Some Great Thing (4 page)

H
E HAD BEEN PROMOTED
for the third time in eight years, and now, thanks to the Struthers name, he was appointed Director of Design and Land Use at the National Capital Division. His new colleagues were intelligent, competent people whose job was to create thoughtful policies that would shape the capital city. It was interesting work, a promising time.

In those days Ottawa was nonetheless a bleak little place. It teemed with people with searching intellects—lawyers, foreign servants, civil servants—people who could capture the world in a memo, people who could have made it a wonderful city. But when they left the office they found very little to do. The Arts Centre was built, but performances were amateurish. There was nowhere to eat, nowhere to drink, nothing to add to the store of experience (gained elsewhere) which allowed them to capture that world in a memo.

Simon loved it. He loved the potential, the blank canvas of it, the empty spaces across the city that suggested nothing but possibility. The population grew. Bureaucracy was growing. When Simon’s father and his friends first launched the public service, there were only 130,000 people living in the city. By the time Simon’s own career was underway there were that many people in the public service alone. Tens of thousands of capable minds—but the city still seemed to be empty.

Something was going to burst.

To tell his story one could begin anywhere. I could start with him as a teenager, when some habits first formed. I could start earlier, childhood, when his view of the world as a vessel of possible fictions first began to settle into the fabric of his body. But this later time stands out.

H
E WAS A MEMBER
of the Shakespeare Club, the Dance Club, the Dining Club. In the summers he joined the Five Lakes Fishing Club, which his father had helped to establish. He knew almost everyone. He associated with old Cambridge friends like Evelyn and Paul Overington (Evelyn and that cocktail dress!), Belinda and Henry Martin (Belinda in her bathing suit, “Please, Simon, no!”). He was close to some for a while.

Everyone knew Simon. They knew the Struthers name. Some thought they knew him intimately, but they could never tell you how.

T
HERE WAS ONE GOOD
restaurant, out of town, across the river, Madame Berger’s, where desperate people with taste would gather to sample, as Leonard Schutz put it, “the finer fruits of the earth and human ingenuity.” Leonard was one of Simon’s new colleagues at the Division.

One night Simon was invited by Leonard to join a gathering at this restaurant, and it was the night he first heard Kwyet’s name.

A
T MADAME BERGER
’
S
, T
HURSDAY
at seven, table flat and pale like a doctor’s wooden stick, say aah it’s nice to see us all together, viz:

The civil service generally, and the Division particularly, was made up of people caught in a constant battle between insecurity and self-aggrandizement. Most of them knew they were important but they usually found no material evidence of this so they puffed themselves up. And they were dubious of each other. Some weathered their difficulties better than others, and around the table that night was a good selection of those who coped and those who did not. In addition to Simon and Leonard, there was Eleanor Thomas, Renée le Mesurier, Randolph James III, and there was Leonard’s wife, Matty (who was not a civil servant).

Simon was suspicious of Matty at first because he could not comprehend why such a fresh turgid flower bloomed by Leonard’s rotten oak.

Drinks were served and Leonard explained a sort of ritual that they always followed on these evenings. With each course a different person would be chosen to speak—to tell stories—on a topic agreed upon by all. Leonard suggested they all speak about food because that was his chief enthusiasm. So with each course came a different story about food.

Leonard was chosen to speak during the main course, and his story was appropriately substantial.

And then Matty spoke—Matty for dessert—a sweet ending and a prelude to everything sweet.

“I’m not very good at telling stories,” she said. “Sorry.

“I don’t know whether Leonard talks about her much with you, but we have a daughter named Kwyet. She’s fifteen. Whenever I think of anything, I think of her. I’m not just being a mother. Kwyet is … My point is, if I have to talk about food …

“When Kwyet was eight, a little boy in her class bought her a cheap metal ring from the post office because he loved her. She didn’t love him but was too gentle to tell him, so for some reason she swallowed the ring in front of him and poisoned herself with the lead in it.

“I guess that’s a story about food, but it’s too short, isn’t it?

“She’s fine, of course.

“We had a funny little event a few years ago with Kwyet. I don’t know whether it’s funny, actually, but I will tell it quickly.

“Kwyet always has trouble deciding on anything. She has this puzzled, vague little face whenever she has to make a choice. So these two separate friends invited her to their places for dinner. One said, ‘Come over on Saturday and my dad will order pizza,’ and the other said, ‘Come over on Saturday and Mom will make chocolate pudding.’

“It was a hard choice, so she told both of them she would come and all day Saturday I watched her face get all pale—her eyebrows going in opposite directions while she was trying to read a book, one toward pizza, the other toward chocolate pudding. Choosing between the friends was hard too. The friends hated each other, but loved Kwyet, and she liked them both equally. By Saturday afternoon, under pressure from me, she had to decide which one she would go to. It got later and later, and I thought she was being rude to both sets of parents.

“She went outside and I watched her running up and down the street, maybe trying to see which direction felt better. Sometimes she seems a bit simple. Finally she came in and called them both, and instead of choosing one she chose neither. She stayed in and had to eat something Leonard made. What was it?”

“Duck. Two roast ducks. I always make two, because they are small. One for three …”

“So poor little Kwyet asked me later if she could have these girls over the following Saturday for pizza and chocolate pudding. She invited them both, and as soon as she did that she remembered they hated each other. All week she had the same problem all over again. And that same little face. She couldn’t bring herself to disinvite one or the other, and nothing I suggested was any help. Saturday came and she was silent all day. I tried
to make chocolate pudding discreetly so she wouldn’t feel like it was inevitable. And again it got later and later, until it was just too late.

