The Age of Cities (3 page)

 

[
1
]. For an in-depth discussion of the exceptional bibliographic circumstance of the forthcoming manuscript, please see
Afterword
(An Introduction).
—A.X. Palios, editor
 

A[pril 19]59

“Good morning, Mother.” Winston walked into the kitchen where Alberta was already at her customary place—back to the counter and arms crossed—at the sink, listening intently to the radio. Sliding his chair away from the table, Winston watched Grendel dart across the floor, dedicated as always to rubbing his shedding coal-black flank against an accommodating set of legs. Her silence encouraged a question: “Not quite awake, Mother?”

“He's to be hanged next week, it's terrible,” she said in reply. The newsman spoke of lawyers and a last minute commuting of the sentence before moving on to another news item. Alberta had been following the case intently and felt incensed about the invoking of capital punishment. Mulling it over, Winston held to ambivalence, believing that while the biblical sanctioning of a just, life-for-a-life vengeance seemed draconian, it was also suitable in a case like murder. Particularly, he'd decided, when a man's life was terminated as a result of some asinine emotion like jealousy.

Love gone bad: he'd read that old story hundreds of times and still could not grasp the sudden transformation of rose-scented letters and muttered sweet nothings into a frenzied knife slash across the throat. He didn't flatter himself to think that he was saintly or even deficient in malice and spleen. Murder, though? And not only the sheer brutality; there was the complete thoughtlessness, not a second spent over the numberless repercussions that would ripple like water after a stone's drop. One's life would be permanently off-kilter, another's completely extinguished, and still others turned upside down. Wielding the guillotine or noose or poison pill, though—that was another matter. He couldn't say that he'd hold that much personal conviction. But surely all men should pay for their crimes in full.

Winston had been surprised by his mother's pronounced opposition. It wasn't her habit to become outraged about a complete stranger in a distant city. She'd even spoken out in public, writing letters to the city's paper and the district's politicians. Reading the contents to him—she had hinted that he might spruce up her sentences—Alberta's voice climbed high and became tremulous but fervent in its call for civility. Elegant strings of rhetoric portrayed humanity as evolved and gradually becoming enlightened and the punishment that had been set for Leo Mantha as an unbecoming throwback, a shameful outburst of caveman barbarism and archaic morality. He'd supplied her with
atavistic
and been touched by her generous words. His opinion had not been changed, though. Alberta's picture of violent punishment as an unwelcome vestige of mankind's primitive face was, he felt, evidence of little other than wishful thinking, impractical sentimental hopefulness. He suspected that even one of the tenth graders who pestered him with questions at the library could refute this notion of modern man's supposed civility without too much effort: he'd need only to drag out a few
Life
magazine photographs of Hiroshima, Dresden, and Auschwitz—snapped well under two decades ago—to prove his point.

Winston had no further comments to make about the case and knew the discussion would lead—as it always had—to their long-running debate about mankind's true self. The subject was one about which they stood at sixes and sevens. Like a Cameron McKay who did not fume and rage with disappointment, Alberta believed in progress and gradual improvement thanks to evolutionary leaps: sharper, faster, and increasingly capable as the centuries sped into the future. Winston had aligned himself with a classical conceit. Years ago, he'd read Alexander Pope's couplet about mankind being born on an isthmus between two places—the feral and the angelic—and still felt it was apt. The two qualities were intertwined, fatally entranced by one another like Narcissus and his reflection. It would never change; it was none other than the nature of human nature. No millennia of civilization and supposed evolving were going to alter that fact. How many centuries had passed between Cain's wild murderous outburst and Mr. Mantha's jealous rage, after all? What had changed? Little except for the means of punishment. He'd read, too, about the Id and had no doubt that its throne was an enormous one in the court of man's faculties.

Seated snug against the table, Winston watched his mother at the stove. Reflected by the prone teaspoon, she was less an elderly woman preparing breakfast than a miniature apparition—the ghost of a moth—fluttering in a fog of silvery light. Rhubarb was stewing; the bubbles released a lemony acrid scent into the warm kitchen air. His tongue gushed juices in response. Passed through the window's variegated vine, the sunlight arrived in lulling tropic hues. Winston thought of poetry. It was a peerless April—irrepressibly sprouting and green, not cruel. He looked down to his foot to check: it was still swollen.

