Mister Sandman Read online

  Barbara Gowdy

  Mister Sandman

  For Christopher Dewdney

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Author’s Acknowledgements

  Praise for Mister Sandman

  P.S. Ideas, interviews & features

  About the author

  Author Biography

  Select Awards

  About the book

  “Lies and Whispers”: A Review of Mister Sandman, by Katherine Dunn

  Read on

  Web Detective

  An Excerpt from We So Seldom Look on Love, by Barbara Gowdy

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  Joan Canary was the Reincarnation Baby. Big news at the time, at least in the Vancouver papers. This is going back, 1956. Joan was that newborn who supposedly screamed, “Oh, no, not again!” at a pitch so shrill that one of the old women attending the birth clawed out her hearing aid. The other old woman fainted. She was the one who grabbed the umbilical cord and pulled Joan head-first onto the floor.

  Joan’s mother, Doris Canary, attributed everything to the brain damage. Joan’s inability to talk it goes without saying, but also her reclusiveness, her sensitivity to light, her size, her colouring … you name it. Joan’s real mother, Sonja Canary, attributed everything to Joan’s past-life experiences. Sonja was there for Joan’s famous first cry, and it’s true she had thought it was one of the old women screaming, “Flo! Flo! She’s insane!” but that didn’t make any sense because the woman who could have screamed it had throat cancer. If Joan was either braindamaged or reincarnated, Sonja preferred reincarnated. She would, being the real mother.

  To be fair, though, there was something unearthly about Joan. She was born with those pale green eyes, and the hair on her head, when it finally grew in, was like milkweed tuft. That fine, that white. And look how tiny she was! Nobody in the family was tiny. Nobody in the family was anything like her, her real parents least of all. Sonja was fat, and had dark brown corkscrew hair and brown eyes. The real father was an orange-haired giant, eyes a flat creamy blue like seat-cover plastic. He had remarkably white skin, and Joan did, too, but without the freckles, pimples and hair. Flawless. Joan was flawless. Another way of saying not like any of them. Sonja, of course, went further, she said that Joan was not of this world, and it drove Doris Canary crazy. Baloney! Doris said. Brain-damaged, brain-damaged, brain-damaged! she said. Face it. Ask the neurologists.

  Doris even told strangers that Joan was brain-damaged. Her husband, Gordon, never publicly contradicted her but he winced and sighed. “It’s the truth,” Doris would say then, as if normally she wasn’t a brazen liar. As if Gordon had ever agreed with the brain-damaged diagnosis let alone that you could point to anything and call it the truth. “The truth is only a version” was one of his maxims.

  (Which Sonja heard as “The truth is only aversion” and, although she had no idea what it meant, automatically quoted whenever the subject of truth was raised.)

  Two

  Gordon and Doris were Sonja’s parents. They had one other child—Marcy—who had left for kindergarten that June first morning in 1956 when Sonja vomited into her cereal bowl.

  “We’ll say I’m the one who’s having it,” Doris announced once the cards were on the table, these being that Sonja had missed three menstrual periods, that she had been bringing up in the toilet for weeks, that the young man she’d had intercourse with was someone she’d known only for an hour, that what this young man had told her to call him was Yours, and that “Try the slammer” was the superintendent’s suggestion when, a week ago, she’d gone to his apartment hoping to find him.

  “We’ll say it’s mine and Dad’s,” Doris said. “When you have a baby at our age it’s referred to as an afterthought.”

  By now Sonja was sucking her fingers and sitting on Doris’s lap, and Doris was patting Sonja’s belly and feeling like the biggest Babushka doll in a nest of dolls within dolls, although she and Sonja were both the same height—five-foot-two—and tomorrow, at the doctor’s, they’d find out that they now weighed the same, as well—153 pounds.

