Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Read online

  “Bob was easy to love,” I said. “Years ago I had the most tremendous crush on him.” The words took me as much by surprise as they did her.

  Immediately, Anne looked startled. She gave a glance over her shoulder to make sure we were alone. I knew what she was thinking. How dreadful it would be if Donny ever heard me say such a thing. But having confirmed her husband was nowhere in the vicinity, she relaxed. “Why, Pal Joey,” she said, grinning with mischievous delight, “the things you say. Just make sure Donny never hears you talk like that. You’d never get in this door again if he knew you had once had designs on his brother.”

  I was mildly offended that Anne had misunderstood what I was saying. “It wasn’t lust,” I told her. “It was just that Bob was so kind. When the other boys started picking on me, he would say a few quiet words and it would end. It wasn’t that they were afraid of him; he had presence. And Bob liked being needed. Bob liked taking care of people.”

  She gave me a puckish look. It was as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “So now I know why you’ve been pumping me for stories about Bob and Donny for all these years. You are still lovelorn.”

  Who could resist Bob Peel’s beauty and kindness? I couldn’t. Even though I always knew that he was up a blind alley in my heart, unreachable.

  This was nothing I wanted to talk to her about. So I said, “Lovelorn? Maybe for July of 1967. A month is my expiry date for carrying a torch.”

  Disguising my pain and grief with flippancy worked. Anne laughed and I smiled, poured myself another splash of tequila, and thought of the two of us, Donny and me, keepers of the memory of Bob Peel, the boy who had never wanted or asked to be admired, only loved.

  Anything

  WHEN TONY JAPP ARRIVED without an appointment at his agent’s office to announce he was finished with the business, Probert squirmed uneasily in his high-back-mesh-executive ergonomic chair until an opportunity came for him to break in and ask, “So is this about Betty?” Betty, Tony’s wife of thirty-five years, had died three months before. The question was not unreasonable, given how cut up his client had been by his loss.

  All Japp said was, “No,” sounding as if he meant it. But then he was an actor.

  They talked for a few minutes more, Probert looking understanding and empathetic, Japp stoic and resolute – like Brutus before he threw himself on his sword. Tony had once played that role at Stratford to good notices. At last, his agent sighed and murmured, “I know you, Tony. Six months, twelve at the outside, and you’ll be asking about jobs, audition calls. Acting’s in your blood.”

  “It was,” said Japp. With that they shook hands and Tony left, feeling only a little disappointed that Probert hadn’t tried harder to dissuade him from laying to rest his old life.

  Probert’s prediction was wrong. It took almost a year and a half before Tony Japp, in a way neither of them could have foreseen, climbed back on the acting horse. By then he was living on the Qu’Appelle Valley property that had been bequeathed to Betty by her parents, frugal, industrious people who had left her pretty well off when they died. Nine months after Tony gave Probert the news that he was kicking the acting-can down the road, he made another decision that left his friends and colleagues in Toronto wagging their heads in disbelief. He moved to Saskatchewan. The guy’s unmoored by grief pretty much summed up their reaction.

  Tony suspected unmanned by guilt came closer to hitting the mark. After all, he had never grasped Betty’s sentimental attachment to her family’s cottage in the Qu’Appelle Valley. His wife had always claimed to have been happiest there – although Tony had trouble believing anything even remotely pleasant could have taken place in that godforsaken setting. By July, the lake floated leprous-looking archipelagos of blue algae; the barren, parched hills surrounding this toxic puddle left Tony feeling as if he were residing on the site of some nuclear disaster that had blasted every living thing with a lethal dose of radioactivity. He thought of the place as “Chernobyl,” a nickname he was careful never to let escape his lips when his wife was within earshot. She would have gone ballistic.

  As soon as Betty got her hands on the property, she began a relentless renovation and expansion of the cottage. The work dragged on for five summers and Tony was luckily absent for most of the construction since he had gigs at various summer drama festivals. When he chanced a few discreet remarks about the expense and practicality of Betty’s home improvement frenzy, he got a tart rebuttal: “God isn’t making any more lakes. The value of recreation property will only go up with time. It’s an investment.”

