View From a Kite Read online

  The relationship fell apart and Chopin settled into his last apartment, in Paris, to die. His doctors—he kept changing them, hoping to find a good one, I suppose—made house calls every day and prescribed herbal infusions, lichen concoctions, and Pyrenees water.

  He got worse and worse, choking, coughing, gasping, bleeding. Most of the time he was conscious and in great pain. At one point, he asked that Mozart’s Requiem be played at his funeral. Later, unable to speak, he wrote requesting that his body be opened after his death. He was afraid of being buried alive. It took him four days of final agony to die, and as news spread throughout the city that he was on his way out, a crowd of the terminally nosy began barging in and out of his apartment for a look. Chopin, after all, was the Great Romantic, Tragically Dying, and anyone who was anyone wanted to be seen swooning in grief at his deathbed. Would-be artists sketched the Fateful Scene. A photographer, who needed more light for his Death of Chopin, tried to persuade everyone to help drag the deathbed over to the window. Finally, the doctor of the moment threw everybody out.

  Chopin died early in the morning, his face black with suffocation.

  I have been in such a filthy mood after reading about Chopin. I’m going to have to give up this research. It’s morbid. Nobody dies of tuberculosis anymore, at least not here in this country. I’d rather have a scar than die like that, but I’d rather not have a scar. Actually, I’d rather not have tuberculosis.

  Denise has begun asking idle questions about my parents. I think she’s fishing for information to feed Miz-etc. in exchange for favours. I think she’s selling me out. I told her so and she denied it and now we are hardly speaking. She’s begun hanging out with one of the men from Ward D, instead. He’s about thirty, and married, but she says it doesn’t mean anything, they’re just having fun and anyway she’s not sleeping with him. She’s an idiot.

  I’m still waiting to hear my test results. Time drags by. Evvie has a cold and sniffs constantly so I can’t stand to stay in my room without wanting to pitch things at her. Elaine is in full-bore wedding-plan mode. At mealtimes our table is covered with two years’ worth of Brides Magazine, and Your Wedding, and Modern Bride, and our opinion is solicited—but not taken—on every tuck, flounce, tint, lighting arrangement, engraving style, shape of bouquet, choice of music, everything. Should she throw her garter, or not? She’d like to keep it for a memento, but there’s tradition to consider. I tell her to buy two, throw one, keep one. You’re a baby genius, she crows, patting me on the head. She can’t settle on a colour scheme, that’s her biggest problem. Maroon and black, I say, and she revises her opinion of my intelligence. My biggest fear is that she’ll ask me to be a bridesmaid. She wants dozens of them, but financial considerations are raining on her would-be parade. We don’t have the final number, yet. I’ve hinted broadly that I’ll probably be gone by then and am not to be counted on. She’s going to stick them in lavender, or spearmint green, or sunny peach. I’m lobbying heavily for her to make Evvie a bridesmaid.

  “It would mean so much to her, she admires you so much,” I say, and Elaine crashes her bangles and allows she’ll consider it. The thing is, Evvie got married in a blue-and-white polka-dot polished cotton dress, her best dress at the time. She is dying to wear a lavender chiffon monstrosity with a matching lavender chiffon cartwheel on her head and carry a mess of dyed lavender shasta daisies, pink rosebuds, and white baby’s breath.

  CHAPTER 31

  Mrs. Oikle traps me in the sunroom, skeins of yarn holding me prisoner while she rolls off balls of wool for her next knitting project. She’s got a carton of skeins: tweedy brown yarn flecked with rust, red, and black. She’s making a cardigan sweater for Junior, her youngest child and only son. Junior is in Dorchester Prison. He finds it chilly. It’s his fourth time there. Junior robs gas stations: four robberies, four jail sentences.

  He’ll be out in seven years to try for number five. He’s spectacularly incompetent. Last time, he dropped his wallet full of ID by the pumps and didn’t notice.

  Mrs. Oikle shakes her head, limp grey curls nodding half-heartedly. She says, “I don’t know what happened to Junior. I pray and pray and pray. For all the good it does.”

  I wonder if she means she prays he’ll reform or she prays he’ll stop getting caught?

