Nights Below Station Street (23 page)

“And how’s your mother?” Doctor Hennessey said.

“I don’t know,” Vera answered, just as solemn. “I haven’t been up to town.”

The doctor continued cleaning the smelts – all the time he spoke, his voice got deeper and hoarser, and the cigarette smoke circled above him. The wind blew through a pipe, and gave the whole house a mournful sound.

“Chores,” he said. “Well, I don’t waste time with chores myself.”

His whole house was a mess. Books and pamphlets lay on chairs, coats sat here and there. There was a smell of woollen socks and sweaters.

The doctor was talking abruptly and trying to find things to say. He looked at Nevin with his cap with the earflaps still pulled down while he sat on the chair, and observed him with the politeness he always reserved for those he disliked.

“How are things at the hospital?” Vera asked.

“Nothing gets done up in that place,” the doctor said.

Then he roared again, and his sister-in-law came downstairs. This was Clare, whom he’d lived with for five years, who cared for him and who listened to his complaining about “things out there.” “Things out there,” he’d said to her after he came home from town the week before, “are
getting worse and worse – the worst of it is, now we have people who actually
believe
they believe in pacifism.”

Clare – who handled the world much better than he did, and had her hair done every week at Myhrra’s (even though the doctor always said it smelled
dumb
) – smiled at Vera and Nevin, as if to indicate that she wanted them to forgive her brother-in-law, which both of them acknowledged, and immediately after this, it became understood by them that everyone thought about the doctor exactly the way they themselves did.

“Who wants smelts?” he said.

Obviously a fight of some kind had taken place between them – as it always did – and the doctor was making amends by cooking something.

Clare tried to take over and he told her to go and sit down. She was a small woman of sixty, with dyed blue hair, and she wore a skirt and bobby socks.

Whenever Clare said that young people were wonderful, the doctor would roar and say that young people weren’t wonderful at all, and in fact, there was nothing whatsoever worthwhile about them. And if she thought that people who did exactly what everyone else did, whatever the craze at the moment was, were wonderful – and took poetry classes (Clare had taken a poetry class), and formed encounter groups at the high school, and bragged about pottery cups, and tried to
stop a few wars
– then she could think what she wanted.

Things the doctor did not like talking about included: aid for poverty-stricken countries, helping people in general, seeing to it that things changed, changing anything in general, relaxation (talking about ways to relax, such as yoga – yoga classes in general), anything that had to do with believing that you could change the system – systems in general.

But it didn’t matter if Vera or Nevin ever mentioned any of these subjects – though, in fact, they never did – the doctor would still complain about something to himself; the tone of their voice or something. And though he tried to be pleasant to them, he often found himself bursting out in irritation.

As Clare and Vera and Nevin were talking, the aroma of smelts filled the room. Vera hadn’t eaten them since she was a little girl. In fact, she had started not to eat meat or fish since the first year of Greenpeace and the protest against the seal hunt. But now the smelts cooking in flour and butter made her want them. But she was afraid to ask. If she asked, the doctor might think the worst of her – this is what went through her mind – so she sat in the kitchen enduring the smell and looked at the clock over the sink, and the other clock over the fridge, and the clock on the timer on the stove – all telling a different time.

Then Clare mentioned the new rule in church about having to stand at the altar to receive, and wondered if Vera liked that idea. Vera was aggravated that Clare did not know what was apparent. Vera was sure her atheism was the one thing that would be apparent. With her big mukluks on and her coat tied with string, she glanced at Nevin for support. Then she said that she did not think of church very often. Nevin shrugged and said: “And I’m Protestant.” And then he looked as if he’d just said something humorous. To Nevin, Catholicism was the one religion everyone was now allowed to dismiss.

The doctor felt they were making light of Clare, and he did what he always did to protect her: he told her to shut up and stop bothering people – and eat her smelts and go to bed.

Then he asked Vera and Nevin if they wanted smelts and set out two platesful on the table. He then
moved some clothes off a chair and sat down himself.

His clothes were strung all over the house. Clare had done his housework for years until he read an article that hinted that men would not be able to exist without women doing “everything domestic for them,” and last month he reacted to this by telling her that he didn’t want her to do anything for him. Now he left his clothes everywhere. He had lost airline tickets when he was supposed to fly to a medical convention (he didn’t want to go anyway), and had criticized her for not being “orderly.” And he cooked all his own meals. All of this was driving her crazy.

The doctor stabbed at his smelts, opened them with his fingers, taking the backbone out and leaving it on the table beside him, doused some vinegar on one and popped it in his mouth. In his pockets there was snuff (for the woods), pipes (for the office), and cigarettes (on hand when he was too lazy to clean his pipe).

As the doctor passed the smelts around, Clare talked of the wedding that was announced between Vye and Myhrra, and how happy she was that Myhrra was getting a chance to be happy. The doctor again frowned, again thought Nevin and Vera would make fun of her, and again came to her aid by telling her that she was crazy, and that no one was ever happy in a marriage – and he could cite a thousand marriages and not find a happy one.

What the doctor said, and how he said it, had the desired effect Both Nevin and Vera realized how insulting he was to his sister-in-law, and so disarmed the very things they themselves thought. Clare then stood and made some tea – of which Vera would have a cup if it was black.

“Frugality and fasting,” the doctor said. “That’s how to live life – eh, Vera – not like us gluttons,” he said taking another smelt.

“Fasting,” he said again, and Vera smiled, looked over at
Nevin, as if by not taking the smelt that she wanted, and drinking tea black, which she never did, she showed him all that she was.

The doctor was thinking of retiring soon and starting his “other occupation” which was fly-fishing, but each month the hospital, with its grey corridors and too few beds, had a crisis, and this crisis propelled him on for another month, much to the agitation of those about him.

