Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (26 page)

The last time I saw Teddy he was still worked up over the prospect of somebody coming to “dig around in his head.” It had been four months and nobody had shown up. The waiting only seemed to increase his anxiety. I told him that that was how bureaucracy worked or rather didn’t work; things got lost in the shuffle. It was highly likely that the paperwork had been overlooked, a call hadn’t been made – who knew? – he
should stop worrying about it and breathe a sigh of relief.

Teddy was pretty sure now that the nurse who had reported him to his nemesis the double-wide was the one he had told the chicken joke to.

“She’s some kind of religious nut,” Teddy said. “In the old days you knew where you stood with church-going people. Everybody was either United Church, Anglican, or Catholic. But now people belong to these screwy churches you’ve never heard of. You got no idea where they’re coming from. It’s all hellfire and Blood of the Lamb.” He stared at the images on the muted
TV
. It was never off. “She asked me to pray with her,” he said.

“That’s definitely not something she’s got any business doing. That’s off-limits. You should complain to her boss.”

“Double-wide?” said Teddy. “Not fucking likely. And it wasn’t so bad.”

“Don’t tell me you
prayed
with her.”

“I didn’t pray. She did. I let her. So what?”

“So what? There’s a principle involved. She’s not entitled to stuff her religious opinions down her clients’ throats. It’s unethical.”

“There was this program I seen on the
TV
,” said Teddy evasively, his gnarled fingers beginning to pick and worry the afghan. “It was all about people who died and then come back to life.”

“What was this, some evangelical program?”

“No.
Scientific
.” Teddy’s voice was vehement. “It’s been proved. These people really died – their hearts stopped and then the doctors brought them back. And they all said they went down this long black tunnel and they saw this light
shining at the end of it. And they said they’d never been so happy because they saw old friends and family waiting for them. Heard beautiful music. Shit like that.

“I asked the religious lady what she thought about that and she said there wasn’t no light at the end of a tunnel for nobody unless they accepted Jesus into their heart. Otherwise, it was the Other Place. What do you make of that?”

“I told you what I think. That woman should keep her opinions to herself.”

Teddy ignored my observation. “But for guys like me,” he said, grinning uneasily, “I bet they got a trapdoor in the floor of that fucking tunnel. They mean to spring it under us when we’re on our way to the light. Get us when we’re not suspecting nothing. But me, I’m going to run down that tunnel full speed so when they spring that trapdoor I’ll have a good head of steam up and then I’ll be able to give one mighty leap and sail clear over the hole.”

I laughed and said, “Well, Ted, if that religious lady is right and you clear the trapdoor, they’ll just lock and bar the door to the light on you. If they have any admission standards at all.”

The look that came over his face. I don’t know how to describe it. Holy terror might come closest to what I saw there. He seemed stricken dumb, scared out of his wits. But Teddy being Teddy, he recovered soon enough. “Well then I’ll pound on that door to be let in. I’ll kick the son of a bitch down. Me, I don’t give up.”

The next time I saw Counsellor Sally she didn’t revisit the issues that she had claimed we would return to. She threw me a curveball, a slider. She said that she had been thinking about the untruths I had told my students and that they puzzled her. Counsellor Sally said that she felt she knew me better now and had come to question her suppositions about why I had done what I did. I no longer struck her as being the kind of person who desired to inflate his importance. Quite the opposite. So why?

“Boredom, I suppose.”

That surprised her. “Boredom?”

“The kids knew how preposterous my lies were. How preposterous
I
was. Crazy old Molson. My antics amused them. They were bored; I was bored. Besides, I was just putting in time until the end of the year when I would give the school notice I was retiring.”

“But now you are adamant about
not
retiring. I don’t follow.”

“Well, I never expected Drogan to find out what I was doing. I thought it was just between the kids and me. But when he decided to force me out I got my hackles up. I thought about all those years I had sat through staff meetings listening to that self-satisfied fraud and never once objected to any of the crap he was peddling. I took it. But all that time I guess I couldn’t keep what I was thinking off my face. Seeing that look year after year must have pissed him off. Then I committed the unforgivable sin, made fun of him to my students. Talked about him being lead singer in a punk rock band. That I had to pay for.”