  “I could never give him the things he wanted. His father ran off with the receptionist at the Fair Isle Hotel and left me with three little girls, and Junior in the oven. When he was a little boy at school the other kids always had nicer things, painted wooden pencil boxes from Boston and money for candy every day. If he took any of it, they beat him up. They were always so mean to him.”

  I think I’m starting to see the problem with Junior. She hands me another skein. I shake my hands out, then oval it around my outstretched wrists.

  “He’s had such a hard life. He can’t keep a girlfriend—of course they all want a fellow with a regular job. You can’t really blame them.”

  Well, yeah, I think, and maybe they prefer somebody who’s available to take them out to the movies once in a while, somebody not prone to disappearing into correctional institutions for years at a stretch.

  “Poor boy,” she sighs.

  I’ve seen a picture of Junior. He’s closing in on forty, paunchy and balding. Spent more years of his life in jail than out. They’re still being mean to him for taking other people’s stuff.

  “It’s all my fault,” she says. “I married the wrong man. If I’d married Wilbur DeWolfe none of this would have happened. Junior needed a good male role model and what did he get? A liquor salesman with his brain in his pants no one’s seen for over thirty years. He left that hotel floozy for a stripper from Saskatoon. I never got a nickel off him. Wilbur DeWolfe now, he was a good man.”

  Christine, my new best friend since Denise and I are on the outs, comes to the doorway of the sunroom and beckons me out into the hall. She’s got something good, chocolates or cigarettes or a refill of gin for the flat silver bottle she keeps in her housecoat pocket. I wave her off; Mrs. Oikle’s on a roll.

  “He had a pig farm. Well, it didn’t smell too pretty, but money don’t stink and he had plenty of money. Pretty white house with climbing roses on the porch, and his Mama in the back bedroom too senile to interfere if you want to rip up the linoleum to put in new cushion floor. Wilbur was fifteen years older than me, big slow hands and lots of dark curly hair. They say you get used to the smell, but I was young and didn’t think I could. Big bank of purple and white lilacs between the house and the barn, but how much of the year do they bloom? Got down on his knees on those shiny parlour boards and begged me to marry him, said he’d already ruined me so I’d have to. I didn’t feel ruined, I felt like I finally knew what all the fuss was about and I was pretty sure I wanted to try it with Junior’s father instead of Wilbur. I did, too, behind every tree and bush in Cumberland county, and then got married in a hurry on my eighteenth birthday. Five years later he was gone. I should have married Wilbur and learned to live with the smell and his big slow ways, but by then he’d been caught by the MacLeans’ youngest. She couldn’t talk right, but she had big bosoms. Down to her knees, now. Junior would be a respectable farmer instead of—well, he hasn’t had much of a chance. That’s all for now, dear.”

  She dismisses me with a peppermint, picks up her needles and begins casting on stitches.

  “Christine,” I ask, “is it this place or is it just me?”

  “What, honey?”

  “People tell me stuff. They ramble on like you wouldn’t believe. I’m not complaining, but I don’t get it.”

  “It’s this place. Their minds go numb and nobody else wants to listen to them. After a while, they get desperate for the sound of their own voice. Got to go over their lives out loud, make sure they really happened. You sit there all quiet, innocent face, big ears, you suck it in.”

  “Naw,” says Jeannie, my other new best friend, who’s liberated orange juice from the kitchen to mix with the gin. “It�
�s because of her folks. People drag up all the bad, weird stuff in their own lives and tell it to Gwen so she won’t think she’s the only one ever had shit happen. They feel sorry for you kid, so they spill their guts. What’d you learn from old Mrs. Oikle?”

  “Hold your nose and marry a man with big slow hands, a senile mother, and lots of money.”

  “Amen!” They hoot and cackle. “Sounds real good to me!”

  Christine and Jeannie don’t have conversations, they just exchange, invent, and embroider gossip. I pretend to be shocked, because the more I’m shocked, the more pleased they are and the more they try to outdo each other. Actually, it’s pretty good stuff—if you want to be a writer, I mean. There seems to be a lot of fooling around going on in this place, according to Christine and Jeannie.

