The box garden

Chapter 6
It takes us a long time to get back to Scarborough. For twenty minutes we’re stalled in traffic. An accident maybe; it could be anything. So many people in this city. Louis’s cautious driving style, so reassuring earlier in the day, is an irritant now that it’s five-thirty, five-forty-five, six o‘clock. A heavy rug of sky pushes down on the streaked sunlight; my head aches. At exactly six-thirty my mother will be placing her Pyrex casserole on the blue, crocheted hotpad in the middle of the kitchen table. I twitch with nerves. Doesn’t Louis know how punctual my mother is about meals? Well, he’ll soon learn.
Louis tries to cheer me up by talking about his favourite poet, Robert Service. I wish he wouldn’t. Please, Louis, don’t. His voice cracks with strain and it’s disappointing to hear he hasn’t read Hopkins. But his lips smack with pleasure over a stanza of “The Shooting of Dan McGrew,” and I chide myself for expecting more than I deserve.
At last Scarborough, the shopping centre, the school where I went to kindergarten (I was the one whose socks were always sliding down), the grid of streets so minutely familiar but whose separate names now seem cunningly elusive. At seven o‘clock Louis pulls up in front of the house, and from the living room window a face (whose?) registers our return.
“Aren’t you coming in, Louis?” I ask. “Aren’t you staying for supper?”
“I’m a little tired,” he says weakly. “This chest of mine.”
“Are you sure you won’t come in? Just for a minute?”
“I think I’ll have an early night,” he says. “You’ll explain to your mother, won’t you?”
“Sure.”
“I’ll bring over the shrubs in the morning. Put them in first thing in the morning.”
“Fine. And Louis ... thanks for everything.” I emphasize the word everything; suddenly I’m tired, too.
“Good night.”
“Good night.”
I’m late. Will my mother dare to scold me? Yes, she won’t be able to help herself. This in itself is alarming enough, but something else is even more frightening, something unnatural about the crouched, waiting house, or is it that strange car parked in front? Or perhaps there are such things as psychic waves, perhaps Greta Savage is right after all about telepathic electricity, perhaps tense, waving vibrations actually penetrate my skin as I walk around to the back door. I don’t know. But coming into this house alone at this hour makes me suddenly and ridiculously weak with fear.
The first thing I see in the kitchen is my mother’s tuna fish casserole. Its tender breadcrumb crust is unbroken. A serving spoon lies tentatively by its side, but the table hasn’t been set. How odd.
Eugene. What is he doing here? He is supposed to be at the Orthodontists’ banquet eating warmed-up roast beef and hard little scoops of mashed potato. He crosses the kitchen and presses me in his arms. Eugene, not here, really, can’t you see my mother’s standing right here?
My mother is standing by the stove. Her hands can’t seem to find a resting place. They’re not clutched behind her back, they’re not clenched at her hips, not folded across her chest, not nervously laced beneath her chin; they are floating freely in a frightening pantomime of helplessness.
Martin and Judith. They are standing in the doorway. How curious, they aren’t actually touching each other, so why do they seem to swim before me in blurry tandem unison like synchronized dancers. Married people grow to look alike—it must be true—just look at those two twin jaws slung in the same attitude of guarded concern. Concern? What is the matter with them?
And then there are the two policemen. Why do policemen wear that dispirited shade of blue, snow-shovel blue, looseleaf notebook blue? Two policemen sitting at the kitchen table. Sitting there. But when I come in the door, they shuffle politely to their feet. A dream, of course.
“Charleen,” Eugene holds me close.
“Thank heavens you’re home,” Judith’s mordant contralto escapes in a gasp.
“Now don’t get excited, Judith,” Martin says. “Give her a minute, everyone.”
“Are you Mrs. Forrest?” one of the policemen demands.
“Wouldn’t you like to go into the living room?” my mother frets.
“You must be calm,” Eugene says into my shoulder. “You must try to remain calm.”
“And your regular domicile is Vancouver?”
“Just take it easy, take it easy now.”
“Keep things in proportion ...”
“You’ll find the living room more comfortable.”
“We have one or two questions for you, Mrs. Forrest.”