“But if you are reinstated, what then?”

“If I get my job back, I’ll hand in my letter of resignation. But not until then. I should have retired years ago, but I didn’t know what else I would do with my life. I was hanging on through sheer inertia. I’m not proud of that.” I shrugged. “But if I win the battle, I’m gone. I’ll go out in a blaze of glory.”

“Well,” Counsellor Sally said thoughtfully and jotted something in her notebook. She looked up at me and sent me a gentle smile. “Let’s see what we can do about facilitating this outcome.”

Four months after I saw holy terror written all over Uncle Teddy’s face, he died. The pneumonia he had escaped that winter when he had been strapped to a cold marble bench in Italy finally claimed him. Aunt Evie asked me to give his eulogy. She said he had always had a soft spot for me. Her grief was spectacular. She had one of what she called “Teddy Bear’s bears” placed in his coffin to keep him company.

When I came to write Teddy’s send-off, none of the conventional plaudits could truthfully be applied. Good husband, good brother, good uncle. Definitely not. So I told the story of Teddy’s plan to leap for the light. I thought it was the truest thing I could say about him.

The minister, a young woman whom Evie had enlisted to perform the funeral service and whom she had strong-armed to visit Teddy’s deathbed, said to me, “Just before your uncle died his legs were going like crazy under the covers. Like a dog chasing a rabbit in its dreams. Given his condition, I couldn’t see where the strength to make such an effort came
from. I guess you answered that.” She gave a girlish toss to her hair. “Your uncle was a charming man. On one of my visits – that is before he lost consciousness – he said to me, ‘If all the ministers had been as good-looking as you, I’d never have missed church.’ ”

I’m sorry I told Teddy that the door to the light would be barred to him. I’m not sure why I did. Maybe it had something to do with those nights long ago when he stood hammering and kicking at
our
door, shouting like a maniac while I cowered in my bedroom. But now when I imagine the hollow thunder of an old man battering at a locked door with his arthritic fists, there at the end of the long dark tunnel of his life, I only hope that the door did give way and that he stumbled, roaring, into a great spill of light.

THE LINEUP AT THE ATM
had stalled again, leaving Jack Corbin to wonder why, after three years of retirement, three years as master of his own time, he hadn’t figured out yet that withdrawing cash from the bank near the university during a Friday lunch hour was a truly bad idea. There were eight people ahead of him, students checking their accounts, gauging how much the kitty could be pillaged for weekend festivities. Most were texting as they waited their turn, heads bent in the reverential silence of parishioners shuffling towards the communion rail.

The queue shunted forward and Jack caught sight of the man who had just surrendered the machine. Someone who wasn’t a student, someone roughly his own age, maybe two or three years older, a man in his mid-sixties dressed in a stained trench coat, someone who came surging back up the line, legs scissoring, kicking at the skirts of his coat as if in disgust, arms savagely chopping at his sides. But oddly enough, given all
this hectic action, his face was eerily composed: high cheekbones crimping a faraway gaze, bald head glowing with a serene lustre, lips tucked in a smile blending world-weariness and self-satisfaction.

Kurt Jorgensen
, Jack thought with a jolt.
Daddy Lenin. Holy shit, it’s Daddy Lenin
.

Forty years ago, Rodney Stoyko had been the one to give Jorgensen his nickname, to spot his uncanny resemblance to the lovingly preserved corpse lying in state in the Kremlin. Even in his twenties, Jorgensen had displayed a virile waxy dome that, along with the trim moustache, the clipped beard of the professional revolutionary, and the glittering eyes tucked in the perpetual squint of someone gazing long and hard into a utopian future, had made him a dead ringer for Vladimir Ilyich.

