Deadly Appearances (15 page)

“Where’s the chocolate on my pillow?” I asked.

“You don’t deserve one. I’ll bet you and Howard ate and drank everything that wasn’t nailed down. Where is he, by the way? I thought he might come in for tea.”

“Not tonight, little girl. He was a bit tired and I have to get up early tomorrow because I’m going out to see Roma Boychuk.”

“Andy’s mother?” Mieka said. “Well, don’t give her a clear shot at you.”

“Mieka, what an awful thing to say. And you don’t even know her.”

“Oh, but I do. One night I’d had it up to here with you nagging at me about my grades, and I complained to Andy. You know what a nice guy he was. Anyway, that night we had a long talk about mothers.”

I was surprised. “When was that?”

“After mid-terms when I was in grade eleven. Remember when you told me I’d end up scrubbing toilets at the bus station if I didn’t pass chemistry?”

“Well, you did pass chemistry.”

“With a fifty-three. Anyway, Andy took your side, of course. Said you guys do nag at us because you love us so much. But in the process of defending mothers collectively, he said some pretty interesting things about his own mother.”

“Such as?”

“Such as nothing. It’s bedtime. You’ll be seeing Andy’s mother tomorrow. Howard would say I was prejudicing the witness. But you should know” – and she grinned and bent to kiss me good night – “that there are some mothers who devour their young.”

CHAPTER

10

Roma Boychuk still lived in the Junction, on the west side of town, in the house Andy grew up in. The west side is where you go if you want used furniture or real Szechuan or twenty minutes of romance. Farther out, toward the railway station, is the area called the Junction. It’s a neighbourhood of onion-domed churches and mom-and-pop grocery stores with names like Molynka’s or Federko’s. The Junction was, Andy said, a great neighbourhood to grow up in. As I walked along the quiet streets where the leaves on the elm trees were already turning yellow, I tried to imagine Andy running along these sidewalks to school, and I tried to remember what I knew about Roma Boychuk.

It wasn’t much. Andy had been born when his mother was forty. His father died just before or just after Andy’s birth. I don’t remember Andy ever speaking of him. Roma doted on her son. I once handed Andy an article about the disproportionately large number of political leaders who were the favoured children of strong, domineering mothers. I had expected him to laugh, but he hadn’t.

“They think they’re doing you a favour, you know – all that love. But you spend your whole life trying to keep the love coming. That’s why so many politicians are so screwed up – and Jo, the demands …” His sentence had trailed off.

The fear of his mother’s disapproval was something everybody who worked for Andy had to deal with. He always spoke Ukrainian to his mother, and when our party announced a policy that was at odds with his mother’s beliefs, Andy would be on the phone with her for hours. I didn’t need to understand Ukrainian to know he was explaining, rationalizing, justifying. He would come from these phone calls shamefaced and telling a joke on himself, but he never stopped calling. Once somebody, I think it was Dave Micklejohn, had come back from Saskatoon raving about how generously Roma had welcomed him into her home. Andy had laughed and said, “Just don’t cross her or they’ll find you at the bottom of the South Saskatchewan with a crochet hook driven through your heart.”

I had the address in my notebook, and Howard had given me directions. I didn’t need them. I knew the house at once because I recognized the place next door – the home of the Sawchuks, Roma’s arch-enemies. The families had lived next door to one another for sixty years, and they had fought for sixty years.

“Why doesn’t somebody move?” I’d asked Andy once.

“And lose their reason for living?” Andy had shrugged. “Jo, if my mother gets a new brooch or if I get my picture in the paper, her pleasure isn’t complete until Mrs. Sawchuk – ‘that Sawchuk’ as my mother calls them all – sees it, and I’ll bet it’s the same for them. Anyway, the Sawchuks have their revenge. You should see their house.”

In truth, the Sawchuks’ house was unremarkable except for the colour: a neat, rectangular wooden bungalow painted egg-yolk yellow with green trim. But the lawn in front was spectacular. It had sprouted a bumper crop of lawn ornaments. White plastic lambs whose innards had been hollowed out to hold red geraniums; scale models of wooden airplanes with propellers that hummed in the wind; painted plywood cutouts of little German boys with round pink cheeks and stiff wooden lederhosen; a family of wooden ducks, a mother and the babies; a pair of plywood Percherons that pulled a wooden cart full of petunias past a miniature – perfect in every way – of the egg-yolk and green Sawchuk bungalow.

