The Romantic Page 5

  “Australia?” my father says, dazed.

  “Also Japan,” I say.

  The investigation is uproarious. Aunt Verna flips over the mattresses and seat cushions. She empties out all the drawers, closets and cupboards, paws through the contents, then just tosses everything back in. At first I am horrified, and I refold sweaters, neatly arrange cans on shelves.

  “You take after your mother,” Aunt Verna observes, and it’s such a perplexing statement—I am nothing like my mother—that I let drop to the floor the opened box of white sugar I happen to be holding.

  So the house is a mess, and I don’t care, and my father doesn’t seem to notice. Specifically, Aunt Verna is looking for a diary, a note, a map, a letter, a private keepsake, a suspicious doctor’s prescription. We find none of these. But inside the white leather-bound Bible my mother was given as a child and claimed not to have opened in twenty years, we find her birth certificate. It’s a break, of sorts. Aunt Verna maintains that if you run off and don’t take your birth certificate, nine times out of ten you intend to create a new identity.

  And that, she says, is “easy as muck.” She tells us how you do it. You go to a city library and ask for the obituary pages from a newspaper published in the year you were born. You look for the death notice of a baby who is the same sex as you and who lived only a few hours or days. When you find such a baby, you record its name, parents’ names, the exact date and place of birth. You take the information to a government office and pass it off as your own history. If anybody double checks, and usually nobody does, all they’ll discover is that there really was a baby born when and where you say. You get your birth certificate. You soak it in coffee and bask it in the sun to give it an aged appearance.

  “Grace wouldn’t know to do all that,” my father says, rasping his hand over his unshaven jaw.

  Like the house and Aunt Verna, my father is a mess. Hair spiking out, nobody ironing his shirts. Nevertheless, he goes to work every morning, cleans his plate at supper, wins at Scrabble. He’s more than coping, it seems to me. In the middle of the night when I wake from Aunt Verna’s snores and hear the floorboards creaking down the hall, I don’t picture him pacing in heartbroken torment (since I don’t yet know that he misses my mother’s laugh). He is a man who has flung himself around his study plenty of weekends simply out of frustration that one word in the cryptic crossword continues to elude him. He is pacing, yes, I picture that. He is punching his fist. Wanting answers.

  “She might know,” Aunt Verna says, regarding the fake birth certificate,“might not. All we can be sure of is that she had her secrets and kept them tucked under her hat. Anyways, her accessory might know plenty along those lines.”

  My father nods. “Small-time hoodlum.” Because he adopts this slangy tone only when talking about fancy Dan, I immediately grasp who “accessory” refers to. “Fraud artist,” he says, his eyes taking on a crazy gleam.

  “Crook,” I say. “Pickpocket.” To me, this is no longer the true story it is to my father. And yet I somehow know that the more lost my mother becomes, the more substantial Dan must be, and so I tend to nudge the biography along.

  As does Aunt Verna. “Never did an honest day’s work in his life!” she bellows.

  “Freeloader,” my father mutters.

  My father and I aren’t much help. It’s during the day, while we’re out of the house, that Aunt Verna does her real work. She badgers the police, hospitals, modelling agencies, beauty salons, clothing stores, tracks down many of my mother’s old Montreal connections, gets copies of her medical and dental records. She keeps notes and every morning types them up and sticks them in a copper-coloured accordion file labelled “Case Report: Helen Grace Kirk, née Hahn.” For a couple of hours most afternoons, in her drab skirt, mismatched socks, paddle-sized penny loafers and man’s tweed topcoat, she stalks up and down the streets of Greenwoods, banging on doors and interrogating housewives. On my way home from school I sometimes hear her booming voice—“I won’t take but a minute of your time…. Sawyer Kirk’s sister, Verna”—and I hide behind bushes in terror of her spotting me and shouting,“Lou-Lou!”

  Back at our house she lies flat-out on the living-room floor to ease her aching hips. I lie beside her. She has explained to me that an investigation is not so much a gathering of evidence as an elimination of the universe of possibilities. Litde by little the universe contracts. She demonstrates by bringing her hands together in a strangling motion. She keeps me posted as to what can be ruled out: My mother is not an inmate of any Canadian jail or mental hospital. She is not wanted by the Mounties. Under her real name she has not taken out a library card or contacted the Canadian office of any Swiss bank. Since she is striking enough that, even if she were wearing a wig, people would remember her, it’s a safe bet she has not personally picked up an airplane, train or bus ticket at any Toronto travel agency. She has not checked into any southern Ontario hotel or motel. She has not pawned her jewellery. Her accessory, her fancy Dan, is no local husband. Nor is he an Eaton’s delivery man.

