Saturday, 23 August 2014

Thirteen crucifixions 35


Doris had been very careful.  To not prepare her speech too meticulously.  Too much control hindered the dance.  For her it was all a dance.  Everything: a great intricate choreography, a Divine configuration of infinite steps, movements and combinations.  One must find one’s place, one’s step, rhythm and movement in the Dance in order to fully participate.  Yet even those who resisted the Dance, through their very resistance became part of it.  Their very negation fulfilled their part in the Dance.  As a young woman she had had questions, nothing but questions.  No answers.  At sixty-three she still had no answers, though she felt that she was running out of questions.  She felt that the first half of her life she’d spent trying to find and formulate the questions.  And now she was learning how to ask them.  The answer was in the asking.

            The chamomile tea steamed in the mug next to the National Geographic.  A bird of paradise had been painted onto the mug.  Doris had opened the magazine to a photo of two huge blue parrots.  Alice gave her the mug for her birthday.  She bought it at Murchie’s, Vancouver’s vintage coffee and tea emporium, and Doris knew she paid handsomely for it.  Alice with her taste for fine things, shopped regularly there, and in other establishments where Doris wouldn’t think of setting foot in.  They were very different sorts of women.  Even their shared profession teaching English Literature they approached differently.  Doris always challenged her students to apply to their present day lives and the needs of their community the moral dilemmas and lessons contained in the great works of English literature.  Alice tended more towards aesthetics and metaphysics. Sam had dismissed her as an “Ivory Tower Tootsie.”  Never in her life had Doris had such a devoted friend as Alice.  They could comfortably pass hours together in each other’s presence without having to mention a single word.  She had told Doris once that she had on her a very calming effect, and by her own admission Alice had a very anxious, nervous and high-strung nature, which she concealed artfully.  The first time they met and chatted together in the faculty lounge, Doris had found Alice to be slightly intimidating, with her blonde good looks and her film star glamour.  She was new, having just completed her practicum, and immediately Doris loved her, and particularly because Alice looked nothing at all like anyone’s idea of a professor of English literature.  But she never failed to bring into a room with her a presence of beauty: she was a beautiful introvert.  Too beautiful to be bookish and possibly too bookish in order to be beautiful?  She had never been short of male admirers; Doris had always held in check her prim moral outrage over Alice’s tendency towards pathetic young men.  She had so much more going for her than her looks, but Alice didn’t really appear to know this.  She wasn’t envious of Alice, she didn’t think that she was.  Even at Alice’s age Doris looked much older.  But many women of forty looked older than Alice who was well into her fifties.  Doris herself had never been a beauty.  The men had never lined up to court her and she had never expected that they would.  Unlike so many of her compatriots who, during the war, had cheerfully sacrificed their maidenhood in the service of England, Doris had remained a virgin until she married Sam, just shy of her twenty-eighth birthday amid the guns and bombs of the fledgling state of Israel.  Their passion was short-lived.  Theirs had been a marriage of minds?  Sam had been practical to a fault.  The niceties of courtship had never worked for him, and besides, having already been through one war, here they were, three years later, getting married in the midst of another one.  Not that Doris had expected much.  There was a war on.  But Sam, with his large nose, saturnine face and premature baldness already suggested a brooding vulture.  His three years in the death camp had left him flayed, eviscerated.  He had nothing left to give, and Doris was a seasoned care-giver.  She must have nursed over a thousand bomb victims in London.  Had they ever really loved each other?  Theirs had been a pragmatic union.  She didn’t weep at her husband’s funeral and then for three months she maintained a decorous silence to calm the light and dancing heart she had been struggling to subdue.

            This had lately become Doris’ way of unwinding at night, seated thus at her kitchen table, sipping herbal tea while looking idly at a National Geographic. These pictures of the Amazon Rain Forest were particularly lovely.  The blue parrots were  called Hyacinth Macaws.  A beautiful name.  There were two in the photo.  They were huge, the world’s largest parrots it said, with massive, frightening charcoal-coloured beaks and gleaming feathers—what colour would she call that?  Like the flowers.  Hyacinth.  Deep ultramarine blue with hints of violet and turquoise.  And they were endangered?  Threatened.  By the pet trade, and by environmental degradation.  Were Glen to ever begin painting again, Doris would try to commission from him such a painting, or maybe of a bird of paradise, with its sweeping golden plumes.  Perhaps a painting with both?  And then she’d give it to his mother for Christmas, since Alice had more of a penchant for fine and beautiful things than Doris ever would.  It wasn’t that she didn’t appreciate beauty.  She simply didn’t enjoy having to own anything.  Unlike Alice she had always striven to keep her earthly pilgrimage as simple and uncluttered with things as possible.  Doris didn’t really know how Alice would welcome such a gift, were it executed by her son, but commissioned by her.  It might be awkward.  And there was this whole matter of getting Glen interested again in painting.  He still hadn’t recovered from his trauma.  But all healing had to come from within.  It couldn’t be imposed on him.

