Things As They Are? Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Things As They Are

  “Vanderhaeghe creates vivid, credible characters.… [These stories] draw the reader into the dramatic tensions that arise from people living at cross purposes.… Vanderhaeghe is an important voice.…”

  – Vancouver Sun

  “Guy Vanderhaeghe is extraordinarily adept at taking readers beyond the visible surface and into the emotional heart of his characters.… His vivid prose takes the reader into the skin of his creations.”

  – NOW

  “[Vanderhaeghe’s stories showcase] a flexible and authentic narrative voice; complex narrative strategy; precise rendition of place, time and mood; broad and penetrating intellect; generous and incisive wit; and remarkably felicitous language.… He brings readers closer to the pathos of human existence.… The particularity and precision of Vanderhaeghe’s characterization paradoxically opens onto universal issues.… Penetrating and moving.…”

  – Event

  “A solid performance from one of our most reliable fiction writers.”

  – Winnipeg Free Press

  “Things As They Are is impressively varied, ten pieces that capture the absurdity of the human condition, yet retain a compassion that gives them depth.”

  – Toronto Sun

  “Vanderhaeghe’s talent for seeing things as they are keeps Things As They Are from the grimness its themes might suggest. There is pain here, to be sure, and an aching awareness of our lack of generosity to each other, but it’s leavened with a high-spirited and unselfconscious heartiness that makes those conditions only a part of the broader range of human experience.”

  – Ottawa Citizen

  “Things As They Are is a terrific collection, full of memorable and moving characters vividly rendered.”

  – Broadway Magazine

  BOOKS BY GUY VANDERHAEGHE

  FICTION

  Man Descending (1982)

  The Trouble With Heroes (1983)

  My Present Age (1984)

  Homesick (1989)

  Things As They Are (1992)

  The Englishman’s Boy (1996)

  The Last Crossing (2002)

  PLAYS

  I Had a Job I Liked. Once. (1991)

  Dancock’s Dance (1995)

  Copyright © 1992 by G & M Vanderhaeghe Productions Inc.

  Trade paperback with flaps edition published 1992

  First Emblem Editions publication 2004

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher – or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency – is an infringement of the copyright law.

  National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Vanderhaeghe, Guy, 1951-

  Things as they are / Guy Vanderhaeghe.

  Originally published: Toronto : M&S, 1992.

  Short stories.

  eISBN: 978-1-55199-572-4

  I. Title.

  PS8593.A5386T45 2004 C813’.54 C2003-907280-0

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and that of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative. We further acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program.

  The events and characters in these stories are fictional. Any resemblance to actual persons or happenings is coincidental.

  SERIES EDITOR: ELLEN SELIGMAN

  EMBLEM EDITIONS

  McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

  75 Sherbourne Street,

  Toronto, Ontario

  M5A 2P9

  www.mcclelland.com/emblem

  v3.1

  To Morris Wolfe

  with thanks for help and

  encouragement from the beginning

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  King Walsh

  Man on Horseback

  The Master of Disaster

  Ray

  New Houses

  Teacher

  Fraud

  Home Place

  Loneliness Has Its Claims

  Things As They Are?

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  King Walsh

  KING CALLED ME LONG DISTANCE from the city again last night. He said, “They’re warning me to stay clear of Putt ’N’ Fun Town, leave off playing the mini-golf.”

  “King,” I said.

  “I ain’t going to do it,” he said.

  “Whatever you think is best, King,” I said.

  “Just so you know what’s really going on here,” he declared and hung up.

  King is my brother. He’s seven years older than me, turned seventy-eight last January. We were raised in Advance and both of us lived our whole lives here, until recent circumstances took King to the city.

  Everybody in Advance knows King Walsh. For seventy years more heads were wagged in this town over King Walsh’s mistakes than any other baker’s dozen of ordinary men. But King got forgiven his little errors, people liked him all the better for making them, and it didn’t hurt either that brother had a smile could light up a coal bin. However, the difference between an old man’s mistakes and a young man’s is that the ones the old man makes he’s probably got to live with the rest of his life. King’s learning that now, living his big mistake, the one that’s trapped him in a basement suite in his son’s house there in the city.

  Albert Walker met up with King and me that day in the beer parlour and talked us into going along with him as moral support to The Senior Silver Jets’ Wednesday afternoon Singles’ Dance. So moral support sat on tin chairs watching a couple dozen old widows dancing the foxtrot with each other and throwing us boys the hopeful come hither looks. I been a bachelor all my life, and like it that way, so I kept my eyes mostly wherever theirs weren’t.

  Tell the truth she was a pretty lean stag line, consisting of just four old bucks – King, Albert Walker, me, and Rudy Schmidt, who was acting as master of ceremonies because he’d been a cattle auctioneer before he retired and so was accustomed to public speaking. Now Rudy is a professional when it comes to talking but even he can’t hold a candle to Albert Walker. King was catching the brunt of it, that endless rambling on about this and that and a hundred per cent of nothing. But all of a sudden, out of the blue, Albert says something of interest. “King, remember that night you danced every dance on one leg at Kinbrae School?”