“Here, Charleen, sit down. Martin, get her to sit down.”
“You’d better sit down; you must sit down.”
“There, that’s better isn’t it?”
“And when was your departure from Vancouver, Mrs. Forrest?”
“Leave her alone for Christ’s sake, can’t you see she’s confused.”
“Take it easy, Char, take it easy—”
“ ... if you’ll just answer a few questions ...”
“The living room is cooler and you could ...”
“Keep your balance, that’s the important ...”
“Your exact arrival in Toronto was ...?”
“Hey, give her a chance ...”
“You tell her.”
“I’m only trying to help.”
“I think Eugene should be the one. He’s ...”
“We understand this is upsetting, Mrs. Forrest ...”
“The living room ...”
“ ... unfortunately they expect a complete report at headquarters.”
“Charleen, listen to me. Are you listening?”
“Yes.” Was that my voice? Was it?
Eugene is sitting next to me with both my hands in his and he is saying the most preposterous things. Incredible things. How melodramatic—I wouldn’t have thought it of Eugene. Seth has disappeared, Eugene is saying that Seth has disappeared. What a joke. Is it a joke? It can’t be because these policemen are writing things down and besides my mother doesn’t like jokes. And neither, I realize for the first time in my life, neither do I.
Seth has been taken somewhere by Greta Savage. Taken away. Several days ago. No one knows for sure when. Or how. But they have both been missing for several days. Now don’t get excited. No one knows where they are at this precise moment, but in all probability they are safe. Greta Savage has disappeared with my son and Doug Savage has called in the police, that is what has happened, Charleen.
“Say something, Charleen,” Eugene commands.
“Is she going to faint?” Judith’s arm is on my shoulder.
“It looks like it. Someone get some water.”
“Are you going to faint, Charleen?”
“Darling.”
“No,” I say distinctly. “No, I’m not going to faint.”

All I have to do is hold on to consciousness. Nothing is more important than that, for the moment nothing more is required of me. But if I shut my eyes for even a second I will never see Seth again. I must sit still, I must pretend I am composed of dry, unjointed wood, if I move one inch from this table there will be an explosion.
I must try to understand. Slowly, perfectly like a child memorizing the Twenty-third Psalm, He restoreth my soul for his something-or-other sake. Certain facts must be absorbed.
Doug Savage has been trying to reach me all day. The last call came from Parry Sound. He phoned at least four times today. Finally he agreed to talk to Judith. Judith phoned downtown immediately and had Eugene paged at the conference. Eugene came home at once and since then he has been trying unsuccessfully to reach Doug Savage. But Doug Savage promised Judith he would phone back at eight o‘clock. That’s less than an hour, Judith says, only fifty minutes now, and until then there is nothing anyone can do.
Seth and Greta have been missing all week. While I was eating English muffins on the train, while I was kissing Eugene in the back of a taxi and, Oh God, while I was chasing around the countryside with Louis Berceau on a foolish, pointless, private, childish quest Greta and Seth disappeared; they took the Savages’ car in the middle of the night—there is some confusion about which night it was, Sunday? Monday? The Vancouver police think—there is reason to believe—that Greta may have given Seth some sleeping pills. Sleeping pills!
For the first two days Doug thought he could avoid calling in the police. He had a hunch that Greta might have taken Seth to a cottage they own in the mountains in Alberta. He borrowed a car and drove all night, but when he got there, he found only rumpled beds and tire tracks. They must have spent the first night there. After that, he thought they might have gone to Winnipeg where Greta has old friends, but when he got there, twenty-four hours later, he couldn’t find any trace of her. So he phoned here last night—Can that possibly have been only last night?—hoping Greta had made some kind of contact; after that he phoned the police. There had been no alternative.
The police: they are looking right across the country, but they have to move cautiously (are they dealing with a mad woman?). They don’t know. I don’t know. The situation has been judged too risky for public appeals, but they are making all sorts of inquiries. It seems Greta is driving mostly at night. A gas station attendant just outside Thunder Bay is almost certain they stopped there: a woman and boy resembling the police description stopped for gas and a hamburger. Did the woman appear dangerous? No. Had the boy appeared intimidated or drugged? No one had noticed. Which way were they headed? The attendant wasn’t sure. All he could remember was that they were in a hurry.

