The Dancehall Years Read online

  Don’t pay any attention to me. I’m probably talking through my hat.

  You probably are.

  23.

  At Scarborough a few days later, the clock says six o’clock. Time for Flora to make supper. Maybe that pot roast she’s got in the icebox. Where’d these coho come from? What if her sister made it all the way to Vancouver to find herself wandering around Cordova St.? She’s got to talk to her son again, but her phone is on the blink. The tearoom phone will be working; she’ll take a walk over there. Nightie on instead of a slip. How’d that happen? Well, it’ll do as a slip. Why’s this dress so tight? She hasn’t been eating that much. It’s not the lack of people making her lonely; it’s the shadows behind the bushes and trees that refuse to come out. It won’t be long before the thousands of picnickers will be ghosts and there’ll be no more steamers whistling up the inlet.

  It’s too early for the sun to be going down; the sun’s always on her right in the evening when she walks over to the cove. Now, when she makes sure it’s on her right, the hotel’s on her left. What’s the monkey tree doing over there? The sun’s supposed to be setting on the west side of the planet so people on the other side of the Earth can have themselves a day, so what’s it doing gaining inches into the sky? Something’s turned the whole ball of wax the wrong way around. The latticed arbour beside the hotel is covered with honeysuckle the way it’s meant to be, but that short red-headed woman who was supposed to have been Eleanor is inside, her face patterned by sketches of leaves and light. Strange to see a grown-up person whose feet don’t touch the ground.

  What day is it? Flora asks.

  Monday. Do you know Isabelle Gallagher? I’m going to be her mother-in-law. I’m Jack Long’s mother. This used to be his stomping ground before he went overseas.

  Is that so? says Flora. I’m looking for the tearoom. I seem to have gotten turned around.

  It’s that way.

  Oh, of course.

  A little further down the trail, she sees Isabelle inside the second ivy-covered arbour, sitting so still on the bench it’s as if she’s turned to wood. Flora leans into the shadows. There’s a woman by the hotel who’s looking for you, she says.

  I know, says Isabelle.

  At last, there’s a sunny day up Narrows Inlet, and Takumi can make progress in his plan to move out of the dank shed. If he builds a structure higher up so he’s facing south, he’ll get more sun and might not come down with that racking cough again. The maple leaves will fall soon, the forest floor softer on the deer leather binding his feet. An inner tide has turned in the night; the firs seem more anchored, the bottoms of the trunks wider. His hands feel strong again. Up and over the slope in the small meadow he’s cleared, he paces out what he guesses would be the floor measurements of the Scarborough house. Marks what would be the corners with rocks, ties the chain he’d used to direct rainwater from the gutters of his first lean-to onto a propped log and pulls another log into place to mark the house corner that’s appeared in his drawings since the day Isabelle’s father whistled when they were hiding in the tree platform. Now, softening alder into flesh with an old chisel from the shed, he remembers her pulling away, running up the stairs to Miss Fenn’s cottage where her father was scything foxgloves. Takumi’d slipped by, a paradise inside him so intense it was a relief to be going home to his own bed above the kitchen.

  In the lifeguarding boat, sometimes he’d let go an oar and thrust his hand back like a speed skater to feel the thrust of her shoulder, if it lifted into a wing. In the tree platform, he’d bent up her knee to see if her skin turned bluer when it stretched. Now, walking the beach, feeling the forest settle within him, he sees her pelvic bone arc in a piece of beached fir, the curve of her neck in the arch of an alder.

  As autumn moves in and it’s safer to be on the shore, he begins to move comfortably between large pieces of driftwood as if they’ve become his furniture. Accenting a line of whiskers with his knife in an upended butt of a weathered fir evokes a family of seals. Tracing his palm along a peeled log flank, a sweep of giant snail hunkers to meet him. His hands are so cold he alternates them in and out of a disintegrating pocket, shaking the one he’s working with to keep it warm.

  Percival, Flora says to the receiver on the phone in the tearoom booth. I saw your note. I went to meet Eleanor, but she wasn’t on the boat. I’m worried she might have missed you. You didn’t leave a note? Well, who did? I don’t know, Percival. It’s too much for me. I don’t mean that. She hangs up. You have to be careful what you say to them, or next thing you know they’ll be putting you out to pasture.

