Open Secrets (28 page)

Old Annie was staring off in the other direction.

She told me to get down. Get down, she said, and ask them if there is a Mr. George Herron that lives here and is he alive yet, or dead?

I did what I was told. And one of the men said, that’s right. He is. My father.

Well, I have brought somebody, I told them. I have brought Mrs. Annie Herron.

The man said, that so?

(A pause here due to a couple of fainting-fits and a trip to the hospital. Lots of tests to use up the taxpayers’ money. Now I’m back and have read this over, astounded at the rambling but too lazy to start again. I have not even got to Treece Herron, which is the part you are interested in, but hold on, I’m nearly there.)

These people were all dumbfounded about Old Annie, or so I gathered. They had not known where she was or what she was doing or if she was alive. But you mustn’t think they surged out and greeted her in any excited way. Just the one young man came out, very mannerly, and helped first her then me down from the car. He said to me that Old Annie was his grandfather’s sister-in-law. It was too bad we hadn’t come even a few months sooner, he said, because his grandfather had been quite well and his mind quite clear—he had even written a piece for the paper about his early days here—but then he had got sick. He had recovered but would never be himself again. He could not talk, except now and then a few words.

This mannerly young man was Treece Herron.

We must have arrived just after they finished their dinner. The woman of the house came out and asked him—Treece Herron—to ask us if we had eaten. You would think she or we did not speak English. They were all very shy—the women with their skinned-back hair, and men in dark-blue Sunday suits, and tongue-tied children. I hope you do not think I am making fun of them—it is just that I cannot understand for the life of me why it is necessary to be so shy.

We were taken to the dining-room which had an unused
smell—they must have had their dinner elsewhere—and were served a great deal of food of which I remember salted radishes and leaf lettuce and roast chicken and strawberries and cream. Dishes from the china cabinet, not their usual. Good old Indian Tree. They had sets of everything. Plushy living-room suite, walnut dining-room suite. It was going to take them a while, I thought, to get used to being prosperous.

Old Annie enjoyed the fuss of being waited on and ate a lot, picking up the chicken bones to work the last shred of meat off them. Children lurked around the doorways and the women talked in subdued, rather scandalized voices out in the kitchen. The young man, Treece Herron, had the grace to sit down with us and drink a cup of tea while we ate. He chatted readily enough about himself and told me he was a divinity student at Knox College. He said he liked living in Toronto. I got the feeling he wanted me to understand that divinity students were not all such sticks as I supposed or led such a stringent existence. He had been tobogganing in High Park, he had been picnicking at Hanlan’s Point, he had seen the giraffe in the Riverdale Zoo. As he talked, the children got a little bolder and started trickling into the room. I asked the usual idiocies … How old are you, what book are you in at school, do you like your teacher? He urged them to answer or answered for them and told me which were his brothers and sisters and which his cousins.

Old Annie said, “Are you all fond of each other, then?” which brought on funny looks.

The woman of the house came back and spoke to me again through the divinity student. She told him that Grandpa was up now and sitting on the front porch. She looked at the children and said, “What did you let all them in here for?”

Out we trooped to the front porch, where two straight-backed chairs were set up and an old man settled on one of them. He had a beautiful full white beard reaching down to
the bottom of his waistcoat. He did not seem interested in us. He had a long, pale, obedient old face.

Old Annie said, “Well, George,” as if this was about what she had expected. She sat on the other chair and said to one of the little girls, “Now bring me a cushion. Bring me a thin kind of cushion and put it at my back.”

I spent the afternoon giving rides in the Stanley Steamer. I knew enough about them now not to start in asking who wanted a ride, or bombarding them with questions, such as, were they interested in automobiles? I just went out and patted it here and there as if it was a horse, and I looked in the boiler. The divinity student came behind and read the name of the Steamer written on the side. “The Gentleman’s Speedster.” He asked was it my father’s.

Mine, I said. I explained how the water in the boiler was heated and how much steam-pressure the boiler could withstand. People always wondered about that—about explosions. The children were closer by that time and I suddenly remarked that the boiler was nearly empty. I asked if there was any way I could get some water.