There is nothing to do but wait until Doug calls again. The two police officers wait courteously in the living room. My mother frets about whether or not to offer them coffee. Eventually she decides against it. She is more confused than alarmed; her six-thirty supper has been disrupted and in some indefinable way the untouched casserole precludes the making of coffee. As always she is just outside of events, hovering—ghostlike but demanding—at the perimeter. “How could you leave him with people like that?” she scolds me sharply. “What kind of friends are they?”
Judith tries to soothe her, but Martin flushes with anger. Martin is convinced that what I need is a stiff drink, but of course there is nothing, not in this house. “I’ve got some Scotch in my suitcase,” he says, suddenly assertive. He brings it out, and my mother, her hands still flapping wildy, finds a juice glass. But my stomach leaps and dissolves; I can’t even look at it; Martin picks up the glass, regards it mildly, and then drinks it off neat.
Judith’s voice floats over my head in a sort of chanting reassuring descant. “Look at it like this, Charleen, they’ve both been seen alive and well. Yesterday. So they’re okay. Maybe she’s a bit on the crazy side, but she isn’t dangerous, that’s what Doug Savage said on the phone. He said try not to get Charleen upset because Greta wouldn’t hurt a fly, it’s just a matter of hours before they find him.”
Martin pats me awkwardly on the crown of my head. “Look here now, Charleen, she’s a little unbalanced maybe, but, God, who isn‘t, and you’ve known her for years. You know she wouldn’t do anything to hurt him, nothing really crazy. You’ve got to keep thinking what she’s really like.”
Eugene sits wordless beside me. He’s not a wordy man, he never was a wordy man. He’s still holding on to my hands, and I’m grateful to him. There’s nothing to say. And nothing we can do.
I think of the huge distance between Toronto and Vancouver, the blending agricultural regions, the mountain ranges, river systems, squares of acreage, contours, city limits, county lines, townships and backyards with chickens and shrubs and children. I try to hold that whole terrain in my head; it is a numbing exercise, though it shouldn’t be all that difficult, for haven’t I just crossed that country myself? Haven’t I touched every inch of it? I think of all the people strung out over that distance, imbedded in their separate time zones. Seven-thirty: they’re washing dishes. I can hear cutlery right across the country dropping into drawers. They’re bathing children, playing bridge, reading newspapers, all of them magically sealed in their preserving spheres of activity. Out there in all that darkness is Greta’s car, a blue Volvo—it has to be there—cruising past apartment houses and suburbs and farms; and these people, shutting their windows, watering their lawns, walking their dogs, they just allow her to go by. Maybe they even wave to her. Maybe she waves back, she has always been so friendly, so pathetically friendly. She would do anything to help a friend; she is so kind, she wouldn’t hurt a fly. Remember that, above all remember that; she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

Eight o‘clock. We wait in the kitchen. The silence is minutely detailed like a blueprint for a piece of immensely complicated machinery. The minutes are sharply cornered and pressing, and each one hangs rigidly separate.
Eight-fifteen. Why doesn’t Doug call? Something has happened. One of the policemen asks if he might phone in a report.
“No,” I gasp.
Eugene shakes his head, “Better not tie up the phone here.” The policeman nods politely and asks if he might use the next-door neighbour’s phone.
At this my mother looks up, horribly alarmed, and I see her mouth twist into its tight diminishing shape. I know that shape, its denials, negations, interdictions, the way it closes to inquiries, the way it forbids, the way it ultimately blames and refuses. Now. She is going to do it now, going to give one of her terrible, unforgiving no’s.
But she doesn’t. Bewilderment—or is it fatigue?—makes her thin lips collapse. She nods a shaky assent. Then she rises and puts the kettle on.
In a moment the policeman returns; there are no further developments, he tells us. We will have to wait a little longer, that’s all.