  (The doctor would be chosen randomly out of the phone book for the sake of secrecy. He would keep mixing Sonja and Doris up, that was how alike the two of them were. Small, flat-featured faces like faces painted on balloons. Dark, curly hair. For the appointment they would hide behind sunglasses, and since only Sonja would remove hers the doctor would assume, wrongly, that her dopey expression was inherited. He’d assume that they were both putting him on—Sonja acting dumber and more innocent than she was, Doris pretending to be overjoyed—and he’d be wrong again. They were putting him on, all right. Sonja was fifteen, not nineteen, and there was no husband overseas. But Sonja was innocent. In all of those fifteen years, maybe ten minutes had been devoted to thinking about sex and another minute or so to having it. And, no, Doris wasn’t overjoyed, but that was how she always sounded. Thrilled, bursting with news that would knock your socks off.)

  Even that morning at the breakfast table, if you didn’t know Doris you’d think that having a daughter pregnant out of wedlock was her dream come true. In her breathy little-girl voice she said that as soon as Sonja was out of school, the end of the month, the two of them would go stay with Aunt Mildred in Vancouver until after the baby was born.

  “She’s starting to lose her marbles,” Doris said about Aunt Mildred. “She’ll hardly know we’re there. We’ll tell everyone here she’s on her last legs and needs us, her only living relatives, to look after her, and we’ll just keep stringing that out.” She clapped her hands once. “Play it by ear!”

  “Okay,” Sonja said dreamily.

  Gordon went along, too. Out of being stunned, out of no choice. He stood just inside the kitchen doorway (he’d been about to leave for work, he had his coat and hat on) and kept reaching up and touching the ceiling to reassure himself that he still could, although being a stringbean wasn’t something that normally heartened him. At the part when Doris said they would tell people the baby was theirs, “Now hold on” came out of his mouth, and Doris waited, but he was a desperado pretending that the finger in his trench-coat pocket was a gun. Abortion, adoption … he couldn’t even say the words.

  This was his daughter.

  Their other daughter they would keep in the dark. Doris pointed out that you couldn’t expect a six-year-old to hold in a secret as big as this one. Marcy would stay in Toronto with Gordon, and Doris would hire somebody to babysit her after school.

  “Can we afford all this?” Gordon asked when Sonja was out of the room. Doris was the one who banked his salary and handled the bills.

  “Sweetie, you just leave it to me,” she said, her tone even more thrilled and hush-hush than usual so that he allowed himself to envision a secret nest egg, whereas all they had was a huge long shot, something like a five-hundred-to-one chance that she would be crowned queen.

  Any day now she should hear. It was pure luck she saw the ad. She’d been unwrapping frozen chicken livers from a newspaper and had spotted the words “To All Ladies in Dire Straits.”

  “Are you wrestling with severe money difficulties?” the ad had gone on. �
�Caring for ailing loved ones? Recently widowed? Are you doing everything in your power to improve your circumstances but still can’t seem to get out from under?” And then it had said that if this was you, you might be eligible to win thousands of dollars worth of fantastic prizes by appearing on ABC-TV’S Queen for a Day show, which was holding auditions at the Royal York Hotel—that very afternoon, as it happened.

  The minute Gordon and the girls were out the door Doris phoned a neighbour to come by at noon and fix Marcy’s lunch, then she put on her frowziest house dress and rifled through Marcy’s box of dress-up clothes for an old purse, cracked high heels, that fake fur stole and the tatty purple turban, her plan being to carry these in a bag and change into them at a restaurant washroom near the hotel. On the subway she hatched her sob story. She’d never actually watched Queen for a Day but she knew about it. Housewife contestants took turns describing their miserable lives, after which the studio audience decided who was the most miserable and that’s who won. It was such a tasteless idea that Doris had always figured that the contestants were actresses. Or so she told herself until she arrived at the Royal York and walked down the line-up of mangy women, and either they were world-class impostors, every one of them, or she shouldn’t be there.

