Late Nights on Air (15 page)

Make preparations now
was heartbreaking shorthand. Making the preparations for imminent death that Hornby had failed to make to preserve their lives.

Whalley’s script put it beautifully, Harry thought. “For in the end most of what can be said about John Hornby is outweighed by the record of his unrelenting courage in the face of a disaster that he must have known his own irresponsibility had produced.” An enigma during his life, Hornby was fortunate after death in having the best of biographers.

It seemed to Harry as he listened that everyone had fallen under the same spell, except Dido, whose blank face he
couldn’t read. Now she caught his eye and his heart sank. She didn’t like this documentary he loved, this unfolding drama of fascination. He shifted his gaze to Gwen, who had heard the program when it was originally broadcast, as had he, and from her expression he could see that she recognized certain voices, remembered certain turns of phrase, and was caught up all over again in the overwhelming pull of the story.

But
why
had Hornby dallied so long, so inexplicably? Why had he let September slip by without laying in the winter’s meat, thus leaving himself and the others short of food as early as November? Harry had his own explanation. To him, Hornby was a George Orwell type, even in appearance. The two men shared an enormous appetite for doing without.
Down and Out in Paris and London. Down and Out in the Arctic
.

The program ended and Harry broke the silence with a resonating afterthought: he’d like to see the spot where Hornby died. It would be worth the trip, he said, casually setting in motion the events of the following summer.

Dido, listening to Hornby’s story, remembered her father. She was back in their house where he was grading papers as he listened to the radio, pausing in his correction of a mangled line from the
Aeneid
to drift over to England in his mind. Their house a house of maps and books and foreign sounds, of coffee every evening at eight, of fresh cut flowers, of salty licorice. Her father would have liked this documentary, it would have appealed to his melancholy mind. She wished he had done more with his life. But what her mother used to say was true.
He didn’t have a fighting temperament. Nothing could arouse the battling instincts of that mild and gentle man. His voice wasn’t unlike the actor’s who played Hornby, she thought, the same ruminating style and pace of someone who seemed to stand outside life—a kind of baffled backwards sound, as if the future was already in the past.

She glanced through the window at Eddy in master control and knew what he was thinking: the program was well and good in its minor way. This wasn’t the North that interested him, these old tales of the glories and disasters of English travellers. The present called out for justice, not for nostalgia over another extravagant failure on the part of blind and incompetent white men. Teresa Lafferty wasn’t here. Why would she be? Dido looked around at all the pale, absorbed faces and felt like an atheist in church. These Canadians, she thought, these old-fashioned, colonized Canadians. She saw Gwen’s fingers steal up to her eyes and Eleanor’s gentle smile of too easy, too automatic appreciation lingering on her face. Abe Lamont’s beard jutted out like a furry flag. And Harry, she knew without even looking, Harry was watching her, measuring her reactions, wanting something she wasn’t about to give. Don’t look at me like that, she’d told him once, you’ll wear out your eyes. She glanced at him now and raised her eyebrows and his face had that hungry look of special pleading—fill my bowl, give me seconds—that made her lose patience. Earlier in the week she’d complained to him about Abe. Said that in calling her antiseptic, he was being racist. It was an anti-Dutch slur, she said, and no, she wasn’t kidding.

In this moment (this parting of the ways) she made up her mind to be more uncompromising, less like her father. She
remembered something Eddy had said about Berger. The man was too
reasonable
.

Afterwards, they remained in the studio and talked. Dido said Hornby must have been a masochist. “He was demented,” she said, enunciating too clearly, this habit of over-enunciation that made Abe Lamont call her too perfect on air.

Gwen flared up. She hated words like
masochist
and
narcissist
and, and, and—she tried to think of another such label and couldn’t. “Call someone a masochist,” she spluttered, “and there’s nothing left to say. It’s the end of the story. You’ve written him off. Explained him to death.”

Dido replied in a steady, even tone. “You haven’t explained everything maybe, but almost everything.”

“No! Those labels just give you a fancy reason to stop thinking about people.”

“What would
you
call Hornby then?”

“Complicated.” Gwen couldn’t bear the criticism—she never could bear it when anyone she treasured got pilloried and dismissed. “What did Whalley say?” she cried. “‘Brave, desolate, and haunted.’“

Dido pursed her lips. “Poor Edgar,” she murmured. She was tired of Gwen’s vehemence. All week, whenever she’d floated a new idea, Gwen had leapt in with a differing opinion, as if she had some privileged understanding of radio. They’d made a ten-minute documentary together about a Dene play on alcohol abuse, it was being performed on an outdoor stage, and they’d interviewed the actors and the director, who said, “Mostly we don’t really tell them how
the play is, but we want them to make the story to themselves of how the play is.” Gwen had overruled Dido’s intention of running music below the interviews, shaking her head dismissively, not even considering it.

Eddy weighed in now. Usually you could count on his silence. He said that Edgar, without Hornby, was nothing; he would have lived an ordinary life and been completely forgotten. He was talking to Dido, asking her which she would choose if she had the choice. “A long, steady, unexciting life or a brief spurt of intensity?”

Dido traced circles on the table with her fingertips. A small smile parted her lips. At last she admitted it. “Intensity.”

Harry couldn’t help himself. “And you accused me of being a romantic!”

But Dido and Eddy weren’t paying attention, not to him.

Eleanor tried to say that surely the two weren’t incompatible, intensity and a long life, but nobody was listening and she didn’t go on. The words that kept ringing in her head were Hornby’s
I’ve come to love the silence
. After the others had left, she said to Harry that Hornby’s description of the Barrens as sudden, featureless, endless, as land ground down and scoured by glaciers, put her in mind of the holy men of the desert starving themselves in order to have visions. Hornby had been drawn to a place that almost nobody had ever seen, where everything was severe, but where suddenly the air shook with life, with the sounds of tens of thousands of caribou. Eleanor said visionaries and mystics are always drawn to emptiness and silence as the necessary preconditions for an upwelling of the spirit. No wonder George Whalley turned to the Bible when he tried to describe the power of this world at the end of the
world. “Stones of fire” was one of his phrases. From Ezekiel.