“Both of these girls arrived at the door at exactly the same time, both were sort of pale and polite when I opened the door. The funny thing … the astonishing thing was that Kwyet didn’t say anything all night. That indecisive look was gone and there was another weirder look she gets sometimes which I can’t describe. She looked friendly and smiled at her friends and everything, but she didn’t really say a word.

“I ordered pizza and sat with them for a while. I think it was the pizza maybe. Once they started eating the pizza these two girls started joking with each other and laughing, and Kwyet had nothing to do with them. She just sat back and smiled. She didn’t even eat much. By the time I brought out the pudding, they were such good friends that I didn’t want to be near them. You know how giggly they get.

“Kwyet had one spoonful of pudding. I can see it, one spoon of pudding missing from the bowl.”

S
HE WAS JUST A
name then, you see. More than that, the name of silence—he didn’t know how it was spelled in those days.

Take hold of a word and rattle its cage of bones, then you will understand Kwyet.

A
ND REALLY, SHE
WAS
just a name, just a little girl—of no more interest to Simon than as the subject of Matty’s story. It was Matty who charmed, Matty who stretched his trousered mind to breaking point. Her mouth, when it teased out that phrase, “one spoon of pudding missing from the bowl,” a smiling, kissing, mischievous mouth, “one spoon of pudding.”

It is not much of a story, not much of an evening in itself, giving not much of an idea of the story of a man who is not much of a
man at all. But it was the evening he met Matty. It was the evening he began his affair with Renée. There were consequences. Matty told her story, the dinner ended, Simon drove Renée home and kissed her in his car.

Perhaps I should be more straightforward.

From his personnel file, which he later doctored along with those of his colleagues, you can learn the story of Struthers, Simon:

T
HE LIGHT OF A
welding torch is like nothing on this earth. You’ve noticed that. You’ve been on a site once or twice, getting your shoes a little dirty. You’ve looked at the frame of your dreams, the house you’ve put your money into, and you’ve seen hard hats and thick heads, bricks and wood, and black and gray men stooped in corners wearing gloves and welding things. You’ve seen their flames.

In 1968 I saw a flame.

Maybe you saw me. Maybe you were visiting the house two houses from the corner of Honeywood and Glyde, holding your wife’s hand or your husband’s hand, and you saw two men blowing fire on your dream, and all you really saw was two small people working on your own private miracle like you were God and we were your angels. Maybe you came right into that house that still had no
in
to come into and the foreman (the guy in the tie) pointed through the walls that weren’t there at two men with masks and said, “They’re welding your pipes.” Maybe you were a little shy or scared.

In 1968 I was huddled in a corner on a weatherless day with Johnny Cooper, who was showing me the one thing on earth that kept him calm. He was welding sections of an out-take pipe together like they had nothing to do with sewage, like they needed to be some seamless piece of cloth for a bride. And I watched his flame, and he watched his flame, and maybe you watched his flame, but that was not, my friend, the flame that made the difference. You can’t look at it, of course, that welder’s flame. We both had our visors down while you took a quick look at it and realized you shouldn’t look at all, and for maybe a split second we all wondered
who could be angry enough to give men such a bright fire, but that is not, I tell you, the flame I have in mind.

In 1968, on that very day, a woman with no pity came up and tapped me and Johnny Cooper on the back, both at the same time.

Some flames you can look at for a long red time. This woman tapped us on the back and it was the only time I ever saw Johnny relax his fists when he was touched. Johnny looked at her, and I looked at her, and Johnny turned off his torch and we both watched the flame suck back in shame and I can still hear the silence. Up came our visors and there she was, smiling like everything perfect was inside her skin.

I don’t know what we looked like—and if you were there looking at your new house feel free to tell me—but I have an idea that a picture of the three of us, Johnny, me, and her, would show this: two dirty welders in a silent land of promise. You’ll have to look at the picture to find out what I mean and where she went, but I will tell you something about promise: it keeps everything warm and it burns when you touch it.

Hold on and listen to the Man in Black for a minute:

I
FELT IT ON
my cheeks, my friend, and you know what I’m talking about. Her name was Kathleen Herlihy and the first thing she said was this:

“My name is Kathleen Herlihy.”

N
OW, I DON
’
T KNOW
or care about your life but there is one thing
I’d like to say about mine. It changes every second, and each second changes the next, but there have been one or two seconds that were more important than others. Kathleen Herlihy watched Johnny Cooper and Jerry McGuinty raise their ugly selves from a crouch to a stand and it was the first few seconds after they stood up that changed all their lives for ever. For she looked only at Jerry McGuinty.

“My name is Kathleen Herlihy.”

She looked at Cooper later, and she didn’t look at me for all that long, but it was long enough to shift all our future seconds in a different direction, and I can tell you with as much truth as there is in the great deep balls of the black god Johnny Cash that without that look I would never have held young Jerry in my hands or lost him.

I
DIDN
’
T KNOW WHAT
to say to her when she told us her name, but Johnny Cooper did.

“So?”

“So I was just drivin by and I saw yiz weldin.” In those days her voice touched your ears like a petal. “I was in my truck, so that’s why I came over.” And she was shy. Not shy looking at your feet sort of shy, but shy like she respected you and knew that if she showed her true self right away she would blind you.