My mother is moving around the kitchen putting her trembling hands to work. (What have I done to her, what have I done to her this time?) Now she is making tea, now she is arranging jittery cups on a tray. Judith gets up to help her and together they begin to make sandwiches. How extraordinary, my mother actually has a package of boiled ham in the refrigerator. And cheese. Sandwiches are disaster fare; who would have thought my mother had a sense of occasion. She and Judith stand with their backs to us buttering bread. They are exactly the same height; I never noticed that. Their elbows move together, marionettes on a single lateral string. Abstract kinship suddenly made substantial. But why am I thinking about ham and cheese and kinship? Why am I not thinking about the centre of this disaster; why am I not thinking about Seth?
Because I can’t bear to.
Seth dead. No, that’s not possible. It’s not possible because my life isn’t possible without him; it’s not possible when I’m sitting here, wired with reality. Pulse, heartbeat, nerves, breath, sudden sweating, hurting consciousness, all the signs of life failing me now by not failing. In this kitchen every small sound is magnified; my mother’s half-invalid, half-despairing shuffle, the policemen laughing in the living room (laughing!), Martin crashing into his ham sandwich, the sugar spoon which strikes with dead neutrality on the formica table. And my eyes: suddenly I can see with wolfish clarity. I can see the neat hem on my mother’s sheer kitchen curtains, her tiny over and under and over stitches, and through the curtains a glittering, mocking, glassware moon is coming into view. Evening. Nine o‘clock. Doug Savage, why doesn’t he phone? Seth dead. No, it’s not possible.
Sleeping pills. Greta stuffing Seth with sleeping pills; she is so small, such a weak, wiry woman, something dark about her face, always a sense of shadow. But Seth is quite strong for his age, well developed, remarkably healthy. His health is startling; something godlike nourishes him despite his inheritance; I’ve never been able to understand it. I picture his strength against Greta’s weakness, and a tiny flashbulb of hope goes off under my skin; she can’t possibly harm him.
Then I remember how clever she is, how she is veined with a wily unaccountability. Her secrecy about Watson’s letters; she hints she has heard from him but says nothing more. And her sudden, piercing, illogical bursts of purity. Madness? Not really madness. How did Doug once put it to me? “Greta is rational enough, it’s just that her rationality is not as evenly distributed as it is in more balanced people.” Certainly she is not a fanatic, not in the accepted sense of that word, but she suffers from blinding pinpricks of virtue. The way, for instance, she once burned Doug’s thesis on the diseases of short ferns because she believed it had been conceived to fill an artificial academic requirement. (Only by good fortune had she overlooked the carbon.)
Her weaving too is girded by purity; the way she refuses to touch synthetics and swears to give up weaving altogether if she is forced to work with wool which is chemically dyed and treated. Then there is her violent anti-smoking stance. And her contempt for Eugene and what she considers his crass profession. Her leaps into various systems of the human potential movement. Her bright, birdlike fixations: the insistence (I suddenly remember) with which she had determined to pick up Seth at school last week. Then there is her refusal to have children; here perhaps her fanaticism is grounded on objectivity, for she would have made a shocking mother for all her devotion to Seth. But most painful to me has always been her clinging admiration for Watson; she once confided in an orgy of tactlessness that she “reverenced” Watson’s decision to alter his life. She keeps track of him with passionate persistence, long after everyone else has given up, smothering him with letters, forcing him to acknowledge her existence, coercing him by her indefatigable energy to keep her supplied with news of his latest incarnations. Ah, Greta, poor Greta, poor, twisted, buggered-up Greta, where are you? It’s nine-thirty and I’m going crazy, where are you?

In the living room the policemen have turned on the television. Hawaii Five-O. Screams, sirens, the sound of bullets, throaty accusations, weeping, all so bearably unreal. What a poor tissue fiction is, how naively selective and compressed and organized, justice redressed in exactly sixty calculated minutes, the violence always just marginally tolerable, the pressure just within the bounds of human acceptance, tragedy in an airtight marketable tin.
Martin paces. My mother and Judith wash plates and cups, and Eugene goes next door to phone a car rental firm. He has decided that the minute Seth is located we must have a car to get to him.
I think bitterly of Watson. Wherever he is, he is being spared this hour. Of everything he has left undone as a father this seems the worst.
Even Louis—I think of him with a flash of envy—even Louis in his furnished room, so wonderfully protected from all this. So innocently unaware. What peace not to know.
