Late Nights on Air (7 page)

Dido smiled at her. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“It’s all right.”

“I don’t like sleeping alone,” she admitted. “I fall asleep, but then I have bad dreams.” She sipped her coffee and said slowly, “I woke up from a dream about Nijmegen and I had a real feeling of homesickness.”

“I don’t mind. It’s like having a sister.”

“I knew you wouldn’t mind.”

Dido intended a compliment and Eleanor took it as such, benign flattery. But it wasn’t really like having a sister, she thought. It wasn’t quite like anything she’d experienced before.

She remembers as a girl climbing into an apple tree with a cushion and a copy of Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury of Poems
, and staying there till tea time. Her pretty mother had so wanted a pretty daughter, but Eleanor had her father’s unfortunate chin and needed thick glasses before she was eight. She was fifteen when they moved to Canada, propelled by the legendary moment in her father’s life when he stumbled into a news theatre on Piccadilly, escaping one of London’s killer fogs, and saw
The Romance of Transportation
—a jazzy, funny, animated film about a northern country so clean and simple and fresh and refreshing that he asked himself what they were waiting for. It was 1954.

Her father had been an impetuous man, a poetry-loving physician as beguiled by bad verse as by good. McIntyre’s
deathless ode to the Ingersoll cheese never failed to cheer him up.
We have seen thee queen of cheese / Lying quietly at your ease, / Gently fanned by evening breeze, / Thy fair form no flies dare seize
. He’d read aloud to her. Walter de la Mare, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Shakespeare. The trouble with Othello, he told her, was that he had no sense of humour, poor wretch. Even Macbeth had a sense of humour.

Her father bought a house near the Ottawa River, then a canoe and an old Hillman, following in the strokes of his beloved explorers in one, retracing the steps of early settlers in the other, and instilling in his reluctant wife and eager daughter a sense of Canada as a northern country. That’s what made it special. He had a library of books about the Far North and an old dream of seeing it with his own eyes. Eleanor knew all the names: Franklin, Ross, Peary, Cook, Rasmussen, Stefansson, Samuel Hearne, David Thompson, John Hornby.

On their local travels it was usually just the two of them, since the motion of the car made her mother sick. Eleanor was navigator, co-pilot, chronicler, copying into a notebook words and dates on plaques, such as,
AUGUST
28, 1955.
In memory of the services, self-devotion and tragic death of Charles Lennox, Fourth Duke of Richmond, a gallant soldier and governor in chief of Canada, who died here, 28th August, 1819
.

Self-devotion? He was devoted to himself? That couldn’t be good, she remembers saying, and her father told her she was quick to pick that up. But no, devotion of self to duty.

Spreading the picnic rug near the stone cairn, setting out the Thermos of tea and the bread and butter and hard-boiled eggs, he’d then told her the sad and remarkable story of the fourth Duke of Richmond, who went mad after he was bitten
by a pet fox. Nothing happened to him for a little while, but there came a night when he couldn’t swallow his mulled wine and a morning when the sight of water in his shaving basin sent him into a convulsion. At the time, he was travelling by bush trail from Perth back to Richmond, and he kept travelling, careful to avert his eyes from streams or any running water, hydrophobia being a classic symptom of what he was suffering from, namely rabies. His final hours were eked out on Chapman’s farm, close to this very spot. Not in the cabin, which overlooked the unsettling waters of the Jock River, but in a dimly lit barn, where he lay on a pile of corn shucks suffering excruciating pain and delirium. At dusk, when the river was hidden from view, they moved him into the cabin and he died soon after, poor wretch.

Wretch
was one of Ring Lardner’s favourite words, her father informed her. Mr. Funk, the poet and dictionary publisher, had compiled a list of the ten most beautiful words in the English language, namely: mist, hush, luminous, murmuring, dawn, chimes, lullaby, melody, tranquil, and golden; and the American humorist had responded with a list of his own: gangrene, flit, scram, mange, wretch, smoot with a small “s,” guzzle, McNaboe, blute, crene. A blute being a smoker who doesn’t inhale, and a crene a man who inhales but doesn’t smoke.

“Those aren’t real words,” she’d said, “blute and crene.”

Her father sucked happily on his pipe.

“
Your
favourite word is knucklehead,” she said.

“No. My favourite word is daughter.”

“Don’t be a blute,” she said.

They were thick as thieves.

One December day, close to Christmas, her father invited her to come with him into the country to see a patient, which is how they found themselves driving down a lane at the end of which stood something of a miracle. A tall maple tree in full leaf. Closer, and the tree appeared to be hung with clumps of sod. Closer still, and Eleanor asked what they were. They were partridges, sixteen in number. Sun-seekers, her father said, and he stopped the car. The Burnt Lands of Almonte were behind them, an area of flat, scrubby heath, a natural home for partridges, pheasants, quail. It was a mild December with what the weatherman on the radio called snow-licking temperatures. As they watched, the sun came out and the tree shone with its unusual fruit. Like something out of antiquity, her father said.

There was another time she remembered as vividly. They’d gone one Sunday afternoon for a walk in Rockcliffe Park above the Ottawa River, when suddenly the wind rose and her father, putting his hand on her shoulder, told her to listen. Do you hear the different sounds in different trees? They stood entranced. The wind whispered through the pines and roared through the elms, mournful then tumultuous, reminding him of a line from the past, and he quoted it:
like a lost wave seeking a forgotten shore
. His fine Dew memory often retrieved quotations without identifying them. There would be plenty of time for that. They had a lifetime of poetry to look forward to.