She said, “If you go to the Barrens, Harry, I’d give anything to go with you.”

On the afternoon of the same day, several of them went canoeing on Frame Lake, the protected inland lake on the western edges of New Town. It was a day soaked in sunshine and threaded by blue damselflies, in twos, mating. Darning needles, Harry called them. They lit on everybody, but especially on Gwen’s shoulders and hair, stitching her with colour—blue, delicate, darting, iridescent—mending her mental aches and pains and errors and embarrassments. She was in the bow of Harry’s canoe, Eleanor was paddling with Ralph. Ralph called out,
Gwen, they like you. You’re a flower
. And she turned around with a wide smile.

Eleanor caught her breath.
La fille qui était laide
. Gwen looked beautiful.

What would happen next? wondered Eleanor. Love would happen next, as it always does, she thought, even to the old heroes. She’d been reading her beloved Edith Hamilton, refreshing her memory about the twelve labours of Hercules and thinking, as she turned the pages, about what a long, eventful, exhausting life he had, poor wretch, only to be reminded that yet to come were all the complications of love. First for Iole, then for Deianara, this latter ending in unendurable pain and death.

The canoes carried the canoeists and the canoeists carried the damselflies and everything seemed weightless. They were
heading towards the first day of August, the street lights were noticeable again, and a few leaves were turning yellow, indicating in their minimal, elegant way an end to this long, warm summer and the beginning of a darker chapter.

Harry and Gwen went for a walk later on, all the way to the lip of Rainbow Valley, at the end of Latham Island. Gwen’s voice was animated as she told him what she’d learned from Abe about lifting words off the page. He’d coached her to raise her eyes as she read, and it was hard to do, she wasn’t relaxed enough, but a few times she’d succeeded in delivering the words as if speaking directly to the listener, and it was wonderful, she said, to feel unlocked from the tyranny of the page.

She’d had a good week and he was glad. Her professional progress was a small part of what he was after—a new flow of languages and information on air. He wanted one long street of sound that would be interesting to anyone, white or Dene, at any time of day. If radio could be more relevant than ever, he reasoned, then it stood a better chance against television. He was sure of it. He’d also been thinking that if head office was going to waste money on an elaborate new building, then it could be argued they should spend generously on crucial new programming. Already he was picturing Teresa Lafferty’s hour of blended Dogrib and English; he wanted to hire another Dene woman, young Tessa Blondin, to do reports in Slavey; and he was tempted to curry more disfavour with the newsroom by carving five minutes off the regular local newscasts and adding them to the Dene allotment.

He and Gwen reached Rainbow Valley. They stood together looking down at the colourful curve of poverty, the small prefab houses painted in pastel blues and greens and pinks. Scruffy children played in the road, an old woman hauled a pail of water up her steps, smoke rose from several chimneys. The scene of settled displacement pulled from Gwen a wistful, pointed question. “Are you ever lonely?” she asked Harry. Tacitly confessing, she knew, that she herself was lonely and glad for his company.

Harry didn’t hesitate. He said yes, he knew he’d always be lonely. “But I always have good friends wherever I am.”

And Gwen knew exactly where she stood. She was meant to feel included in that company—one of many. She fell silent as they walked back to his house, disappointed somehow in Harry’s answer. He made tea, moving a large box off his kitchen table to make room for teapot and cups. The box was addressed to Harry, she saw, and had a return address in New Brunswick. But he hadn’t opened it.

“Why not?” she asked, dumbfounded that anyone could receive a package in the mail and resist its mystery.

He laughed and said that opening boxes made him sad. “I get lost in them, Gwen. All sorts of ghosts pour out.”

IT WAS ABE LAMONT’S LAST NIGHT
in town before flying back to Toronto. Harry had arranged to join him in the Gold Range, and he found him there, soused and voluble, bending Dido’s ear about the old days when thousands of geese shot in the Mackenzie River Delta were piled high on barges and shipped south. Travelling the other way by barge came Pete, the Lebanese peddler from Alberta, selling oranges at every stop for a dollar apiece.

Dido was wearing a necklace of red coral beads, and in Harry’s mind the colours took over, the creamy-grey breasts of the geese, the precious oranges, the reddish beads. Eddy wasn’t with her and Harry took heart: perhaps she wasn’t so attached to him, after all. He kept looking at her, but she was having none of his glances, none of his big, obvious, smitten heart. He felt old and raw with wanting her and not having her. A few weeks ago he’d invited her to a cabin on Prosperous Lake for a day of what he imagined might be seclusion, confessions, concerted wooing, but she had declined to go.

“Then have dinner with me in town. I’ll cook for you.”

“If you insist.”

“Oh, I never insist.”

That made her smile. “All right, then.”

He’d made his signature dish, cauliflower soup so delicious (a touch of curry powder, and thick cream) that Dido had a second helping. “You’re young,” he’d said, looking at her but speaking of himself, “you’re doing something really interesting, you think your future holds more of the same, but better. Then you discover that the highlight of your working life occurred at the beginning. And you can’t go back.”

Dido had laughed his comments away. “You want me to believe the best is now, things will never be better than this. Of course they’ll be better. Of course I’ll try television if I get a chance. Who wouldn’t?”

“Let me see your palm.” He’d stroked her palm with his fingertips. “Is television in Dido Paris’s future? I see mansions, tropical trees. A lot of water.”