Compared to the Sawchuks’, Roma Boychuk’s place, 82 Joicey Street, was a model of restraint. The house was white with red trim. On each side of the walk to the front door was a half an oil barrel painted white. The raw edges of the barrels had been smoothed into scallops, and the barrels were filled with bright red geraniums.

I had told Roma I would be there by ten. It was five past when I knocked on the door, and she was waiting for me. When I called I had told her I was working on a book about Andy’s life; she had been interested and pleased.

Less than two weeks before, her only child had died and I expected full mourning, but she was dressed for company. She was a stocky little woman but not fat, and she dressed with the care of a woman who has, all her life, been proud of her looks. Her black skirt was cut carefully to slim the line of her hips, and she had a brooch of china pansies at the neck of her lacy white blouse. Her hair was mauve-rinsed, and she had braided it and twisted it into two knots, one at the nape of her neck and one just above it. She had secured the knots with flowered combs that looked vaguely Japanese. Her cheek, when she placed it in front of my lips for a kiss, was smooth and unlined. “Vaseline every night,” Andy told me once when he saw me buying some expensive night cream. “That’s what my mother uses, and she has skin like a baby. Of course, she goes to bed looking like a channel swimmer, but she hasn’t slept with anyone in forty years, so …” And he’d shrugged and laughed.

Roma didn’t smell like a channel swimmer; she smelled pleasantly of something masculine and familiar.

“You smell good,” I said.

“Old Spice,” she said, “the only thing that covers the onions. I make shishliki this morning. I give you some to take when you go.” She gestured me into the front room – a place of heavy drapes, heavy furniture covered in plastic slipcovers, and pale, dispirited light. “You’ll have coffee,” she said, then, brushing aside my offer to help, she left me alone in that gloomy room.

Through the door I could see the kitchen – a room flooded with sunlight and potted plants and good smells. If I had been a friend, I would have sat at the kitchen table and sipped coffee from a thick mug and talked to Roma as she sliced cabbage for soup or twisted dough into circles for poppy-seed bread. But I was company and I sat on the stiff plastic, which kept Roma’s living room suite as free of spot or blemish as it had been the day the men from Kozan’s loaded it onto the truck and delivered it to Joicey Street. When my eyes grew used to the light, I saw that the room was full of pictures. Half were of the Blessed Virgin and half were of Andy.

Most of the pictures of Andy as an adult I had seen before. They had been in campaign literature or newspaper articles and then we replaced them and forgot them. But Roma hadn’t forgotten. She had clipped these pictures of her son and framed them and hung them on her wall next to pictures of the Annunciation or the Sacred Heart. There were pictures of Andy as a child – dozens of them. I walked to the wall by the window to look at these more closely. There was Andy at school, a succession of ever larger Andys sitting, hands folded in front of him, in a series of dim grey classrooms with the pictures of the Pope and the King and Queen and then the new Queen behind him. There was Andy with his friends, grinning, face bleached almost into nothingness by the sun as he stood with his baseball team; Andy sitting in a canoe, waving at the person who stood behind the camera on the shore of some forgotten northern lake.

There were none of Eve and Andy. None of Eve and Andy and their children.

“You like? I get more.” Roma’s voice behind me, startlingly loud and strong. She set the tray she was carrying on a wooden tea wagon, disappeared and was back almost immediately with a box of photo albums. The one on top had a cover of palest powder-blue satin. In the centre was an oval indentation with a picture of a tired-looking Jesus surrounded by little children. Across the top of the album in raised Gothic letters was the legend “My Baptism.”

“I get our little lunch while you look at Andrue’s pictures for your book,” said Roma as she placed the box on the floor beside me. Then, magician-like, she fluttered a lace tablecloth out of nowhere, covered the coffee table and began arranging cups and plates. As I went through the pictures, Roma moved from kitchen to living room, bringing first a pot of coffee and cream and sugar, then a plastic lazy Susan piled high with breads, poppy-seed and zucchini and carrot, then a tray with butter and cheese and dishes of pickles and jams and jellies. And finally another plastic lazy Susan, this one heavy with cookies and squares.