  She joined the line anyway. A long wait on hot pavement during which she thought of the men on the Titanic who had dressed up in turbans and fake stoles and too-small pointy high heels, and what she wanted to know was, how many of them had been responsible citizens with another baby on the way? Answer her that. In her head the buoyant refrain of the Titanic song screamed—It was sad, so sad, oh, it was sad, so sad…

  For virtually any occasion Doris knew a song that went with it, or at least she knew the first verse, and she sang it to herself—involuntarily, ceaselessly—until the occasion changed, at which point another song usually took over. This was just background, like a radio playing or her own footsteps, but today it was as if she had crossed wires with Ethel Merman. On the subway Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell had blared the whole way. Now that her feet were really starting to hurt It was sad, so sad was blending into an ear-splitting “Your Feets Too Big.” Oh, it was sad, so sad that your feets too big. And, boy, her feet really were killing her. By the time she was finally ushered into the room where they were doing the interviewing, her stagger was no act.

  A fast-talking, sweat-soaked man in shirtsleeves paced in front of the chair where she was told to sit. “Do you work, Belle?” the man asked. (Doris had given her name as Belle Ladovsky.)

  “Twelve-hour shifts in a beanery,” Doris said, putting on the vaguely East European accent she had cultivated years ago to audition for the Yiddish niece in a play. “Nothing but beans do I eat.” This to suggest that her round figure was from bloating rather than three square meals a day. “The doctor—“

  “How’d your husband die?” the man cut in.

  Doris hadn’t even mentioned a husband yet. A heart attack, she almost said, since what with his heart murmur that was how she had always pictured Gordon going. She had a better idea. “In Korea,” she said. “Killed in action.” She thought of the saddest thing she could, which was going on seven years since Gordon had made love to her, and her eyes filled.

  “How many kids?”

  “Eight.”

  “Any of them sick, deformed?”

  “My twins, they are cripples. When my husband died—“

  The man stopped pacing. “You mean with crutches?”

  “Oh, yes. Crutches, yes.”

  “So you’re saying that those kids could do with a couple of top-of-the-line wheelchairs.”

  “Yes, of course,” Doris said, immediately catching his drift. “But, oy, who can afford—“

  “What’ll get you on your feet, Belle?”

  “Maybe pots and pans,” Doris suggested. As she understood it, the queen always won a stupendously expanded version of the humble thing she asked for, plus, the humbler this thing was, the more fur coats and appliances were heaped on her.

  “A few measly pots and pans,” the man said.

  “Then one day, God villing, I open my own beanery.”

  The telegram arrived June fourth, the Monday after they found out that Sonja was pregnant. It said that Belle Ladovsky was one of three lucky audition winners from the Toronto-Buffalo area and would be flown down to New York City on June twelfth for a June thirteenth taping.

  All day Doris worked on a story to tell Gordon, but seeing as the only times in eighteen years she’d been away from home overnight were when she was in the hospital giving birth, everything she came up with made it sound as if she were having an affair. Eventually she decided she’d have to resort to the truth. She waited until evening, until after the girls had gone to bed, and then she put on the outfit—the stole, the turban, the dress and shoes, plus a pair of Gordon’s old glasses for extra disguise—and went into the living room where Gordon was sitting on the chesterfield, reading a manuscript. She had the audition ad and the telegram as well as the Dutch Masters cigar box that she kept the overdue bills in. Without a word she handed him the ad and when he’d read it she gave him the telegram.

  “I take it you’re Belle Ladovsky,” he said.

  She emptied the box onto the coffee table. “I was hoping to spare you this,” she said about the bills.

  He studied each one, flattening it first under his jumbo hand, unbending folded corners. Because she was wearing his old glasses she couldn’t make out which bill he was looking at, but a few of them, like the ones for Sonja’s and Marcy’s pink bunny-fur muffs, were extravagances, she knew that. China man, he had a wife, led him such a miserable life the lyrics in her head went. Why didn’t Gordon say something? “Say something,” she said to the hunched-over blur of him, feeling as though she were addressing a man in a dream or through frosted glass. Or through time … the unsung clerk. The bowbacked, myopic, genius book editor, unappreciated by everyone except for her and a few alcoholic has-been writers whose stacks of unpublishable manuscripts were her footstools and bedside tables.