His biggest concern at this time, and something which if you looked at him you would think he was not capable of being concerned over – because one only had to go back to the volunteer program to see what a misogynist he was, and remember how he told his own sister-in-law Clare to go home and stop bothering the patients by being so nice to them – his one concern was that nurses who did their work fairly be treated with fairness.

The doctor had always seen the same things during an accident or crisis in the hospital. Noting everything about him, wearing his bow-tie and his thick black glasses, he could see not only concern on the faces of the bereaved but an excitement caused by impending death in those about him. For this, he disagreed with the volunteer system because it gave voyeurs of death a legitimacy to bother the bereaved. Also, people could be
selective
about what they volunteered for, and he could not see volunteering for one thing because you were altruistic and not another.

Often because of insomnia he would be awake all night and sleep from noon till late afternoon. Drawing on his strength to get up as soon as he woke, he would toss the blanket off him and stand. He often slept in his pants, and
his bare chest still showed signs of being powerful. He would listen to the school bus rattling past, and, looking out the window, he would see snow escaping in great blows over the back fence, and the school kids walking home across the snowed-in driveways under the metallic grey-blue sky.

Then he would wash and shave in his own sink in his bedroom, check the window again and see the sun, pink against the black spruce far away, and see the poplar shoots almost covered in snow. Then he would turn on the portable
TV
in the corner and watch the last fifteen minutes of his soap opera, “The Edge of Night.”

Sometimes he would insult his sister-in-law and make her cry, and then he would feel sorry for her, and would try to make amends. But there was this difference in temperament between them. She, at sixty, perhaps because she was widowed and childless, had suddenly seemed to find a lot to do joining the Gilbert and Sullivan group and the Historical Society. The doctor had always thought of these societies as being a pretence to authenticity that people mistook as cultured and devoted no real time to anyhow. And he disliked them. Yet he still queried her a lot about them.

“Was Roy at the meeting tonight?” “Yes.”

“Of course he would be – that’s the kind of society he likes – those kind of societies.”

“What kind of societies?”

“All those kind – where you eat little sandwiches – those kind – musical societies. He wanted to start a barbershop quartet here, well, it didn’t work, and now it’s historical societies. Find out what Virginian Loyalist came here in 1785 – which has nothing to do with me or you being Irish and Scots, but is considered our heritage at any rate.”

“Well,” said Clare, “why don’t you join the Irish or Scottish societies? They hold great parties every year.”

“I hate them – I hate everything to do with them – and there isn’t one bit of authenticity in them. And I certainly don’t need someone from Dublin coming here to tell me where I came from and quote some Irish poet so everyone can think they’re cultured. I’d rather be shot in the head or strangled in my sleep.”

The trouble with this conversation was that it went on not once but a half dozen times a month. Clare had also taken a concern over Nevin and Vera, whom she loved, and the doctor felt for some reason because of this that he had been betrayed. They came to the house more, and every-time they came to the house the same feeling of being betrayed by something would overwhelm him as Clare smiled and fretted about. It was, in fact, because of this that Nevin believed the doctor to be the most prejudiced person he had ever met. Or at least a man on the wrong side of progress.

But what got the doctor into trouble was his feeling of a deeper reasoning under a surface reason in whatever people said. It sometimes made him cynical whenever anyone else was applauding someone’s virtue, and at times it made him act kind toward those who had just done something that was considered disgraceful. His fault lay in his high moral tone when trying to protect anyone others condemned. Nevin did not know the doctor had already sternly reprimanded two women from the Ladies Aid Society at the church for gossiping about him and Vera, saying that Vera and Nevin had every right to live exactly the way they chose.

One night he made the mistake of showing Nevin and Vera Clare’s poem: “To Love Oh to Love,” which was written in memory of her husband. This, even though Clare
begged him not to show it. “Show it!” he roared. “I guess I’ll show it – she’s a regular
JOHN KEEEATS
, or something.” He had no idea why he said this.

The doctor was sitting off the pantry tying a gigantic streamer fly, but because they had mentioned poetry he, by sudden impulse, went upstairs and found her green poetry folder and brought it down. It had been a long time – five years since she’d written a poem. For a year after her husband died she had tried to find something to do, and she wrote poems.

The doctor came downstairs and Clare blushed and closed her eyes. Then he handed the lined page to Vera to read and stood over her looking down, puffing dramatically on his big round-bowled pipe.

Vera read the poem and without commenting passed it back to him.

“Not a bad poem,” the doctor said, embarrassed at Vera’s silence.

Clare smiled at them as if frightened. Finally the doctor handed the page to Nevin. Nevin read it, looked over the page, and handed it to Clare, who held it in her hand, fumbled with it, and smiled.

“It’s an awful poem,” Clare said in a false tone.

“Oh no.” Vera said. “It isn’t.”

The doctor, without wanting to, imitated the exact tone of Clare’s voice. “Terrible poem,” he said. He knew nothing about poetry and felt absolutely foolish over this decision to show Clare’s poem. Now he knew this was all his fault and he was angry. “Mrs. Shakespeare.” He laughed unnaturally. “Good enough poem – ha ha.”

What relieved the anguish was that old Allain Garret came in to share a talk and a half pint of rum with the doctor.

Some time later, the doctor argued with Clare over being
the sort of old woman who would end up being a Buddhist and writing poems. “What do they agree with that I agree with – nothing whatsoever! And what do I agree with that they do – less than that. They have no idea about moose and have never seen one – and yet chastise anyone for hunting them. They make a mockery of Remembrance Day because they know nothing about it, and it’s the same way with their peace movement. In this they believe they are visionaries. That is, they see what is obvious and are visionaries while those who have suffered and loved more (here he could not help thinking of Clare) get no credit at all – well, so what. That’s the best way to have it good for them!”