She handed me a dessert plate and a bright paper napkin that said, “No matter where I serve my guests they seem to like my kitchen best,” poured our coffee and began her narrative on the albums in the box. She told me about the pictures in “My Baptism” and “My First Communion,” then she handed me four fat scrapbooks, each of which was labelled, “My Life in the Church.”

“These,” she said, “perfect for that book you do on Andrue. Just copy them out.”

The scrapbooks were filled with the work Andy had done at school, drawings and poems and essays on subjects like chastity and obedience and piety.
Many
essays on chastity.

“Here,” Roma was saying. “Here is the picture for the book – on the front. Andrue with the bishop. This is Andrue’s confirmation picture from Saint Athanasius. That bishop dead now, but a good man, very kind and patient with the children.”

The bishop did not look kind and patient. He had the bulbous nose and the paunch of a serious drinker. But then pictures often lie.

“You take it,” she said. “I have copies. Use it in your book to show Andrue brought up in the church. That baby-murder stuff … abortion.” She made a spitting sound of derision. “He must have picked it up from that one he married.” Again the spitting sound of dismissal. “You write the truth in your book. Andrue did not believe in that stuff. No.” And she shoved the confirmation picture in my purse and went to the kitchen for more coffee.

The rest of the morning passed pleasantly enough. Roma wanted to talk about Andy, and I wanted to listen. When I left, she kissed me and gave me an ice cream pail of lamb shishliki for Mieka.

As I started to walk down Joicey Street, the enemy Sawchuk came running after me.

“So how is she?” He stood, blinking in the sunlight, a barrel-chested man with iron-grey hair and a voice that had ordered a hundred thousand packages of smokes. “What do you make of it?”

“It’s a very sad thing,” I said.

His eyes were bright with spite. “I suppose she’s been carrying on like crazy now that the big shot’s been killed off.” He laughed a wheezing, sucking kind of laugh that touched a nerve in me.

“Mr. Sawchuk, I hope you’re never unlucky enough to lose a child – especially your only child.”

His face came alive with malice, and I knew immediately that I’d walked into Sawchuk’s trap. He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief before he answered me.

“Is that what she told you? That the big shot was her one and only? Next time, ask her about the girl – the one she threw out.”

Suddenly the fun seemed to go out of the situation for him. He sounded distracted, as if his focus had shifted somewhere deep inside himself. “Probably dead now, too, or worse. Such a beauty. The old man, the father, he doted on that girl. Every year he made her a skating rink out back. Hours he’d spend, standing in the cold, holding the hose so the ice would always be smooth for her. She would skate and skate. My wife used to stand by the kitchen window and just watch her. She said it was better than the ice show. She’s gone, too, now – my wife.” The spite had puffed Sawchuk up. Now he looked depleted – small and old.

“Mr. Sawchuk,” I said. But I’d lost him. He was somewhere in the past, standing at the kitchen window with his wife, watching the neighbour girl skate.

“Mr. Sawchuk,” I said again.

He looked at me, and suddenly his eyes were as blue and untroubled as the September sky. “Elena,” he said. “That was the Boychuk girl’s name.” He turned, and without another word, he walked away – to his fabulous yard and his empty house.

As I stood waiting for the bus, I was confused and off balance. I had known everything about Andy. And yet I hadn’t. A sister. Andy had a sister. But he couldn’t have known. He would have mentioned it. He couldn’t have known.

But how could he not know?

And behind me, sweet with the singsong of the street chant a little girl’s voice.

I am a pretty little Dutch girl
As pretty as pretty can be,
And all the boys on Joicey Street
Are so in love with me.

My boy friend’s name is Tony.
He lives in Paris, France.
And all the boys on Joicey Street
Watch me and Tony dance.

CHAPTER

11

Mieka’s spaghetti sauce was lighter than mine, but full of fresh basil and very good. Her boyfriend, Greg, joined us for dinner, and he was deferential to Howard, courtly with me and adoring of Mieka. It was a fine party but, as pleasant and courteous and civilized as we all were, it was apparent that Mieka and Greg wanted to be alone. There was a hum of sexual tension in the air as soon as supper was over, and it wasn’t coming from our end of the table. When I announced that Howard and I should leave as soon as we did the dishes, Greg was up in a snap, putting the dishes in the sink with one hand and helping me on with my coat with the other.