Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 21

  Looking around him, Jack realized his anger had swept him in the opposite direction from the bank, farther east along Jorgensen’s street. It was déjà vu all over again. There he was right in front of a house that only a few weeks ago he had been peering at from his wife’s BMW while Linda chattered away in his ear, flushed by the news that the property’s owners were in the process of having their home appraised for the market. But her excitement about the house wasn’t professional. Linda was sure it was perfect for the two of them.

  There he had sat while Linda enthusiastically enumerated the virtues of the monstrosity before them, forefinger emphatically tapping the driver’s wheel. The city had recently designated it a heritage building, which in her books gave it an irresistible cachet. For the life of him, Jack couldn’t see why the municipal nabobs had bestowed this dubious distinction except that the house looked ancient, even if it was nothing of the kind, hadn’t even clocked a century yet. Built in the Gothic revival style, an architectural fad already passé when the eyesore had gone up in the 1920s, this prairie manoir boasted a parapet, a slate roof, a duo of marble gryphons mounting guard on the front door, and a cuddly, cute tower nestled coyly up against the east end of the house. The only fucking things missing were a moat, a drawbridge, and a donjon.

  In spite of the Ye Olde chintziness, Jack found the place genuinely disturbing. He could just make out a presence hovering behind the stained-glass window at the top of the tower, someone who he sensed was looking fixedly down at him. If whoever was up there was trying to intimidate him, he’d give him as good as he got. He was prepared to enter into a staring contest if that’s what the watcher wanted. After all, he certainly wasn’t doing anything wrong; the whole raison d’être of the house was to elicit attention. So don’t act hostile when you get it.

  But the feeling of being subject to some cold, probing, clinical examination grew in Jack with every moment that passed, swelling his chest with panic. Heart banging, he lowered his eyes, and before he knew it his feet were carrying him away from the house. For the life of him he couldn’t say exactly why this Disney-enchanted-kingdom nightmare filled him with such anxiety and apprehension.

  Just one more curveball that life was throwing him. Ever since his wife had gotten her realtor’s licence, the curveballs had kept slicing by him while he stood flat-footed, bat lamely propped on his shoulder.

  Linda had amazed him with her talent, her flair for hawking houses. And not just houses. Five years ago she had gone into the commercial property sector and had become her office’s number-one earner, raking in some very big bucks indeed. Jack’s teacher’s pension now accounted for little more than pin money in the family budget. Linda was the breadwinner, and she made no bones about letting him know that she and she alone was in charge of the big financial decisions. When the haunted castle hit the market, she was buying it. End of discussion.

  How difficult Jack found it to reconcile this ruthlessly driven woman with the girl he had married forty years ago, a girl so unsophisticated and unworldly that he had worried about her fitting in with the self-styled “intellectuals” of the Apollo Room, wincing whenever she said something gauche in the presence of Daddy Lenin. Jack had wanted to protect his wife from condescension and the killingly tolerant, understanding smiles that his friends turned on her.

  Now it was he who needed protecting from her and her colleagues’ condescension. Those bluff, practical men and women who knew exactly where they stood in the realtor pecking order, their rank determined by their sales: Executive Circle, President’s Circle, Director’s Circle, Rookie Circle. There was no question about Linda’s status. She was absolutely top gun Executive Circle. Her title had earned her deference at the office and she expected the same at home.

  Jack meant to do something about that. He was tired of riding in the back seat. A visit from Daddy Lenin might take some of the wind out of Linda’s sails. Jorgensen had a talent for doing that. Daddy’s presence would be a reminder to Linda of what she had done in the past.

  As for installing herself as châtelaine of the eyesore château, at the end of the day Jack would have something to say about that too. The horseshit had to stop somewhere. There was only so much a person could tolerate.

