Thirteen Crucifixions 29

Glen was a cheap drunk.  The beer had already gone to his head.  But unlike his father he was not at all given to drink.  Gavin McIntyre now lived in England with his young wife and their four children.  He was a medieval scholar.  Chaucer was his specialization.  Glen had yet to meet his step-mother, who wasn’t much older than him, or his half-siblings.  His father had never been a consistent presence in his life.  Throughout his disjointed marriage to Glen’s mother he had had a steady stream of mistresses—often his students.  For three years Alice McIntyre had banished him from the family home.  A brief reconciliation was attempted before the scandal occurred.  Gavin was having an affair with a seventeen year old student of his, the daughter of a wealthy Taiwanese off-shore developer, who cried foul.  It hit the papers, during the late

Sixties when white professors bedding their underage Asian students could still carry a stigma of miscegenation, along with charges of statutory rape. Neither would the girl’s parents countenance their daughter being bedded by a white man. The divorce was quick and brutal. When the Chinese girl turned nineteen, Gavin married her and they moved to England.

            Glen had never spent a single Christmas with his father.  When she was fifteen Marlene stayed with him for four months, just before he remarried.  Even now, Marlene obstinately refused to divulge anything to Glen about what had then transpired between her and their father.  The very mention and Marlene’s face would blanch, her lips tighten, and she would nervously change the subject.   That was when she most resembled their mother.  Marlene was otherwise outspoken, tactless and embarrassing.

            Gavin McIntyre was Irish-Italian, dark, robust and handsome.  He could pass easily as Spanish, or Greek or Arab, unlike Alice whose English-Czech roots guaranteed her a sculpted, blond and pre-Raphaelite luminosity.  Even in her fifties, Glen’s mother was considered a knock-out, outlandishly beautiful.  As though in competition with her husband she had to Glen’s acute discomfort a tendency of attracting to herself extremely young men.  Her most recent conquest quite made his skin crawl.  He was Glen’s age almost to the year.  He didn’t want to meet this person.  Alice McIntyre didn’t seem terribly conscious of her beauty: she resembled a latter day Marlene Dietrich, but with an airy, slightly Anglicized lightness.  She had another son, six years Glen’s senior, the result of an affair before meeting Gavin.  In Toronto Glen had met several times with Brent.  Had they been the same age they might well have been identical twins.  They got on very well together.

            English Bay Beach was virtually deserted in the twilight. Only the hem of the sky remained luminous.  Having dispatched Randall to his hotel room, Glen was only happy to finally have solitude, to walk alone along the water’s edge.  There was a sudden thump at his feet, where a large black object had just fallen from the sky.  It almost landed on his head, as though it was being thrown at him.  Glen looked down and prodded carefully with his foot the large black carcass of a dead raven.