The Romantic (8 page)

Mr. Dingwall is a clerk for the government, and the nature of his job occasionally brings him into my father’s law office.

“He worked late last night,” I say about my father. “I’d already gone to bed by the time he got home.”

“They moved in yesterday. You must have seen the van. I was laid up all day with my bad chest, missed the whole thing. All’s I know is what Dora O’Hearn told me, and she only met them the one time. They’re German, you know. Came here after the war, so that’s going on fifteen years, but they still have those heavy accents. Dora could hardly understand a word the woman said. Greta, that’s her name. That’s the woman’s name. He’s Karl. Greta and Karl Richter. I suppose that sounds German, although I know a Greta from Strathroy, where I grew up, and there’s a Karl at church, Karl Stock, he’s an elder, and neither of them are German. I never met a Richter that I can recall. I said to Bill, I said, how do we know they’re not Nazis? and he says, how do we know they didn’t fight in the Resistance? Bill always looks on the
bright side. They’ve only got the one boy and he’s adopted.”

I perk up. “Adopted?”

“And around your age, Louise, which threw me for a loop when Bill told me, considering as how they’re old enough to be the grandparents. I’d go over, welcome them to the neighbourhood and all, but if they say Heil Hitler I’ll keel over dead.”

“I’ve never met anybody who was adopted,” I say.

“Probably couldn’t have her own babies for one reason or another.” She turns to Mrs. Carver. “I don’t know if you heard, but I lost a baby, it’ll be four years come Valentine’s Day. The doctors said it was because I was run ragged. I’m lucky to be alive.” She presses her palms into her eyes.

Before I understand that she is crying, Mrs. Carver is out of her chair. She hurries around the table and pats Mrs. Dingwall’s bouncing shoulders. “Should I get a Kleenex?” I ask. No response. I look at the calendar—it’s thumbtacked to the wall beside the phone—and realize that yesterday, December eighth, was the anniversary of my conception. Feeling entitled, I take the last cookie.

It is Mrs. Carver who moves me, with her twitching face and her fast pats that I doubt can be very comforting. For Mrs. Dingwall I feel only exasperation. I nibble the edges of the cookie and look at her chewed-to-the-quick fingernails, the dirt in the creases of her knuckles, and feel a pure, ruthless disgust for the tragedies of adults. The mess they make of things.

The following morning, instead of waking up anxious, as I almost always do, I wake up happy. I review the events of
the previous day to come up with a reason, but there isn’t one. It’s a strange, hollow happiness, almost unbearable. Joy, I think. Maybe what this feeling is, is joy.

I look at my bedside clock. Eight-fifteen. That isn’t my father shovelling, then, so early on a Saturday morning. I get up and draw back the curtains. The glass is frosted over. With my thumbnail I try to clear a spot, but the frost is too thick, so I undo the clasp and crank the window open.

Snow lies like a pelt over everything. Cars, shrubs, hedges. The only tracks—and they cut across our property a couple of yards from the window—were made by a person walking over everyone’s lawn, straight through the drifts. Who? The shoveller is Mr. Parker, across the road. In all the whiteness his red cap is a gash. “Day is breaking,” I think, equating this fracturing event with the rasping sound of his shovel.

Even happier now because of the snow, I go to the closet and get my bathrobe and mule slippers. The bathrobe is the same style and colour as the one hanging in my mother’s closet, and whenever I put mine on I remember how my mother agonized over whether we should buy the champagne or the cornflower blue. We ended up with the champagne because it matched her hair. “The blue matches your eyes,” I pointed out and was told, coldly, that her eyes are delft.

I open the bedroom door, tiptoe down the hall. In front of my father’s door I listen. His quiet snores remind me of men on television breathing through skin-diving nozzles or gas masks. I would like to burst in and tell him about the snowfall but I have never entered my parents’ room when
the door was shut, and now that my mother has left and I know my father misses her laugh, I’m afraid of finding him in some unimaginable grief-ridden condition.