  Tony knew that his wife was not really intent on upping the value of the property; what she was busy doing was feathering them a nest for their golden years. Winterizing it so it could be occupied year-round was what tipped her hand. Betty’s plan was for them to retire there when Tony finally came to his senses and agreed to give up acting.

  Telling Probert that his forsaking stage and screen had had nothing to do with Betty had been a bald-faced lie. Before she had fallen ill, Betty had been able to talk about little else. “You’ve had a good run, Tony. Take it easy now, enjoy life. What Mom and Dad left us put our money worries to rest. Face it, you’re never going to top Aid or get back to where you once were. It’s just not in the cards,” she would say, giving him a little tough-love, truth-telling lecture that always sent him into a three-day sulk.

  Aid had been the highlight of Tony’s career, a CBC series in which he had starred as Bobby Casgrain, a legal aid lawyer whose dyslexia had pinned the stupid label on him as a boy, the child of an unmarried welfare mother whose drug habit had landed him in the care of stern foster parents. These psychic scars had turned Bobby into a social crusader, a righteous defender of down-and-outers, a rule-flouting lawyer often cited by judges for contempt, a legal bad boy affectionately supervised by his wise, matronly boss, Alice Dawe, the supportive, nurturing Mommy he had never known. Casgrain was the quintessential Canadian Perry Mason, a defender of the marginalized, the scourge of heartless Crown prosecutors and prejudiced cops.

  The moderate success of Aid during the early 1990s had earned Tony tepid Canadian fame, although that had now cooled to the point where only occasionally, very occasionally, did somebody passing him on the street throw him a puzzled glance as if to say, You look familiar. Didn’t we go to school together?

  But Betty’s death had left him with concerns other than giving a boost to his sagging star. He was nagged by feelings of guilt, feelings that he had an obligation to appreciate what his wife had loved, to take a stab at accepting what Betty had spent so long preparing for them. A retirement home in the valley.

  But before he could do his duty by Betty, the condo in Toronto needed to be sold, loose ends tidied up, and arrangements made to ship his belongings halfway across the continent. All of this took much longer than he expected, the result of which was that he had arrived in the Qu’Appelle Valley in late autumn, winter ready to pounce. Which it did shortly, with a vengeance. Soon howling blizzard followed on the heels of howling blizzard. On the days when the sky didn’t blanket everything in sight with a pall of snow, the wind came shrieking down from the hills to thud against his doors, to lament in his roof vents, to groan in the throat of his chimney.

  Suddenly Chernobyl had gotten much worse. Chernobyl had frozen solid. Yet as relentlessly white and empty as the landscape had become, it was nothing compared to the void within him. After his wife’s death, Tony’s friends had talked him into seeing a therapist. But he had given up on counselling because, as far as he could see, it wasn’t doing him any good. Now he wondered if maybe his therapist, a very pleasant, sympathetic, capable young woman, hadn’t been able to get through to him because there had been nothing for her to reach, that his core was a blank, had always been a blank.

  Perhaps that had been the root of his bewilderment on those occasions when other actors talked about recognizing some part of themselves in a character, of using that bit to begin to flesh out a role, to add layers to
the onion. They had been talking about working from the inside out, which had always seemed strange to him. A notion he distrusted. Because Tony Japp had always been an outside-in actor. He began with the words on the page, although they had never been all he needed. He had always required something more, something tangible, something real and solid, something he could touch and handle. He had needed to hold the onion, and for Tony Japp the onion had always been the right costume, the right prop.

  In Aid the onion had been Bobby Casgrain’s lawyer’s robe spattered with “two all-beef patties, special sauce …” and Tim Hortons doughnut-glaze stains. Bobby’s grubby appearance had been a recurring joke worked and reworked by the showrunner. But for Tony that greasy rag wasn’t a joke; it was Casgrain, not just camouflage that lulled prosecutors and judges into underrating him, taking him for an incompetent mook. The robe was Casgrain’s history, a messy life made visible.

  If he had had to rely on locating that squalor inside himself, Tony would have come up empty-handed. His life had always been a neat and tidy affair. Sometimes he would recall, with a twinge, overhearing two young actors talking about him. One of them had said, “The only part Japp ever got exactly right is the one in his hair.” At the time he had been able to dismiss that remark as simple envy. Because with the right costume, he had always been right for any role. Tony Japp had never suffered from typecasting, had never lacked for work.

