Daddy Lenin and Other Stories (25 page)

“Oh,” she said, “Teddy would never take anything from me.”

“And he would from me? I’m the one who tried to murder him once.”

“Oh that’s different,” Ma said. “He would take lasagna from you. You’re a man.” Ma has always had a never-ending supply of non sequiturs.

So I agreed to play lasagna delivery boy. What harm could Teddy do me now? When I was going out the door, I found out. Ma said, “Make sure he gets a good look at you through his screen door. Knows who you are. Evie says Teddy’s got a pellet pistol in there.”

“Jesus Christ. Why’s he got a pellet pistol?”

“He watches a lot of cable
TV
from Detroit. You know how things are down there in America. House break-ins. People killing each other left and right.”

“But Connaught isn’t Detroit.”

“Well,” said Ma, “Teddy never gets out. So what does he know about the world anymore?”

It was a fine July day. Teddy’s suite faced a sunny courtyard. I rang the bell and called to him through the screen door, trying to outshout a television raving in the background. “Ted, it’s your nephew Bert!”

A querulous voice answered, “Who?”

“Bert Molson. Your sister Adele’s boy.”

“The furniture-mover. What the fuck do you want?”

“Ma asked me to bring you some lasagna. Can I come in?”

“Suit yourself.”

As I eased into the suite Teddy put the television on mute. The temperature in his apartment was Saharan. High summer and a space heater pumping out heat full bore. The place was shrouded in shadow, the blinds drawn. The television screen shed flickering light on a little old man, all aggressive nose and furious eyes, scrunched up in an enormous recliner. Holy terror slumping down into itself, a landslide of flesh.

I showed him the casserole dish. “You want me to heat it up for you now, or do you want it in the fridge?”

“Fridge.”

I stowed the lasagna, went back to the living room, and settled down on a chair. As my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I scanned the room for evidence of a pellet pistol. Noted a suspicious lump under the afghan covering his lap. Also noted six impossibly cute, fuzzy Teddy bears sitting in a row on the chesterfield. Teddy caught me staring at them.

“I order those off the
TV
. Give them to the Home Care girls. The ones I like. Young women appreciate cuddly things. Cuddly things like me,” he added grimly.

“You certainly have a plentiful stock of them. You must have a lot of favourite young ladies.”

“Not too many lately.” I got up and turned on a light. His eyes narrowed against the sudden brightness. “You ever hear of verbal abuse?” he said abruptly. I had no idea where that had come from.

“Yeah. There are notices up about it everywhere now.”

“I never heard of it before until that bitch Home Care director came by. Said they got a strict no verbal abuse policy. She told me I better watch my mouth with her staff. The woman had a ass on her like a double-wide trailer. I told her to get the hell out of my place, and go out the door sideways so she didn’t stick there and make me have to call for the jaws of life.”

“Okay, good demonstration of the concept of verbal abuse. Well done, Ted.”

“I never took shit from anybody and I’m going to take it from some fat ass that bosses a bunch of diaper-changers?”

The question was purely rhetorical, but I answered it anyway. “Highly unlikely.”

He stirred in his chair, wincing with pain. “Even in the army I never let nobody push me around,” he said, still rivetted on explaining his long-term take-no-shit policy. “I got called up this one time before Colonel McTavish on account of a spot of trouble with some limey Red Caps outside a pub in Leatherhead. ‘Gunner Aker,’ he says to me, ‘this is the fourth time you’ve been up before me in the past six months
on charges. Young man, you are no credit to your King, your country, or your family.’ I looked him straight in the eye and cut the cheese. Good and loud. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ I says, ‘it’s all that rough cider I drunk last night. Same rough cider got me in trouble with the Provost Corps.’ I got twenty-eight days for that fart.” He looked around his apartment as if he expected to spot an eavesdropper lurking in the shadows. “And now I can’t even say what I think in my own jeezly house.”

“Loose lips sink ships.”

He had a lot to get off his chest. Ma had said that with all the deaths in the family Ted had no one to pay calls on him anymore. Evie, who used to drop in on him now and then, no longer went to see her husband because whenever she did he threw a fit and accused her of having had him “locked up in the Black Hole of Connaught.”