  When Flora starts down the tearoom stairs, Gwen crawls out from under the verandah. You’re out early, Grandma. Everyone else is still asleep, I bet.

  All right, fine, pretend she knew all along they were in the AM, not PM. If anyone asks, they always have roast beef for breakfast. Guess she already had one dress on when she put on another this morning. Later, at home, Lyndon’s upstairs in bed listening to Flora ingratiate herself with that yokel handyman who’s here to talk about the drains.

  When I opened my icebox this morning, there were these lovely salmon, Flora says. I have no idea who put them there.

  George smiles. That’d be me.

  It was you came early this morning, was it?

  Odd that she doesn’t feel offended by the way he must have walked in unannounced, and now clearly intends to help her with the canning. He moves casually to the sink where he starts washing jars in steaming water. Can’t have a speck on these here, he says, or they’ll spoil. I’ll have the heads and fins cut off and the insides scooped out in no time.

  The way Lyndon figures it, if he pretends to be too feeble to make it home from the store on his own and gets George to drive him, he might find a sabotaging clue in the glove compartment of Fenn’s car. Why does the fellow have so many matchboxes that don’t rattle when you shake them? He opens one, copies the x-marked maps he finds while his nibs is in for the mail. Let them think he’s wandering aimlessly around the cove. Morning, Lyndon. Morning, Ada. On your way to the Pie Shop?

  Wish I could say so, Lyndon, but I’m delivering Leo’s newspapers. He has earache again.

  I’m sorry to hear that.

  24.

  At the beach, it’s so cold and rainy they have to keep their sweatshirts on for water ballet dry practice. Scull figure eights in the air at their sides. Arms above her head, Gwen feet-first propellers toward shore and Frances grabs her solid feet in one hand, pushes her away straight-legged like a drifting log.

  Later, the lifeguard drapes each girl over her arm like dough to check their back bends. When she gets to the end of the line, Jeanette, who’s supposed to be there to help Frances, inserts her thumb under her own bathing suit edge and snaps it on her thigh. The quick glimpse of her pale flesh makes Frances button her jacket onto her shirt instead of onto its proper buttons. She leans over and hisses, I’m teaching now, for heaven’s sake.

  After lunch, the tide’s out so Gwen takes the beach way home, the patch of bulrush grass growing brightly on Miss Fenn’s Rocky. Wonder why she isn’t here this summer, flinging her window open, flapping her hand back and forth conducting them on her swing between the Douglas firs? O how I love to go up in a swing. Up in the air so blue. Definitely enough grass on good old Miss Fenn’s Rocky for a hula skirt. Her brown one-piece bathing suit would work if she made a couple of leis to cover her chest.

  Over at the hotel, dozens of orchids in the upstairs window press their faces to the panes like orphans. She heads into the lobby to talk to Auntie about picking some to thread together even if their mother’s said not to bother her. Since her aunt’s been living at the hotel, foxglove blossoms are only foxglove blossoms. They’re nobody’s hats. If you plant your milk teeth roots down, lady slippers don’t grow from them any more.

  The lobby is cool and smells of honeysuckle and furniture polish. Auntie’s not at the desk, not in the dining room, not out with Mr. McConnecky planting croqu
et wickets on the grass by the monkey tree.

  I’m looking for my aunt, Gwen says, coming back down the stairs.

  Her day off, Gwen. Not sure where she is.

  Mr. McConnecky shakes his fleshy head so the skin wobbles around his jaw. She might as well go on up to the falls and practise dancing hula so she can be ready for Saturday. Passing the corner Deluxe, she sees Auntie sitting in a chair on the verandah so completely still it’s as if she’s turned to wood. Her eyes stare straight ahead as if they’ll never blink again.

  Hi Auntie.

  Hi Gwen. She goes over and stands beside her for a hug. Auntie puts her arm around her but doesn’t say anything, just smiles sadly.