  Yet when the odd spell of unemployment came, Betty had complained he was impossible to live with, a moody pain in the ass. Now Tony asked himself if those infrequent stretches of joblessness hadn’t provided him with a troubling glimpse of what he faced now each and every morning in Chernobyl: his profound, essential emptiness.

  His therapist had encouraged him to express his anger over the loss of his wife, which she assured him was a normal response. But Tony wasn’t sure he felt angry. He could simulate anger for the counsellor, which he did convincingly on any number of occasions. But the line between what he felt and what was just acting was never clear. He did feel a terrible grief over his wife’s death, of that he had no doubt, but he couldn’t be sure that the tears he shed in the therapist’s office weren’t simply squeezed out of him to fulfill her expectations of how he ought to be behaving. It was easy enough to do. For years he had wept on cue for cameras and audiences.

  Spring came in torturous increments. On the lake the ice began to rot, forming tiny puddles that glinted maniacally in the strengthening sun. Japp’s eaves gargled meltwater and the sand on the beach shyly crept out from beneath the snow. The worst winter in a decade was ending. Then one morning as Tony stood on his front steps drinking his morning coffee in a weak shimmer of sunshine, a whitetail doe staggered on to his lot and crumpled to the ground, lay there panting, stark ribs heaving under its mangy hide. Tony ransacked his fridge for anything a deer might eat, but the doe was too weak to take a carrot or even a leaf of lettuce from his hand.

  In a panic, he called the cell of the local handyman, a fellow he had often seen riding around in a half-ton with a 30.30 in a gun rack in his back window, and implored him to come put the animal out of its misery. But Bits Bodnarski didn’t view this as an emergency; besides, he was busy pumping out a septic tank and estimated he couldn’t make it to Tony’s place in less than four or five hours. Given Tony’s description of the deer’s condition, Bits thought the doe would be long gone before he got there but if Tony wanted him to haul the body to the dump he was willing to do that.

  A city boy and a newcomer to the area, Tony had no idea who else to turn to, what else to do in the unnerving situation he found himself in. The thought of watching the deer slowly expire before his very eyes threw him into a panic. Suddenly, he became determined to put distance between himself and the deer, between himself and Chernobyl. He booked a room in The Bessborough in Saskatoon, jumped into his car, and beat it, leaving Bodnarski to deal with the mess.

  Next morning Tony decided to go for a walk in downtown Saskatoon, hoping a little air might dispel the previous night’s morbid dream about the doe. A nightmare garishly embroidered with vivid, gruesome details that he couldn’t remember actually having witnessed while kneeling beside the dying animal: a swollen tongue lolling in a blue-grey mouth, an eye scummed with a thick, yellowish mucus; a pungent, scorched-coffee-bean stench rising from the hide.

  On his stroll, Tony stumbled on a vintage menswear store that piqued his interest. Thirty minutes later he left the shop with a leather hat box under his arm. According to the owner, the woman who had left the hat with him on consignment had told him it had never been worn. Her grandfather had ordered the hat, a homburg, from Europe in 1950, but before it arrived the old man had died from a massive coronary. For sixty years the homburg had been shuttling from one of his descendants to another until it had finally passed to her. But as she had said, “What use is a stupid-looking hat to me?”

  Tony had fallen in love with the hat at first sight.

  Back at the hotel, he unsnapped the brass clasps of the hat box and reverently laid the hat, a dove-grey felt with Prussian blue velvet band, on his bed. The leather sweatband was in immaculate condition, not the slightest discolouration. As the woman had claimed, the homburg had clearly never touched anyone’s head. It was virgin.

  The hat was merely a taste, an amuse-bouche, just enough to make Tony aware how ravenous he was, how starved he was for the full-meal-costume deal. The Yellow Pages yielded only one tailor who offered custom-made suits. Within the hour, he found himself in a seedy section of town in a small shop run by an Iranian immigrant. When Tony showed the man a picture of the 1930s-era suit he had located on a website and had printed off in the hotel’s business centre, the tailor assured him he could have it ready for him in forty-eight hours, no problem, “Same as Hong Kong. Better than Hong Kong.” Tony selected a charcoal wool pinstripe and patiently submitted to having his measurements meticulously taken.