I keep going, down to the bathroom where, after using the toilet and washing my hands and face, I brush my hair with my mother’s glass-handled brush. I then apply a drop of her baby oil under each of my eyes and rub Jergens lotion into my elbows. I tell myself I am fighting wrinkles (according to my mother, I have the kind of thin skin that is prone to premature aging), but my mind is on the transgression, which I would never commit if I thought my mother might catch me and so, because I do commit it, I feel that there can be no possibility of her coming back. I am closing the lid on her coffin. Bang. (Although I don’t think of her as dead.) I sometimes consider wearing her perfume and her scarves, except there is still my father to contend with, his incurable hopes.

A few minutes later I go down to the front hall and manage to shove the door open against a bank of snow. Just as I’d thought, there’s no newspaper or milk bottle; I’d have seen the footprints of anybody who had walked up the drive. But it has become my morning routine to fetch the milk and paper and then to pour out two glasses of orange juice. On weekday mornings I percolate a pot of coffee for my father, but on Saturdays and Sundays, because he sleeps late, I don’t bother.

I drink my juice, standing at the kitchen window. All the junk on the Dingwalls’ lawn is buried, the broken tricycles and chairs. You can’t even see the picket fence between our yards. There is no private property today, there are no
eyesores. Under parcels of snow our four cedar trees bow down in postures reminiscent of Aunt Verna carrying her steamer trunk. When she said goodbye to me, the night before she went back to Texas, I drew away from kissing her, but only because I wasn’t used to kissing people, and she said,“Oh, I know you’re cross with me for leaving!” and her eyes reddened. I think of Mrs. Dingwall crying and of the German family—the Richters. I decide to walk by their place after breakfast.

By the time I am getting ready to go out, my father is up and stalking from window to window, flourishing a putty knife. “How will the fire trucks get through?” he exclaims. “The ambulances?” With the knife he takes swipes at the frost. “Don’t have a brain seizure, Louise! Don’t burst your appendix!”

“I won’t,” I say, getting into my snowsuit. He hasn’t been this chipper since before my mother left.

“If you do, I’ll be forced to operate!” Bathrobe billowing, hair on end, he flies down to the landing and scrapes at the long window next to the door.

“Could you?” I ask, surprised.

He considers. “I’d have to consult my atlas of human anatomy. Sharpen the paring knife.” He presses his forehead against the pane. “Virgin snow,” he says. “Pristine.”

“Somebody walked on our lawn.”

He scrapes a bigger clearing.

I say,“It was the German boy, I’ll bet.”

We discussed the Richters last evening. Mrs. Dingwall was right about their lawyer being somebody my father knows, a man from his office. Six years ago, my father him
self was involved in drawing up the papers for the adoption of the boy, whose name he couldn’t remember. What he did remember was how the Richters had wanted a baby girl, having lost their own baby girl ten years earlier, but at a church orphanage they found themselves taken with a boy, and not a baby either, a three-year-old. Which was better all around, my father felt. He said it would have been hard for people the Richters’ age to get a healthy newborn.

“Abelard,” he says now. “That’s his name. Abelard.”

I leave the house and plough my way to the trail of footprints. Once I’m in them, walking is easy enough. Everywhere, people have started shovelling. The older set of Dingwall twins, Larry and Jerry, are on the roof of their carport, heaving off shovelfuls of snow from each side and in time with each other so that what I see are white wings opening as the snow is thrown, folding as it drops. Behind them the sky is such a clear blue I feel drawn upwards, as a blue lake can draw you.

Sure enough, the footprints lead me to the O’Hearns’ house. The Richters’ house now. And there they are, Mr. Richter and the boy. Abelard. I own an old book, which was my father’s when he was my age, called
Peoples of the World,
and consequently I am surprised that the two of them aren’t wearing the short leather pants, suspenders and little Robin Hood hats that the father and son in the book have on. Abelard is dressed like any boy: blue jeans, brown jacket, brown cap. Mr. Richter, in a long black coat and black fedora, looks like a judge.

I move along to the Gorys’ property, directly across the road, where I hope I’ll be anonymous among a gang of little
girls tobogganing down a drift. Abelard does the shovelling, strong, fast throws. Mr. Richter sweeps what is left behind. The thought enters my mind that the Richters adopted a boy so he could do the hard labour around the house, and it is just then, as I’m feeling sorry for him, that Mrs. Richter comes out the front door.

