The Man Game (26 page)

Mrs. Alexander had recently plunged into a community project to ensure that the Erwagens were adequately provided for over the holidays. With the work she does to care for him, Mrs. Alexander told her husband, she's practically a nurse. There's not a single garland. It's as spare as the day they moved in. That poor girl. I hope she's coping. Oh, I feel awful for them both.

Invite them for dinner, said RH, to rile her.

Yes, well, she said to her fingernails, I must decide on a plan.

A voice upstairs upset the quiet.

Children, thought RH, are awful things. RH was especially disinterested in his sons, who'd arrived by boat and train from Cambridge with excellent grades and grandly self-conscious of their new opinions.

Mrs. Alexander hid from her boys in the smells and bluster of the season's kitchen servants, actual Whitewomen for a change, and RH locked himself in his study and smoked the pipe.

Through the window of his study he saw the boys in the yard. They took turns chopping wood, arguing as well as working. He couldn't hear the conversation, only the hawkish tone. They talked in House of Commons voices that scaled the threshold of wrath sooner than one ever should in good business. He found irresistible comedy in this attempt of theirs to unlock the mystery of adulthood. Pride and too much condescension in his smile made it feel like a grimace, and if he retracted the focus of eyes to his own image in the rain-dappled glass, he was, in a moment of high truth, pained to see his former self so unflatteringly re-enacted in the actions of his sons. Inasmuch as he loved them at all, he wanted to see them fail early. Such cocksure adolescence deserved to be shivered up the same as cordwood. In a furthering haze of narcotic aphasia, he watched his sons chop and argue. He wanted to go out and discipline them for using foul language, a bar of lava soap for you and you, but he couldn't raise himself to his feet. The pipe was effecting. His eyes slouched to the inkblot in front of him and he completely fell asleep. Three hours later he heard his wife scream. She screamed again.

He awoke just in time from his purple coma to see his wife bound into his study. He swung his chair around to face her. The look of disappointment on her face was typically protective, adoring, and hardly an endorsement of sobriety.

There is a
deer
in the dining room.

His wife got him up and they went together to take a look at the snow-daubed doe.

What's she doing in here? he asked.

How should I know?

Must've come in through the front door, said RH, the boys left it wide open while doing their chore, chopping wood to keep the house
warm
.

The table was nearly set. The flatware was in order. Most of the food was in place. From the smudge on the wine glass it was plain to see the deer had sniffed it over but luckily not broken it. Trying not to startle the creature, RH crossed the dining room and opened the bay windows. He had a plan. The deer p-clopped with nervous balletic steps while RH corralled it slowly but surely around the table, and at the count of three he and his wife charged from all angles and forced the valiant creature to jump out the window—but not before it ate the last of the Christmas pie.

Molly and Sammy celebrated Christmas with Toronto that year. It definitely affected
his
life for the better how at ease she was commanding the manservants to do the complicated and time-consuming chores of the household. Without her and the manservants she ruled, the home would be chaos. It was during the Christmas season when Sammy began to realize how selfless she was. Even when he
contemplated
trying to explain how to prepare a traditional Christmas meal to an Indian, a Jewess, and two Chinamen, he got anxious. The Erwagens were a traditional accounting family, where God existed nominally at best. The receiving and paying out of gifts was observed as a sacred transaction. His ancestors were Protestants from the good side of Ireland, and the ordeal of Christmas was not something Sammy was prepared to order Chinamen to reproduce for the sake of tradition.

Ooh, squirmed Molly, but Toronto and I would love very much to experience the Christmas a
your
youth, Chinook. For
his benefit, and my own, I want the perfect Christmas for us this year. Besides, it would be foolish not to include ourselves in this feeling a joy simply because we don't understand it.

Toronto looked hopeful. Sammy wasn't so sure. It seemed an absurd task to recreate Christmas in this hoary forest.

In the meantime, Mrs. Alexander was kind enough to make a very impressive laurel and mistletoe wreath for their front door in her spare time, which she brought over herself in the week before the 25th. When Molly invited her in, Mrs. Alexander was distraught to see her laurel was only the Erwagens' second Christmas decoration after the expensive paraffin candles Molly had on the mantel.

Oh my dear, she said to Molly and touched her face, you'll see how Vancouver's families rally around their
own
, you'll see.

Though not a surprise that his wife had never experienced Christmas, Sammy was bemused by how its conventions silenced her. When the mayor's wife appeared on their doorstep the following day with shortbread cookies, Sammy laughed to see his wife stammer for a word. She had no reply to the charity of Christmastime. The mayor's Mrs. was shocked to tears at Molly's speechless acceptance of the cookies and she quickly said: We're all behind you, Molly, and ran away.

