Late Nights on Air (5 page)

Dido was listening too, without comment, but she felt like stepping into the studio and taking over. She became aware of Eddy, who was leaning his long, sinewy body against Eleanor’s desk, ignoring everyone except herself. He fixed her with his small, intent eyes. He wanted to know if she’d ever been to Prosperous Lake. He was driving out there tonight.

“I’m sorry,” Dido said, feeling and sounding invincible in her formality. “I have another engagement.”

“What engagement?”

His expressive eyes—how small they were—didn’t let up, and against her will she laughed a little.

“What engagement?”

“We’re going to the movies.”

“Who’s ‘we’?”

Dido licked her dry lips. She didn’t like this man and didn’t feel the need to answer. He smiled and shrugged and headed out the door.

After he left, Mrs. Dargabble said something so quietly Dido wasn’t sure she’d heard properly.

“Perhaps I’m wrong,” Mrs. Dargabble said. “But I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think I should get mixed up with him.” Dido looked thoughtfully out the big plate-glass window with its view of the street and saw Eddy heading up to Franklin Avenue. He carried himself with easy pride, like a professional soldier on leave. And she took away the image of a man pacing himself to outlast any number of wars.

IN THE LITTLE BOOTH OF LIGHT
, speaking into the silver fruit hanging off the silver bough, Gwen struggled with the words on the greens. They twisted a little and moved away, capitalized, cagey. She tightened her grip on the page and stumbled. Alone, but heard for miles, she winced and stumbled again.

The news. Gwen Symon was reading the news. She heard herself make the mistake in her head and then she made it on air in a small voice flattened by panic. She remembered the fat actress with stage fright in
On Stage
, who lost weight by eating lettuce without any salad dressing and got over her fright by imagining that everyone in the audience was a rabbit.

Her voice came over the speakers in the hallway and then she herself came out into the hall—greens in hand and white-faced—as white-faced, thought Eleanor, as George VI after the crown was put on his stuttering head. Gwen carried the greens back to the newsroom and gave them to one of the two newsmen, who took them without looking at her—she who had ruined their long day’s work in fifteen minutes by booting one story after another.

Eleanor, from her safe perch, heard it all. Harry stopped on his way past her desk and said with a grimace, “I could hear
the sheets rustling.” He recognized the softness of uncertainty, of nakedness, of no confidence at all. The loneliest voice he’d ever heard.

“You should help her,” Eleanor said to him.

He jigged his head back and forth, as if considering it, and turned towards the door.

“You’re helping Dido,” Eleanor called after him, “who needs it less.”

All right. He would teach Gwen how to read, as he’d taught his sister how to drive, how to navigate the lines of words, the lanes of vocabulary without embarrassment, accident. How to look ahead so that her voice flowed, rather than straight down at one stumpy phrase after another.

“I pretend I’m talking to one person,” he told her the next afternoon in his office.

“I’m no good at that. I seize up. I run out of things to say.”

She was watching his sensitive mouth. She would take away the memory of him smoking, and the spit-spit sound of getting the bits of tobacco off his tongue and lip. And of the three unfortunate things that were to happen to him that winter, one after the other, three months in a row.

The question she asked: How can you be a personality on the air when you have no personality?

That’s good, came Harry’s answer. Self-doubt is good. Most announcers are full of themselves, they’re so in love with the sound of their own voices. You don’t want a plummy sound. You don’t want to be Henry Comor the second.

Gwen flared up. She loved Henry Comor, she told him. She had listened to “Hermit’s Choice” every Saturday night when she was sixteen.

“Gwen, Gwen. Why weren’t you out partying?”

Because nobody invited her. Curled up in the big armchair beside the varnished standing cabinet that contained the radio, she listened to Henry Comor interview well-known actors, writers, professors, journalists, politicians about what four books and four records they would take to a desert island, what in their solitude they would rely on for company. It was Robinson Crusoe-in-advance. Emotional seafaring on the airwaves.