“You can’t even flirt with the good-looking nurses,” said Teddy. “Where’s the harm in that? When it comes to women I’m like a dog chasing a car. What would I do with it if I caught it? I don’t mean nothing by it; it’s just talk. I told one of them a little story and she said it was ‘inappropriate.’ I think she was the one complained to the fucking double-wide.” He scratched his face with the brace on his wrist and grinned hugely. “It’s kind of funny what I told her. See, when I was overseas I wrote this letter back home to Rudy Demchuk. I says to him, ‘Over here in England I get nothing but chicken, chicken. There isn’t a night I don’t go to bed without a breast in one hand and a thigh in the other.’ Well, Rudy’s reading that out to some of the boys in the lobby of the post office and they’re splitting a gut. The United Church minister comes in
and wants to know what’s so funny. So Rudy, who’s a character, hands the preacher the letter and winks at the boys. The minister reads it over and says, all thoughtful, ‘You know we hear these stories about rationing in Great Britain, how hard things are over there, and I think it would be wonderful if I could share Mr. Aker’s letter with my congregation. It would be a great relief and a terrific boost to the morale of all the parents of boys serving overseas to know their sons are being so well taken care of over there in the Old Country.’ And Rudy agrees that would be an excellent idea and the fucking innocent dope takes my letter with him and reads it out in church to everybody.” Teddy paused. “So you tell me, what’s the harm in trying to give somebody a good laugh now and then with a story like that?”

I said nothing. Teddy sat there, eyes fixed on me. Suddenly he said, “You called me a lunatic once. You think I’m a lunatic?”

Honesty is seldom the best policy with the old. “No.”

“Because the double-wide says she’s sending somebody over to give me some sort of test. I told her, ‘Don’t bother because if they show up they’re not getting in my fucking door. Sure, maybe I give those Home Care girls a little shit when they do a half-assed job around here. But it’s good for them. They need toughening up. They ought to learn life’s no bed of roses.’ ” He hesitated. “So do you think they’re sending some head doctor over here because of this verbal abuse business?”

Teddy looked worried. It wasn’t often anybody saw Teddy looking worried. I tried to reassure him. “Whoever comes won’t be a psychologist or psychiatrist. More likely a nurse
or a social worker. They do this sort of thing with seniors all the time now. Maybe she’ll ask you a few questions like, What day of the week is it? Who’s the prime minister? What season is it? When’s your birthday? Just to see how you’re managing. Don’t sweat it. You’ll pass with flying colours.”

Teddy patted the lump under the afghan. “They send somebody over here, somebody’s going to be sorry.”

“You’ll be the one who’s sorry. So lose the pellet pistol, Uncle Ted. In fact, you better give it to me right now. For your own good.”

Teddy ignored that. “I know something about head doctors,” he said, “how they operate, the fuckers. In Italy an officer took me out of the line and sent me to a casualty station on account of I climbed out of a slit trench under a mortar bombardment and stood up in the open. I figured, Fuck it, if I’m going to die it’s not going to be like a rat in a hole.

“This doctor come to see me, he looked about thirteen years old. For chrissakes, he had
braces
. Tin-toothed cocksucker. He said they’d given me to him to examine because when he got back home he was going to specialize in mental cases. Not them words exactly, but that’s what he meant. You wouldn’t believe the kind of shit he asked me. I says to him, ‘One more question about my mother and I’ll drive your Adam’s apple out the back of your skinny neck.’ ” Ted fumbled for a package of cigarettes on the table beside him. It was difficult to watch the agonizing effort it took him to make the lighter work. When at last he got his cigarette going, he sucked a long, grateful breath of smoke into his lungs. “This casualty station was in some rich Italian’s house, and after I threatened this doctor they strapped me down on
a bench that was by the entrance. I guess it was there for the peasants to cool their heels on while they were waiting to kiss the ass of the big shot who owned the place. That bench was all marble and colder than a witch’s tit. This is December I’m talking about and I could have caught pneumonia laying there on that fucking slab of ice. I probably wouldn’t be here now if Colonel McTavish didn’t order that quack to release me. The colonel told him my only problem was that I was a malingerer. McTavish sent a corporal to collect me, probably to make sure that the doctor didn’t make a fuss about letting me go. Me and the corporal ran into him when we was leaving the casualty station. I stopped and said, ‘I’d like to make an appointment, please.’ ‘What do you mean? Appointment?’ says the doctor. ‘An appointment for after the war,’ I says. ‘I’ll look you up so’s we can have a nice long chat about
your
mother.’ He didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”

I got up and said, “Well, I better be on my way.”