  “What about the saltpetre?” I ask.

  “Grass don’t believe in it,” says Jeannie. “She believes in the Moral Power of Rules, Regulations, and the Exempl’ry Conduct of the Staff.”

  Christine has just finished telling me how one of the male orderlies is simultaneously romancing a kitchen worker, a nurse’s aid, and one of the patients in Room 12 down the hall.

  “Why,” I want to know, “is there so much of this stuff going on?”

  Christine rolls her eyes.

  “You got about two hundred patients in here, half of them well enough to be wandering around, bored out of their skulls, and TB makes you horny, anyway.”

  “That’s just a stupid myth left over from the Romantic Era,” I say, “the idea that tuberculosis makes you all feverish and sexy. It’s not true.”

  “Sex is good for you, helps you to heal quicker.”

  “Another dumb myth.”

  I can’t believe they’re still floating these ideas around. Just like I can’t believe they let us smoke, because they think the stress of quitting is more harmful than the actual poisonous smoke. Well, they let the “adults” smoke. The rest of us have to sneak around like twelve-year-olds.

  “Well, maybe it’s the boredom that does it,” says Jeannie. “All I know’s lots of people who wouldn’t say shit if their mouths was full of it are makin’ out like bandits in the dark.”

  “Not only after dark.” Christine nudges me. “That friend of yours, Denise, was in the laundry room this morning making out with Stan. MacConnell almost caught them.”

  Dumb, dumb, dumb. I go have lunch, and Mrs. Driscoll’s calm washes over me like waves in the Bras d’Or Lakes in August. Cool, and a little salty. We look at more colour samples, and photos of six million tiaras meant to stick veiling to your head and let you pretend you’re Royalty-for-a-Day. Elaine can’t decide if she’s too old to wear a veil or not.

  “It’s your wedding,” I say. “Wear a cake rack and antlers on your head if you want.”

  Elaine frowns, and then smiles and pats my hand. “Something’s got you worried, honeybunch,” she says. “Tell Elaine what’s wrong.”

  Surprisingly, I do.

  “It’s Denise,” I say, nodding to where she sits, three tables away. Since our fight she’s moved so she doesn’t have to look at my bratty face while she eats. All heads swivel to where she sits, picking at her plate. She is pale, and everything about her droops: her mouth, her eyes, even the lapels on her robe.

  “Have you tried talking to her?” asks Mrs. Driscoll.

  “We aren’t exactly on speaking terms,” I confess. “We had a fight.” It isn’t like they don’t know. Nothing goes unnoticed in this place.

  “It’s up to you to make the first move,” they chorus, like a Dear Abby column. “She’s your friend and she needs you.”

  “Tell her to stop acting like a slut,” says Mrs. Oikle.

  “Hush, now.” says Mrs. Driscoll.

  Elaine nails Mrs. Oikle to the wall with a look that could take down a Crusader—armour, horse, plumes, and all. This pretty much confirms what we all suspect, that Bernard and Elaine are doing it. Mrs. Oikle, realizing that she’s about to be dumped from the wedding invite list, backtracks.

  “I don’t mean she’s a slut, I just mean she shouldn’t be carrying around with a married man, especially when she’s engaged, I mean, he’s just taking advantage of her, and you know what some people will think, and she’s so young, and she doesn’t want to get a reputation and it’s not even her fiancé, it would be different if it were her fiancé, that Stan’s not to be trusted, look at the shape of his eyebrows, a man like that will always cheat on his wife…” She runs out of steam.

  Elaine gives an elaborate, bangle-clanging shrug and turns to me. “You go talk to her, sweetie, she needs some good advice from a good friend. She needs you now, more than ever.”

  Mrs. Driscoll nods in agreement as Mrs. Oikle rakes the bottom of her soup bowl for hairs.

  “I guess so,” I say. I’m not altogether sure Denise will give me the time of day. I sort of did call her a stool-pigeon and a traitor and a bitch.