  By the end of the day he had visited several other men’s clothing stores and completed his costume: a trench coat with a leather collar, a couple of dress shirts with French cuffs, a pair of distinctly foreign-looking Italian shoes, a set of abalone cufflinks. He was excited, just as he used to be when a role started to come together, when he sensed himself getting a handle on a part. Best of all, he felt himself filling up, not feeling quite so hollow anymore.

  The suit was ready on time, just as promised. And Tony had been able to extend his reservation at the hotel. Location was every bit as important to him as the costume. The Bessborough, built in 1928, had a marble-floored lobby, crystal chandeliers, and well-worn Bergère chairs in the hallways, the proper stage setting for the man he was envisioning. Maybe not quite Grand Hotel, but then he wasn’t John Barrymore’s Baron Felix von Geigern, except for the Homburg. Even more important than the physical setting The Bessborough provided was the hotel’s reputation for sheltering ghosts.

  Tony had learned that from the teenaged bellhop who had shown him up to his room when he had checked in. The kid was obsessed with “the Bez’s ghosts.” The soul of the suicide who had thrown himself over an upper-floor railing and cracked the marble floor of the lobby when he landed there. The man in a grey suit and fedora who wandered the hallways late at night, but, hey, nothing to worry about from him, he always gave everyone a nice smile, that was it.

  When Tony had spotted the hat he had immediately thought, What better way to banish the ghost he had become than to play a ghost.

  Tony came down from his room a little before six and seated himself in one of the Bergère chairs near the entrance to the restaurant. In his hand he held his final prop, a copy of Georges Bernanos’s Sous le soleil de Satan, a book he had picked up that afternoon in a second-hand bookstore. Tony had thought that the reference to Satan on the cover had a nice atmospherish touch to it and that a French novel wasn’t really at odds with his conception of the character he was playing: a pre–World War II gentleman of Mitteleuropa, cosmopolitan, slightly jaded, and frayed by history, a
man who by now would have been in his grave for nearly fifty years. But that was the point, wasn’t it? A ghost was supposed to be dead.

  He sat there for an hour without anybody giving him a second glance. Not the harried-looking business travellers who bustled by him into the restaurant, nor the families from rural Saskatchewan visiting the city on shopping safaris. Tony felt underappreciated, a little like he had when Probert hadn’t more forcefully protested his decision to quit acting. Which led him to hunt up excuses for why he wasn’t attracting more attention. First of all, it wasn’t exactly the hour people expected to encounter spectres. Second, matinees were always a tougher sell, audiences less responsive and appreciative.

  Tony decided to fuck it, find some place outside the hotel to eat.

  His mood lightened a little as he walked over the Broadway bridge. Spring was becoming a reality. The air was milder, softer; sunshine flashed on the scales of the river and the trees bore pale green parasols of budding leaves. It wasn’t a stretch to imagine yourself in Budapest, sauntering over the Danube.

  And, even more encouraging, he was drawing looks from those he met on the bridge, most of them hipper young people than the sort you ran into at The Bessborough. One young Johnny Depp wannabe in a trilby even gave him a grin and a thumbs-up, one wearer of hats saluting another. Tony asked himself when was the last time he’d seen an actor in a homburg? Al Pacino in The Godfather II? David Suchet in Agatha Christie’s Poirot? At any rate, it put him in distinguished company.

  He chose to take a light supper in a French-style bistro. Gratifyingly, one or two heads turned when he made his aloof and self-possessed entrance and was seated at a table beside a window where he could watch people strolling about, enjoying one of the first truly warm evenings. Placing his homburg and Sous le soleil de Satan conspicuously on the table, he asked for a glass of red wine and a plate of charcuterie in the faintly Germanic-sounding accent he had been working on all afternoon, nothing Colonel Klinkish, just the slightest shading of pronunciation and intonation. When the food and wine arrived, Tony shot his French cuffs and tucked in with more appetite than he’d had in ages. He even indulged in dessert: a vínarterta, a double espresso, and an Armagnac.