  At the falls, sitting miserably on the ledge above the spot where the water flows hardest, her feet hit up against something hard. She reaches down and pulls up a wine bottle. When Mother finds liquor bottles in the bush, she makes a big show of pouring out the liquor, saying she will not touch a drop of alcohol as long as she lives, and it’s not funny years later when Uncle Jack gives her a key chain with a gin bottle charm on it for Christmas. When Gwen twists off the wire and pulls the knobbed cork, there’s a bang like a firework and the bottle shoots a geyser onto the rocks.

  Frances is out in the rowboat, backhanding the oars to stay in place so she can teach and watch the beach at the same time. Ada’s lying in her spot over by the boat rental pier, offering her haltered breasts to the sky. Small flat stones balance on her closed eyes to darken the sun.

  Frances beaches the boat and goes to sit beside her. Gwen’s working awfully hard at this water ballet, she says, pointing her sun visor. How’s Isabelle? I haven’t had a visit with her for ages. She hasn’t been eating in the staff dining room. Maybe she eats in her room.

  I doubt that, says Ada, fine-tuning the stones.

  Does she know I told you about Blaine?

  I didn’t tell her because I told you I wouldn’t, but she knows you’re the only person who knew, right?

  I guess that’s why she’s not speaking to me.

  You know the baby died.

  I didn’t know that. That’s terrible.

  Yes, it is.

  I assumed it’d been… taken care of.

  It was.

  They’re quiet then, as if hoping the tide would come straight back in and cover the slimy raft resting akimbo on the muddy bottom. It’s so hot even Leo’s in the water, his white stomach like a skate fish as he flaps his hands to propel himself out to the small float joined by logs to the diving tower to create a rectangular pool. Billy and the boys on the Intermediate team are horsing around on the tower end. Gwen does her lengths, swims in and walks up the beach slope to join her mother and Frances.

  Will you teach me to do a Catalina? she asks Frances, pulling off her bathing cap and shaking out her hair. She’s almost forgiven her the sandcastle contest disaster because the other night her swimming teacher’d taken her to a movie at the Laundry Tub cinema, where a line of girls in dazzling gold bathing suits swung onto the screen and dove in unison into a pool below. Someone pulleyed a solo swing up way too high for Esther Williams to dive into the pool, but she did it anyway. When she surfaced in shimmering platinum, her smiling teeth gleamed and water flashed around her head like a halo.

  It’s tricky, Frances says when they’re out on the water. Like rubbing your head and patting your stomach at the same time. Gwen strokes her crawl beside the boat, head raised above the water so she can hear the instructions. Billy’s on the diving part of the raft. She’s going to have to figure out something to protect Leo, since she can’t find any more money to pay off Billy. Scull hard, says Frances. Deep breath, ballet leg, says Frances. Point your leg in the air, rotate your torso. Dive straight over your shoulder. Executing a wide leg split upside down, Gwen raises her left leg smartly to meet the right, heads for the bottom. If she can keep her body straight enough to execute four Catalinas across the pool like stakes pushed into the seabed, shuttle back and forth across the pool, she could weave an invisible net to block Billy swimming down to the other end where her brother’s sprawled out like a walrus. He’d hit against the underwater net as if his bed had been apple-pied. Not the kind where you stuff in sticks and stones like they’re going to do to Evvie’s bed as a joke, but the kind where you take one sheet and fold it so it looks like two, and blam, when the person sticks her feet in the covers, she pops back out like a jack-in-the-box.

  What’s Frances doing out there, training seals? I’m not sure I want my daughter turned into a seal, Percy says from the blanket where he’s joined Ada. She is husky, isn’t she?

  They have to be, dear. People get violent when they’re drowning.

  Crack, Billy and his boys are off, thrashing down the swimming lanes. Halfway down, Frances fires the starter pistol; the racers stop on a dime and turn back. False start, she says. A few more inches and he would have smashed up against Gwen’s net. For the rest of the class they have to practise not jumping the gun.

  25.

  Matches, George, Frances says at the wharf. I need matches.

  I bet you’re after the romantic ones, eh? he says. The lifeguard’s probably set her cap at Dr. Stan, the way the two of them always have their heads together planning some swimming regatta or other. Never mind that the first aid attendant only has eyes for Evvie Gallagher. George spreads his assortment of small boxes on the hood of his truck, and, yes, the one she wants is the one labeled with a rock and a waterfall.

