The divine ryans, p.11
The Divine Ryans, page 11
It was, for instance, a blessing to be able to direct your stream of pee in such a way as to explode cigarette butts left floating in the toilet. The thought of the contortions into which Mary would have to twist herself to even come close to accomplishing this feat always sent me into fits of laughter. Then there were things that girls could not do as well as boys. Hockey, for instance. Girls, I informed Mary when I was five, could not play hockey.
Faced with my complete refusal to acknowledge the advantages of being older, Mary had tried to prove her superiority on my terms; that is, on the ice. Though otherwise she was one of those girls who are defiantly incompetent at sports, she was something of a tomboy when it came to hockey. The fact that her sole reason for practising the sport was to beat her brother at it made her unique among the players on Fleming Street, all of whom were boys.
For years, we had played goal against each other, and Mary, to howls of derision from my friends, had often beaten me, though she did so with less and less frequency as time went on. In fact, she had been saying over the summer and fall that she did not want to play against me any more, denying that this decision had anything to do with her recent lack of success.
‘I’m too old for playing hockey,’ she said.
‘Too old?’ I said. ‘You’re only twelve. Half the Leafs are over forty.’
‘I think Mary means she’s too old for a girl,’ my mother said. Mary rolled her eyes.
‘Too old?’ I said. ‘Mary’s too old?’ I howled scornfully, knowing that after the Harold Noonan episode she was ripe for a challenge. ‘C’mon, Mary,’ I said. ‘Let’s go down to the rink. Me against you.’
‘Forget it,’ she said.
‘Mary, Mary, bum so hairy,’ I said, looking at her as if to say that I would complete the sentence if she did not accept. She jumped out of her chair and stood over me, her hands on her hips.
‘All right, Draper Doyle,’ she said, thumping her forefinger against my chest. ‘All right. I’ll play you one last time. ONE LAST TIME. And I’m going to beat you, too.’
This was one game that I was determined not to lose. I had the notion that somehow, despite my father’s ghost, beating Mary would lay Momary to rest, not to mention keep my alarm cock from going off again. Just the thought of not having to buy any more underwear was inspiration enough. I had lost my spot on the hockey team, I had been shamed into taking my goalie picture down from the wall, all to Mary’s glee. It simply would not do for her to win.
We played the following Saturday on the rink at the end of Fleming Street. I enjoyed the usual advantages. While I had every conceivable piece of equipment, including goalie pads and goalie skates and a Habs sweater with Gump Worsley’s number on the back, Mary played goal wearing white figure skates, three overcoats, and copies of Life magazine for shin pads. ‘Mary the Goalie’, I called her. On her head, she wore a stocking cap from which her hair hung down, fanning out across her shoulders.
‘Got yer pads on, Mary?’ one of the boys said, to a chorus of snickers from the others.
‘You can see that she doesn’t have any pads on,’ I said, at which the older boys all but fell down laughing. Mary looked at me.
‘Shutup, Draper Doyle,’ she said. ‘Just please shut up.’
We stood at opposite ends of the rink, facing one another. There was Mary, goaded once again into playing goal against me, hoping to beat me the way that she hoped some team, any team, would beat the Habs, and wipe that smirk of invincibility off my face. My defeat was Mary’s holy grail, in quest of which she had set out every season for the past five years.
I went to my equipment bag and, throwing aside my trapper, took out the bullhorn which Uncle Reginald had given me for Christmas some years ago.
‘No way,’ Mary shouted. ‘No way, you’re not allowed to use the bullhorn.’ I held the bullhorn to my mouth and, in a kind of grimly official, we-have-the-house-surrounded tone of voice, said, ‘Yes I am.’
‘No you’re not,’ Mary said, but my squeakily magnified voice drowned out whatever else she had to say.
‘We’ll take a vote,’ I said, speaking through the bullhorn. ‘Who votes for the horn?’ They all raised their sticks except Mary, even the boys on her team. It was universally acknowledged that although to have the bullhorn was an advantage, it made the game more interesting for everyone.
