Late Nights on Air (19 page)

In the coming months, Gwen formed an image of the North as an open page in a book of wonders illustrated and illuminated with rare animals and subtle plants. The North was the tropics made simple and cool. A rather more know-able place, since it held on to all traces of passage, to every weathered bone and fire-cracked rock. One scientist talked about the length of time it took anything to decay in the arctic air, on the one hand, and to grow, on the other, since food supplies were limited, summer was short, reproduction rates were meagre. In some parts of the North an arctic char didn’t produce ripe eggs until it was twelve years old, and even after that it spawned only every second or third year. A world, where if you were a child and the world was a plate, then the plate would be huge and have lots of space between a few select foods. She had been that very sort of child, wanting everything kept separate, and not a lot of different things at once, or much of any one thing at all.

The inquiry was making so much visible and noteworthy. Something quickened inside her when she heard native testimony on the radio about living on the land, about existing in makeshift shelters as you went storm-tossed and sun-warmed through life. Many native people still spent May and June in their spring camps trapping muskrats, and summers at their
fish camps in the Delta catching and drying fish or harvesting white whales, and parts of the winters inland, hunting and trapping. Berger was going to their doorsteps, settlement to settlement, thirty-five in all. He was visiting summer camps and fishing grounds, like the itinerant preachers of old, in his corduroy jacket with the leather patches on the elbows, wearing his large school-boy glasses on his pleasantly wide face. And people, of course, were coming to him. Countless witnesses were speaking into the microphone in a gathering, an aggregation if you like, of informants and information. A remarkable time of hope for anyone opposed to the pipeline, for anyone in favour of the present learning from the past.

Around Yellowknife, the miniature birches and poplars changed colour in August. For about two weeks they were a ravishing yellow-gold. It was quite astonishing, but so fast: every single leaf was on every single tree and every single leaf was yellow. Farther south, colour gathered on some leaves as others fell, and you only ever got a piece of the whole, but here you had all of the glory all at once, and then it was gone. In September, it snowed enough to cover the ground, and the roads turned icy. They wouldn’t see water on the streets again until April.

Towards the end of September, a large package arrived at the station addressed to Gwen Symon. A round-shouldered bundle of heavy brown paper, bigger than a big sleeping bag, she thought. No return address. She’d thought immediately of a peace offering from her brother in Ontario—they
hadn’t spoken in months and months—but the postmark said YELLOWKNIFE.

Opening it, while Eleanor looked on, Gwen recalled Harry’s comment about ghosts pouring out of boxes. He was right. It was a fur coat, a ghost of sorts.

She lifted it out of its wrappings, her expression open-mouthed and astounded, and Eleanor said, “We’re going to remember this for the rest of our lives. You’ll remember the look of the coat and I’ll remember the look on your face.”

Gwen held the coat by its shoulders and shook out its folds. She examined the dark, brownish-grey fur that seemed to shed light. It felt as soft as talcum powder. She checked the label, “Wright Furs,” then looked for tags and found none, looked for signs of wear on the brown silk lining and found not wear, but the softness of having been worn. She slipped it on, bringing it close around her neck, and stepped up to the studio window to see her reflection.

“You look wonderful,” said Eleanor.

Gwen put her hands in the pockets and pulled out a small card.
From a secret admirer
. Now her insides were as transformed as her outsides: she felt flattered and stunned. The first snowfall had worked a similar change on the town itself. It dazzled interiors by transforming the external world.

The beauty of fur. The coat was light in weight but immediately warm and luxurious. And Gwen did look wonderful. Even she could see that.

Teresa was able to identify the fur. Her father ran a trap-line, and so she knew sheared beaver when she saw it. The coat had been perfectly cared for, she said, it was as good as new.

Dido had appeared too, drawn by all the fuss. She fingered the coat enviously. “It’s beautiful, Gwen.”

“Try it on.”

Dido tried it on. She had to hunch her shoulders and when she stretched out her arms, inches of bare wrist protruded. “Whoever sent it knows your size,” she said. “Maybe somebody’s watching you. Did you think of that?”

Gwen took the coat back from her, and slowly, carefully folded it. She hadn’t thought of that, and what had been latent, a slight feeling of alarm and suspicion, now overtook her joy. She stroked the fur. What a shame if she couldn’t wear it.

“Come on,” protested Teresa. “Who cares where it came from.”

Then quite suddenly Gwen knew. In her childhood a big basket of precious blueberries from Manitoulin Island had been sent to a family down the street, the Johnsons, a gift from their island relatives. But the berries never arrived—they were delivered by mistake to another family with the same name—a story pieced together only after the relatives wondered aloud at never having been thanked. “There must be another Gwen Symon,” she said.