Great scurry to get pails and man the pump! I went and asked the men on the veranda if that was all right, and thanked them when they told me, help yourself. Once the boiler was filled, it was natural for me to ask if they would like me to get the steam up, and a spokesman said, it wouldn’t hurt. Nobody was impatient during the wait. The men stared at the boiler, concentrating. This was certainly not the first car they had seen but probably the first steam car.

I offered the men a ride first, as it was proper to. They watched skeptically while I fiddled with all the knobs and levers to get my lady going. Thirteen different things to push or pull! We bumped down the lane at five, then ten miles an
hour. I knew they suffered somewhat, being driven by a woman, but the novelty of the experience held them. Next I got a load of children, hoisted in by the divinity student telling them to sit still and hold on and not be scared and not fall out. I put up the speed a little, knowing now the ruts and puddle-holes, and their hoots of fear and triumph could not be held back.

I have left out something about how I was feeling but will leave it out no longer, due to the effects of a martini I am drinking now, my late-afternoon pleasure. I had troubles then I have not yet admitted to you because they were love-troubles. But when I had set out that day with Old Annie, I had determined to enjoy myself as much as I could. It seemed it would be an insult to the Stanley Steamer not to. All my life I found this a good rule to follow—to get as much pleasure as you could out of things even when you weren’t likely to be happy.

I told one of the boys to run around to the front veranda and ask if his grandfather would care for a ride. He came back and said, “They’ve both gone to sleep.”

I had to get the boiler filled up before we started back, and while this was being done, Treece Herron came and stood close to me.

“You have given us all a day to remember,” he said.

I wasn’t above flirting with him. I actually had a long career as a flirt ahead of me. It’s quite a natural behavior, once the loss of love makes you give up your ideas of marriage.

I said he would forget all about it, once he got back to his friends in Toronto. He said no indeed, he would never forget, and he asked if he could write to me. I said nobody could stop him.

On the way home I thought about this exchange and how ridiculous it would be if he should get a serious crush on me. A divinity student. I had no idea then of course that he would be getting out of Divinity and into Politics.

“Too bad old Mr. Herron wasn’t able to talk to you,” I said to Old Annie.

She said, “Well, I could talk to him.”

Actually, Treece Herron did write to me, but he must have had a few misgivings as well because he enclosed some pamphlets about Mission Schools. Something about raising money for Mission Schools. That put me off and I didn’t write back. (Years later I would joke that I could have married him if I’d played my cards right.)

I asked Old Annie if Mr. Herron could understand her when she talked to him, and she said, “Enough.” I asked if she was glad about seeing him again and she said yes. “And glad for him to get to see me,” she said, not without some gloating that probably referred to her dress and the vehicle.

So we just puffed along in the Steamer under the high arching trees that lined the roads in those days. From miles away the lake could be seen—just glimpses of it, shots of light, held wide apart in the trees and hills so that Old Annie asked me if it could possibly be the same lake, all the same one that Walley was on?

There were lots of old people going around then with ideas in their heads that didn’t add up—though I suppose Old Annie had more than most. I recall her telling me another time that a girl in the Home had a baby out of a big boil that burst on her stomach, and it was the size of a rat and had no life in it, but they put it in the oven and it puffed up to the right size and baked to a good color and started to kick its legs. (Ask an old woman to reminisce and you get the whole ragbag, is what you must be thinking by now.)

I told her that wasn’t possible, it must have been a dream.

“Maybe so,” she said, agreeing with me for once. “I did used to have the terriblest dreams.”

On the night of Eunie Morgan’s disappearance, Rhea was sitting in the bootlegger’s house at Carstairs—Monk’s—a bare, narrow wooden house, soiled halfway up the walls by the periodic flooding of the river. Billy Doud had brought her. He was playing cards at one end of the big table and a conversation was going on at the other end. Rhea was seated in a rocking chair, over in a corner by the coal-oil stove, out of the way.

“A call of nature, then, let’s say a call of nature,” a man was saying, who had formerly said something about a crap. Another man had told him to watch his language. Nobody looked at Rhea, but she knew she was the reason.

“Out on the rocks to answer a call of nature. And he was thinking he’d like a piece of something, to come in handy. Though he didn’t naturally expect to find it there. And what
does he see? Sees this stuff laying around. Sheets of it, laying around. If that isn’t the very thing! Laying all over, in sheets. So he picks it up and stuffs it in his pockets and thinks, Plenty for the next time. Doesn’t think any more about it. Back to the camp.”