  King said he sure as hell did.

  The summer of 1935 was what they were talking about, the summer King broke his ankle, the summer I was fifteen and King had me drive his car out to Kinbrae School on a soft, starry night because he couldn’t work the clutch with a cast on. My brother was twenty-two that summer, his hair red and full as a rooster’s comb, and him a one-legged dancing fool. That night in Kinbrae he danced with every woman that didn’t drive him off with a stick when he hopped up to her. Thirty-three answered the call – not many women ever refused King. His chums slung his arms over their shoulders and poured rye into him between tunes and the band agreed to play through the midnight lunch so King didn’t cool down, go stiff, and bind up. Come two in the morning there were still more than twenty ladies, some old enough to have been his mother, lined up for a second go around. “Death before dishonour,” King said and jolted through the entire mixed assortment. Last partner of the
ball was Elsie Macintosh. The sun was standing in the window and her anxious father in the door when the band collapsed from exhaustion and the curtain came down on the spectacle. King married Elsie two years later. I wonder how many times she wished she could have took that final dance back.

  “Those days are long gone now, aren’t they, King? All the good times in the past,” said Albert with a mournful last-day-of-summer sound to his voice.

  If there’s one thing that King never could stand, it was a pisser and a moaner. So naturally he contradicted him on principle. “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “Well,” said Albert, “your one-legged dancing days are a thing of the past. I know that much.”

  “Ha!” said King.

  “You couldn’t even stand on one leg,” said Albert. “Remember, you’re seventy-six years old.”

  Seventy-six or not, King got up and showed him. He wobbled some but he stood.

  “Maybe you can stand,” allowed Albert, “but you sure as hell can’t dance.”

  Red flag to the bull. King scrambled to his feet, bellowing at auctioneer Rudy to get a goddamn polka on the goddamn turntable. Rudy said that wouldn’t do, the ladies found the polka too energetic for their time of life. Pardon his English, but ladies be damned! roared my brother. King Walsh was going to dance all around the hall – and do it on one leg. For that, a polka was required.

  Soon all the biddies had him surrounded and were clucking against rashness, but I could tell from the brightness of their eyes they truly hoped King would not be persuaded. He wasn’t. Give credit where credit is due though. None of those women agreed to dance with him; they knew better than to risk life and limb in the arms of a madman. She was a sight for sore eyes, that horse’s ass in the middle of the floor up on one leg like one of those pink flamingoes, his arms held out just as if they were cradling a woman.

  Rudy dropped the needle on “The Beer Barrel Polka,” King took his first hop, and the sidelines erupted in wild applause. And kept it up. The harder those old girls clapped and hooted, the bigger the head of steam King built, jerking and jigging and bouncing along with his tongue hanging out like a three-legged dog. Halfway around the dance floor he negotiated his first fancy turn and the crowd went berserk. “Give ’er, King! Give ’er, you old son of a bitch!” Rudy shouted in his auctioneer’s voice.

  King gave her. Let me say he was never shy of being the centre of attention. His bearings were starting to smoke and he was leaking oil, but he cranked her up three more notches and gave a ki-yi every turn he twisted out. Around and around he went, the widows clapping, and the old bucks hooting and stamping their feet until the dust started to lift from between the floorboards. King was showing them one hell of a good time, just like he had his whole life long.

  It was different with me. There, right in the midst of the hullabaloo, something peculiar happened. I never felt the like, before or since. Those fifty-five years that lay between a summer night in Kinbrae School and where I stood now, all that time folded in on me. Yesterday, today, even tomorrow, all of it went crooked and confused in my mind, I couldn’t separate one from the other. That woman King had tucked in his arms – that invisible woman – was Elsie the way she was that night many long years ago, slim and fair. Or maybe as she would have been if she hadn’t died in 1967 – old and tired like King and me. It was a lovely and terrible feeling both, the ends of life drawing in on you like that without warning.

  Then King’s hip bone snapped like a piece of chalk and down he dropped in a heap.

  The doctor ambulanced him to the city to have the hip replacement, they can’t do nothing that complicated in our hospital here in Advance. To cut a long story short, they operate, King catches pneumonia, almost dies, and then, soon as he can lift his head from the pillow, he starts agitating for release. They manage to hold him there for a time but in the end he gets an early discharge, on condition he promises not to live alone while he heals. This means moving in with his only child Sonny and precious daughter-in-law Myra.

  Myra is Sonny’s second wife and has a tight little mouth that looks like a cigarette burn on a plastic car seat cover. Lucy, the wife King liked, divorced Sonny about eight years ago. King’s never forgot the day she drove herself out from the city to tell him she was going to ditch his boy and brought along a bottle of Crown Royal to do it with. As soon as King saw the whisky he started in speculating what could be behind it. It came into his head maybe Lucy was in the family way. That’s the only news King could think of that went with a bottle of quality whisky. But, no, after she poured out a couple of shots at the kitchen table Lucy delivered her announcement. “King,” she said, “I’m here to tell you I’m leaving Sonny.”