Although she is dressed nothing like the German wife in my book, she is nevertheless very foreign looking, very dramatic. Big for a woman, much bigger than her husband, and wearing a red-and-orange skirt and red shawl. No coat or gloves. It takes me a moment to realize that her hair, braided and twined several times around her head, isn’t a brown hat. She carries a tray holding two steaming glasses, and Mr. Richter and Abelard stop work and each take one. She sets the tray on the porch wall. Abelard removes his cap, he’s hot, and she ruffles his hair, which is the same dark brown as hers. While he and his father drink, she does a little dance step and swirls her skirt. She points to the pattern her feet have made in a dusting of snow, and there is a discussion, in German supposedly (over the screaming of the little girls I can’t catch any words) regarding these patterns. Abelard puts his glass on the tray and stamps out his own pattern. Mrs. Richter wraps him in her shawl and they embrace before she unspools him. At what he says next she claps her hands and throws back her head, and then she breaks into song: “La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” This I clearly hear. So do the little girls, who go silent. She sounds like a lady on the radio. She sings the same phrase again, no words, only,“La, la, la, la, la, la, la.” Abelard glances in my direction. He puts his cap back on and picks up the shovel. Behind me the
children resume screaming and clambering up the drift.

Mrs. Richter turns. She opens her arms at all the snow, and then she turns again and seems to be including in her delight the little girls, and me as well. In a burst of feeling, a kind of anguish, I smile back.

Was Abel always saying “curiously enough”? Mrs. Richter thinks so. A couple of months after he died, she told me that she found herself using this expression all the time,“the way Abel used to.” She said,“You remember.”

No, I don’t, although I pretended to.

What I
have
noticed is how she and I and Mr. Richter seem to be acting like him in small ways, taking on his mannerisms and even his passions. He loved tree frogs and now so do I; I love their slim waists and gawky legs, I make special trips down to the ravine just to look for them. When he was nervous he’d pull on his earlobe. When he was listening to you, he’d cock his head to the right. Mrs. Richter now cocks her head. Mr. Richter pulls on his earlobe.

The examples go on and on. How he shelved his books: the tallest top left, the shortest bottom right, an eccentric arrangement I have been driven to adopt. And his smoking! None of us smoked, but within a week of the funeral his father and I were puffing on Player’s plain, Abel’s brand, and I observed that Mr. Richter held his cigarette the way Abel used to, between rigidly straight fingers.

As if his spirit flew piecemeal into the ether, and we gathered up whatever parts drifted back down. Despite ourselves, even against our wills.

We never went to church, we never said grace or bedtime prayers, not in my family. To my mother’s way of thinking, religion was the crutch of superstitious weaklings. God, Jesus, heaven and hell, that was all “a load of bull.”

My father, who is the grandson of an Anglican bishop, once gave me a lesson in the layout of a church (the pulpit, the altar and so on) as well as in the elementary tenets of the Protestant religion, the idea being that I’d then have some understanding of what most of the people in our neighbourhood did on Sunday mornings, and why they would go to the trouble. Considering that I was seven at the time, I found the magical components—the birth of Jesus, the resurrection and angels—extremely compelling, and I asked my father how he could know that such things
weren’t
true.

“I
don’t,”
he said.

I said,“Why don’t you believe in them, then?”

“Because I believe in mankind” was his impenetrable answer.

As I would later learn, he also believes in the miracle of life. Life appearing out of nothing and returning to nothing. He has said that anybody who tries to explain this miracle (by way of a parable, for example) is engaged in a process of debasement tantamount to sacrilege, since the defining
principle of a miracle is that there
is
no logical or even comprehensible explanation.

Which, I suppose, amounts to a more civil expression of my mother’s view.

But when I am seven, he tells me only that in our household we are non-believers and that I should answer “secular humanist” if the teacher asks me my religion. I answer “Protestant.” What’s more, I pray, starting out with “Our Father, who art in Heaven” as I’ve learned to do in school, and then begging to be popular or invisible. From the day that I first see Mrs. Richter, I pray for her to want to adopt me.

I am sick with love. Sometimes, when I’m thinking about her, a white light wavers at the edge of my vision, an angel shape, a young woman angel. I call her the Angel of Love because she seems even more desperate than I am for Mrs. Richter to notice me. At her urging, I write letters: