Deadly Appearances (9 page)

When Ian had had his office there, he’d panelled the walls in knotty pine and had bookshelves built along one wall. There was a desk, a good leather chair for the desk, a reclining chair for reading, a brown corduroy couch that made up into a hideaway bed, and that was it. The decorating was fifties
Argosy
magazine, but the room had a cottagey feeling I liked.

The Christmas before Ian died I’d ordered a braided rag rug from Quebec as a surprise. It is a joyful splash of colour in that sombre room. The rug and a wall full of photographs Ian’s mother sent me after he was killed are the only changes I’ve made. The pictures are a chronicle of Ian and his brother, Jack, growing up. I don’t know what a grief counsellor would say about the hours I spend standing in front of the pictures, but it helps. There is something comforting about the neat and inevitable progression of those young lives: from babies who stare wide-eyed, then beam as they sit, then walk, to boys who hold dogs and play baseball and ride bikes, to young men, faces suddenly serious under strangely dated haircuts, who hold the arms of girls in billowy dresses, and graduate, and receive awards.

I wonder now if Peter didn’t believe we all needed the healing power of those pictures when he suggested we carry our sleeping bags into the cool peace of the granny flat until Andy’s funeral. Whatever the reason, we moved. And in those still, hot evenings before the funeral, we turned up the air conditioner, ate ice cream from Bertolucci’s and worked hard at doing nothing. The boys watched baseball on the portable
TV
, and they brought the
VCR
over so they could watch movies when there wasn’t a game. Mieka and I read through a stack of old women’s magazines she’d bought at a garage sale.

It seemed in that cool apartment we could, for a few hours, seal ourselves off from the hot world of pain and insanity that surrounded us. And it was in those rooms that I decided to write Andy Boychuk’s biography.

It was a decision that almost cost me my life.

It began on the morning of the Taber corn. At around seven o’clock, somebody started pounding on the door. When I opened it, Howard Dowhanuik was standing there. Over his shoulder, Santa style, was a gunny sack of corn.

“Jesus, Jo, I thought you guys were all dead. I just about smashed down the front door of the house, and then I remembered this place. What’re you all doing up here, anyway?”

“It’s cooler for sleeping.”

“Well, it’s not going to be for long if we stand here with the door open. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

“Howard, would you like to come in?”

“Yeah, I would, and I’d like some coffee. Look, I brought some corn for breakfast. A guy was setting up a stand at a gas station out on Dewdney. He drove in from Alberta this morning – first Taber corn of the season. Let’s get some water boiling. I’m starving. Peter, go over to the house and get a pot. Angus and I’ll start husking this. C’mon, c’mon. Let’s look alive, everybody.”

Laughing and grumbling, we began to look alive. The kids had always liked Howard, and since Ian’s death, they seemed to treasure his rough kindnesses. They liked to be with him. So did I.

I made coffee. Howard cooked the corn and it was wonderful, indescribably delicate and sweet. Mieka unearthed a half gallon of peach ice cream and a Mieka cheesecake from the deep-freeze. It was an oddly comforting meal, and after Howard left to go to the legislature, I poured myself another cup of coffee and sat back in the reclining chair.

The room was filled with sunshine and the sweet smell of corn and butter. The boys were playing canasta – that summer they’d exhausted the possibilities of every card game but that one. Mieka, barefoot and in her cotton nightie, was sitting in the window seat, a stack of
Ladies’ Home Journals
and
Chatelaines
beside her. It was a moment of rare peace.

Mieka’s glasses were balanced at the end of her nose. Suddenly she looked over them at me.

“Mum, did you know Margaret Trudeau made her own wedding dress?”

“Good Lord, Mieka, how old is that magazine?”

She flipped it closed and looked at the cover. “June 1971 – five months before I was born.”

“Yeah, I remember when you were born, and I also remember that dress. It was a caftan, white, of course, and he had a rose in his lapel. She was so beautiful. Livvy Scobey, who was our
MP
then, told me Margaret went all over Ottawa talking about how she made all her own clothes. The seams were all crooked and the hems were coming down, Livvy said, but no one had the heart to say anything. Margaret was so young and pretty and, of course, according to Livvy, everyone just felt so sorry for her being married to ‘that man.’ You know, all the years they were both in Ottawa, Livvy could never bring herself to say his name.”

“Oh, Mummy, you guys are awful.”

“Not me, Mieka. I thought he
was
terrific. He was terrific. At least, he was terrifically interesting. I suppose now that you’re grown up and going to university, I can tell you this. The first time I ever voted, I voted for him.”

Mieka twirled her glasses and grinned. “Oh, no. I was counting on you getting a nice cushy job when we get to be government again. But with that kind of skeleton in your closet, I don’t know … Of course, you do have friends in high places.”

“I’m not sure about that any more, Mieka. I’m not so sure about that at all.” Suddenly the golden morning was edged in black. I swallowed hard. “Pitch me one of your magazines, would you?”

But she didn’t pitch the magazine. She brought it over with a hug. “Are you going to be all right, Mummy?” I hugged her back, but I didn’t say anything. I didn’t trust my voice; besides, I didn’t know the answer.

The magazine she’d brought me had a picture of a very young Natalie Wood on the cover, and inside was a memoir of
JFK
. The date on the cover was February 1964, a time before the truth had made its cruel revision of Camelot. The article was uncritical and sentimental, and it brought a flood of memories: a grey November day in Toronto, coming out of political science class in the Sidney Smith building and someone saying Kennedy’d been shot and someone else saying they’d shot Johnson, too. Then numbness – walking across Queen’s Park with a boy from my class, both of us crying, plodding our way through sodden leaves while old newspapers whipped wetly at our ankles. Then a pub on Yonge Street that smelled of urine but didn’t check
ID
too carefully, and sitting at a table in the back near the television and drinking and drinking but never getting drunk. After that, a weekend of flickering black and white images on a television that had come from my grandmother’s basement. The vertical was stuck so you always had the top half of the picture on the bottom and the bottom on the top. It had seemed a reasonable enough way to watch what happened in the next few days. Now there was another loss, and I wasn’t eighteen any more.

It would be nice to say that the memoir of Kennedy I read that day in the granny flat inspired me to write about Andy. It would be nice, but it wouldn’t be true. The decision to write about Andy’s life and death came out of a need more jagged and more complex than nostalgia. I was at risk, and I knew it. If I was going to be safe again, I had to prove somehow that life, life with a capital
L
, was a coherent narrative with a beginning, a middle and an end. Somehow I convinced myself that if I understood Andy’s life, I could make sense of his death. I had already lost a husband to the abyss. I couldn’t lose Andy, too. There had to be logic there – cause and effect. The alternative was unthinkable. And so even before my friend was buried, I was deep in the puzzle of his life.

CHAPTER

6

Andy’s funeral was Friday, September 2, in the morning, so people could get away for the Labour Day weekend. “No point,” said Dave Micklejohn, “in having it later in the day and ticking people off. Next week they’ll be over their grief and all they’ll remember is that Andy’s funeral loused up the last long weekend of summer.” He was right, of course, and we all agreed. But when the telephone rang that morning in the granny flat, I was disoriented. For one thing, it was still dark. I propped myself up on my elbow and grabbed the receiver. Dave Micklejohn was on the other end.

“Wake up, dear. It’s show time!”

I looked out the window. “Dave, it’s the middle of the night. It’s still dark out there.”

“Look again, Jo. It’s seven a.m. That dark you see is a rainstorm. It’s coming down in sheets.”

As Dave talked, I got up, picked up the phone and walked to the window. The sky was the colour of pewter, and the rain really was coming down in sheets. There were already pools of standing water in the backyard, and my sad, stunted tomato plants had been flattened.

“Dave, the sky’s falling in. What are we going to do?”

“Well, Henny Penny, when it’s a funeral you’re putting on, it’s a little hard to give people a rain check and call it off. Did Kelly get the marching orders to you? You know where you’re supposed to be and when?”

“They’re right on top of the suit I’m going to wear. Don’t worry, I’ll be all right. And Dave, I’ll buy you a drink afterward.”

His voice sounded very far away and old. “There isn’t enough liquor in the whole world to help with this. Damn it, Jo, I had such hopes for him …”

The receiver clicked down, and I was standing in the still, dark room listening to the sounds of my children sleeping.

I flicked on the coffee machine, walked into the bathroom and stepped under the shower. In an hour and a half the front doors of the legislature would be closed to the public. Twenty minutes after that a limousine would pick me up and take Eve and me to the legislature for her private goodbyes to her husband. Why Eve had chosen me for this painful and intimate duty was a mystery, but Eve was full of mysteries. She had asked, and I had agreed. So we two widows would accompany Andy’s body from the legislature to Little Flower Cathedral for the funeral mass then to a reception at the parish hall (catered, I had noticed on Kelly’s marching orders, by the ladies of St. Basil’s Ukrainian Catholic Church – one in the eye for Eve there; I’d bet my last dollar there would be perogies on that table) and finally to Wolf River for a private burial.

I towelled off, put on a robe and poured a cup of coffee, then looked through the rain across the yard to our house. From this angle, it always looked big and foreign. Upstairs on my bed was my outfit for the funeral, my “sad rags,” Mieka had said with a small smile when I showed them to her. But she approved. A creamy silk Alfred Sung suit that I’d bought from the “Reduced to Clear” rack at Drache’s, a shiny, cream-coloured Italian straw bag and a pair of leather pumps, miraculously the right colour and on sale. I had some good gold jewellery Ian had given me over the years, and the night before, when I tried everything on, I was pleased with how put together I looked. But today the thought of getting dressed or even leaving the granny flat filled me with an exhaustion so complete I wanted to sink down in the nest of sleeping bags with my children and drift back to sleep. I was tired of being responsible. I was tired of being a grown-up. I wanted out. The rain continued to fall. The yard would be muddy under my bare feet. But part of being a grown-up is knowing that most of the time there aren’t too many options. I pulled my robe tight around me, whispered to Peter to remember the dogs and went down the stairs that led to the rainy, pain-filled world.

When the limo from the funeral home pulled up outside my house, I was waiting. The undertaker, a sad-faced young man in a hot-looking wool suit, ran up the walk with a big, black umbrella to shield me. When I slid into the limo, the Alfred Sung was still bandbox fresh. Eve was already in the car. Surprisingly, she was dressed in green, a beautifully cut suit the colour of a new leaf.

She looked my outfit over thoughtfully. “Maybe white would have been better,” she said, “but green is supposed to raise the vibrations of the body above the vibrations of pain.” She tried to smile. “I don’t think it’s working.” Then without another word, she leaned forward, tapped the driver on the shoulder and told him to go.

The rain was lashing the windows so hard that all I could see was the soft fuzz of the streetlights, still lit although it was almost nine o’clock. The limo was as quiet and set apart as the confessional.

“I like the rain,” Eve said, as much, I think, to herself as to me. “It rained on my wedding day, too. Do you know what my mother-in-law said?” She switched to a burlesque Eastern European accent. “ ‘Rain good. Means lotsa babies, lotsa babies for Andrue.’ Oh, God.” She laughed then choked. “Lotsa babies.”

“Eve.” I reached out to her, but she pulled away from me and pressed her face to the window.

We’d pulled into the circular drive in front of the legislature. Ahead of us, gleaming whitely in the powerful bank of lights that illuminated the entrance to the legislature, was the hearse that had come to pick up Andy.

No people – just that silvery hearse and the empty stairs in the rain. All week, from early morning till mid-evening, the stairs had been choked with people. The line, patient and endless, had stretched down Legislative Drive, past the banks of marigolds and zinnias fading in the baking heat, out onto Albert Street. Each time I went to the Caucus Office, I walked beside the line. I was amazed at how many faces I recognized. People I’d seen at party potlucks or rallies or picnics – people who, year after year, paid for their memberships and made a pan of brownies for a meeting or brought their roaster full of cabbage rolls for a dance and felt as connected to the party as any cabinet minister. They were the people who defended the party to their neighbours and tore it apart at conventions. Political people sometimes call them the foot soldiers. The soldiers were at home this morning getting ready for the funeral, and Eve and I were going to be alone with the leader.

When I looked at those empty stone stairs I felt a spasm of pain as acute as a blow from a fist. I thought of all the times I’d seen Andy, always late, pulling on his jacket, bounding up the stairs to get to the House. And now he was lying in a box in that building, and it was over, and I’d never see him again. I couldn’t move. I sat there and let the sense of loss wash over me.