  Monday afternoon Jack spent tippling cooking wine, chopping and dicing meat and vegetables. While he did these things, he brooded over questions he had wanted to ask Daddy for forty years. Had his supervisor really encouraged him to examine the fairness and legitimacy of Robert Brasillach’s trial because he thought it a topic worthy of historical inquiry? Did he really have so much confidence in the principle of academic freedom that he believed it was possible to argue that the moon-faced, spectacled Brasillach had been sent to a firing squad by a kangaroo court? Because Daddy Lenin had made it very clear that that was the line he wanted Jack to take. Or had he simply sent his graduate student down the academic coal mine to see if the air would be toxic for Kurt Jorgensen if he pursued similar scholarly interests?

  Daddy had been cunning, a master at selling himself as a certain winner in the academic stakes race. His colleagues may have resented his arrogance, but they were also a little overawed by his presumed promise. After all, at twenty-seven, the precocious Jorgensen was already the author of two highly regarded articles that had appeared in prestigious journals devoted to the history of ideas. Even more impressive, he had a letter from the distinguished Parisian house, Gallimard, professing interest in publishing his doctoral dissertation on Charles Maurras, once he had finished satisfactorily revising and expanding it to book length.

  So why hadn’t he been recruited and hired by a university of higher standing? Only Stoyko, who had gotten himself into Daddy’s bad books, had ever had the temerity to actually wonder out loud why this supernova had chosen to blaze in the heavens of a prairie backwater. Stoyko liked to speculate that it was the draconian anti-sodomy laws still on the books in many American jurisdictions that had enticed Jorgensen to Canada. Once Pierre Elliott Trudeau had declared that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation, Daddy Lenin had assumed the Great White North was, as Stoyko put it, “a pederast’s paradise.”

  But Stoyko’s sniping was largely ignored because by then the Jorgensen fan club was in full bloom. His Survey of Modern History was the most popular class in the department, perhaps even the entire College of Arts and Science, Daddy packing the biggest lecture hall on campus to the rafters, stalking the stage, lecture notes abandoned on the lectern, freestyling his way through rambling monologues. Jorgensen, the acid-tongued iconoclast, was perfect for the times. Young parricides who made it an article of faith to trust no one over thirty were happy to hear him slash and burn the reputations of everything and everyone their parents admired.

  Daddy liked to point out that as late as 1938, Churchill had declared that if Great Britain ever lost a war he hoped it would find a Hitler to lead it. Was the booze-addled British aristo pining to play führer in England’s green and pleasant land?

  And Franklin Dumbo Roosevelt, the president around whose head every right-thinking liberal loved to draw a halo, Roosevelt the sainted democrat, was he entitled to all that adulation? According to Daddy, it was Roosevelt who had done more than anybody else to establish the “imperial presidency.” Against long-established precedent that no president serve more than two terms, FDR had run for office a third and then a fourth time. A blatant play for absolute power, naked Caesarism.

  And let us not forget Senator Harry S. Truman, Daddy Lenin would say, the statesman who had opined that if Germany looked to be winning the war, the United States should support Russia, and if Russia seemed to be getting the upper hand, then Germany should become the recipient of American aid so as to kill off as many Germans and Russians as possible.

  Another day, Daddy scrawled a list of names on the blackboard: Dostoevsky, Wagner, Rilke, Valéry, Eliot, Pound, Celine, Hamsun, Degas, Rodin, Renoir, Cézanne. What do all these men have in common aside from being among the most celebrat
ed artists of the modern age? he had asked the class. Why, they are all anti-Semites. Every mother’s son of them. Think about it.

  Nobody had known what to make of that.

  But if Jorgensen was a crowd-pleaser as a teacher, he was equally skilled at navigating his course through the university bureaucracy. With two more years of probation before he was eligible for tenure, Daddy had suggested that Jack request him as a thesis supervisor. But to make this kosher, the History Department had to be persuaded to appoint Daddy an adjunct professor, a bit of jiggery-pokery that made him eligible to supervise graduate theses before he received tenure. All of which had left Jack basking in the warm feelings that he had been hand-picked by the great man to study with him, that he had been the number-one draft pick by the number-one professor in the league.

