The divine ryans, p.18
The Divine Ryans, page 18
I was forever grateful to Uncle Reginald for bailing me out, as well as to my mother who afterwards bought me twenty pairs of underwear the easy way – that is, all at one time – and simply left them on the bed where I would find them, never once making mention of them.
Despite my mother’s rescue, despite the way Uncle Reginald disarmed my tormentors, I was still upset when I went to bed that night, still playing the day’s events over and over in my mind. I could see Father Seymour’s face as he prepared to strap me, his eyes blinking rapidly with spite as he ordered me to open up my hand.
It took me a long while to fall asleep, and when I did I dreamed that Momary, naked as always though this time trailing a black purse behind her, was pursuing me down Fleming Street at night, making remarks about my backside. ‘Look at his bum, Mary,’ said my mother’s voice, ‘look at how it bounces when he runs.’ Far more spectacular, I suspected, was the way her breasts were bouncing as she ran. With one hand tightly clamping my Methuselah, I kept looking over my shoulder at her, staring at her bosom, so hilarious, so volatile, the nipples going up and down like large pink eyes in a head that was nodding rapidly, nodding ‘yes’, it might have been, ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’.
‘Draper Doyle,’ Momary said, ‘I want to kiss you, Draper Doyle.’ I looked back to see her right behind me, holding out towards my backside a long black feather, trying to tickle me with it so that I was forced to make a kind of bow of my body, to run with my shoulders thrust back, my groin thrust out in front of me as if I was trying desperately to keep a pair of pants from falling down, my feet fighting for balance, for, even as I ran forward, I was in danger of falling backwards.
‘Help!’ I screamed. ‘Help!’ until I saw, just up ahead, The Daily Chronicle, where I knew my father was working. I ran inside, ran stark naked into the newsroom, which was empty. Even the machine room was quiet, the window dark. That left his office. I went to the door and, instead of knocking, opened it to find my father naked, in the arms of a Momary-like creature, female above the paraline but male below it, my mother from the waist up and, my Methuselah being unmistakable, me from the waist down, my bud as erect as Tom the Dobermann’s had been.
The creature was holding my father from behind, his hands on his waist, bending him slightly forward, his little erect bud aimed unmistakably at his backside. ‘No!’ I screamed, then woke up to find myself in mid-pee, my alarm cock going off and still as hard as that of the creature in the dream. I ran to the bathroom and, when I was finished, when I was coming back to bed, I remembered the incident the dream was based on, remembered another day from my missing week.
It had been just over a year ago that I had gone to the newsroom to surprise him in the middle of the night. I remembered lying in bed beforehand, thinking of how the next day was his birthday. By ten p.m. the rest of the Chronicle staff was always either gone home or working upstairs in production, which meant that he would have to spend the first few hours of his birthday by himself, then come home to sleep away the next one third of it, after which, perhaps without having seen either me or Mary, he would have to go back to work. By ten o’clock, with two hours still left in his birthday, he would once again be by himself.
Thinking of the birthday card I had left for him on the kitchen table, I had an idea. I would put the card in the sermon envelope and take it to him at the newsroom. Wouldn’t he be surprised to see me, out after midnight, apparently delivering a sermon.
I managed to stay awake until about twelve-thirty when I got up, put on my clothes, including my duffle coat and boots, and took the sermon envelope from beneath the mattress. I crept out of my room and, grabbing the birthday card from the table, left by the kitchen door.
I looked up at the sky. It was a clear, cold night, but because of the brightness of the moon, not many stars were visible. It occurred to me that I had never been out at this hour before. I had once tried to stay awake all night, to see if time really passed while I was sleeping, to confirm my suspicions that the so-called hours between bedtime and morning were just inventions of my father. I had sat up in bed, trying my hardest to stay awake. My father kept coming in to see how I was doing. ‘The watch that proved the night’, he called it, even though I fell asleep long before morning. Of course, he said, I hadn’t really proved that time passed while I was sleeping, only that it passed while I was awake. The other question was one that not even philosophers could prove. ‘You’re fooling me,’ I said. He smiled. ‘Here’s a riddle,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you a whole day to solve it. Name something you’ve done a thousand times but cannot remember doing.’ The answer, of course, though I didn’t get it, was fall asleep.
