I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place Page 8

“That is the kindest thing I ever heard, but—”

  “Look, you’re a mess. Everybody can use some help now and then. You’re not so special.”

  “No, I know that. I just wish you hadn’t paid off my debt, Jean. I can’t let you. Now I’m indebted to you. Just take it out of my paycheck.”

  “It wasn’t a bribe. Just say thank you. And I’m giving you a small bonus for all your good writing. I only had to change a comma here and there, and maybe take out some adjectives. I’ve already received compliments on the Holland brochure, you should know. I’ve been approached by a publisher about a full-blown travel guide. Would that interest you to work on with me?”

  “I haven’t been anywhere.”

  “Look, you could start with the pages about Halifax. You could start there.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “See how well we’re already working together?”

  The guidebook never materialized. Though I did take on more hours and a variety of new tasks at the travel agency, for some reason I didn’t give up my janitorial work. Ellen had gotten well enough to leave the hospital, and Jean was spending more and more time away from the office. There was another employee, Bettina, who was about forty but referred to herself as “a local girl.” She had indeed been born and raised in Halifax. Bettina ran the day-to-day operation. She went to lunch with prospective clients and fielded telephone calls. I had no deep interest in the travel business, but it was work and I was grateful for it.

  One evening at dinner, Isador said, “Even if your Mathilde showed up every time, those goddamn séances don’t make for much of a social life.” I think he wanted me to appreciate his little joke. “Aren’t there any attractive nurses you could go to the movies with or something? You mope around and sleep in the lobby. This is not healthy.”

  I had no argument there. My social life consisted mostly of dinners with my uncle at the hotel, and with Jean at her house on Sundays. Sometimes Jean and her “paramour,” Gus, went out to the movies and I’d watch TV with Ellen, who would regale me with observations about the nurses and doctors she’d known those months she spent in the hospital. She spared no one her harsh and witty judgments. It cracked me up when she said, “Sorry, sometimes I use adult language.” She also admitted to stealing lipstick from the pocketbook of one of the night nurses. She had a tutor, Grace Eversall, whom Jean hired to get Ellen up to speed in math and social studies, as Ellen had missed so much school. Jean blatantly suggested that if I didn’t already, then I should have designs on Grace, who was a student at Dalhousie University. “She told me she’s interested,” Jean said.

  The next Sunday we were together with Ellen, and while Jean prepared dinner in the kitchen, I looked more closely at Grace and let it register how beautiful she was. When Ellen dozed off on the couch after a game of checkers, Grace asked where I lived. But I was so reliant on the belligerent, and to a great extent fraudulent, contingencies of mourning, where I could just as easily have provided Grace with a simple street address, I responded with cruel obtuseness, going into too graphic detail of my relationship with Mathilde, such as it was, or how I wanted to selectively remember it. Grace calmly listened, cool and collected, then said, “I’m so sorry she died. That’s really sad. But you know what? I think I once saw you two together. She had on a very cool leather jacket. At first I envied that you were so unusual a couple, you know? I mean, she was so exotic-looking. Honestly, my girlfriends and I wondered what she was doing with you. But after a while I noticed neither of you looked very happy. I’m pretty sure it was you two. You used to hang out at the café right near Dalhousie, right?”

  Late one afternoon, I was visiting Isador in his hotel room. He said, “Saturday, do you want to take a drive with me up to Truro? We could spend the night. I’ll pay for everything.”

  “Izzy, what’s in Truro that could possibly interest you? You don’t even like sitting in a car. And you’d miss your regular Saturday-night chess with the retired bellman. I don’t get it.”

  He fumbled around, rearranging items in his small refrigerator, then said, “I just thought it’d be good to get out of Halifax for a night.”

  “You look like a kid caught with his hand in the candy jar.”

  “I never liked candy.”

  “Well, I’m not going to Truro. The place sounds dull as dishwater.”

  “Where will you be, then? Saturday.”

  This dance went on in fits and starts all through dinner. Finally I said, “What’s all this about Saturday night, Izzy?”

  “There’s another auction in the hotel.”