  Now this was a bigger blow than you might think it was, because King was struck on Lucy. By this I don’t mean to say that he was cutting Sonny’s grass or even eager to – although with King and women a person can never be certain of anything. What I mean is that I think King may have loved his daughter-in-law the way he had loved his dead wife Elsie, for the things she was and he wasn’t.

  An even bigger surprise came when he asked her how Sonny was taking it and Lucy said, “I haven’t told Sonny. I left this morning with the car packed. As far as Sonny’s concerned, I’m tail-lights.”

  King asked her what the hell she was up to, treating Sonny so inconsiderate.

  Lucy looked him straight in the eye and said, “If I thought anybody would understand, I believed it would be you, King. Admit it. You can’t stand being more than an hour in the same room with Sonny.”

  King denied this, even though what Lucy said is true. He just kept repeating that this was one shit of a way for Lucy to behave.

  “Don’t get holier than thou with me,” Lucy told him. “From what Sonny says, you skipped out on him twice yourself.”

  “It wasn’t Sonny I walked out on,” King said. “It was his mother. And I’ll tell you something else, Lucy. I never made two bigger mistakes in my life.”

  “Let me tell you something, King,” Lucy said. “I never got much out of seven years of marriage to Sonny, but I did learn something from seven years of watching you.”

  King asked what that might be.

  “To take a chance on any number of mistakes as long as you make them running after life. I always had a soft spot for you, King,” she said. “So let’s make this goodbye a friendly one. And let’s drink to life.”

  You can be sure that King never refused a drink to life. Which is how it came about that he was the one who said goodbye to his son’s wife and toasted his son’s divorce before Sonny even heard about it.

  King surely hated the hospital. Not for any normal reason, but mostly because the doctors and nurses insisted on calling him Mr. Walsh. He wouldn’t shut his mouth on the topic. I heard about it every time I visited.

  “I can’t get them to call me King,” he said. “Nothing but Mr. Walsh.”

  “Maybe it’s a rule,” I suggested, “calling patients mister.” I didn’t suggest maybe he’d turned them stubborn, bullying them to have his way.

  “They ought to call a person by their name,” he said.

  “Well, come to that, King isn’t your birth certificate name,” I reminded him. “You aren’t really King.” It was our Auntie Vi that gave him the name when he was three years old and strutting around my mother’s parlour bold as brass. She said, “Now look at that one. Don’t he act like he thinks he’s a future King of England.” And King he’s been for seventy-five years since. Nobody ever said it didn’t suit him.

  King’s got mad at me a time or two in his life, but never as mad as he was the day I told him his name wasn’t really King. “I’ve never been nothing but King and by the Jesus nobody’s going to change that now! Why do you think they want to mister everybody? I’ll tell you why! It’s easier to stack you here and stack you there if everybody’s the same size, size mister! Call me King!” he shouted out the door and down the hospital corridor. “Give me my name back, goddamn it!”


  Once King escaped City Hospital I knew he was never going back. It had put the fear of the Almighty God into him. If he hadn’t been scared, none of what Sonny said would have had any effect on him. King would have done what he originally intended – gone back to his house in Advance.

  But Sonny kept picking away at him. “You want to land up in hospital again, Dad? What if you fall in that house with nobody to help you? Don’t be silly. Come live with us, Dad.”

  Of course, nobody knew that Sonny was promoting this charitable idea because the bank was threatening to take the house he was inviting his father to come live in. This was a result of Sonny overselling his financial situation to Myra when they were dating. Naturally when they marry, Myra has expectations, so Sonny buys her a house big enough and expensive enough to match the lies he’s been telling her. For a while he just manages to carry the mortgage and then the recession hits, his commissions go in the crapper, he misses a few payments, and the bank starts clearing its throat. Still, for shame, Sonny won’t come clean with Myra. He’d rather go to work on King. “Come live with us, Dad. We got the suite in the basement standing empty, your own bathroom, fridge, stove. Sell the house in Advance.”

  The really important part of this pitch is the part about selling the house, because it’s the only way Sonny can get a sizeable sum of cash into King’s hands where it can be pried loose. Finally, King caves in and sells. No sooner is the cheque deposited than Sonny comes out with his sorry tale of woe. He’s in temporary difficulties because of the economy, the GST. The goddamn government is a vampire, it’s drinking his blood. The bank is a vulture picking his bones clean. But if the money from the sale of the house in Advance was used as a lump payment to reduce his mortgage to a manageable size, he could breathe again. Don’t misunderstand him, Sonny says. If he only had himself to think about, the bankers could take it, flinty-hearted cocksuckers. But Myra, it’s her dream home, she loves it, the air-conditioning, central vacuum, Jenn-Air grill, the underground sprinkler system, the chandelier in the dining room – he can’t imagine what the shock of losing it would do to her.