And Brother Adam, you with your abstract wisdom, your fire-escape view, you know nothing of what I’m suffering, you are a dream, you don’t even exist for me now.
And Seth, what are you thinking, wherever you are? Are you safe?

Judith, always compulsive, is tidying the kitchen. She covers the tunafish casserole with a dinner plate and puts it in the refrigerator. Then she swirls a wet cloth over the table, picking up my purse and putting it on top of the cupboard.
“What’s this?” she asks, picking up an envelope.
I am slow to react; am I losing consciousness after all? Then I say, “Oh. That’s mine.”
It is the envelope containing the child support cheques, my last connection with Watson. A business envelope, eight-by-eleven in business-coloured brown. Closed with a huge paperclip.
I open it idly, and the cheques slide out on my lap. What a lot of cheques, twelve for each year, and yes—I count them—enough to last until Seth’s eighteenth birthday. And a stack of addressed envelopes with a rubber band around them. There’s even a sheet of postage stamps. How wonderfully organized of Watson, beneath his many layers he must still be in touch with that boy prodigy of his youth and with his dull parents who always paid their bills, in touch too with his unknown, sober ancestors who never ran away from their debts.
There is something different about the final cheque: it is dated for Seth’s eighteenth birthday, May 21, and it is made out for five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars! I feel my breath harden; how had Watson managed to save five thousand dollars? He must have been exceedingly careful over the years to save that much money. But how pointless, how useless, a piece of paper for a son who is missing. A son who can’t be found.
I can’t help it. I’m starting to cry. I can’t help it. This piece of paper, this five thousand dollars—it isn’t enough. It’s so futile, it’s just like Watson to make a gesture like this, so stagey, so impressive and so utterly, utterly useless.
But there’s something else in the envelope. Still crying I pull it out. It’s another piece of paper, a page raggedly torn from a notebook. But the message on it is carefully typed.
I have to read it twice before I realize what it is. It is Watson’s farewell note, the one he must have stuck on the screen door before he left the Whole World Retreat. Rob and Cheryl, those two good children, had been more than worthy of the trust he placed in them, guarding not only the cheques but his final words of good-bye. How absurd, though, to write a farewell note on a typewriter, how somehow incongruous, how like Watson. The note he once left me, the one I burned in the barbeque, that note had been typed too. I had forgotten Watson could type; I had forgotten a lot about Watson. But I had not forgotten his embarrassing penchant for prophecy; reading his words of good-bye, it all seems suddenly very familiar.
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
These words are written in love and sadness.
The life of the spirit is love
but it is also containment and peace.

It is time for me to leave you.
Time to go East.
You will understand.
Understanding is all.

Two things I ask of you.
First, care for the land which
We have made green.
It will feed you purely.
But the grass will give you
Peace and delight.
Care for the grass before the grain.

Secondly, I leave an envelope of envelopes.
Please mail one each month for me.
I put my faith in all of you.

Remember
There will be other lives
Other Worlds.
Watson Forrest

At last the telephone is ringing. Eugene leads me to the hallway, holding my arm as though I were a thousand years old. Everyone—Martin, my mother, the two policemen—gather around me.
“Hello.”
“Charleen.”
“Doug.”
“Are you all right?”
“What’s happened? Have you found them?”
“No, but I think we’re onto something now.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m out at Weedham, Ontario with the cops. At the Whole World place.”
“Yes?” I breathe.
“They said you were here—”
“Yes, but—”
“They’re not here. But we haven’t given up.”
“Tell me,” my voice bends with pleading. “do you think they’re ... all right?”
“Oh, God, Charleen, if you knew how terrible I feel about all this. You and Seth and ... if you only knew. But I think it’s going to be all right, I think we’re going to find them.”
“What happened? Do you know what happened?”
“I just don’t know. I thought Greta was okay on Sunday. A little edgy, but no worse than usual anyway. But as near as we can figure out, she overdid the meditation thing. She rounded. That’s what we think. She just rounded.”
“Rounded?”