But less than a year later, on the evening of October 22, 1957, her father closed a book halfway through. He’d been reading to her as part of his campaign to improve his boyhood French “at your expense,” he’d say, since she was near the end
of high school by this time and her French was better than his.
La fille qui était laide
. A picture book about a girl so ugly no one in her village would have anything to do with her, and so she ran away to the forest, where, day after day, one page at a time, the fresh air brightened her eyes, the sun bronzed her skin, the wind lifted and ruffled her hair, and she became beautiful.

But her father closed the book. He wasn’t feeling well. He needed to lie down.

“Sorry. Tomorrow.”

He went upstairs to bed and at nine o’clock he died.

There was a day, a few weeks after the funeral, when she put her grief to one side and tried to do something for her mother. She took her for an outing, a change of scene. They went to the National Gallery in the east wing of the Victoria Museum at the end of Metcalfe Street and stood in front of Rembrandt at his less-than-best. The doughy face of Esther, her skin so obviously the product of a cold, northern climate—its range of splotchy colour—and the thin, awful hair. It could be a portrait of you, thought Eleanor, turning to look at the parent she’d been left with.

She had been her father’s daughter, and she consoled herself by spending long hours at his L-shaped desk in a corner of his second-floor study, surrounded by volume after volume about the North. The faded spines of blue, green, red, and gold were like an ancient springtime that took her back to the earliest scenes of affection. She would always be living her life backwards, she realized, trying to regain something perfect that she’d lost.

Her mother, frantic about money, sold the library a year later to Gladys Pyke, owner of Ye Olde Book Shoppe on
Gilmour Street. They moved to the small town of Almonte, where everything was cheaper, including their rented bungalow on the highway. Among the books her mother packed up and sold were a Japanese marine book tied together with shoelaces that showed coastlines and islands and clouds and rain, and a book about Japanese artists who would go out into the weather and observe it, absorbing it in every level of their being, before coming back inside to paint.
La fille qui était laide
Eleanor never found. It must have come from the library, her mother said. It must have been returned. But no librarian then or since had ever heard of the tale.

Finally, Eleanor went north herself, and now in the summer of 1975, a variation of the story was about to unfold in front of her eyes.

ON THE SHORTEST NIGHT OF THE YEAR
, a golden evening without end, Dido climbed the wooden steps to Pilot’s Monument on top of the great Rock that formed the heart of old Yellowknife. In the Netherlands the light was long and gradual too, but more meadowy, more watery, or else hazier, depending on where you were. In her part of the Netherlands, the rolling and agricultural southeast, winds from the west brought a marvellous, sea-swept clarity, while from the east came all the dust of landlocked Europe. Here, it was subarctic desert, virtually unpopulated, and the light was uniformly clear.

On the road below, a small man in a black beret was bending over his tripod just as her father used to bend over his tape recorder. Her father’s voice had become the wallpaper inside her skull, he’d made a home for himself there as improvised and unexpected as these little houses on the side of the Rock—houses with histories of instability, of changing from gambling den to barbershop to sheet metal shop to private home, and of being moved from one part of town to another since they had no foundations. All the little and large efforts of settlement intrigued her. Down the shore from the old cemetery on Back Bay there used to be market gardens. Some of the
log buildings remained; it wasn’t impossible, with greenhouses, to produce melons and tomatoes in Yellowknife. We Dutch would have stopped at nothing, she thought, we would have turned this place into a northern garden. And that’s what pained her most about her Canadian father-in-law, how easily he’d given up on her. She remembered one of her father’s questions to “London Calling.” “What did you mean by the phrase ‘a month of Wednesdays’?” And the answer came over the air: “The expression is ‘a month of Sundays,’ but in the particular context ‘a month of Wednesdays’ made sense.” Her father-in-law wasn’t going to come after her, not in a month of Sundays, and not in a month of Wednesdays, either.

The man in the beret was Ralph Cody, she realized. She’d seen him around the station when he came in to do his book reviews. He folded his tripod and moved along Ingraham Drive, as it was fancifully called, since the narrow little roads on and around the Rock were more cow path than grand driveway. She’d read that the Ingraham of Ingraham Drive had been an early settler and hotel-builder who lost both feet and most of his fingers in a terrible boat accident on Great Bear Lake: fire then frostbite then amputation. All of these pioneer families were colourful, storied, and a diversion, Dido firmly believed, from the real story of the First Peoples, displaced and impoverished and now having their audience with Judge Berger, who wouldn’t be radical enough in his recommendations. That went without saying.

Dido turned 360 degrees to take in the west, north, east, south of Back Bay, Giant Mine, Latham Island, Yellowknife Bay, Willow Flats, New Town, Peace River Flats. Then she made her way back down the flight of wooden steps to
Ingraham Drive and took a side road to another road that led past float plane bases and around to the government dock on Yellowknife Bay. Here there were small warehouses and from one of them came the sound of gentle hammering. She poked her head in the open door, surprised to see Eddy sitting at a workbench. He didn’t look up and she could have stepped away unseen.

She went in.

He was working on a big old radio set, adapting it to his own purposes, he said when she asked. What purposes? His smile came suddenly, transforming his small eyes. Their depths came alive with an amused, seductive light that went right through her. He told her he knew about electronics from the U.S. army, he’d been in the communications corps. What purposes? she asked again, but again he didn’t answer. So she confessed she’d grown up on war stories, or stories of liberation, to be accurate; her father adored both England and Canada.

Eddy had rented one corner of this warehouse, the rest of the space was occupied by rolled-up carpets. He didn’t have the room in his apartment or the freedom at the station to spread out, and he indicated the array of tools and parts on the long table beside him.

“I wish I knew even half as much as you do,” she said, conferring praise, singling him out as special. “Where are your people from?” she asked, and spoke his last name.
Fitzgerald
.

“Ireland originally,” he told her. “We don’t adore England.”