  Dinner was in the oven by four, and Jack had drained the last of the cooking wine and was dipping into a bottle of Macallan. By five-thirty he was anxiously peering through the picture window, searching the street for any sign of the guest of honour. He worried that Daddy might arrive late. He wanted to see him comfortably settled before Linda got home. Jack had decided not to inform her they would be entertaining a blast from the past tonight because she would have vetoed the whole thing; guest and hostess colliding on the doorstep would have most definitely ruined his little surprise.

  Just a few ticks short of six, he spotted Jorgensen churning up the street, trench coat billowing and flapping around his knees. Jack made sure to let the doorbell ring a few times before answering it; looking too eager to welcome Daddy wouldn’t set the correct tone. After three insistent peals of the bell, he popped the door and said, “Hello, Kurt.”

  Jorgensen snapped him a nod, walked straight past him into the living room, and hurled himself down on the sofa in his trench coat. From that vantage point he inspected the room with a savage gaze.

  Five years ago Linda had given a free hand and a blank cheque to an interior designer. The superannuated artiste had dictated “a mid-century Danish teak look.”

  “Personality plus,” Daddy observed.

  “To the max,” conceded Jack, reluctant to defend the look. “But I’m sure you could use a drink. I think we have pretty nearly everything. But I remember you had a taste for Scotch. How does a bit of single malt sound?”

  “I wouldn’t say no. Nothing but a few drops of water to break the surface tension.”

  Well put, thought Jack. He slipped into the kitchen, fixed Daddy a very hefty drink, and generously refreshed his own. When he returned and leaned down to hand Jorgensen his glass, Jack felt himself tilting, and barely managed to correct the list before he toppled into Daddy’s lap. No doubt about it, he had taken on more liquid ballast than was wise on an empty stomach. “Let me take your coat,” he said. “Stay awhile.”

  “We’ll see,” said Daddy. Jack didn’t know what that was supposed to mean. Then came the abrupt demand: “Where’s Linda?”

  “Linda? She often does a bit of paperwork in the office at the end of the day. She shouldn’t be too long.” Jack didn’t fancy Linda as a topic of conversation this early in the game. He was holding that off for the dessert course.

  Just then he heard the clunk of the automatic garage door being activated, followed by the expensive purr of his wife’s bimmer rolling up the driveway. Today she decides to come home early. Fuck me gently. “Why, there she is now,” he exclaimed with manufactured brightness. “If you’ll excuse me a sec.”

  He reached the back door just as his wife was shouldering her way into the kitchen, arms stacked with binders, a laptop balanced precariously on top of them. A rust-coloured suit, a string of amber beads, an ash-blond French bun fastened with a tortoiseshell hair comb lent her fluster an undeniable elegance.

  “Let me take those,” he mumbled, relieving her of her load and dumping it on the kitchen island.

  Linda’s nose wrinkled. “What’s that smell?”

  “Beef bourguignon. I went all out for a Monday night.”

  “No, not that. Has someone been smoking in the house?”

  Jack caught a telltale whiff of cigarette smoke threading its way from living room to kitchen. The son of a bitch had made himself at home and lit up. “We have a guest. Somebody unexpected,” he said quickly. “You’ll never guess.”

  “Who?” she said. “And who gave him, her, permission to smoke in the house?” Linda was beginning to wind herself up, and Linda wound up was no one to mess with.

  “Jorgensen. Kurt Jorgensen.” Linda stared at him blankly. The name didn’t seem to register. “Daddy Lenin,” said Jack excitedly. “Now there’s a name you probably never expected to hear again.”

  Linda’s face stiffly set in a mask. “What the hell is he doing here?”

  “We ran into each other the other day. I invited him to dinner.”

  “You’re insane, Jack,” Linda said in a husky whisper, retrieving her car keys from the counter and heading for the door. “Totally and completely out of your tiny fucking mind.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out,” she said. “You two have fun.” The pneumatic closer softly eased the door shut on her departure.

  Out of the corner of his eye Jack caught a glimpse of his blurry reflection on the stainless steel door of the fridge. It reminded him somehow of the ill-defined figure behind the stained-glass window in Linda’s new dream home. He felt terrified. This wasn’t like the panic attacks that had robbed him of breath in his days of teaching school. Those were of a different order. This, however, was a fucking attack of doom.