“Went over ... you know, over the top. It happens sometimes. She lost touch with the real world, what they call rounding. But I know she’ll come around. You know Greta, she wouldn’t hurt a—”
“But why did she take Seth?” I am crying into the phone. “Why did she have to take Seth?”
“We’re not sure. That is, the police can’t figure it out unless she was just crazy to have a kid of her own. But I tried to tell them I don’t think that’s it. I’ve got a crazy hunch—this sounds really crazy—but I think maybe she’s trying to take Seth to Watson.”
“Watson?”
“I know it sounds insane, but you know Greta. She might take it into her head that Seth would be better off with Watson. You know how she idolized the guy, always has. And she was, well, a little uneasy in her mind about Eugene and all that, you know how she is sometimes ...”
“You really think ...”
“It’s just a guess, that’s all. That’s why I came out here, out to Weedham. But the kids here haven’t laid eyes on him for a couple of years.”
“Greta is taking Seth to Watson?” I repeat this numbly.
“That’s all I can think of. I’m going crazy trying to think. That’s why I’m two hours late calling you. I turned my watch back instead of forward when the time zone changed, I just found out, that’s how mixed up I am. I’ve just been looking and looking all week and I’m just about out of my mind.”
“We’ll find them,” I say falteringly, unbelievingly.
“Look, I’m sure Greta knows where Watson’s living. I mean, I know she writes to him now and then.”
“Yes. I know.”
“Look, Char, I don’t suppose you’ve got any idea yourself where Watson might be.”
I think for a quarter of a minute and then I say, “Yes.”
I give Doug the address very slowly so he will be able to write it down.

Standing in my mother’s crowded little hall, we make hurried plans. Eugene and I and one of the policemen will go to the meeting point and wait for Doug Savage. The police will send reinforcements immediately.
The other officer will stay here with the family. He has just received a message, he tells us a motel operator near Parry Sound reported renting a room last night to a middle-aged woman who was driving a dark coloured Volvo with B.C. plates. Was she alone? The report is not entirely clear, the officer explains. It was late at night, very dark, and no one is sure whether she was alone or not.
“We can take my car,” Eugene says.
“Your car?” Martin asks.
“A rental,” Eugene explains shortly. “They’ve just brought it over.”
“God,” Martin says, “that was quick.” He says this with mingled surprise and admiration, and for a moment all of us turn and regard Eugene who is checking his wallet for his license. Such a simple thing, renting a car; Eugene would never be able to understand why my family stands in awe of such simple acts. I pick up my purse in the kitchen, and Eugene and I follow the policeman out the back door.
It is a big car, hugely clean, and the three of us fit in the front seat easily, Eugene driving, I in the middle, the policeman enthusiastically giving directions from the right. Eugene turns the car south toward the lake.
For me every passing car takes on extraordinary significance; each one must be checked off against Greta’s blue Volvo. She is sure to be in the city now. I strain in the dark to see.
Vancouver, Calgary, Thunder Bay, Parry Sound, what could it signify? Perhaps a straight meaningless sweep across the whole country. What if they kept going, across Quebec, across the Maritimes, what if they dropped senseless into the sea like lemmings?
Then suddenly I am overcome with flooding despair. A moment ago, hearing the gassy zoom of the rented car I had felt temporarily buoyant. Now, from nowhere, comes the knowledge that Seth is dead. The certainty arrives in the middle of a breath. I had inhaled with hope and by the time my breath left me I was certain he was lost forever. This dark road, this silence.
It was a night like this when Seth was born. A spring night, the streets dry and dark with only a cold knot of a moon in the sky. Watson was out at a peace rally and I, drinking coffee in the apartment and feeling the first kick of pain, had been shocked and frightened and then, suddenly, for no reason, I had become serenely confident, packing quickly and neatly, phoning the doctor, locking the windows, calling the taxi, and then riding down the tree-arched Vancouver streets, sucking in the cool, friendly darkness as though it were somehow edible, exaltation knocking inside my heart. This was it, this was the beginning of my life, the only life that was going to matter.
“You want to take a left here,” the officer advises Eugene after a mere ten minutes. “This is a one-way.”
“Okay.”
“Now, you want to jog right at the stop sign. I know this neighbourhood pretty well.”
“Parking?”