  Frances lies on her beach blanket dreaming of Jeannie with the light brown hair. Her Jeanette’s is blonde but never mind. Isabelle saw you kiss me the other day, I know she did, the way she looks at me funny. If anyone found out how we feel about each other, I don’t know what I’d do, Jeanette’d said. Even so, they’re going to spend the afternoon together at the falls eating strawberries and drinking wine.

  When Frances sees George over at the tennis court office that afternoon, she goes in to talk to him.

  It’s there, is it? It’s in place? she asks.

  It is.

  Carefully drawing the strands of his plan together, Lyndon gathers up the ledgers he found in the old Scarborough desk, a copy of the hand-sketched Bridal Falls map in his pocket. Once the authorities know what the new handyman has been up to, it’ll be off to jail for him, away from his wife once and for all. Trust me, he says to the RCMP officer sitting in the café. I have something important to show you up at the falls. No it can’t wait.

  So now it’s his turn to head down the trail along the waterfall rocks below the white picket bridge. Turning around every few minutes to make sure the officer is following him, he unfolds the duplicated map on the ledge of the stone balcony and shows him the x. The running water drapes over his ropey hand and comes up empty.

  That’s odd, he says. This is supposed to be the spot. You know Fenn’s a bootlegger, don’t you? George Fenn? He hides his bottles all over the cove.

  The officer could have his thumbs in his belt, he’s that blasé. I haven’t seen George selling liquor to anyone, he says. I know he sells matches. Pretty harmless way to make a living, I’d say. As for you, sir, I’m not sure it’s above-board for you to be rifling through the glove compartments of peoples’ vehicles.

  Now look here, says Lyndon. I haven’t brought you on a wild goose chase. All you need to do is visit Fenn and see what kind of distilling equipment he’s got over at his place. See here in these ledgers—he spreads Shinsuke’s account books on the balcony—it must have started way back when the Yoshitos gave him bushels of potatoes for practically nothing. Bet your bottom dollar he knew what to do with them. And likely blackberry wine too, the way he’s got that son of his picking pounds of the stuff. We’re always having to chase him off our property.

  The officer looks away. I’d have to get a search warrant for that.

  Well, get a search warrant.

  As I said, this is our busiest weekend of the year, Mr. Killam. I’d have to go to town, and no can do. The way the off
icer looks indifferently off in the distance, he could have been about to charge Lyndon for wasting police time. He probably owes George Fenn for something.

  Lyndon’s started wetting his bed, and the washing machine’s conked out. Flora has to stand her husband up like a child to pull on his underwear. Soon she’ll have to clean his bottom, lifting his pale hairless legs as he stares expressionless past her shoulder. Yesterday, he came down to breakfast dressed in two shirts, the collar of the first folded over the second. One of the family’s going to turn up any minute, and no one, she means no one, is going to know how bad things are. When she has him dressed and propped at the kitchen table, he tries to feed himself and misses his mouth. When she takes the spoon and inserts it, he seals his lips so she can’t pull it out. Worse, his speech is jumbled up and runs together like a speeded-up record.

  When Flora goes outside these days, it seems as if the wrong plants are growing from the wrong bushes. String beans dangle from the raspberry canes, corn sprouts from the squash. The long shoots of blackberries arc ahead, root, send out more shoots: when her back is turned, they leap further. She makes pies with the harried look of a reluctant volunteer having to feed a large crowd the way she did when the threshers were at the farm. Sometimes she sleeps in her apron.

  That afternoon, when Percy arrives on the Daddy boat, he finds George Fenn sitting at their kitchen table. George Fenn has never sat at their kitchen table before, but there he is briskly stirring sugar into his coffee. You’d think a weekend dad would be able to pour himself a drink before being accosted with socially ingratiating remarks, but no.

  Expect you two are worried about the old people over there? George says in an overly familiar tone, lifting his cup with both hands. Once the hotel is closed, he goes on, I’m at loose ends for the winter. Wouldn’t mind stopping by on a regular basis to see what needs doing. Mrs. Killam is having a heck of a time trying to get Mr. Killam into his bath.