brief? And why was the trick so hard, the trick every expatriate and every conquered people had to learn to survive.
Je me souviens, he said. Je me souviens.
Dancing Bear
THE OLD MAN lay sleeping on the taut red rubber sheet as if he were some specimen mounted and pinned there to dry. His housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Hax, paused in the doorway and then walked heavily to the bedside window, where she abruptly freed the blind and sent it up, whirring and clattering.
She studied the sky. Far away, to the east, and high above the bursting green of the elms that lined the street, greasy black clouds rolled languidly, their swollen underbellies lit by the occasional shudder of lightning that popped in the distance. After each flash she counted aloud to herself until she heard the faint, muttering accompaniment of thunder. Finally satisfied, she turned away from the window to find Dieter Bethge awake and watching her cautiously from his bed.
“It’s going to rain,” she said, moving about the room and grunting softly as she stooped to gather up his clothes and pile them on a chair.
“Oh?” he answered, feigning some kind of interest. He picked a flake of dried skin from his leg and lifted it tenderly to the light like a jeweller, intently examining its whorled grain and yellow translucence.
Sighing, Mrs. Hax smoothed the creases of his carelessly discarded trousers with a soft, fat palm and draped them over the back of a chair. The old bugger made more work than a whole tribe of kids.
She glanced over her shoulder and saw him fingering the bit of skin between thumb and forefinger. “Leave that be,” she said curtly. “It’s time we were up. Quit dawdling.”
He looked up, his pale blue eyes surprised. “What?”
“Time to get up.”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“It’s reveille. No malingering. Won’t have it,” she said, fixing an unconvincing smile on her broad face. “Come on now, up and at ’em. We’ve slept long enough.”
“That rubber thing kept me awake last night,” he said plaintively. “Every time I move it squeaks and pulls at my skin. There’s no give to it.”
“Complainers’ noses fall off,” Mrs. Hax said absent-mindedly as she held a shirt up to her own wrinkled nose. She sniffed. It wasn’t exactly fresh but she decided it would do, and tossed it back on the chair.
The old man felt his face burn with humiliation, as it did whenever he was thwarted or ignored. “I want that damn thing off my bed!” he yelled. “This is my bed! This is my house! Get it off!”
Mrs. Hax truculently folded her arms across her large, loose breasts and stared down at him. For a moment he met her gaze defiantly, but then he averted his eyes and his trembling jaw confirmed his confusion.
“I am not moved by childish tempers,” she announced. “You haven’t learned that yet?” Mrs. Hax paused. “It’s