“Anywhere now.”
Eugene slows the car. “Maybe we’d better not park right in front of the building,” he suggests.
“Squeeze in there by the hydrant, what the hell. Anyway there it is, that’s the house. That big bugger on the left.”
This is a certain type of Toronto street—narrow and, despite the streetlights, deeply shadowed. Cars park all along one side. The houses are tall and narrow and old; wooden porches hang on to their blackened brick fronts. It’s a warm night, and here and there people are sitting out on their front steps; I can see the glowing red tips of their cigarettes. The front yards are small and, though I can’t see in the dark, I know they are made up of packed earth and clumps of weeds; this is the kind of neighbourhood where there are always too many children and where it is shady even on the brightest days.
The blue flicker of television sets fills most of the front windows. Eugene turns off the ignition and says, “Let’s go.”
The policeman stands outside for a moment checking the other cars on the block. “That’s one of ours,” he says pointing to an unmarked Ford. “And those two guys are ours too.”
“Let’s go in,” Eugene presses.
“But Doug Savage isn’t here,” I say, suddenly confused.
“They’ll be a few minutes yet,” the policeman says, checking his watch, “all the way from Weedham. Even in good traffic that’s a fair run.”
“No sign of a Volvo,” I hear Eugene saying.
“She could’ve ditched it anywhere.”
“I’ll go in,” I tell them.
“I wouldn’t advise that,” the policeman says, “you never know about these characters.”
“I’m going in,” I tell him again.
“I’ll come with you,” Eugene says.
“I think it would be better if I went alone, Eugene.”
“We could back you up,” the policeman says, thinking hard.
“If I could just talk to him alone. For a few minutes.”
The policeman ponders a moment and then asks, “Is he, well you know him, he was your husband. What I mean, is he a dangerous guy?”
“Is he, Charleen?” Eugene turns to me.
“No,” I almost smile. “He’s not dangerous at all. He’s like a ... like ... like a baby.”

The policeman checks with his friends in the parked car. When he comes back he nods at us and says, “Okay. We’ll have a go.”
It’s a large house, one of the largest on the street, a three storey with jutting bays and ugly round-topped windows. Even in the dark I can see that it’s in shocking condition. A few of the windows are broken, and most of them, except for two or three at the top, are dark. The front steps are shaky. The open porch is garishly lit by a naked bulb and it’s filled with dirty plastic toys, a wicker chair with a rotted cushion, a dead plant in a pot. I’m frightened now, reluctant; perhaps I’ve made a crucial error in coming here.
The three of us stand on the porch for a moment, and for some reason the policeman is telling us about himself. His name is Bill Miller, he says, and he doesn’t usually come out on jobs like this. He’s filling in, he tells us, because this is a special case. Of course, he says shrugging, every case is special if you think about it. “We’ll back you up,” he says again in what sounds to me like Dragnet dialogue. “If your boy’s up there, we’ll get him out.”
There are six doorbells stacked in a wiggly line on the door frame, but the name we want isn’t there. A man appears in the doorway, a short, scrawny man, neither young nor old, with a rabbitty neck and a small, sharp nose. He is so drunk he has to lean on the door jamb to keep from falling down.
“Yeah?” he challenges us.
I explain whom we want to see.
“Sure, sure, he’s up there,” he tells us. “Lives at the top. I told him I’d put up a lousy doorbell for him, but what the f*ck for, no one ever comes to see him.”
“Is there anyone up there with him now?” Eugene asks.
“Naw. ‘Less they come up the fire escape. I been here all night.”
Bill Miller says, “Look, mister, what we want to know is, did a woman come in here tonight?”
“Woman, eh?” he winks obscenely. “I always tell him that’s what he needs, a good roll in the hay to straighten him out. He’s a real nut.”
“A woman with a boy?” Eugene asks carefully.
“Search me,” he shrugs. “Why don’t ya go up and have a look for yerself. Third floor. Name’s on the door, ya can’t miss.”
Eugene and Bill Miller position themselves on the dark second floor landing. The stairway to the third floor is narrower and there is no railing, but a dim lightbulb shows the way.