  “I get it. You’re being protective of me. You think if I drop by to watch you playing chess, I’ll see the auction and make the same mistake all over again.”

  “That sort of thing has been known to happen.”

  “I’ll stay a million miles away. What’s being auctioned?”

  “I only noticed some bird pictures again. Drawings. Paintings. Like last time. Maybe more of a hodgepodge than last time. I don’t poke my nose into the auction business. But since it’s in the hotel here, I’m apprised.”

  “I took somebody’s Saturday shift at the hospital.”

  “I understand.”

  “Okay, then. Are you having any dessert?”

  The auction began at eight-fifteen on the dot. There had been a small reception beforehand, which attracted a crowd of about fifty people. I had called in sick to work. I hoped that Mr. McKenzie didn’t stop by for a drink at the hotel or come in for dinner with his family. Probably nothing to worry about there. I sat in the back row. After the usual introductory rules and niceties, the first item was put on the block: a rare print called Black-tailed Gannet, which Edward Lear had drawn for John Gould’s Birds of Europe. Reading from a note card, a different auctioneer than last time said, “To inaugurate today’s proceedings, we have Black-tailed Gannet, until recently in private hands. We will accept bids starting at fifteen hundred dollars.”

  There must be a phrase in the vernacular of obsession to define my actions. Repetition compulsion might come close—there certainly was repetition; there certainly was compulsion. But let me put it this way: the winning bid was $2,250, and had there been the same auctioneer as last time, I might have been recognized and tossed out of the room. The difference this time was, thanks to Jean paying off my debt, I had enough in savings to take Black-tailed Gannet home to my apartment. Now I owned Laughing Gull and Black-tailed Gannet.

  By April I had decided to take classes at McGill in September, and I told Isador, who said, “Let’s celebrate the fact that you’ve made any sort of decision.” That seemed fair. So the next day, a Sunday, we had dinner at the hotel. Afterward we went to his room to have coffee and listen to his favorite radio shows, originally broadcast during World War Two. Many of these shows—gumshoe dramas, westerns, and domestic comedies—still included requests for listeners to buy war bonds, which lent them an air of historical authenticity. The thing was, each time we’d listen to these programs Isador would become despondent. But this particular Sunday his despondency seemed, I don’t know, precarious. He seemed drawn darkly down into it. He even started to mumble. I knew that the same old merciless interior harangue had started: How could I have done it? How could I have acted in that movie? How could I have done it? Isador appeared to drift away, and I said, “Izzy, maybe you shouldn’t listen to these programs anymore.”

  He snapped, “What the goddamn hell kind of nonsense is that?”

  “Well, you become so morbid.”

  “I’m not having a nervous collapse in front of you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “You might have one in private.”

  “These radio shows bring up all sorts of regrets. That’s all.”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  “I cling to my regrets, once I discover which ones won’t go away. I rely on them for unhappiness. It keeps me connected to the past. You’re so thick in the skull, you haven’t learned anythi
ng.”

  “You like getting so down and out? I don’t understand.”

  “I heard a rumor once that some people don’t have any regrets. Now, what kind of person would that be? Do you want to be friends with someone like that? Would you trust someone like that?”

  Isador was debating at a depth of philosophical paradox I could not compete with. It had a comical aspect, just the way he said what he’d said, characteristically Isador’s way of putting things. I loved him, so I loved his comic-tragic way of inverting logic in order to define himself by his worst moments. I knew that when this whole thing about The Cross of Lorraine got most deeply to him, he’d put his scratchy records of Bach’s suites for unaccompanied cello and Chopin’s nocturnes on the turntable, to accompany and intensify his mood, a duet between sad and sad; and having found a successful way to comport himself at such moments, he stuck with it. Not a few times, when I heard one of these records through his door, I turned around in the hallway and walked back to the electric lift.

  Now turning down the radio volume, he said, “Look at my life. What have I got? My wife’s been gone for years now. My children live far away. You’re about to abandon me for university. Which is fine. Which is good. A very good thing. Let’s just leave it at that, all right? It’s hard for you to understand because you didn’t live through the war. People who lived through it, they’d understand my unconditional unforgiveness toward myself for taking that part. And Laszlo meant well, I know that. But it’s been a curse.”