She liked Comor’s voice speaking
to
her, unhurried, and then to his guests. One of his guests, she remembered, was a professor of French who chose Stendhal’s
Scarlet and Black
as one of his four books and talked about the very sad moment in his life when he discovered that Stendhal, who was short, fat, ugly, and too intelligent to be agreeable, died young, in his fifties, without having achieved his simple aim of being loved for himself. Then there was the Montreal poet Louis Dudek, who sounded like a farm boy and chose Joyce’s
Ulysses
, since he wanted a book he could labour on. There was J. Frank Willis, the voice that reported the 1936 Moose River mine disaster with three-minute broadcasts every half hour for sixty-nine hours, day and night, without sleep. His breathing was heavy the night she heard him with Henry Comor, his voice like tires on a gravel road leading to a summer lake. He chose George Gershwin, saying that the night Gershwin died, artists gathered at the Hollywood Bowl and played his music for seven hours straight.

Henry Comor’s voice changed, depending on his guest. Anyone with an English accent, and his own voice got more
posh. But she didn’t blame him, or any of them. She found it all too interesting. “It was wonderful company,” she said to Harry.

Harry didn’t seem to be paying attention. But he was.

“How did you come by that bruise?” He pointed to her throat, and her fingers went to the fading colour. “If you don’t mind my asking.”

Outside, a car door slammed. A town where you could hear every sound. She saw a piece of paper fly across the street and wondered how much snow would fall in the winter and how cold it would get and whether she would still have a job in radio by then.

What happened, she said finally, still staring out the window behind Harry, was a scary encounter on her way to Yellowknife. She was north of Edmonton, near the Alberta— Northwest Territories border, when she asked a nice-seeming farmer, thirty or so, not old, about a campground and he offered his lane as an overnight camping spot. In the middle of the night he came into her tiny trailer and she jerked awake, sitting up with a pounding heart. He put his finger to his lips and whispered that he liked long hair on a girl. Then he bent over and pushed his mouth hard against hers. She shoved him away and his voice turned mean.
What’s the matter? You don’t like men?
He must have used the side of his hand. Striking her across the windpipe so hard she choked. But then, amazingly, he left. She got herself dressed and peeled out of there, and when it began to get light she pulled over to the side of the road and dug out her nail scissors and cut off her long hair.

Gwen looked over at Harry’s concerned, assessing face and said, “I know. I know what you’re thinking.” He was
thinking—she thought—that she’d put herself in danger and was lucky to have escaped. That she was asking for trouble.

“What am I thinking, Gwen?”

“That I’ll never get work in a hair salon.”

He liked the joke. But that wasn’t what had been in his mind. Gwen waited.

“I think you’re intrepid,” he said.

She ducked her head to hide her pleasure. Her face was warm. “Harry?” Looking at her hands.

Gwen.

“That person you pretend you’re talking to when you’re on the air?” She looked up. “Who is it?”

Harry smiled. “My imaginary listener? He’s a man in his sixties who comes home tired from work and he goes down to the basement to his workbench and builds model boats. And while he’s doing that he listens with rapt attention to me.”

“So it’s not somebody you know?”

“Not somebody I’ve met,” he said.

She nodded slowly, and Harry asked, “Who do you feel comfortable talking to?”

You, she thought. “Nobody,” she said.

“My favourite person. Now give him a hat.”

She thought for a moment. “A fedora.”

“Fine. What else is he wearing?”

Into Gwen’s mind came a middle-aged man puttering around a kitchen. He wore a wedding band, but he lived alone. A widower. He cooked for himself. His radio sat on the kitchen table. He had it on whenever he ate—it was always on. Before he went to bed he cleaned up, doing the dishes, setting
up his coffee for the morning, sipping a final glass of Scotch. I could talk to someone like that, she thought.

