Marnie made a sound – a laugh that morphed into a sob. “Voted.”
“Right,” I said. “She voted for us. She even said she’d take a lawn sign.”
For the next five minutes I told stories. Marnie punctuated the familiar anecdotes with gurgled words and laughter, and I tried to banish the memory of Howard’s terrible statement of fact. “When she laughs, she shits herself.”
Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. “It was great talking to you, Marnie,” I said. “I’ll call again.”
“Soon,” she said. She laughed her new growling laugh. “Good times,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “They were good times.”
When Howard came on the phone again, I was fighting tears.
“Howard, I am so sorry,” I said. “For everything.”
“Look, Jo, we’re up to our ass in Catholic guilt at this end. We don’t need any of that watered-down Protestant crap.”
“Okay,” I said. “What can I do?”
“Help me save Marnie’s son.”
“Howard…”
“I know, I know,” he said wearily. “Just do what you can.”
I hung up the phone and walked downstairs to the family room. Bebe Morrissey wasn’t the only scrapbook keeper in our city. It had been many years since I had clipped out articles and carefully pasted them on the soft cheap pages because I believed that what Howard and my husband and the rest of us were doing was so important we’d want to remember it forever.
I had to riffle through a lot of yellowing scrapbooks before I found what I was looking for. There was no shortage of photographs of Howard and Ian and the others giving speeches, wowing audiences, building the province. But that night my interest was not in the men.
Finally, I found a photograph of Marnie Dowhanuik and me that had been taken on a long-ago election night. Fresh-faced and exultant, we were handing around coffee and sandwiches at campaign headquarters. The caption under the photograph read, “They also serve…”
I ripped the page from the book, wrote “Screw them all!” on the bottom, put it in an envelope, and addressed it to Marnie at Good Shepherd. It was a start but it wasn’t enough. Marnie deserved more.
I picked up the phone and dialled Mieka’s number in Saskatoon. It was time to find out more about the man who had fathered Ariel’s child.
I could hear Madeleine crying in the background when Mieka picked up the phone.
“Troubles?” I asked.
“Temper. Maddy went to all the trouble of crawling over to the CD player, now Greg won’t let her push the buttons.”
“Tell him to distract her with his world-famous rendition of ‘Louie, Louie.’ ”
Mieka laughed and relayed the message. I could hear Greg singing, then silence from Madeleine.
“Good call, Mum,” my daughter said admiringly.
“It’s the singer, not the song,” I said.
“You sound a little down,” said my daughter. “Something wrong?”
“No, everything’s okay.”
“Just okay?”
“I keep thinking of Ariel. So many people loved her.”
“You’re thinking of Charlie.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m thinking about Charlie and, Mieka, I’m thinking about the other man in Ariel’s life. Did she ever give you a hint about who the father of her baby was?”
For a beat there was silence, then Mieka said, “I promised her I wouldn’t say anything, but I guess there’s no harm now. I don’t know the man’s name, but I do know that he was an academic.”
“At our university?”
“Yes. And Mum, that’s all I know. Ariel was very discreet. Now, I have to boogie. Greg’s run out of verses of ‘Louie Louie,’ and Madeleine looks like she’s ready to howl.”
As my daughter and I said our good nights, my nerves were taut. I was certain I knew the identity of the father of Ariel’s baby. The fact that the man was an academic wasn’t exactly a clincher, and Bebe Morrissey’s description of Ariel’s companion on the day she left Charlie had rung no bells for me. But finding an African prince who was teaching at our prairie university wasn’t exactly like looking for a needle in a haystack. In fact, as Willie and I turned out the lights and trudged up to bed, I was sure that, by noon the next day, the father of Ariel’s baby and I would have talked face to face.
CHAPTER
8
Fraser Jackson had been a member of our Theatre department for five years. I had never thought of him as an African prince, but I had played with the thought that he might be the doppelganger of Yaphet Kotto, the actor who portrayed the Black Sicilian Lieutenant Al Giardello on “Homicide: Life on the Streets.” Both men were in their mid-forties, heavy-set and physically powerful, with strong features and smiles that came infrequently but were worth waiting for. Both spoke with the reverence for language that reflected classical training.
The two men were alike in another, more profound, way. Both possessed the intensity of those whose tumultuous inner lives are kept in check only through rigorous self-discipline. More than one woman I knew had been intrigued by the possibility of discovering what lay behind the interior walls Fraser Jackson had erected around his essential self, but Ariel Warren had, seemingly, been drawn to him first for professional reasons.
One windy fall afternoon I’d run into her on the academic green. She was wearing a fluffy red turtleneck and bluejeans, and she’d taken off her sandals so she could walk barefoot through the leaves. Her long blond hair was corn-silk fine, and when she stopped to talk to me the wind lifted it into a nimbus that shimmered in the yellow autumn light.
“Look at this,” she said. In her hand was a small leaf whose centre vein bisected its surface into two distinct planes of colour: scarlet on one side, gold on the other. “Perfect symmetry,” Ariel said softly.
“Miracles all around us,” I said.
“Especially in September,” Ariel agreed. “Joanne, I just spent two hours watching Fraser Jackson with his Advanced Performance class. He’s letting me audit.”
“That’s a fair commitment of time on your part,” I said.
Ariel put her hand up in a halt gesture. “I know, I know. I should be churning out papers and ingratiating myself with my new colleagues, but this feels so right. Fraser is amazing, and so much of what he does is pure instinct. He has this innate sense of what’s going on inside a student, and he’s so gentle with them.”
“Sounds like a great teacher,” I said.
“He’s a pretty decent human being, too.” Ariel twirled the perfect leaf between her fingers. “Today, after everyone wandered off after class, he asked me if I wanted to work on a piece – just for fun. Of course, I pointed out that I was auditing and it wouldn’t be fair for me to add to his workload. He said, ‘Just let me hear your voice. There must be a poem you liked enough to remember.’ ”
“So what did you choose?”
A flush started on Ariel’s neck and spread upward to her face.
“Not something salacious,” I said.
“Worse,” she said. “The Hippocratic oath. Talk about bizarre, but when your mother is a doctor…”
“You don’t have to explain,” I said. “My father was a doctor. I remember looking it up, too.”
“I’ll bet you didn’t memorize it,” Ariel said. “And I’ll bet you never stood in front of the mirror watching yourself swear by Apollo and Aesculapius and Hygeia and Panacea and all the gods and goddesses that you’d ‘prescribe regimen for the good of your patients according to your ability and judgement and never do harm to anyone.’ ”