  Over supper she repeats her day’s findings to my father, and his reaction veers from anxious attention to brooding cynicism (aimed at Dan) to dumb astonishment. He says, finally, invariably,“I can’t believe it.” He can’t believe she disappeared without a trace. Without a word, not even to Mrs. Bendy.

  He has phoned Mrs. Bendy, of course. “That sneaky bitch,” Mrs. Bendy snarled venomously enough to convince him she knew nothing. She then came up with a couple of suggestions as to who should be tracked down: some heavy-drinking model from Flin Flon, Manitoba. Jane or Anne or Joanne. And my mother’s high-school sweetheart, a guy with webbed feet and the incredible name of Duck. Tom or John or Ron or Rob Duck. “Dead ends,” Aunt Verna predicted, but she phoned every Duck in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario. She also phoned everybody my father phoned, including my mother’s mother, Grandma Hahn, who for a decade has lived in a mobile home outside of St. Petersburg, Florida, and whose annual Christmas gift of three red-and-green crocheted placemats—the exact same gift year in and year out—my mother always threw in the garbage but not before calling attention to the flaws and stains and saying,“That woman is out of her mind.”

  Coincidentally, Grandma Hahn said the same of my mother when my father told her the news. “Must be,” she reasoned,“to throw away a steady meal ticket.” She said my mother always did have a reckless streak. “Miss Anything Goes,” she said. “Miss Free and Easy. Miss Devil May Care. Well, she’s Miss Devil Take Her, as far as I’m concerned. Miss Don’t Come Crying to Me When You Get Thrown in the Gutter,” and the escalating pseudonyms did not go unappreciated by my father, who reported them with a kind of wonder.

  Weeks later, in reference to that phone call, Aunt Verna says,“I, for one, don’t think your mother is crazy or unhinged or anything like that.”

  She and I are lying next to each other on the living-room floor. After weeks of going unvacuumed, the carpet is opulent with colourful specks whose source I cannot imagine, also threads, hairs and dead flies kindled within the rungs of light that come through the Venetian blinds.

  “She’s nothing but high-strung,” Aunt Verna says. “Beautiful, skinny creatures often are, you know. Wound up so tight they snap.”

  “She never screamed or yelled,” I say. “She never hit me.”

  This is simply information. It hasn’t yet occurred to me either to defend her or to blame her or even to wonder very strenuously where she might be.

  “Well, who said she hit you?” Aunt Verna shouts, all agonized. “My lord, I would hope she never did!”

  Usually I lie on my side facing Aunt Verna, arms pressed against my ears to protect myself from her blare. Sometimes she’ll give my leg a pat, clutch my knee. In my every utterance she detects either an orphan’s sorrow or a daughter’s loyalty. I say, purely speculating as to my mother’s activities,“I wonder if she’s curling her own hair,” and Aunt Verna cries,“Oh, honey, I’d curl your hair but I’m all
thumbs!”

  One afternoon in early March she says,“Lou-Lou, we’re at the end of our rope.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re out of leads.”

  “We are?”

  “It doesn’t mean we close the file, though.” She squeezes my knee. “The file stays open. UFO. Unsolved, Fully Open.”

  “So,” I say,“she got away.” I can’t believe it. She’s really gone.

  “For the time being, yes, ma’am, she got away.”

  We lie there looking at each other. It takes me a moment to sense that her failure to find my mother is only her most recent disappointment. The sorrows of the homely spinster whose paramount achievement is that she remains hopeful, I perceive with the gauzy, unimpeachable understanding of my nine years. I say, a pain in my throat,“Don’t worry” (because while I may not fully understand everything I am just then seeing, I have learned to recognize the glint in the eye that signals a person’s imminent departure),“I know how to cook.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In my father’s brain are an infinity of analogies attaching everything to everything else. Provided he is his normal, expansive self. After my mother leaves, in those first weeks,“everything” narrows to thieves and smooth-talkers, and “everything else” to sharks, snakes, leeches, rats, cockroaches, nuclear rain, hot-air balloons, silver tongues.