“He was in the Army?” said a man Rhea knew—the man who shovelled the snow off the school sidewalks, through the winter.

“What made you think that? I never said that!”

“You said camp. Army camp,” said the snow-shoveller. His name was Dint Mason.

“I never said Army camp. I’m talking about lumber camp. Away up north in the Province of Quebec. What would an Army camp be doing up there?”

“I thought you said Army camp.”

“So somebody sees what he’s got. What’s that there? Well, he says, I don’t know. Where’d you pick it up? It was just laying around. Well, what do you think it is? Well, I don’t know.”

“Sounds a lot like asbestos,” said another man Rhea knew by sight, a former teacher, who now sold pots and pans for waterless cookery. He was a diabetic, and his condition was supposed to be so severe that he always had a drop of pure sugar, crystallized, at the end of his penis.

“Asbestos,” said the man who was telling the story, not pleased. “And on the spot they developed the biggest asbestos mine in the entire world. And from that mine came a fortune!”

Dint Mason spoke up again. “Not for the fellow that found it, I bet you it wasn’t. It never is. It never is a fortune for the fellows that found it.”

“It is sometimes,” said the man telling the story.

“Never is,” Dint said.

“Some have found gold and got the good of it,” the man
telling the story insisted. “Plenty have! They’ve found gold and they’ve got to be millionaires. Billionaires. Sir Harry Oakes, for instance. He found it. He got to be a millionaire!”

“He got himself killed,” said a man who had not taken any part in the conversation till now. Dint Mason began to laugh and several others began to laugh, and the pots-and-pans man said, “Millionaires? Billionaires? What is it comes after billionaires?”

“Got himself killed, so that’s how he got the good of it!” Dint Mason cried at the highest pitch of the laughter. The man who had told the story brought his flat hands down and shook the table.

“I never said he didn’t! I never said he didn’t get killed! We aren’t talking here about whether he got killed! I said he found it, he got the good of it, he got to be a millionaire!”

Everybody had grabbed their bottles and glasses, to keep them from toppling. Even the men playing cards had stopped to laugh. Billy had his back to Rhea, his wide shoulders gleaming in a white shirt. His friend Wayne was standing at the other side of the table, watching the game. Wayne was the United Church minister’s son, from Bondi, a village not far from Carstairs. He had been at college with Billy, he was going to be a journalist—he already had a job, on a newspaper in Calgary. As the conversation about asbestos proceeded, he had looked up and caught Rhea’s eye, and from then on he watched her, with a slight, tight, persistent smile. This was not the first time Wayne had caught Rhea’s eye, but usually he didn’t smile. He would look at her and look away, sometimes when Billy was talking.

Mr. Monk pulled himself to his feet. Some illness or accident had crippled him—he walked with a stick, bent forward nearly at a right angle, from the waist. Sitting down, he looked almost normal. Standing up, he was tilted across the table, into the middle of the laughter.

The man who had told the story got up at the same time and, perhaps without meaning to, knocked his glass to the floor. It smashed, and the men began to shout, “Pay up! Pay up!”

“Pay next time,” said Mr. Monk, in a voice to settle everybody down—a large and genial voice for a man so wracked and dwindled.

“There’s not so many brains in this room as there is arseholes!” shouted the man who had told the story, treading on glass, kicking it aside, trotting past Rhea’s chair towards the back door. His hands were clenching and unclenching and his eyes were full of tears.

Mrs. Monk brought the broom.

Ordinarily, Rhea wouldn’t have been inside this house at all. She would have been sitting outside with Lucille, who was Wayne’s girl, in either Wayne’s car or Billy’s. Billy and Wayne would go in for one drink, promising to be out in half an hour. (This promise was not to be taken seriously.) But on this night—it was early in August—Lucille was at home sick, Billy and Rhea had gone to the dance in Walley by themselves and afterward they hadn’t parked, they had driven directly across country to Monk’s. Monk’s was on the edge of Carstairs, where Billy and Rhea lived. Billy lived in town, Rhea lived on the chicken farm just up over the bridge from this row of houses along the river.