  “Isador, there’ve been hundreds of movies with Nazis in them. Besides, you told me yourself, The Cross of Lorraine was a flop. Hardly anyone saw it.”

  This seemed only to more firmly establish his point of view. “I see it every night—in here,” he said, putting his finger to the side of his head as if pointing a revolver. “I am not a good man.”

  “You’re a very good man.”

  “On that subject we differ in our opinions.”

  We listened to three more hours of radio shows. The Aldrich Family, Dick Tracy, The Timid Soul, Sherlock Holmes, and Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons. Isador’s absolute favorite was You Can’t Do Business with Hitler, featuring John Flynn and Virginia Moore, produced by the radio section of the Office of War Information.

  In June, sponsored by five separate newspaper commissions (none knew about the others) to write about birds in Saskatchewan, I sat at the kitchen table and mapped out my summer. The cumulative payments would just about cover expenses. I was surrounded by boxes of clothing and books I’d packed up for storage. I’d hung Black-tailed Gannet and Laughing Gull on a wall in Isador’s hallway. I was letting go of the apartment; it was now rented out to a seamstress.

  Traveling light (clothes, notebooks, pens, a copy of The Carrier of Ladders by W. S. Merwin, a field guide to Canadian birds, field glasses, plus that postcard of the couple eloping), on June 5 I flew from Halifax to Regina. From Regina I boarded a small plane to Kyle, just north of Saskatchewan Landing Provincial Park, a few miles from where Mathilde’s plane went down. With no professional therapeutic guidelines, but fiercely cajoled by Isador, I knew that if I was going to “move ahead with life” (Isador’s words)—detach from séances, detach from the delusion that in time Mathilde would have considered me the love of her life—then I’d best start with an actual location on the map, so I chose the site of Mathilde’s death.

  It was to be far less a pilgrimage than a chance to begin some sort of new journey. Mathilde had gone to her Maker; I needed to look at her photograph to recall her face, since even dreams seldom provided that now. I had a photograph of her at what I considered her most ebullient, bright self, laughing, seated at a wedding banquet, and when I looked at it in the plane, I smiled at her comment about her pronouncedly angular nose: “I cut a swath through the day.” Also, I remembered really liking the dress she had on that evening. The earrings, too. How she was inebriated, giddy, whispering to the woman who sat next to her. And how she’d danced every dance with someone, including me in my rented tuxedo. I’d turned twenty-one in March. Her twenty-seventh birthday would have been June 7.

  To get to the site of the wreckage was simple. At the landing strip in Kyle there was a car and a pickup truck for rent by the day or the week. I chose the truck and put twenty dollars in the hands of the attendant. That was commerce in those days. On a road southeast out of Kyle, I found the six-cottage motel where Mathilde had been staying and asked the owner, “Can you please direct me to where the plane crashed last year?” He drew a rough map on a napkin. No questions asked except, “Will you be needing a room?” It took me less than fifteen minutes to get to the spot he’d marked with an X.

  It was a beautiful day. There were some birds, but I didn’t bother to identify which kinds, since I just wanted to take in the sweep of the landscape. Open fields along a creek, with cattails waving and slightly bent in the wind. As I started to walk, with no destination in mind, I suddenly saw that someone had put up a wooden cross, decorated with plastic flowers, near a small marsh. This had to be in memory of the pilot, or Mathilde, or perhaps both. There were no words on the cross, but it was built solidly and seemed to be planted deep in the ground.

  It occurred to me that I should find out who had done this, but then I thought that would make for detective work the result of which would have little meaning. I wasn’t there to write about Mathilde’s fate, I was there to write about birds, and that was that. The wreckage had been mostly cleared, but not completely. I noticed a charred seat with its springs exposed, sections of a wing, blackened pieces of glass, and what looked like photographic film cases lying about. There also was part of the fuselage with decaled numbers on it, but I didn’t care to touch any of this. I just needed a place to begin.