  He didn’t speak. He held a bill closer to the light.

  “Nobody vill recoknice me in dis get-up,” she said, sitting beside him.

  He shook his head, at her or the bill there was no telling.

  “I’m promisink hew.”

  When he was done he neatly piled the bills and returned them to the cigar box. “I had no idea,” he said into his hands.

  “Heck, it’s not that bad,” she said. “Eleven months out of twelve, I can manage just fine.”

  “Now this baby—“

  “Okay, we need a miracle, and hallelujah!”

  Gordon looked at her. Then he looked her up and down as if he had only just registered what she had on. “Jesus, Doris,” he whispered.

  “Listen to me.” She took his hand. Kissed his mountainous knuckles. “Sweetie,” she said, her voice trembling with righteous fervour. “I’m a shoo-in.”

  She was. She got to be the third contestant, a lucky break because it allowed her to top the agony of the other two. The first contestant was an arthritic cleaning woman with nine kids and a bed-ridden husband. Then there was a wall-eyed pea sheller whose husband had ditched her for a good-time girl. Neither of them knew how to build a story let alone how to play to an audience. But you should have seen Doris. When she sobbed, “I am so ashamed to be beggink,” two fatsos in the front row sobbed along with her. Before the applause meter had even confirmed it she knew she’d clinched the crown. Her winnings included two full-length fur coats (one sable, one mink), two wheelchairs, a colour television, a twenty-piece set of pots and pans, an electric range and a year’s supply of beans. Back in Toronto her explanation to neighbours was that she had entered a draw and what do you know?

  She sold the fur coats back to the dealer who’d sold them to the show. Just the money from them alone paid off their debts with enough left over for fibreglass living-room drapes—pea-green, shot with w
hat Doris told the girls was real silver—and (here’s why Gordon couldn’t muster enough annoyance to even shake his head at that lie) a convertible. Baby blue, brand new, their first new car and not one he’d have dreamed of buying if they hadn’t hit the jackpot and she hadn’t haggled the price down by trading in the beans and wheelchairs.

  On the drizzly morning that she and Sonja left for Vancouver, Gordon picked up the car from the dealer’s, and so the first family outing was the drive to the train station. To everybody’s disappointment the weather obliged them to leave the top up.

  “We wouldn’t want to ruin the regally luxuriant, stylishly elegant upholstery,” Doris said in her tone of confidential exhilaration. She was reading from the sales brochure.

  “You see the road but never feel it,” she read, twisting around to the girls in the back seat. “This car has glamour plus.” She batted her mascaraed eyelashes.

  She wasn’t one to get “all dolled up,” as she put it, but for the train ride she was wearing fire-engine-red lipstick, moss green eye shadow, mascara and a smudge of rouge on each cheek. To the girls her face looked like a movie star’s. To Gordon it looked like a clown’s, not that he let on. He loved her a great deal, protectively and sheepishly. “What do you think of my new hat?” she’d asked that morning, and he’d said, “Very smart,” although it was ridiculously tiny, like a chimpanzee’s hat, and her hair springing out from under it made her head look detonated.

  She had sewn on an elastic chin strap to keep the hat from blowing off. As she read from the brochure the strap gave the girls the funny impression that her jaw was hinged, like a marionette’s. They laughed at her into their hands. “It’s a supreme joy and a thrill and a blessing,” Doris read, and the girls giggled into the white cotton gloves they were both wearing.

  “And,” Doris read, “it’s all yours!”

  Yours being the baby’s father’s name, Sonja swallowed hard before laughing. She wasn’t quite free of him yet but would be once she was on the train. A few weeks from now she’d get a postcard signed “Yours, Dad” and all she’d swallow over was that he hadn’t signed it “Love.”