  But as his attention shifts from the culprit to the loss, so the world cracks open to show all its pathos. Anything that goes missing, and in our overturned house much does, anything that falls to the floor, that runs out, such as cereal, he sighs and waxes over. Eating his meals, long back hunched in woe, he stares at the stool my mother used to perch on to fix supper. There it is, awaiting her. A pillar of faith. A bastion of trust. Or Time, all of it: the present because it is empty, the past because it hasn’t changed, the future because it is unknowable.

  And yet, like his sister, he remains ever hopeful, convinced that one day my mother will return to her sweaters and shoes, her blue Noxema skin-cream jar. None of these does he view as remnants. Even while they bring tears to his eyes he flaunts them as evidence of an absence merely temporary. Each little thing of hers is so incontestably there (if not exactly where she left it), so imperturbably itself that, apart from its siren call to her, the simple fact of its existence seems to sustain him. He will open the door of the hall closet and take one of her hats out of its box, any hat, it doesn’t matter which. He’ll turn it in his hands, study it. If it’s her matador he’ll remove the pin and say,“A cultured pearl.” Enchanted, holding the pin to the light. “A real cultured pearl.”

  Around the time that Aunt Verna announces her intention to leave, he begins to retreat from this kind of idolatry. He stops speaking of my mother at all except to say “She’ll be back” when Aunt Verna suggests her clothes be stored in the basement or donated to charity. Our two family photo albums, formerly kept on a shelf in the linen closet and filled mostly with studio shots from my mother’s modelling days, he transfers to the locked bottom drawer of his desk. Out of fear that Aunt Verna will confiscate them for investigative purposes, or so I presume. Not for years will I imagine him looking at the pictures, immersing himself in memory, fury, lust. Blame. I’ll be twenty-six and Abel will be dead before I’ll understand that even blame can be a memento.

  Before going away, Aunt Verna commits herself to one more search. For a housekeeper, a temporary one, naturally, since the file remains Unsolved, Fully Open.

  “I can burn a meal,” I argue and am told that, grown up as I am, there is a law against children my age being left by themselves. But I mustn’t worry, I won’t be overly supervised. The housekeeper will arrive midmorning, she’ll clean, shop, make my lunch, wash our clothes, do the ironing and fix supper. As soon as my father gets home at six o’clock, she’ll be on her way.

  “No reason for her to lollygag here all evening,” Aunt Verna says. “And you won’t have to put up with her on weekends, either.” She sounds annoyed, as if her successor is already throwing her weight around.

  There are many applicants. On three different afternoons I meet the three finalists, who are like the three bears: one hefty and blond, one tiny and dark, one medium-sized, brown-haired and pretty. Or to put it another way: one a cheerful chatterbox, one a nervous near-mute (who lost the lining of her throat in a botched adenoid operation), one who says, calmly, about as much as you’d expect. I don’t like the hefty, blond, cheerful chatterbox. She reminds me of Maureen from school, a covert persecutor; she talks a little too zealously of fattening me up. The medium-sized, calm, pretty one seems the obvious choice, until she is about to leave and I catch her glancing at herself in the hallway mirror and see a momentary absorption, a receding from everything but herself, and a chill goes through me.

  So it’s the tiny, dark, nervous near-mute. Mrs. Carver. She may well be the best cook anyway. At her second interview (the interview that included me) she arrived with a cold meat loaf wrapped in aluminum foil, a potato salad in a Mason jar and a paper bag containing homemade shortbread cookies. Each of these offerings she excavated from an enormous navy purse and slipped to Aunt Verna in the manner of somebody passing smuggled goods. That evening Aunt Verna, my father and I wolfed the food down and pronounced it delicious (which it may or may not have been; as Aunt Verna pointed out, compared to her cooking, a dog biscuit tasted like a gourmet meal), but we still felt that Mrs. Carver’s difficulty with speech, pitiable though it was, counted against her. Then, the next day, the pretty candidate fell out of the running and we came around to the view that a tiny, silent woman might be just what we wanted: not apt to be much of a disruption, not apt to bore us with her life story.