  Braced against the kitchen island he heard the garage door roll up, Linda’s much-loved bimmer roar to life, the sharp squeak of rubber as she backed down the driveway at a rate of speed that sounded, to Jack’s ears, unsafe and uncalled for. And just like that, as inexplicably as it had poked its head up, his anxiety retreated. Jack took a deep breath of relief and headed back to the living room.

  Jorgensen had removed his filthy trench coat, tossed it in a bundle on the sofa, and posed himself in the frame of the picture window, backlit by slanting fall sunshine. He’s unveiled himself for Linda, Jack thought. There was no other word to describe it. Daddy Lenin’s suit looked to be salvage from some Goodwill rack, a Rat Pack number with narrow jacket lapels, tightly tapering trousers. What closet or suitcase had this perfectly preserved fossil been hidden away in for all these years? How to account for its immaculate condition? And how had Daddy managed the same trick, kept himself equally untouched by time? Jack felt a twinge of envy noting Jorgensen’s flat stomach, his Sinatra-like angularity, the way he casually took the cigarette from the corner of his mouth, and said, “Was that Linda I heard leaving?”

  “Yes.”

  “But she’s coming back?”

  “Hard to say. Likely not. She has a real estate emergency to deal with.”

  “No time for a quick hello?”

  “No time for a quick hello.”

  “What exactly constitutes a real estate emergency, I wonder,” said Daddy. Jack had no answer to that. The awkward moment expanded. Daddy directed a withering smile at him. “I think I need an ashtray,” he said.

  “We don’t have any ashtrays. We don’t permit smoking in the house.”

  “You mean Linda doesn’t permit it.”

  “I’ll get you a saucer,” Jack said.

  “You are too good,” said Daddy.

  Jack went to the kitchen, collected a saucer and the bottle of Scotch, carried both back to the living room, and set them down in front of Jorgensen on the second-hand Danish coffee table that the interior decorator had “picked up for a song” at an estate sale. He ran Daddy’s glass half full of Scotch and did the same with his own before flopping into the Finn Juhl easy chair, another of Linda’s prized acquisitions from the land of the Vikings.

  “I need to bum a cigarette from you,” he said to Jorgensen. “I want a smoke. For old times’ sake.”

  After months of long summer days, Jack was always surpris
ed to realize how early dusk arrived in September. It stole over them as he and Daddy huddled in the living room around the Scotch bottle, plates of beef bourguignon on their knees. Jack had suggested that’s where they eat. It reminded him of student potluck suppers, those halcyon days when he had revelled in the prestige of having been Jorgensen’s anointed. It had been a wonderful feeling to know someone had discerned promise in him, to feel selected. And now it was a strangely, sweetly companionable feeling to share a meal with his old mentor.

  But to Jack’s disappointment, Daddy had no interest in reminiscing. He preferred to talk about some stupid Mediterranean cruise he was off on in October. Not as a holiday-goer but as staff. For four autumns now Daddy had had a gig giving onboard lectures about the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome to what he described as “a bunch of baseball-capped, pot-bellied smorgasbord-foragers and women of a certain age who have selected purple, fuchsia, and lavender as the colours for their sunset years. Whenever I think of S.S. Change of Life and all who will be sailing on her, I am sorely tempted to pack an AK-47 and do a Columbine.”

  How Jorgensen had managed to keep intact his invincible sense of superiority all these years while in freefall down a garbage chute that had landed him in a basement squat reeking of mouse shit and sewer gas was a mystery to Jack. But Daddy had never suffered from self-doubt. Running into Jorgensen three days ago had been like time travel; Jack had found himself just as intimidated by Daddy’s patronizing attitude as he had been in his student days.

  “Well,” said Jack, “I guess we’ve both had a come-down. You and me.”

  Daddy carefully set his plate on the coffee table and said, “Have we? Really? Fucking we, is it?”