No one dream was any easier to bear than another.
He shifted his eyes from the window to the clock. A bit past one o’clock. Not so very late.
Monkman climbed out of bed, pulled on a pair of socks, padded downstairs in his underwear. He could not help himself. He needed the sound of another voice to break the loneliness of the ice. Before he had even prepared his excuse for calling, he had dialled Stutz’s number and the phone was ringing. It rang nine times and then Stutz answered.
“Yes, Alec?” Stutz knew who would be the only person phoning at that hour.
Monkman cast desperately around in his mind, scrambling for a plausible reason for disturbing him.
“Yes, Alec?” repeated Stutz patiently.
Monkman seized upon the first thing which offered itself. “You know Vera and her boy are coming tomorrow. Can you pick them up?”
“Is that the bus?”
“Yes, on the STC.”
“Morning bus or afternoon bus?”
“Just a minute, I’ll check.” The old man squinted at the calendar tacked to the wall beside the telephone. He read what he had scrawled over the date, July 2. “Afternoon bus. One o’clock.”
“One o’clock it is then,” said Stutz.
There was no exasperation or resentment in Stutz’s voice that Alec could detect, and for that he was grateful. He cleared his throat and, embarrassed, tried to explain. “I just wanted to clear that up. My memory isn’t what it used to be and I kept thinking I’d forget. I didn’t want them standing waiting with their luggage. So I just wanted to clear that up. Wouldn’t sleep otherwise. Seems I can’t sleep with things on my mind anymore. Must be a symptom of old age.” He laughed in such a way as to alert Stutz that his reference to old age was not to be taken seriously, was a joke.
“What is it, Alec?” asked Stutz in his calm, deliberate voice. “Is your arthritis worse again? Is that what keeps you from sleeping?”
Monkman glanced at his gnarled hand clutching the receiver. Looking at it made him aware of the pain. “I suppose,” he said. “Yes, that could be it.”
That settled, Alec Monkman hung up the receiver and considered Vera’s return. Thought of how so long ago she walked out on him without so much as a by your leave. Walked out on him, a widower, and her younger brother Earl, leaving the boy without benefit of a woman in the house. All the letters she wrote during the war (all of them addressed to Earl) could not make up for that. And then from 1945 until late 1946 even they stopped coming, didn’t start again until she sent her wedding announcement, this time addressed to both of them, although now there was only one of them still at home to read how she had married her Jew down east. It was like Vera to make a big production mentioning that. As if he cared she married a Jew.
So now the silence between them had been broken. Sort of. Twelve years of hit and miss Christmas cards, the occasional photograph of her and the kid. And always tagged on to the end of the scanty, bloodless news the same question, the reason she wrote at alclass="underline" Do you have Earl’s address?
And always he wrote back: No, I believe he’s moved again. Kind of a drifter, your brother.
He thinks of her as she was when she left at nineteen. Passionate and headstrong. He can’t deny the beauty of these qualities. Her mother had them too.
His Vera with a child of her own. He can scarcely credit it. How old is the boy now? Eleven? Twelve? Daniel is his name. Daniel Miller.
It’s typical of Vera to claim that it’s only because of the boy she wants to come home. “It is because of Daniel that I ask you to help us. I am afraid the city means trouble for him,” she had written. The only letter – real letter – he can recall receiving from her in all those years. Signed Vera Miller, which struck him as pretty stiff stuff served up to you by your own daughter.
He had not hesitated to say, Yes, come. After one of his dreams, company in the house would be welcome. He could not go on as he had been these past few months, telephoning to Stutz all hours of the night.
Why now, at the age of seventy-three, should he take to drowning in his bed?
2
On the last part of Daniel’s and Vera’s journey, the leg which carried them from Regina to Connaught on a little-used local line, the bus was nearly deserted. There were only four other passengers: an old man with a barricade of soiled shopping bags behind which he lurked; two teenage girls, one fat, one thin, who took turns admiring their reflections in a compact mirror as they practised french-inhaling and blowing smoke rings; and a proper-looking young man in a white shirt and dark blue tie who sported a crew cut.
Vacant seats provided Daniel with an opportunity to escape his mother for the first time in two days and the boy had crossed the aisle to stretch himself out on two of them and nap. Vera remained where he had abandoned her by the window, holding herself absolutely erect, an imperious upward tilt to her chin. In spite of how awful she had felt for the past two and a half days, Vera preserved her aloof posture because she had a theory that people who kept their spines straight didn’t get talked at and bothered on buses.
Vera Miller was a tall woman who had never once despaired over her height. Even though she was five feet eleven inches she was not afraid to wear high heels. She took secret satisfaction that her hands were large and powerful-looking. She never wore jewellery and although she was thirty-six and her thick brown hair was showing grey she refused to consider dyeing it. She had good teeth and a bad nose, one with a conspicuous bump on the bridge because she had swung a door open on it when she was six and broken it. Her eyes were a biting, restless blue.
My God, she thought, a fifty-six hour ride from Ontario to Saskatchewan on a Greyhound coach. No sooner the bus pulls out of the depot than my sick headache starts and carries on nonstop two and a half days. Of course, I can’t say whether it’s the bus keeps my head thumping or the sight of Daniel over there, what he’s managed to turn himself into the last ten months. If his father was alive what would he make of all that ridiculous hair? Knowing Stanley, probably just laugh. Duck’s ass – there’s truth in the name. At least Daniel knows what I think. I didn’t spare him. “That’s no hair for a twelve year old,” I told him. “It makes you look like a pimp angling for a promotion.” You try, or say anything to keep them decent. I thought maybe threatening to make him wash the grease out of his hair every night before he went to bed, telling him I wouldn’t have my pillowslips ruined, might persuade him to give it up. But he’s his mother’s son. Stubborn. Chalk that one up to him.
Daniel, Daniel, after all those years holding out, you make me beg for help. The pickle you got yourself into, behaving like that. I swore I’d never do it. I swore I’d never go back to Connaught. I swore I’d never ask the old man for a nickel or a blessing. There’s not many people keep a promise they made at nineteen as long as I did. And I’d still be keeping it if you hadn’t gone off the rails on me.
I’m not like some people; I’m not good at swallowing my pride. It sticks in my throat. Funny how some people have no notion of pride. Pooch Gardiner, poor old silly bitch, certainly doesn’t. When I let it slip Dad had got himself comfortable in his later years she couldn’t feature how I hadn’t got my snout in the trough. “Fool’s pride,” Pooch called it. But then Pooch isn’t one to look too closely where a dollar comes from. “If your old man has a little money,” she said, “why shouldn’t he help? You’re a widow, aren’t you? And Daniel’s his grandson, isn’t he?”
Which is to miss the point. Asking him for anything is to admit failure, to admit I couldn’t make it on my own. But I did make it on my own, for seventeen years. Nobody can take that away from Vera Miller. I buried a husband with a seven-month-old baby in my arms and I supported and raised that baby on my own. Until now.