  ‘You’ll hardly know she’s here!” Aunt Verna yelled. “You’ll have to watch you don’t step on her!”

  April first, April Fools Day. My father takes Aunt Verna to the airport at dawn, Mrs. Carver arrives some time later, after I’ve gone to school. I come home at noon and don’t have to shove the front door against a mound of boots and shoes. The landing is empty. The tiles gleam. Since these are unmistakeable signs of my mother, my knees buckle in the moment before I notice Mrs. Carver standing at the top of the stairs.

  “Oh, hi,” I say. I kick off my boots. My jacket I throw over the bannister, as I’ve got into the habit of doing.

  Mrs. Carver starts wringing her hands. Her eyes, magnified by thick glasses into great brown puddles, circle wildly.

  “What?” I say, frightened.

  She jabs her finger in the direction of the closet. I think she’s trying to tell me that somebody is in there. An intruder!

  “Hang it up,” she whispers.

  “Oh.” Breath returns to my chest. “Okay. Sorry.” I open the closet door to another surprise. Coats on hangers. Hangers on the rod. Shoes on the floor, all lined up.

  The kitchen is still in the throes of reclamation. The oven door sprawls open, racks lean against the wall. There are cups and plates all over the counter because she’s laying down new shelf paper. But the table (where only yesterday you had to push aside unpaid bills, pencil stubs, dirty dishes and who knows what else to clear a spot for yourself) has nothing on it except for my lunch: a glass of milk, an eggsalad sandwich quartered on the diagonals, a few sliced carrot sdcks, two small pieces of chocolate cake and an apple that has been cored and sectioned.

  “Everything’s cut into pieces,” I observe, making the curious association between this fact and her name.

  She motions me to sit.

  “What about your lunch?” I ask.

  She gestures at an empty plate and glass near the sink.

  “You’ve already eaten,” I say.

  She nods. I feel an ember of satisfaction leap between us. I am beginning to decipher her.

  I take my seat and she abruptly climbs on a chair and gets back to scrubbing the cupboard shelves. She is so small and jerky, like a little kid, but she’s not young, she’s forty-five years old. I know this from Aunt Vern
a’s interview notes. I know that she was born in Kingston, that she is the widow of a bankrupt inventor (whose best ideas—the electric typewriter and the electric curling iron—were stolen out from under him) and that she has a twenty-two-year-old daughter who got married last June and is now living in Port Hope.

  I await her signal: a questioning glance, or maybe she’ll come right out and ask. I am accustomed, during lunch, to describing my day so far, either a fairly honest account, which is what Aunt Verna demanded, or—what my mother liked—a joking, exaggerated version. But Mrs. Carver just goes on cleaning, and by the time I have finished two sandwich quarters I understand that there will be no conversation. I slump in my chair, relieved. I take a good look at her.

  From the back you can see that her short black hair is thinning, alarmingly so at the crown. And that it’s dyed. In the pink terrain of her balding spot the white roots blaze. She wears the same short-sleeved yellow blouse she wore to her second interview. Stained under the arms, nylon. Her black skirt is a thin flannel. “Cheap fabrics,” I think but without my mother’s derision. Poor Mrs. Carver, with her dead failure of a husband and her unlined throat. Driving a beat-up sedan, forced to clean other people’s cupboards in order to pay the rent on her downtown apartment. Several weeks ago, when Aunt Verna and my father were discussing the need for a housekeeper, I heard Aunt Verna say,“A girl Louise’s age needs a woman around the place.”

  Now, here she is, the woman I needed. Better than a slob, I tell myself. Or a chatterbox. Better than that bossy chatterbox lady. I think of who else I might have ended up with. Mrs. Bendy! Well, better than her. Better than an alcoholic with a face like a can of worms.

  Within three days Mrs. Carver has the house in order, if not up to my mother’s standards. For all her incessant cleaning, Mrs. Carver lacks the perfectionism of the scouring angel who appreciates that dirt floats before it settles and that it settles even on vertical surfaces. Thus you vacuum the air and walls. As far as possible you banish landing pads: picture frames, knick-knacks. The last thing you would ever do is transfer, from the back of a kitchen cupboard to the centre of the coffee table, an intricate china basket holding three china cats. The day this basket appears I pick it up and say provocatively,“A magnet for dirt.”