Alberta apparently did not have the heart for a philosophical tussle this morning, and had moved on to her apothecary role. Winston watched as she crumbled sage leaves between thumb and forefinger. With a dramatic flourish—silver bracelets dancing—she released the debris over a bowl, then followed with thick mustard and a pinch each of cayenne and the dried raspberry leaves usually reserved for one of her stomach tonic brews. She lifted the bowl close to her face after swirling the ingredients together.

“That smells about right. This'll fix you up good.” Winston heard laughter in her voice; her earlier potions had not worked wonders.

“More voodoo, Mother? Some magic recipe you picked up from your riverbank Indian chums?” Duck egg whites and oolichan oil had been the foundation of her treatment last week. Winston reached down to pat Grendel's flank.

“I'll never tell. What good is a sphinx if she doesn't have mystery?”

Alberta was long used to her child's questions; she'd smiled at those moments of exasperated disbelief for years. He'd told her often enough that she ought to be consistent, and she'd replied as often that consistency was a sign of a mediocre mind.
Anybody
could be consistent. Mules and ants were consistent.

She placed her remedy on the counter. “Slather some of that on and keep it there for the day. You can tell everyone in the staff room that your dear old mother prepared something delightful and French for dinner and that what they're now enviously smelling are the leftovers.”

Heading toward the kitchen's back door, her slow arthritic shuffle was pronounced. Winston told her he expected to be home from work at the usual time. “I'm going to tour the grounds,” she muttered. She lifted her grey cardigan from the hook on the door and wrapped it around her shoulders. “That should come off the burner in five minutes,” she said at the doorway. Outside, a pheasant's strangled song reported her arrival.

Winston's pale foot was swollen like the white belly of some drowned fish. He'd noticed the ballooned shape while stretched out in the bathtub during the Christmas holidays. Whenever he sank a finger into the soft flesh—the urge to do so was irresistible—he could recall no accident to account for it. He'd let a few weeks pass before showing the appendage to Alberta. Like Winston she'd watched incredulously as her finger pressed slowly into its pillow surface. “It's like clay,” she'd exclaimed. They had agreed it must be gout—all those butter-filled breads and sweets!—and decided that a cure would require a restriction of all rich foods. The holiday gorging of dainties must have been the provocation.

And yet even after he'd followed the boiled beef and plain vegetable diet there'd been no change, though both of them had dropped a few pounds. Alberta reported that on the bright side she had noticed a new spring in her step. The foot remained resolute, inflating no further and still not diminishing by an iota. The swelling gave him no pain or discomfort. Still, Winston couldn't help but notice the pinch when he laced his shoe.

Alberta had wondered aloud if the problem might not be
psycho-somatic
, a word Winston imagined she'd picked up in some ladies' magazine. A few years ago, he'd given her a subscription for
Chatelaine
as a birthday present, and she read it—always taking time to mock a sampling of its ludicrous articles—from cover to cover the day it arrived in the mailbox. She'd also explained to him that this word means a physical problem originating with a mental problem, like shell-shock, but hadn't gone so far as to name anything specific. To his sarcastic retort, “Where's the shell-shock in my life, Mother?” she'd raised her eyebrows and said, “You're right, it's as calm as a lake.” Later, she returned to the likelihood of gout and began to concoct new herbal remedies that could cure it.

During quiet moments at his library, Winston had speculated with a smirk about the other root—laughably literary—of his ailment. He'd decided that the old Greek story had no relation to him, living thousands of years after the fact and in a wholly different world. That he was living with his mother and that his father was missing was sheer coincidence. There was no untoward affection here in River Bend City, and, certainly, no lost eye, no oracle, no murder. Even tragedy was a rarity. A drunken murder outside of a beer parlour five years ago was as sensational as it ever got. Not even a perverted crime of passion, like the one that had Alberta so worked up. Small potatoes only. Pathetic failings and petty scrambling for money or territory, those were the headline crimes in the Bend. Nothing tragic or epic. Ordinary, not remotely majestic.