Teddy put his hand under the afghan and yanked out a very realistic-looking pellet pistol. One of those replica models that get kids shot by the police when they wave them around. “Take it,” he said. “In case I get an itchy trigger finger.”

I did.

On reflection, maybe I shouldn’t have mentioned Uncle Teddy and the psychiatrist to Counsellor Sally. I don’t want her musing about a family history of mental instability. I should also have kept my mouth shut about the pellet pistol,
but sometimes Counsellor Sally’s sympathetic demeanour can lull me into saying things I don’t mean to divulge.

She wanted to know what I did with the pellet pistol.

“I don’t know. I got rid of it.”

“That doesn’t sound very definite. How did you get rid of it? Was it disposed of safely?”

“I smashed it to pieces and dropped it down a chimney.”

“That’s not very funny,” said
Consigliere
Sally. “I happen to have seen
The Godfather II
.”

“Oh, Christ,” I said, “that was a joke. After all, it’s not a real gun. It’s not all that dangerous.”

Counsellor Sally said, “Remember when we began our sessions? I said that everything we talk about is confidential. The two exceptions to this rule would be if you were to speak about harming yourself or someone else. That I would need to report.”

“And I haven’t done either of those things.”

“Correct. But I would like an assurance from you that you are not contemplating doing something rash. In regard to Mr. Drogan. For my own peace of mind.”

“You can sleep easy. I wouldn’t dream of it. I destroyed the pellet pistol. Scout’s honour.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Counsellor Sally shifted in her chair. She didn’t look entirely convinced by my assertion. “But let’s return to your ‘joke’ about the pistol. You don’t think that didn’t contain an element of aggression? Just like the ‘joke’ Uncle Teddy told the Home Care nurse? That it wasn’t intended to make the hearer of it ill at ease, to make her feel some discomfort?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Is there a possibility that telling me about your uncle’s hostility to being examined for a mental or emotional problem was a way of expressing your own resentment towards me?”

I didn’t bother to answer that. The two of us sat in silence for a time. Then Counsellor Sally said, “I would like to make an observation.”

“Feel free.”

“It strikes me that you speak about your uncle’s actions with a certain ambivalence. On the one hand, you seem to think it important to leave the suggestion with me that you disapprove of his behaviour, but – how shall I put this – I can’t help thinking that I detect a tone of approval, even admiration in your voice when you talk about him. Would you say that in some way you might even admire your Uncle Teddy?”

“Maybe,” I said grudgingly.

“Can you elaborate?”

“He always stuck up for himself. As he would say, he refused to take shit from anybody.”

“And you feel that you have failed in that regard.”

“Well, I’m taking shit from Drogan now, aren’t I? Truckloads of it.”

“And your Uncle Teddy’s attitudes, his ways of dealing with others – do you consider them healthy?”

“Not healthy maybe. But effective.”

“Would you call injuring others, alienating others, an effective approach to life problems? Look at the outcome in your uncle’s case. He ended the last years of his life alone.”

“Look, I’m not holding him up as the gold standard of
decorum. All I said was that he didn’t let people take advantage of him.”

“The picture you draw of your Uncle Ted is of a very aggressive man, often violent, certainly an intimidating presence. So how did it make you feel when you saw that power so diminished in his final years? Your uncle ill, shrunken, frightened?”

“Did I say he was frightened?”

“You left the impression with me that he was.”

“Okay, maybe a little spooked because he thought he was going to get labelled a head case. I can identify with that.”

“Perhaps you identify with him in a different way. See a similar fate in your future. Isolation. After all, you have no life partner. That may frighten you.”

“Wife.”

“If you prefer that term.”

Counsellor Sally waited. I kept her dangling. Finally, she glanced at her watch. “I see that our time is up for today. But I think we’ve done some good work, opened up some issues. Let’s revisit them next session.”