Jack could see his fellow graduate student Stoyko smirking at him, asking in a mock-conspiratorial whisper, “How are things in the inner circle? Is the fearless leader happy with the Politburo, Jackie? Any rumours of another purge to trouble the sleep of the faithful?”

But that was Stoyko’s bitter-grapes joke after Jorgensen had made it clear that he was no longer welcome at his table in the Apollo Room, the seedy watering hole where the students Jorgensen had judged worthy of his company met on Fridays to drink beer and listen to him expound. Jack’s wife, Linda, was frequently there too, despite the fact that she wasn’t a student. She was working in a Safeway because his teaching assistantship couldn’t keep their household afloat financially. Jack naturally assumed that Linda was tolerated in the Apollo Room on the strength of his special, privileged
relationship with Jorgensen. After all, he was Daddy’s chosen one, his right-hand man. Jorgensen was supervising his thesis, had even dictated his topic: Robert Brasillach, French fascist, anti-Semite, novelist, newspaper editor, and author of a seminal film study. Convicted of treason in Paris in 1945, executed at the age of thirty-five for “intellectual crimes” despite pleas for mercy addressed to DeGaulle from the likes of Camus, Mauriac, Cocteau, and Colette. Brasillach, the literary comet who had burned himself to a cinder in less than a decade.

Jack had been given the nod from Daddy. Poor Stoyko had not; he had been consigned to Siberia because Jorgensen had judged his mind tediously, unforgivably ordinary. That was what everyone in Daddy’s circle dreaded most: banishment.

That the man Jack had glimpsed was his old mentor was scarcely likely, but he
needed
to know. He scrambled out of the bank after him.

The sidewalk was packed with twenty-somethings dawdling in the autumn sunshine. The bright, acidic light spilling from a cloudless sky flooded Jack’s eyes, dissolving the crowd of students in a swarm of colour. He panicked, terrified Daddy Lenin had melted away, vanished forever. But then his eyes cleared and he spotted him striding full throttle down the sidewalk, strollers flinching back from the maniac bearing down on them. In a frantic dogtrot, Jack pursued his quarry down College Avenue, the honking of horns and the roar of engines battering his ears. After three blocks, his head was thumping and he was gasping for breath. If this was Jorgensen, the bastard had kept himself fighting fit.

The same couldn’t be said of Jack Corbin. Thirty-five years teaching high school had worn him down. Keeping the rowdy elements in check in the classrooms had always been a problem for him; anxiety over disruptions had kept his stomach constantly flipping and churning, turned him into a squeamish eater. But in retirement he had recovered his appetite and all those pounds he had gained were taking a toll.

Suddenly, Jorgensen veered off the busy thoroughfare and disappeared up a side street. Rounding the corner, Jack saw that his prey had slackened pace. Maybe he was looking for an address, or maybe the quiet of this residential enclave, the stately elms spreading a yellow, shimmering vault of leaves above the roadway, had subdued his frenzy. It definitely was a pleasant area, what Jack’s wife, Linda, who had acquired a real estate licence after their two girls had flown the nest, would describe as a
mature neighbourhood
. In the 1950s, the majority of the children and grandchildren of the original owners of these houses had removed themselves to the new suburbs, opting for reliable wiring and plumbing.

In time, many of the spacious family homes they had deserted had been subdivided into cheap rental accommodations. But recently the district had undergone a gentrification blitz and was hurriedly being restored to its well-heeled beginnings. “Location, location, location,” as Linda was fond of saying. Within walking distance of the university, the river, and the downtown, this neighbourhood resoundingly tinkled the location bell three times. Plus, it exuded
character
, a
DINK
couple’s wettest dream.

Yet here and there a relic still teetered, and Jorgensen was making for one of these, a three-storey with plugged eaves
sprouting rusty weeds, windows curtained in dusty sheets and fading Canadian flags, its siding eczemaed with scabby paint. Cutting across a lawn patched with naked earth and dead grass, Jorgensen bypassed the front door and slipped around to the side of the house.