            Doris was worried about Carol, who was clearly traumatized.  Who drove herself relentlessly.  Not unlike Doris, before her health started to break down.  She was better now. The cancer was still in remission.  Unlike Sam, she had been very lucky. She was sure that the death camp had thoroughly ruined his immune system.  It was during her illness that Doris learned of the Dance.  As she was sure that Carol would once she was older.  She had slowed a little, with age, and since her cancer had not recovered her full energy.  Likely she never would. She had no other health issues, no arthritis.  Doris sometimes longed to return to Israel, to the kibbutz and to the olive groves they’d tended.  She had never seen an olive tree in Canada.  But for their decision to live in a Palestinian refugee camp, they might have remained in Israel.  They were expelled for being anti-Zionist, for being un-Jewish, for being traitors, for treason.  Doris and Sam Goldberg had publicized that the Jewish Nation might eventually disinherit itself by pursuing similar policies to what the Nazis had inflicted on them.  Sam, for having survived the death camps, was a particular embarrassment.  By his very existence he had shamed the nation-state of Israel.

            They never had children.  Sam had no wish of bringing into global peril another generation.  Doris conceded, though on entering menopause she had experienced nine months of black depression.  Never before nor since in her life had she wanted to kill herself.  Unconsciously her left hand ran deftly across her breasts, then rested gently over her stomach.  She thought that she just might try to bribe Glen to do her this painting, that maybe this would kick-start again his artistic career.


            “BASTARD” was the only word that Dwight could form with his selection of Scrabble tiles.  Carol spelled out “PINOCHET”, which Margery protested was a proper noun.  “Not in my vocabulary he ain’t”, Carol said.  Two damsels in distress for Dwight to rescue.  As he’d done for Jeanne who had stolen his children from him. Their children.  Dwight had been an exemplary father, raising his infant son almost single-handed while Jeanne worked full time in the library.  She almost couldn’t wait to get back to work.  Dylan was just three months old and off she went.  What kind of mother… Dwight still managed to finish two plays while his son was being toilet trained.  And what Jeanne had missed of their son’s progress, his little crises, his small triumphs.  Dwight and not Jeanne had seen him cut his first tooth, and Dwight and not Jeanne had witnessed their son’s first smile, watched him sit up for the first time, begin to crawl—she hadn’t even been there for his first unassisted footstep.  When Dwight first met Jeanne in university he was rescuing her from an abusive boy friend.  She sought refuge in Dwight’s apartment, moving from his couch to his bed.  In six months they were married.  It was when their infant daughter was taking her first steps that Jeanne was swept off her feet by an oil executive twice her age.  The divorce was sudden, quick, brutal and seamless.  They moved to Toronto after the court had ruled that Jeanne’s new husband in his Rosedale mansion would be providing a better life for the children.  Jason would be six now.  Annie was almost four.

            Margery told Dwight to start dating again.  He didn’t want to.  He was through with women?  How could he know?  He was still seeing a psychiatrist in order to cope and unravel the Sargasso tangle of the breakdown that had followed.  Dr. Elizabeth Montague was still trying to convince Dwight that either he dump Margery or marry her, that she would otherwise be standing in for Jeanne in a way that couldn’t possibly be healthy.  That his insistence on regarding Margery as his sister was an acting out of denial that was simply prolonging his need to come to terms with the castration that Jeanne had visited on him.  But he didn’t need to date since he reasoned that Margery adequately filled his void for female companionship.  She wasn’t merely a sister to him, and this he was sure was understood if unspoken between them.  He had remained for more than three years completely celibate.  Dwight thought that he might have a monastic vocation.  In carefully measured professional language Dr. Montague told him that he was being ridiculous.

            Dwight had never in person spoken to nor seen his ex-wife’s second husband, though he’d seen his picture in the paper.  Smug, balding and jowelly.  That Jeanne would desert him for such a troll, such a toad, someone so unabashedly repulsive.  He’d made an utmost effort to not even think of visualizing how their possible—or theoretical—sex life might look.  Dwight wanted his children back.  Not simply to see them, but to have them, possess them.  They were his.  He still had fantasies of killing both Jeanne and that hideous old bastard she was fucking.  Dwight, not himself a violent man, had confessed this to Dr. Montague.  But now he had Margery to take care of, and the beautiful Carol, who could stay with them forever as far as he was concerned.

            As though reading Dwight’s thoughts, Carol said, “I’m going home tomorrow.  I think I’ll be okay.  You’ve both been very kind.  Thank you.”

            Not even Margery knew that he was seeing a psychiatrist.

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