From long practice I had mastered the art of doing a play-by-play commentary even as I was playing goal. ‘The voice and the goalie of Fleming Street’, I called myself. The strange thing was that while I described the play the way that Danny Gallivan would have described it, the bullhorn made me sound like Foster Hewitt. (Foster Hewitt’s voice sounded the way anyone’s voice would have sounded when magnified by a bullhorn.) I might have been some strange hybrid of the two announcers, possessing Danny’s style and Foster’s voice.
The game began well for us. In the first five minutes, we scored on Mary twice. The problem was that she was barely able to move in those overcoats; her arms out rigid from her sides, she had to move her whole body when all she really wanted to do was turn her head. Just to keep breathing in those coats, she had to stand fully, exaggeratedly erect, like someone wearing a neck brace. Judging by her height and by the angle at which she was forced to hold her head, I estimated that she lost complete sight of the puck, if not, as some of our team claimed, the moment it crossed centre ice, then certainly when it came to within about ten feet of her. It looked as if she was merely guessing where the puck was, listening for it, her whole body turning one way, then another, her team-mates screaming at her, giving her directions, do this, do that, while Mary tapped about with her goalie stick like someone blind, a look of the most heartrending distress on her face.
Imagine trying to play goal while looking straight up in the air, and you have some idea of how Mary played it. In a goal-mouth scramble, she was helpless. She took pucks in the ankles, sticks on the instep and knees, she slipped on the ice, falling down and struggling in those overcoats to get back up, often falling down again in the process.
As if Mary’s problems in the net were not enough, our having the bullhorn gave us a further advantage. I had a way of doing the play-by-play that demoralized the other team. When they had the puck or threw a check, or when Mary made a save, I gave either an understated description of it or none at all. ‘Mary the goalie makes the save,’ I said, or ignored the save she made entirely. But when we had the puck, I described the play the way that Danny Gallivan would: ‘And Foley comes out with it, ad libs his way to centre ice and Ohhhh! what a move he puts on Skiffington. He loses it, but Ohhhh! what an enormous body check by Foley.’
I used such adjectives as ‘scintillating’ and ‘larcenous’ to describe the saves I made, said that our often-dribbling shots were ‘cannonading’, inflated our stickhandling to ‘a bewildering blur of stick and puck’. It amazed me how much effect this sort of thing had on the game, inspiring our players, demoralizing theirs. Despite the fact that we were not playing better than their team, players on both sides were soon convinced that we were. I could see how clearly the other team wanted to hear themselves described as ‘magnanimous’ or ‘brilliant’, and how demoralizing it was for them to hear us described in such terms, even though they knew we didn’t deserve it. It was never long before the game began to take on the character of my description, the tone of my voice, our team skating furiously, the other team convinced that we were far better than them, that it was simply not possible for them to beat us.
I hadn’t felt so good in a long time. After a long absence, I was back in the net, once again wearing my equipment, and my team was winning. There I was, a goalie stick in one hand, and in the other, not the usual trapper, but a bullhorn which, as it turned out, was almost as good for catching pucks. I doubted that anyone had ever played goal this way before.
‘The Bruins look tired, Dick,’ I said, and, sure enough, the other team were soon leaning on their sticks. By this time, the score was 4–0.
‘Four nothing,’ I said through the bullhorn. ‘Mary the goalie looks shaky.’
‘You’re cheating,’ Mary said, pointing her goalie stick at me. It wasn’t enough, she said, that I had the best team, no, on top of that, I had to show favouritism while doing the play-by-play.
