The Woman Who Is the Midnight Wind: Stories

Ashland, Kentucky

I

My mother died on March 14, 1984. It had been inevitable, as all such things are inevitable, and although it had not been unexpected, it nevertheless left me in shock. A large chunk of the past was gone. A large chunk of my past.

Gone.

She had been hospitalized just before Christmas. Accelerating arteriosclerosis, recurring strokes, and crippling arthritis had rendered her virtually immobile. She was seventy-four.

I am forty. Soon I will be forty-one.

But these are mere numbers. And what numbers measure, especially those linked to Time, I have never understood. And now I understand them less.

II

She died, they say, of heart failure.

When I visited her in January, she was rambling. She upset me so much that I cried. There were three other beds in the hospital room, and now I realize that I can’t recall anything about their occupants. I only recall how, that day, I got up and pulled the sliding curtains around the bed so that we could be alone, so that I could hold her hand.

Her fingers were welded into the timeless claw of the aged, the skin of her hand stretched thinly across bony knuckles. Lesions and brittle remnants of skin cancers dotted her forearm.

But her eyes.… It was her eyes—glazed, darting, frightened, the blue diluted as with a watery thinner.…

Jack was here, she told me.

I frowned. Jack?

And my father. She nodded. The eyes darted.

I stared at her. Jack was her brother. She hadn’t seen him for about fifty years. Her father had died thirty years ago.

Jack was here, I repeated, finally.

She nodded emphatically. The eyes never ceased their wild circumspection. Her hand gripped mine.

I told him not to go.

I nodded, understanding.

But he went anyway. Another nod; a pause. He was always a good boy. We were good children. Never got into any trouble. Always did what we were told.

I felt the frail bones of her hand, watched the frantic eyes jump about, saw my mother as I had never seen her.

He’s coming back tomorrow.

I nodded.

Her eyes darted.

III

I returned the next day. The wildness had passed. In its stead, tubes suspended from a bottle by her bedside snaked into her arm.

How are you today? I sat down, took her hand in mine.

Okay. The word was soft and dry. Her eyes, I noted, were steadier.

I tried a smile. What do you think about all this? I indicated, with an open hand and a postured inspection, our surroundings: the beds with hand cranks, the crisp white sheets, the gray tile floors, the plastic wrist-bracelets.

My mother smiled. She was back from wherever she had been yesterday. I don’t want to die, she said. Nobody wants to die. But, she added, I don’t want to live like this either.

I nodded, comforted by the clarity of her answer. She understood what was happening, saw no solution, expressed it simply.

How much more time?

Who would you like to see? Is there anybody you’d like to see?

Her eyes focused on me calmly. Oh, yes.

Who?

Jack, she said.

IV

My parents had moved to their new home in North Toronto in 1929. At the time, so I have been told, there were fields all about and a creek within half a block.

The fields are gone; no one is sure today where exactly the creek was. The most general consensus is that it’s under the city-run parking lot that serves the subway—which is now the proposed site of the new police station. My father still lives there. Alone.

That afternoon, on my way home from the hospital, I drove to the house where I had grown up—the house I had left twenty years ago. It looked like a house that an old man lived in, alone: peeling paint on the eaves, a pitted and corroded aluminum screen door, snow unshoveled in the driveway.

I knew he was in there. He is always in there.

V

Tell me about Jack.

My father lit a cigarette, holding it in his right hand. He jammed his left hand in his belt, as was his habit. He is eighty years old now, I am astonished at his white hair, his groping movements, the thickness of his glasses.

We don’t know what happened to Jack, he said.

I know.

He left in the 1930s.

I nodded. We sat opposite one another at the green, arborite kitchen table. Why did he leave? What happened?

He inhaled on the cigarette deeply, then let it expel slowly. What did your mother say?

Nothing much. I asked her who she’d like to see. She said ‘Jack’. That’s all.

He nodded. Things were never settled. That’s why. Things have to be settled, or they never go away.

I waited. What happened? I asked. Nobody ever told me.

He paused. I’m not sure, he said.

VI

He lit another cigarette. It was time, he knew, for confidences. There were only the two of them, you know. Just Margaret and Jack. Jack was two years younger—born in 1911. We all lived on Berkley Street together. That’s how I got to know your mother. We were neighbours. He smiled, remembering something. We’ve been married fifty-four years now.

I smiled. I know.

Their mother died when your mother was just a kid. As a result, your mother ended up playing mother to Jack. Margaret adored her father, but the old man, as I understand it, wasn’t much help. He always had a big cigar, always boasted. He didn’t like me much either, he added. I remember him saying once, to me—‘you don’t like me, do you?’ I told him that I didn’t. He paused. It’s all too bad now. Doesn’t seem to matter much either. He lifted the cigarette to his lips and gazed off to the wall behind me.