Relaxing in the humid kitchen air, Winston turned his attention to his vexing foot. He held steadfast to his belief that nothing psychological was involved and that there was something else he could do. Poised between his mother's well-intended tonics and poultices and Doc Carter's promissory but inconclusive prescription of time will tell, he decided that a trip to a specialist in the city would be the rational man's wisest choice.

A foot doctor's the thing, he thought. He'll discover what's wrong. He'd stop by Doc Carter's and ask for a recommendation.

Winston slid the stewing rhubarb off its element and returned to his chair. He withdrew the problem appendage from a faded brown plaid slipper. The soft skin reminded him of putty. With the same gesture he'd been repeating for months he made an impression of his thumb and then watched it disappear. Without the insulating slipper the linoleum floor was cold, and he walked gingerly to his mother's remedy. He sank a fingertip into the yellow fluid and drew it to his nostrils. Cayenne pepper snuck out from within the mustard's overpowering vinegary miasma. He reached tentatively with the tip of his tongue. It tasted sharp but not unpleasant, as though Alberta had created it to be served with ham and bread at lunch.

Fingers curved into a scoop, he collected some, then crouched and daubed it along the top of his foot just as his mother had instructed. The skin did not absorb the thin ointment, which looked like spilled sauce. With a frown, he scraped off the excess and wiped his hands on a dishcloth. Winston remembered that the egg white remedy had needed to cover the skin overnight. Alberta had told him it might take a while to soak in. He doubted this latest batch of folk medicine would have any more power than the last, but hopped to his bedroom to retrieve a worn pair of socks. If nothing else, applying the poultice helped him feel he wasn't a weak and passive captive of an invisible hunter. The successes of religions and snake oil salesmen were clear to him. Same principle. Winston knew that credulousness was no fire ablaze in his soul and felt glad that his mother's run of curatives had nearly finished.

 

 

“I hear that you were going to the city to have that foot of yours examined by a specialist.” Mrs. Pierce was reclined on the staff chesterfield, the saucer holding the morning cup of tea poised on her lap.

“You hear?”

“Well, you know. There are no secrets safe in the staff room of River Bend City Senior Secondary School.” Winston returned her sly smile.

“I was wondering if I could impose on you? There's this delightful English candy that I have never been able to find out here. I'm sure Eaton's Department Store stocks it.”

“Of course, I'd be happy to.”

 

 

“Delilah tells me you are going to the city to have that foot of yours examined by a specialist.” Miss Mittchel sat across from him as he was removing a sandwich from his lunch bag. He'd used the bag so often the paper was as soft as chamois.

“She did, did she?”

“Well, you know. It's well known that there are no secrets safe in the staff room of River Bend Senior Secondary School. I was wondering if I could impose on you? There's this delightful fabric shop that sells a veritable rainbow of embroidery yarns. They stock a Belgian brand that I have never been able to find out here. Jewel colours, remarkable. It is a few quick steps from Eaton's.”

“Of course, I'd be happy to.”

 

 

Winston felt satisfied to reach the address on the map the porter had drawn for him; he was closer still to winning the bet he'd made with Alberta. It was childish, he admitted, but he was filled with a quiver of pleasure in proving his mother wrong. He'd collect the two-dollar bill from her—the clasp of her purse a vise of prudence—the moment he arrived home. And now he'd found the place on his first try. Her prediction had him losing his way twice during the time that he was away.

Craning his neck upward, he imagined the constant stream of ailments that would lead to the building of an entire skyscraper stacked basement to penthouse with doctors' offices, all reflecting what must amount to scores of specialties. Winston wondered whether all the excesses city living paved the way for—hazards and conveniences alike—opened the door to such medical industriousness. And all that close living: population density had been the reason London, England was so devastated by influenza during the Great War. Naïve people sneezing, spitting, coughing, and spreading germs in their sardine-packed neighbourhoods and to myriad strangers on the streets. Who needed goose-stepping Germans to wreak havoc? Beyond the constant city noise and the vertical clutter of buildings, he caught glimpses of soaring grey seabirds and yet greyer water.