It seemed to Sammy as though every reputable lady in the community came to the aid of the cripple's bride. Fearing and pitying the Erwagens, no ladylike soul was quite brave enough to offer seats at her table, but to compensate for this blind spot in their benevolence they united to help Molly prepare the perfect holiday feast of her own. By the third day Molly had accepted three puddings, three pans of scalloped potatoes, a honeyed ham, a bowl of mashed potatoes, a sack of freshly shelled peas delivered by a shy child wearing her father's boots, seven jars of cranberry sauce, a jar of pickles, and a bottle of Canadian rye whisky from Joe Fortes himself, who shook Molly's hand inside both of his and saluted her goodbye as he walked away with a tear in his eye, singing: Hallelujah, brother Jesus. Mrs. George Black promised a turkey with
stuffing on Christmas Day, and by the time dinner arrived, the three of them could hardly contain their laughter.

Under a starry Christmas night, frost on the windowsills, quiet streets, and empty beaches, two snakeheads aboard crossing ships raised a toast as they passed each other through the inlet, one boat empty, the other soon to be. That's money in the pocket for snakeheads everywhere.

Dr. Langis had lost everything in the Fire that summer, instruments to medical texts, worst of all his skeleton. Over the Christmas holidays he was asked to conduct an operation to remove a mastoid, and he still lacked the proper tools, so he went down to Tom Dunn's hardware shop and bought himself the most expensive chisels available. In the privacy of his kitchen he tested them on an oxtail he'd bought from Joe Fortes, and when he was satisfied that he could indeed chisel precise work he went ahead and successfully performed the surgery.

As was her annual tradition, Mrs. Alexander paid a visit to the poorer neighbourhoods of Vancouver during the week after Christmas. She often came heavy with alms, which she generously apportioned to those she met on the street corner and around the gin houses, coolies and navvies, charlatans and seafarers, all variety of modern reprobate, characters and dispositions and scents she did not—today—object to. It was not normally her custom to visit Dupont Street, for it required she come in direct contact with the poor degraded souls of the girls in the brothels. She could not even acknowledge that such an abomination existed a mile from her doorstep, or that the world around her was a savage, cruel, predatory vista. Such was the stubbornness of her civilized upbringing that she could not adapt easily to madness and anarchy.

But this year she did want to see the poor sad condition of the newly arrived Chinamen. Those who'd set up beach houses over the tide had demonstrated great pluck. She felt it
her duty to visit them, welcome them to Canada, and provide them with a little extra that her husband could not afford to add to each and every one of their personal fortunes.

Poor things, she said aloud, not gazing at all at the Dupont Street businesses, avoiding their sight and thinking only of the coolies across the street innumerably dozing inside their shantytown on this rare reprieve from the job. Somehow, though these pulchritudinous women beckoned for savage men, they beckoned for her, too, and Mrs. Alexander was likewise suddenly drawn by the sultry funk of their hearts away from the Chinamen to the door of Wood's.

The girls who smoked, sang, and cursed on the verandah could have been her daughters, her maids, her grandchildren, her sons' sweethearts, but they were not.

SEVEN

First, what did yesternight deliver?
“Another year has gone for ever.”
And what is this day's strong suggestion?
“The passing moment's all we rest on!”

–
ROBERT BURNS
, “
SKETCH
—
NEW YEAR'S DAY
, 1790”

A cord of wood whistled in the fireplace, then popped, dusting sparks against the blackened stones, then cracked in two pieces, exhaled a gush of fire, then dimmed. Sammy raised his eyes from the hearth and looked at her across the living room, then down at his body in its chair. It was the morning of duck eggs, sweet butter, and rye bread, New Year's Eve 1886.

We could say I bit my tongue? Sammy suggested to his wife without enthusiasm. We could say that I was unable to find a tie to match my shoes? The axle broke on my wheeled chair?

Chinooky, I'll despair if I miss the only official festivity this entire year.

I'll need a bath, he said.

Toronto shifted his feet under his chair. He was reading the Bible at the dining table beyond the cantilevered glass doors, opened to the heat of the fire.

Yes, Molly said, pressed her cigarette to the ashtray, stood and flapped out the wrinkles in her skirt with a happy sigh. I'll prepare the water.

Toronto brought the bucket to the well to pump the water for Sammy's bath. It was six minutes to eleven in the morning. The sun was at last upon the horizon, skating a dim curve around the south as it started the day. The chill in
the air was like an ice cube falling down your back. A deer nudged through the evergreens beyond the yard, raised her head to look at Toronto, then gently disappeared into forest shadows. The shadows were long, dark, and slow to diffuse against the muted grey landscape.

Once the bath was ready and he'd been lowered into the warm water, she pinned back the danglets of hair that fell in her face, hustled her skirts up, and kneeled on the oilclothed cedar floor beside the tub. She rested her arms on the porcelain rim and looked at her Sammy, all submerged and immobile.

I'm looking forward to seeing you in the new year, she said.

He stared—not out the window, but
at
the window. With the sun still dipped low, he saw the mysterious commas of fingerprints and the pale notation of dried raindrops on the glass, somehow related to his fascination with numbers.