  I’m such a coward. I walk by Denise’s room, back and forth, back and forth. Every time I say to myself that I’ll knock and go in and if she throws me out, well, she throws me out. Then when I get up to the door, my feet just keep on going. When she tried to make up to me, the day after we fought, I told her to go to hell. So, I guess she owes me one go-to-hell. I should just go and take it. How did I get to be such a coward? As soon as I have a smoke, I decide, I’ll just barge right in. First, I’m going to have that smoke. I silently push open the bathroom door and tiptoe around the corner to the far window. The bathroom is L-shaped, and around the corner is where the underage smokers hang out the window, blow smoke, and whistle and yell at the delivery boys. Christine’s got a wolf whistle that carries for miles.

  Somebody’s sniffing in one of the stalls, quietly. I bend over and check out the slippers. It’s Denise. Here goes, I think, and mentally cinch my belt.

  “Denise,” I say, “I’m sorry I called you a bitch and everything else. I don’t blame you for being mad at me and I’ll understand if you never want to forgive me, but please, please forgive me. Please don’t cry over that jerk, Stan. You’re worth a million of him and everybody knows it.”

  “Stan’s an idiot. Stan can go to hell.”

  Well, better him than me.

  “Um, that’s the spirit,” I say, trying to sound as wise as Mrs. Driscoll.

  “I dumped Stan two days ago,” says Denise. “The man was stuck on himself. All hands.”

  “You need a man with slow hands,” I say.

  “What the hell would you know about that?”

  “Nothing, really. Only, Mrs. Oikle said…”

  “Oikle is a stupid old cow.”

  “Okay.”

  “And you are a baby.”

  I remain silent. I am not a baby. Inexperienced, maybe. Not a baby.

  Denise slams open the stall door.

  “Don’t you go around telling everyone I’ve been crying over that asshole Stan because it’s a goddamn lie.”

  “I would never do that,” I say. “What are you crying about?”

  Denise looks like she wants to hit me. I get ready to duck. But she grabs my cigarettes instead, taps one out, and lights it. She blows a big cloud of smoke out the window and turns back to me.

  “The drugs aren’t working. I’ve developed resistance to strep and they aren’t going to let me out next month. Going to keep me until they find another combination that works. Grass won’t say how long it will take.”

  It’s the worst news in the world. I feel it like a punch to the stomach, the horrible, heavy shock of it. I put my arms around her, and then we both cry a bit.

  “Knock it off,” she pulls back, “you’re setting my hair on fire,” and we collapse into hysterical giggles as I beat out her hair. She shakes me a couple of times, calls me an idiot and a fool, then gives me a hug and says, “Come on.”

  We sneak down the hall, down the stairwell, and out the service entrance.

  “Where are we going?” I am running out of breath as we sprint across th
e parking lot and down over an embankment.

  “The graveyard,” says Denise.

  “Okay,” I say.

  The graveyard is surrounded by tall maples and birch. It is quiet and dim and a little weedy. There are a lot of markers from the twenties and thirties, from when the Royal Alex was in full swing and the survival rate wasn’t so good. Denise drags me past these, to where it adjoins an older cemetery. The stones here are really old and the inscriptions are worn down. Some of the stones look like they were made by hand, in poor light, with an axe, by Quasimodo.

  “Look at this one,” says Denise.

  It stands tall and thin, rising from a bunch of dwarf stones, and is carved all over. There is a coffin—in case you don’t get the point—and some pointing hands, meant to show the way to heaven, and a lot of squiggly lines going nowhere.

  Smack in the middle, the stonemason has carved:

  JW Sculptor

  HERE

  Rest a clod of earth

  brighten into a star, shin-

  ing with all the radient love

  of the Deity James

  Robertson. who

  died Feb. 7th 1837

  AEtatis 76

  Life is uncertain

  Tyrant death approaches

  The Judge is at the door.

  Prepare to meet your GOD

  “There’s a better one over here,” says Denise, and she drags me off to contemplate another of J. W. Sculptor’s oeuvre, this time a double stone. It looks like this:

  J.W. Sculptor In

  HERE Memory

  lies the body of

  of james David H.

  HUNTER Hunter, who

  who wasadutiful se eyes

  Husband, and were clo

  indulgent Par sed,