I waited for him to continue. The smoke spiralled patiently toward the ceiling of the kitchen.

The old man left Jack and Margaret with his various sisters. He was incapable of raising two kids on his own. He was an only son, in the midst of a flock of sisters, and he was spoiled rotten. My father looked at me. Always had a big cigar, he said, but always lived in rented rooms. Those were different times, the 1920s. He sighed. You want a cup of coffee?

No, thanks.

Me neither. Bad for your heart.

I smiled, looking at the cigarette.

The two kids lived with the old man off and on from that point. But half the time he was never home. They raised themselves. And Margaret played mother to Jack. They were very close. He switched topic suddenly. Do you remember the old man? Your mother’s father?

No. Nothing.

He died when you were three. Died of a heart attack on the street car, on Christmas Day, coming up here to see us. And that was it.

That was what?

The end of the line for your mother. There was no one else. Her mother and father were dead. Her brother had left and hadn’t been heard of for years.

There was you. There was me.

Yes. But it wasn’t the same. The past was gone for her. Do you understand? The past was gone. No one wants to give up the past. At least, no one I know.

The smoke hung in tendrils between us.

VII

His eyes were watery behind the thick lenses. The skin of his forehead was discolored and flaking. He hadn’t been eating properly. Jack was jealous of me, he said.

I listened, without changing expression. I wanted to hear it all. It was time to hear it all. And it was time for him to tell it.

Your mother married me when she was twenty—when Jack was eighteen. They’d been living alone for a while at that point. The old man had remarried—a girl half his age. The step-mother didn’t want his kids. In fact, I was never sure why she wanted him. So he abandoned them for her. This was the 1920s. Family life was strong then. Nobody did those kind of things. At least, he amended, nobody I knew. So they lived down the street—Berkley Street—together.

Where did my— I paused over the word, … grandfather, live?

Out in the west end. Nobody had cars. It was a long way. He inhaled the smoke. It drifted out as he talked. I guess she chased him because he talked big and smoked a big cigar.

Who? I wasn’t sure I was following him.

The girl he married.

Oh.

She died three years later, giving birth to their second child.

I was silent.

It was the 1920s.

I turned my head to look out the kitchen window—to the parking lot that would become the police station. It was beginning to snow.

So then he had two more kids, and no mother to look after them, and it was all starting again. Then he stared at me, hard. And he was still living in rented rooms.

VIII

She wants to see him.

Who? The thin, white eyebrows wrinkled.

Jack.

He had caught the thread again. He left in 1932. I think. We never saw him again.

Where did he go? Why did he leave?

He left because there was nothing here for him. He was a young man, about twenty-one. He had no use for the old man; he could see through him. When Margaret married me he was alone. I think he felt she had abandoned him. It wasn’t fair. He shrugged. But then, nothing is fair. The cigarette was placed between the thin, dry lips once more. Your mother felt bad. Felt guilty, I think. He looked at me. Try to see it from Jack’s point of view. His mother dies; his father’s run off and married this young thing; his big sister marries the guy down the street. It’s the Dirty Thirties. Nothing for him here.

I shifted in my chair, crossed my legs.

He left the country. Left Canada. Went down into the States. Last we heard of him he was in Detroit.

Why Detroit?

Detroit was turning out cars. There were jobs.

Did he write?

Once, that I remember.

Did anyone try to find him?

The Mounties tried to find him.

I raised my eyebrows.

RCMP came to the door here in 1939 looking for him. Wanted to know where Jack Radey was. He hadn’t answered his draft notice.

I waited.

They never found him either. He drew deeply on the cigarette. You sure you don’t want a coffee?

I got up and put on the kettle.

Good. I’ve changed my mind too. The hell with my heart.

I stood, looking out the window at the parking lot. The sky was gray and the snow was still falling. A creek, I thought. Under there. And soon, a police station. Layer upon layer. Impossible to find it.

When the old man died, they found some correspondence between him and a private investigator he’d hired to find Jack. It was one of the few bright spots your mother could find at the time. The fact that the old man had made some kind of effort to find his own son—that it might have even bothered him—was something he never let any of us know.

What did it say?

The trail had run dry. That’s what it said. He was gone.

The kettle began to whistle softly.

IX

When the phone rang that evening, it was my father. I found something you might be interested in.

What is it?

The letter from Jack that I remembered. And a card from your mother to him that was returned unclaimed.

How old are they?

Just a minute. There was a pause. I could picture him pushing his glasses up onto his forehead and squinting at the paper in his hand. 1934, he said. You want ’em?

The excitement I felt was all out of proportion to