I walked until I reached the graveyard, then began to run. I ran past the darkened convent, the inside of which I had yet to see. Whenever I had gone to collect the sermon from Sister Louise, the nun who answered the door had always had me wait outside. As I ran, I tried and, for the umpteenth time, failed to imagine what Sister Louise looked like in her bed.
I ran past Reg Ryan’s, where I knew two people were being waked, and where the clock out front read 12:43.
When I reached the Chronicle, the whole building was dark except for the lights on the second floor where production was in full swing. There were no windows in the newsroom, which was on the first floor, so I couldn’t see my father. By now, all the copy would have been sent upstairs, and my father’s job, until quitting time, would be to watch the wire in case of last-minute stories. This was the part of the day he hated most, for a story at this point might mean redoing the whole front page.
I went inside. At the end of the hall, the door of the newsroom was open and I could hear the occasional blast of static from the police-band radio which was said to have been playing non-stop since years before my father had joined the Chronicle. I ran down the hall and into the newsroom, with the sermon envelope held stop-the-presses style above my head, all set to shout ‘Happy Birthday’ when I saw that the place was empty. The window in the machine-room door was dark, so he was not in there either. Unless he was upstairs in production, the only other place was his office, which he almost never used and which, judging by the silence, was also empty.
I was about to go upstairs when I heard, from inside the office, what sounded like a chair scraping on the floor. Thinking my father had heard me and had just pushed back his chair to come out, I thought I would beat him to it. I ran to the door and, once again holding the envelope stop-the-presses style above my head, burst in, shouting, ‘Happy Birthday,’ the punchline to a classic bit of slapstick, it turned out, for there, caught absurdly in the act, were my father and another man, engaged in what might have been some strange form of mimicry, their trousers down around their ankles, their shirt-tails and their ties hanging loose, my father bent over as if to read the teletype, with the other man bent over him, their pale and strangely naked bodies pressed urgently together, the other man with his arms wrapped round my father’s chest, his head resting sideways on his back, and his eyes shut fervently against the world while my father, whose eyes were likewise closed, was holding, with his ink-stained hands, the back of a chair that was pushed against the wall, bracing himself against it, face bursting red from his exertions, grimacing with pain or pleasure, it was hard to tell.
They must have thought the door was locked, for it took them a moment to come blinking back to the world, to realize that they had been caught, let alone by whom. They turned to look at me, unable at first, because their eyes were still adjusting to the light, to make me out. I must have been, with the glare from the newsroom behind me, a mere shadow in the doorway. For what seemed like a very long time, my father squinted disbelievingly, as if, facing him in the doorway, was a sight even less likely than that of his eight-year-old son, as if it was his other self that he was staring at and that was staring back at him, the Donald Ryan he had thought was home in bed but instead was hours early, strayed, like some sleepwalker from his other life, from the minds of his wife and children, to confront him.
At first, as if to keep me from seeing how they were joined, they stayed exactly as they were; then, as if a scene which had begun as slapstick must end that way, they began to waddle towards me, my father’s shirt-tail covering his front, the two of them moving so perfectly in time that my father might have been standing on the other man’s feet. My father reached out with one hand as if to touch me, but instead took hold of the door and, without a word and barely giving me time to step backwards from the office, slammed it shut.
I dropped the envelope, then turned and ran. I ran from the newsroom, ran down the stairs, and out the door. Instead of going back by Fleming Street, I took the long way home, walking past darkened houses in which, it was a comfort to know, people who had never heard of me were sleeping.