In the quiet house in Ontario where Gwen grew up, her father used to sit at the head of the table and crack Brazil nuts so painstakingly they came out whole, while her bruised and fractured walnuts whizzed through the air. Nearby was Owen Sound, which gave her the notion that you could be stuck in a certain sound for the whole of your natural life.

Her mother’s throat music, for instance. Those purring sounds of affection meant to reassure Gwen’s dad. And her soft throat clearing whenever company came and awkward silences fell. It was what “not being able to think of anything to say at the moment” sounds like.

Gwen had a radio in her room, installed the summer she got poison ivy. 1961. In that little town of woods and rocks, trails and leafiness, it had been her fond habit when small to pull leaves off the mock orange and stuff them as money into her dead grandpa’s old tobacco pouch that closed with a zipper. Her homely, slight, small-bodied grandpa from Manchester, who had wanted to go to China as a missionary but ended up in Canada instead—a spiritual man, an odd duck. One day, out and about with the family dog, Gwen forgot to think—forgot to look out for the three glossy leaves, and besides, where she was they were everywhere. She pulled down her shorts to pee, and her bottom was tickled by the leaves she wasn’t paying attention to. Then, in an excess of affection for the dog, she
hugged him, this well-travelled connoisseur of every poison-ivy patch, and rubbed her face against his fur.

The itching began several hours later and had a visual equivalent. For dinner her mother served sausages, fat fingers with a grease-gagging flavour that brought tears to her eyes. Two halves of one misery. She shifted in her seat, her bottom crawling, but wasn’t allowed to rise until the sausages were gone. (One day, in her late twenties, she would meet someone—her future mother-in-law—who would say, If I knew my kids didn’t like something, I didn’t serve it. Gwen would look at her with the wonder most mortals reserve for sightings of God.)

From ankles up to and across her bottom, then up to her face and into her eyes, she was soon ablaze and oozing with rash, blisters, torment. Her mother had her lie naked on the bedsheet, where she was too far gone for books or even the ink-induced spasm of excitement that came with the arrival of the
London Free Press
and the ongoing story of Mary Perkins.

A solution of cool water and baking soda, everywhere but on her private parts, which also raged, since her fingers had wandered there too. Her mother wrapped her hands in strips of flannel and Gwen ran her swathed hands across her chest, and the gentle relief of that light scratch, followed by the renewed, Job-like escalation of itching, made her understand the word
torture
.

Then one day came the radio. Installed beside her bed, turned on. She escaped on the highways of the air. The Archers, John Drainie (reading a story she would never forget about a woman strangled by her long scarf when it caught in the wheel of her convertible), Max Ferguson as Rawhide, the
weather, the farm broadcast. Once, as part of the farm broadcast, there was a horse auction with all the sounds of buying and selling, while in the background a young girl sobbed. There were suffering people in the world besides herself, Gwen learned. There were people who were heartbroken.

Thinking back, it was a childhood of warts, wens, carbuncles, poison ivy, and trench mouth, this last affliction treated with gentian violet, her gums painted an astonishing violet-blue. Buttons were lost in the schoolyard. Shirts torn. All this was before television, though not technically. But her parents remained in the pre-television era, doing without one, eventually cancelling their subscription to the
London Free Press
. Living in silence, except for the radio.

The dusty pale pink of calamine lotion.

In her bedroom loose white curtains moved in the breeze. A sleeping-porch spacious with lack of anything but a white bed and bedside table and straight-backed chair and chest of drawers—and the movement of air through screened windows as gauzy curtains swelled inward. In another part of the house the telephone rang. But not here. Not in this outpost of quiet.

And over the radio one night came the story of John Hornby, and something happened that she had almost despaired of ever happening. From having been locked in (at the end of a chapter, the poison-ivy chapter), she entered somebody else’s life and saw it from beginning to end. A man who starved to death. A man whose mistakes caused the death by starvation of his two young companions. A blue-eyed, soft-voiced, lucid madman, who courted hardship and seemed absolutely fearless. Gwen liked him enormously and fell under the spell of the desolate North.