It must have been the sight of me catching the occasional puck in the bullhorn that gave her the idea. Just before the game got underway again, she huddled with her team-mates. Then, when the puck was dropped, she screamed, ‘Aim for the bullhorn.’ The players on the other team who were able to raise the puck abandoned trying to score and began shooting for the bullhorn instead, hoping to either stifle me in mid-voice or bean me with the puck. Soon, I realized that I would either have to stop using the horn or face shot after shot aimed at my head. That puck-shy, choking feeling that had kept me on the bench the year before came back worse than ever. Even though I was wearing a mask and a helmet and was fairly safe from flying pucks, I called time out to throw the bullhorn aside and retrieve my trapper. ‘Hurray,’ said the players on the other team.
‘Well, Dick,’ Mary said, ‘Draper Doyle is having an off day. He’s given up the bullhorn and the other team is coming back.’
‘No way,’ I said, though my voice, no longer magnified by the bullhorn, sounded so absurdly puny that everyone laughed.
The rest is almost too painful to relate. I no longer had the bullhorn, but I couldn’t help thinking that the other team was still aiming for it, aiming for my head. At each shot, I all but turned backwards in the net. In no time at all, the game was tied, and, from that point on, it was, as the boys on the other team put it, ‘all Mary the Goalie’. As unlikely as it seemed, she kept making saves, while my vaunted, puck-dodging reflexes kept missing them. The final, shameful, ignominious score was 9–4.
‘Nine to four,’ Mary said, pointing her stick at me from the other end of the ice. ‘Nine to four.’
I looked at her, wondering if the colour of my face showed through my goalie mask. The tradition was for the winning goalie to make what was called ‘One Last Rush’ on the other goalie. ‘It’s time for One Last Rush,’ Mary said. ‘And this will really be One Last Rush, because I’m not playing any more after this.’ This made it that much worse. I could hardly believe it. I had lost the last game that we would ever play. Mary had beaten me for all time.
With the puck in front of her, she stood in goal at one end of the rink while the rest of the players, even those on her team, went to the other end, jamming the ice in front of me, facing Mary. ‘One Last Rush,’ Mary shouted, and began to make her way up the ice, all but tiptoeing on those absurd white skates, standing weirdly erect, the overcoats tilting her head at such an angle that she was in danger of falling over backwards, looking like some overstuffed, stick-wielding figure skater, not so much stickhandling the puck as pushing it in front of her, nudging it forward a few feet, then catching up to it and nudging it again. When she reached the halfway point, the rest of the players went out to meet her, skating in what was meant to be slow motion, doing in fact a kind of slow-motion parody of Mary, arms and legs flailing, faces all wearing those agonized expressions we saw in hockey photographs, pretending to try to take the puck from her, only to fail, only to go skating past her as if she had deked them out with some brilliant move.
After they had all been deked out, after they had all gone past her, and there was no-one between her and me (I was still standing by myself in the net), they turned around and, catching up with Mary and still moving in a kind of frenzied slow motion, began to grab various parts of her, her shoulders, her breasts, her waist, her arms, some even falling to the ice to wrap their gloves around her skates. None of it was done forcefully enough to pull her down. In fact, they acted as if she was dragging all ten of them along, as if such was her strength that all of them together could not stop her.
They hammed it up, contorting their faces, looking with exaggerated hopelessness at one another, as if she was some superstar whom they could not hope to keep from scoring. I will never forget the sight of those ten boys, almost all of whom were younger and smaller than my sister, their hands just happening to grab her breasts, her backside, her arms, with affected randomness, wrapping about her upper thighs, their faces, as if purely by accident, brushing hers or tangling in her hair. And then there was Mary herself, her expression half mock-heroic, half indignant, as she buckled beneath the weight of the ten peewees who were fastened to her.
Finally, when she had ‘dragged’ them the length of the ice, with ten of them draped all over her, à la Maurice Richard, she started making moves, trying to fake me out of the net. Just as the ten of them began to haul her to the ice in earnest, she deked to the left while I, in accordance with the rules of One Last Rush, made a slow-motion lunge to the right. As the puck went in and as in melodramatic slow motion the boys all fell to the ice, we made ‘the crowd went wild’ noises and Mary landed on her back, her arms upraised, a look that might have been a parody of bliss on her face. Unable to stop, she slid along the ice, knocking my skates out from under me and causing me to fall on top of her, so that my wire goalie mask came to within inches of her face; there we lay, goalie to goalie, two figures so rotund that only about an inch of us was touching, the point of my belly balancing on the point of hers, with a foot-thick wedge of padding between us.