All that had happened over a year ago. I turned off the light and got in bed. The Rhodes Blades. The Gay Blades. I wonder if that was the real joke in that photograph. It must have seemed to my father that the priesthood was his only hope. Instead, his father allowed him four years at Oxford, a stay of marriage, four years, perhaps, of the kind of life he could never keep secret at home, the kind of life from which he had hoped the priesthood would preserve him. Perhaps he had thought it was something he could rid himself of by indulging in it for a time, get it out of his system, and return home the young man they all wanted him to be. Or else it was four years of resisting that life, the toll of the struggle being such that, had he been at home, his family would have noticed that something was terribly wrong and his secret might have been discovered. You couldn’t expect to wrestle with such a demon and at the same time keep him hidden from the world. Not for long, anyway.
And then the missing year. Had he planned to stay away forever and changed his mind? Had he been afraid to come straight home, needing some time to ease back into being Donald Ryan? I tried to imagine him in Montreal. For a year he had watched them, the Divine Ryans, from his hiding place. For a year, he had crept in memory about the old house on Fleming Street, his house, peeking through the windows at his family. And one night, his face pressed to the glass, watching his family who as good as thought him dead, going on without him, he could not resist returning, showing up one day at the door, the prodigal come home, the son who was dead come back to life.
16
Despite the great season they had had, despite Bobby Hull and his time-travelling slapshot, the Chicago Black Hawks were defeated by the Leafs in six games in the semi-finals, paving the way, it seemed, to another easy Cup for Montreal, who had beaten the Rangers in four games. The Leafs, whose victory over the mighty Black Hawks was seen as a fluke, were supposed to be easy pickings for the Habs. All we had to do to win the Cup, said Uncle Reginald, was beat the Leafs, the aging, decrepit, 1967 Maple Leafs, by common consent the worst team ever to make it to the Stanley Cup finals.
He devoted a full session of oralysis to the awfulness of the 1967 Maple Leafs. He told me that the Leafs’ goalie, Johnny Bower, whose age was officially listed as forty-two, was rumoured to have a son who had retired from some minor professional league because of old age. That meant Bower could not be less than fifty-five and might conceivably be sixty-five or sixty-six. Uncle Reginald went around the room singing ‘Ole Man Bower’ to the tune of ‘Ole Man River’. On top of this, the Leafs had one other player over forty, five others over thirty-five, and five others over thirty. How could the Habs lose to such a team? The Leafs looked like some industrial-league team, he said, bald heads and pot bellies everywhere. They should have been wearing scarves and smoking pipes. How could such a team beat the fleet Canadiens, the likes of Beliveau, Duff, Rousseau, Cournoyer, Tremblay?
Who would have guessed that, after the fifth game of the Stanley Cup finals, the Leafs would be ahead three games to two? But then, even at that point, no-one, not even Toronto fans, doubted that Montreal would come back. Even with our team down 3–2, and the next game to take place in Toronto, Uncle Reginald and I were still making jokes about the Leafs.
We compared Bobby Hull’s slapshot to Bobby Baun’s.
‘Bobby Baun’s shot can barely travel through space,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘let alone time.’
‘What’s harder to find than Bobby Baun’s hair?’ I asked Uncle Reginald. He shrugged.
‘Johnny Bower’s birth certificate,’ I said.
‘Johnny Bower is so old,’ said Uncle Reginald, ‘that there is a picture of him in the bible, herding sheep with his goalie stick. No wonder he’s the only person in the world whose face is more wrinkled than his Methuselah.’
Aunt Phil was just as optimistic about the Habs’ chances as we were, despite the fact that Millie Barter was leading 3–2 on the knellephone. After the last game, a Leaf victory on Forum ice, Millie had broken the rules by letting Aunt Phil’s phone ring seven times. But Aunt Phil was counting on the Habs to turn the tables and win one at Maple Leaf Gardens, after which, she said, she would let Millie’s phone ring right off the wall. Then it would be back to the Forum for the Habs’ third straight Stanley Cup – the last ‘real’ Stanley Cup, Uncle Reginald called it, because the NHL was planning to expand from six to twelve teams before next season.