But then why was the package addressed to her at her place of work? No, she realized, she was the one it was intended for.

In the end, Gwen would take Teresa’s view. She wore the coat. She called it Dolly. Come on Dolly, let’s go for a walk. And she would take long rambles, warm as toast and reasonably worry-free. She never ceased to puzzle over who might have given it to her, but no one stepped forward, and the riddle remained unsolved for more than a year.

A few days later, in the parking lot next to the liquor store, Harry pulled up behind Dido’s parked car. She sat alone behind the wheel, so still that he wondered why, and then the light dawned. No doubt she was listening to the radio, and he turned his on to see what might have captured her attention.

It was Eliza Doolittle’s spirited invective against Henry Higgins, but what Harry couldn’t know was that Dido was reliving the skip on her childhood recording, a skip ingrained in her memory as much as the music itself. She heard it coming, then heard it happen, even as the song on the radio sailed smoothly on. It brought her whole childhood back. Her father would lift the needle and place it, delicately, a fraction of a centimetre ahead. As precisely as Eddy had located “Helpless.” “My Fair Lady” had been a recording for daytime. At night, her father frequently put on “Harold in Italy,” and she would fall asleep to those glorious, haunting strains, learning to love the viola because of Berlioz, because, in truth, of her father. Sitting here now, suspended with music that flooded her with the past, she wondered what her father, who’d been drawn to strong women, not to strong men, would have thought of Eddy. Eddy was so private, intense, possessive; he wanted to have a child with her, he wanted a son; and yet there were things he kept entirely to himself, and there were times when she didn’t seem to matter to him at all. The radio news came on and she turned it up. Gravesites were being prepared for the winter, not at the old cemetery on Back Bay where she’d heard her father’s voice, but at the new one
near the airport, twenty-five graves that would be covered with wooden cribbing to protect them until needed, after which the ground would freeze so hard it would be impossible to turn it over with a spade. The innocence of these arrangements struck her. Nobody expects anything bad to happen, she thought, anything out of the ordinary. She, on the other hand, had been having one violent dream after another and they coloured her days with vague apprehension.

Harry’s tuneful whistle greeted her when she got out of the car. He was leaning against his van, whistling “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” and she had to smile. She recognized the compliment, understood the connection; he’d been listening to the radio too.

Harry was delighted to see her, delighted to catch her in an unguarded moment. He was thinking that the age difference between them wasn’t as vast as that between Higgins and Eliza. He in his forties, Dido in her twenties. But Dido must have read his mind because she said, “Harry, I’m not Eliza Doolittle, you know.”

He watched her head into the liquor store and admired her more than ever for seeing through his foolish self.

Radio mattered more as the days grew shorter. Gwen, broadcasting at midnight, had more calls and more complaints about the music she played. There were times when she put her disgruntled listeners on the air and defended herself, using the little sound-effects door to good effect. “Thank you and good
night!” Or, “You think that’s opera? Let me introduce you to opera. Here we are at Joan Sutherland’s door.” She rang the doorbell and invited Joan to sing an aria from
Norma
.

At the end of her summer contract, Harry had called her into his office and extended it for a year. For Gwen, that was more than enough. She felt a new surge of confidence that helped to balance other worries, like her ongoing estrangement from Dido. Their paths rarely crossed any more, and when they did, nothing transpired except the briefest of greetings. She had more contact, really, with Lorna Dargabble, who often phoned during her late night show, almost pitifully grateful for some of the music she played.

Sometimes when she closed down the station at one in the morning and stepped outside, she would see the elderly woman coming back from one of her solitary walks. In the summer, Lorna said, she ventured as far as Frame Lake, and walked along the shore, or went down to Old Town and circled the Rock. In the colder months, however, she stayed in the downtown area that was scented by the warm, stale, greasy puffs of air that issued from Jason’s Chicken.

On this occasion, as Gwen accompanied Mrs. Dargabble home, they saw Eddy and a young Dene man ahead of them, the latter identifiable by his long black braid and a posture even more erect than Eddy’s.

Lorna said, “I don’t trust those two. I don’t know what they’re up to, but they’re up to something.”

Gwen looked at her, surprised to catch a hint of prejudice. “Do they have to be up to something? I mean, here we are, you and I. Would you say we’re up to something?”

Lorna chuckled and put her arm through Gwen’s. But soon she let out a heavy sigh. “My days of being up to anything are over,” she said.

Gwen asked what was weighing on her mind, and Lorna told her that she’d almost decided to see a lawyer about getting a divorce.

“But that’s good,” encouraged Gwen.

“No,” Lorna said. “Nothing’s good.”