I was so encumbered by my equipment that, when I tried to roll off, I succeeded only in flopping wildly about on top of her, a sight the other boys found so hilarious, they gathered round us in a circle. ‘Give it to her, Draper Doyle,’ they said, at which Mary screamed, ‘Draper Doyle, for God’s sake, get off me.’
With a manoeuvre she might have been practising for years, she bounced me off her with one thrust of her pelvis. Then she got up and, without a word to anyone, left the rink. Holding her goalie stick on her shoulder, she went clomping up Fleming Street, her white skates making sparks on the pavement. I suspected that few goalies had ever marched so impressively to their retirement.
10
Momary did not appear in my dreams any more frequently after my defeat at Mary’s hands, but she was more frightening than before, more witch-like, it seemed to me, pursuing me with outstretched arms, almost close enough to look over my shoulder and see my Methuselah, on which I clamped one hand as I ran. Mary had told everyone of my defeat, but no-one had been more tickled by it than my mother, who said she hoped it would teach me a lesson. Uncle Reginald assured me that what he called my ‘day’ was coming, but Aunt Phil took every possible advantage of my low spirits, almost convincing me to write a letter to Father Francis.
One Saturday, not long after what had become known as ‘the showdown on Fleming Street’, I was home by myself when Aunt Phil came back from Reg Ryan’s and told me we were ‘going out’.
‘Where?’ I said.
‘Never mind,’ she said. Taking me by the hand, she led me to the bathroom, where she performed emergency grooming. Standing me on a stool, she bent me backwards over the sink, somehow manoeuvred my head beneath the tap, then turned the water on, the cold water, which matted my hair to my head, so that when she finally released me and had me face the mirror, I looked like some grade-school vampire. She had me put on my blazer and my slacks, then took me by the hand again, leading me out of the house and down Fleming Street.
‘Where are we going?’ I said. ‘We’re not going to Reg Ryan’s are we?’ Aunt Phil said nothing.
‘Mom said you’re not supposed to take me any more,’ I said, recalling, as Uncle Reginald put it, that my mother had declared a ‘moratorium’ on wakes.
‘Your mother gave me her permission,’ Aunt Phil said. I tried to pull away from her but she held my hand tighter.
When I thought of all those establishments Aunt Phil might have owned and which I might have had free use of throughout my childhood, the fact that she owned a funeral home was very hard to take. She had been dragging me off to Reg Ryan’s since I was five, my parents having not so much approved of her methods as overlooked them. I felt it was entirely possible that I held the world record for most dead bodies seen by a nine-year-old, most time spent in the company of dead people. If it was enough that other boys observe Ash Wednesday once a year, Uncle Reginald once asked her, why did I have to go to wakes once a month? Children, but boys especially, Aunt Phil told him, could never be reminded of their mortality too often.
Aunt Phil believed that men were superior to women, but that, in the very thing that made them superior, lay also the flaw that could destroy them. Men were stronger, yes, but with that strength came pride. It was pride, she said, that had flung Satan headlong from heaven into hell. It was pride that had made a ‘renegade’ of Uncle Reginald who, presumably, had not been to as many wakes as the rest of the family. One way or another, while he was still young enough to reap the benefits, a boy’s pride had to be broken. And, for Aunt Phil’s money, there was nothing like the sight of a corpse to instil humility in boys.
‘I don’t want to go,’ I said, as she dragged me up the street. ‘I don’t have to if I don’t want to.’
‘Nonsense,’ Aunt Phil said, adding that today’s wake, that of a boy about my age, should prove especially instructive. As we walked along Fleming Street, the strange, cold vitality of winter was in the air. It made me shiver.