Aunt Phil announced, as if it guaranteed our victory, that Father Francis, who was just back from South America for a few months’ rest, would be joining us to watch the sixth game. We should do our best to make him feel comfortable, she said. A social gathering was a rare thing for him, as was any sort of ‘luxury’, as she put it. Television, radio, cars, electricity, these things were unheard of where Father Francis lived, so he might feel out of place for a while. The problem with Father Francis, she said, was that he was ‘too good for his own good’. He worried so much about other people he forgot to worry about himself. What was missing from his character was a little selfishness, she said. That was what the evening would be then, an evening of rare selfishness for Father Francis.
Aunt Phil reminded everyone, but me most pointedly, that Father Francis might keep his hood up throughout the game. He would not feel awkward about it, she said, unless we did, so we should make every effort to seem relaxed. ‘Take no more notice of him than you would take of anyone else,’ Aunt Phil said.
This, as it turned out, was not so easy to do. The game had already started when Father Francis arrived, and those of us who had not seen him since he arrived home had to stop watching to shake his hand and exchange pleasantries with him. ‘Hello, my Newfie nephew,’ he said, as he shook my hand. ‘Hello, Father,’ I said, trying, as much for the Habs’ sake as for his, not to become preoccupied with his hood, within which his face was barely visible. Though he was about the same height as Father Seymour, he was otherwise his opposite, his body faintly hunched, his arms, where they extended from his habit, thin and hairless.
By the time he was settled in, the first period was over and the Habs were losing I–0. If a watched pot will never boil, an unwatched team will never win, I felt like saying, but something about his hood forbade such comments. It wasn’t so bad when you could see his face, but when you couldn’t and the hood had that empty, faceless, Grim Reaper look about it, it was hard to keep from staring.
What chance did we have of winning with Father Francis sitting there? Talk about the world’s most unlikely hockey fan. It was very off-putting, watching hockey with someone dressed the way he was. There we were, sitting around in Aunt Phil’s living room, and there was this hooded figure, sitting among us. Anyone passing by on the street would have thought that Death had just dropped in to watch the game. By comparison, what Sister Louise and Father Seymour were wearing seemed quite normal – it might have been that in every living room on Fleming Street there were nuns and priests, and ours was remarkable only for having the hooded figure of Father Francis in it. There was no telling what would seem remarkable once we got used to Father Francis, I told myself, trying at the same time to concentrate on the game.
Aunt Phil and Sister Louise made a great show of not being at all bothered by the hood, and invited us by their expressions to do likewise, but I couldn’t help myself. I soon came to think of Father Francis as a bad omen, not only because of how he looked, but because more attention was being paid to him than to the game. The occasion was not the sixth game of the Stanley Cup final, but the first visit by Father Francis since my father had died. There was no way a team could win when their fans were as preoccupied as we were.
Aunt Phil had obviously hoped that the presence of Father Francis would have an effect on my mother, that in the company of someone who thought she was still her old self she might go back to being her old self. It was soon apparent, however, that this would not happen. If anything, in fact, the tension between my mother and her in-laws was that much more pronounced with Father Francis there.
Father Francis himself said very little, replying with a few words when spoken to, accepting whatever was offered him in the way of refreshments, but otherwise just sitting there, his hands on the arms of his chair. Aunt Phil, as if she took his falling silent to mean that he was lapsing into unselfishness again, would jump up to fix him a cup of tea and something else to eat. The more obvious it became that something was wrong, the more Aunt Phil tried to act as if nothing was, and the more she made Father Francis the focus of attention. Nothing could happen, on TV or in the living room, but she must check his reaction to it. Was he pleased? Had he noticed that Montreal had scored to make it 2–1 for Toronto? Had he heard what Father Seymour said? Had he found it funny? Was he having a good time? It was clear, from his almost complete lack of response, that he either had no understanding of the game of hockey, or no interest in it, perhaps both. When Aunt Phil, of all people, took it upon herself to explain it to him, I knew there was no way the Habs would win.