  I ended up staying at the small motel that night. It was only me and the proprietor and his wife; we had hamburgers together in their cottage. Nice people, all seasoned hospitality and grateful for the patronage (twelve dollars for the room), but they thought I wanted to talk about the plane crash, and I may have been snappish and blunt in saying that I didn’t. Later, we watched a half-hour sitcom on TV. Having slept fitfully with the bedside lamp on, I left at five A.M. to drive back to Kyle.

  From Kyle, in harrowing crosswinds, I flew with three others to Last Mountain Lake, beginning the second day of what would be an exhaustive, two-month tour of Saskatchewan’s bird preserves, during which I worked myself to a near frazzle, sleeping at most three or four hours a night. I took detailed notes and snapshots with a Polaroid Instamatic, pictures hardly professional enough for publication, meant only to later help me distinguish, along with my journal, one preserve from the next. In my inexperience, I didn’t know how to go about these commissions, except to chronicle everything I could. When I got home, I would figure out how to tailor my pieces to satisfy each editor. In the end, I succeeded in getting only one published.

  But along the way, something unforeseen occurred. I began keeping a “life list” of birds, a process that I later came to see as distasteful, reducing the natural world to a kind of arithmetic. Yet during those summer months, keeping a ledger of bird names, each one like a found poem, allowed me some purchase on quotidian life.

  I’d wanted to begin with Last Mountain Lake because it was the first designated bird sanctuary in North America. In autumn, a visitor could see as many as fifty thousand sandhill cranes there. Still, it being early summer, I saw peregrine falcons, piping plovers, burrowing owls, ferruginous hawks, loggerhead shrikes, terns, grebes, and pelicans.

  After Last Mountain Lake I traveled to the “hummingbird capital,” the St. Walburg area; the Battlefords, especially to see the black-crowned night herons; Lloydminster for the yellow-headed blackbirds; Saskatchewan Landing for the belted kingfishers and Clark’s grebes; Quill Lake for the red-necked phalaropes and American avocets; Swift Current for the merlins and American kestrels; Grasslands National Park for the greater sage-grouses, prairie falcons, and golden eagles; Weyburn for the chestnut
-collared longspurs; Moose Mountain Provincial Park for the great crested flycatchers and ring-necked ducks; Leader (where, sitting near the Leader Bridge, I got bitten on the hand by a prairie rattlesnake and was administered antivenom at the Park Service clinic, and became only mildly nauseous, though my fever spiked to 103 for a few hours; my hand was puffy, achy, and black-and-blue for a week) for the willow flycatchers, long-billed curlews, and violet-green swallows; Chaplin Lake for the thousands of Baird’s sandpipers, and the black-necked stilts and tundra swans; Duck Mountain Provincial Park for the barred owls and rare golden-winged warblers; Good Spirit Lake Provincial Park for the pileated woodpeckers; Douglas Provincial Park for the veeries, Cooper’s hawks, and migrant thrushes; Gardiner Dam and Danielson Provincial Park for the great horned owls, hairy woodpeckers, and gyrfalcons; Pelican Lake for the American white pelicans; Buffalo Pound Provincial Park for the LeConte’s sparrows and Say’s phoebes; and finally the long journey north to Wood Buffalo National Park to see—mostly to hear—the whooping cranes.

  All summer, while my mind filled with birds to try to push out every other thought, discussions with park rangers and ornithologists, the Cree Indian woman who’d referred to the lifting of cranes from the water as “God-flight,” and the thousand traveled miles, I kept thinking of Mathilde (“She would’ve loved to have seen all this”), though perhaps less and less as the days went on. What helped was the practical philosophy of Robert Frost, from his poem “A Servant to Servants”: “the best way out is always through.”

  In my case, I was working my way through an entire province of birds in order to emerge into whatever came next, and pretty much succeeded. Yet on my last evening at Wood Buffalo Park, I was out by a marsh, the light hazy, the full moon pale under clouds, as if borrowed for the night from a Japanese scroll, when a boisterous flock of about two dozen geese, not in the customary V shape but a more ragged formation, approached the marsh. Painted by the light of that particular dusk, they looked like grey geese descending.