THAT AFTERNOON WAS spent getting my grip and renting a room. I bought a sheaf of magazines from a newsstand to while away my life, the green-covered
I picked up the telephone and asked the operator to put me through to the Dunphy residence. A maid answered. My throat constricted and I severed the connection. I sat on the bed in my shirtsleeves with my head in my hands. Jackass. Too old to be playing childish games of love. She’d led me on, Old Nick knows why, and finally dropped me without a qualm after all the devious stratagems I’d concocted to slip her lovelorn letters, all the artfully orchestrated chance encounters in social settings. I’d been stealing morphine and selling it to finance my romantic campaign. Was it any wonder that after Laura pitched me I began taking my own medicine? Soon enough I was skipping lectures and duties at the Royal Victoria. The money melted away. I became careless and was caught out. Or near enough. And no Jack to save me. Same as in the years after the war: he vanished. The Pater received postcards from San Francisco, Montana, London, then nothing. No one knew.
After I returned from service my father sent me to a local college where we adopted Oxford bags and played golf between semesters. I’d picked up enough chemistry and biology to be accepted for medical studies here in Montreal, just in time for Jack to show up out of the blue, claiming to be enrolled in Divinity, one of his jokes, belike, but one never knew. Perhaps the Pater’s influence over him and a wish to atone. For what? Go ahead, Mick, and pound sand.
Jack and I were Methuselahs amongst the stripling freshmen two years ago but we weren’t alone; my classes were filled with former soldiers playing catch-up after the war. Four semesters was all it took for me to be out on my ear, out in the cold. I was too damn old now, twenty-seven, child of the last year of the last century. No, that wasn’t correct. The century properly started in 1901, the year Queen Victoria died and took all the old certainties with her.
Unconsciously my fingers mimed the movements of preparing a solution, muscle memory. A steel hypodermic filled with release. Put the thought out of your head. Look at the marks on your pale skin. Smoke a healthy cigaret. Distract yourself. Think of what honourable work you can turn to, think about who you are, where you’re from. You’re the son of a Presbyterian minister born beside the Cariboo Road. You spent your childhood in mining camps and at the mouth of the Fraser, a motherless boy on the shore of the sea with a wild child for a friend, a changeling, a cuckoo’s egg taken under the Pater’s wing. Jack, brother and bane, wide and expansive where you’re narrow and small. Do yourself a favour: stare out the window into the city and a world spinning out of control. You’re nothing, not a mechanic of the human machine, not a son or a lover but a criminal, a shortterm ex-soldier unbloodied in war, an Irish Protestant, the worst of all worlds.
I picked up the ’phone again and screwed my courage to the sticking place. Into my ear came the operator’s nasal voice, an electric screech as the connection plug was fitted into its hole on the board and a click as the receiver was picked up at the other end of the line. The same maid answered.
“May I speak with Miss Laura Dunphy, please?” I asked.
“And whom shall I say is calling?”
“Professor Edwin Drood, McGill University.”
“One moment, if you please.”
The maid sounded like a Scotch domestic cleared from the Lowlands to serve different masters on the igneous North American rock. A new indenture, wearing wool while her mistress was clad in silk. Laura copper- haired and cool-eyed, the cat of the house. A muffled sound and then her, her voice low and thrilling.
“Hello?”
“What’re you doing tonight?” I asked.
“Who is this?”
“It’s me.”
Silence. Then: “I thought that you would understand how I felt when I failed to accept your last invitation.”
“That’s the best you can come up with?”
“Honestly, this is too tiresome.”
“Not like dancing,” I said.
“I am sure that I do not know what you mean.”
“Think about it.”
“Michael, you are threatening to become a bore. Have you anything purposeful to say?”
“Laura, you’re not talking to Little Boy Blue here. There’s a strong possibility I might be leaving town for good and I’d like the chance to see you before I go.”
“And where are you going?”
“Far away.”
“I’m afraid that I am not at liberty to see you.”
“‘My love swears that she is made of truth, and I do believe her though I know she lies.’”
“Michael, stop this.”
I hung up. Full stop.
Depression seized me. I opened the window and smelled snow. I thought of my revolver and my temple. It was already past dusk. Oh, but the poor chambermaid who’d find this ruined body. There’d be another girl, a knock-kneed number in a sunny small town. I picked up the ’phone again for the front desk and ordered coffee, then leafed through the magazines in search of some truth. Instead of revelation I found tooth powder advertisements and cures for halitosis. There was nothing real, nothing like Laura in a black coat, black gloves on her elegant hands standing beneath a tree amongst the fallen chestnut leaves, her long hair blazing fire in the October evening light. Or had that been a painting in the Museum of Fine Arts?
The coffee came but I sent it back down on the pretext it was stale. I started pacing, a kind of chattering voice chasing and echoing itself inside my skull. On the dresser was a wireless and I turned it on to the sound of a cat being strangled. The steel whisker went up and down the wire, picking up dance music, hymns, a snowfall warning for farmers, and then nothing but crackling. The empty skies were filling up with voices: Morse code, radio transmissions, unknown electrical rays. Airplane propellers drilled through the atmosphere. It was too much for one such as myself, raised in youth on the fixed verities to be found in
I resolved to walk and clear my head. I would hustle a game of billiards on the lower Main, see a moving- picture show, do anything but trawl through that sea of memory filled with lost loves, squandered hopes, wasted time, embarrassing drunken antics. I rode the lift down to the lobby and then, outside the saloon, hesitated.
“BEG YOUR PARDON. Would you happen to have a light?”
She was a little older than I, well made up and wearing a light fur and a black velvet ribbon with a charm tied high around her throat. I fumbled a vesta towards her face. She touched my hand as she lit her cigaret. A woman alone. I tried to picture myself as I must appear to her.
“Are you from around here?” she asked coolly, regarding me from her perch at the bar.
“Enough to know my way around,” I answered, scanning the room for its few denizens.
“I see. Where are you from, originally?”
“That’s a very good question,” I smirked.
She laughed and I saw the smallest touch of lipstick on a canine. The colour of her eyes was difficult to tell in the light.
“Well then, how long is ‘enough’?”
“Two years,” I said. “Two years too many.”
“Don’t you like Montreal?”
“Not particularly,” I said.