I am at the top of the house standing in a tiny hall; there is only one door and it is clearly marked in blocky, hand-painted letters, The Priory, Bro. Adam. (The diminutive “Bro.” is a warning.) Silence. Then the sound of my own breathing rushing out into the silence. I knock smartly on the door. Twice. Three times.
No answer, but through the old cracked wood I can hear something stirring. Like cloth being moved. Like someone sighing. Someone moaning.
I knock once more and wait. And then I turn the knob. It opens easily, a wide swinging, and I call out, “I’m coming in.”
Afterwards I could hardly believe that I spent less than five minutes in that room. A small square room under the eaves, and yet my first impression was one of blinding, dazzling space. It was the mirrors, of course, huge mirrors mounted on two facing walls and lining the sloping ceiling, so that the small space seemed endless and unbelievably complex, like the sudden special openings that sometimes occur in dreams.
It was like stepping into the warm, glowing, artificial interior of a greenhouse with its combination of plant life, glinting glass and stillness. The air, after the reeking hallway, was deliciously fresh and smelled of earth and new growth. A narrow window let in the fragrant early spring air and on the other side a door stood open to an iron fire escape.
The room was alive with tiny lights. They were strung on wires and they beamed like miniature suns on the wooden flats of grass. The whole room, except for a neatly made-up army cot, was carpeted with grass. In the rebounding arrangements of mirrors and lights, the grass stretched endlessly, acres of it, miles of it; it was like coming upon a secret Alpine meadow, like a pocket of perfect and perpetual springtime where there was no night, no thought of cold or death. Even time seemed to fall away from me, as though the endless grass lived in another dimension altogether where growth and fertility took the place of hours and days.
Watson sat on the bed in a lotus position; I was conscious first of his gleaming skull and then of a certain bodily heaviness under his robe of dull red cloth. A book lay open on his lap. “I was afraid you might try to come,” he said after a moment.
My throat closed soundless over his name: Watson, Watson, Watson. Still there, still there, that tender—no, no, more than tender—sliver of pain and youthful love lodged in the centre of my body. A twisting breathlessness like a rising funnel-shaped cloud of anguish pressed on my lungs, robbing me of speech and, for a moment, of coherence. What was I doing here leaning on this doorway, gasping for breath and for that portion of love that had surely died?
“Why are you here?” he asked again.
Then, like a stone sinking, I regained the powers of speech and thought.
“Brother Adam.” I pronounced the words with finality, as though they were a summation. He gazed at me with detached calm.
“Brother Adam,” I said again, deriving a curious energy from the flat sound of those two words. I couldn’t summon surprise. I couldn’t pretend surprise even to myself; nor could I distinguish the moment in time when I’d begun to know who Brother Adam might be. It seemed to me at that moment, standing in that incredible room, that I must always have known.
“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. (No, I shouldn’t have. I had wanted a holy man with a bright prophetic eye and a tongue threaded with psalms, not this squatting, middle-aged would-be-sage grunting his way into being.) Of course Watson’s vision of himself had never been less than apocalyptic: It occurred to me that the name Adam was just slightly substandard in its patent simplicity. A swindle really. Adam, king of his rooming-house Eden.
“There’s something I have to ask you,” I said firmly.
“I’m leaving tomorrow.”
“Where?”
“East. I’m going East.”
I came close to smiling, for there was a central, un-nourished innocence in the way Watson pronounced the word East, and I saw that I would have to be careful or run the risk of destroying him entirely.
“Tell me exactly where you’re going,” I persisted.
“India, Japan,” he waved vaguely.
“Alone?”
“Of course!”
“You’re not taking anyone with you?”
“No one.”
“Something’s happened, Watson. Something you should know about.”
“Is it really so important? I’m sure you can look after whatever it is.”
“Seth is missing.”
I watched his eyes; they blinked once, that was all. I remembered once years ago when Watson had seen a dwarf tapping his crutch by a bus stop; he had come close to weeping; something should be done, he had said. But the compulsion to relieve suffering was an abstraction for him, a folk belief in husk form. (Later I realized that outrage was only another form of innocence.) For a missing son he could only blink.
“I said Seth is missing.”
“Missing?”
“Have you seen him, Brother Adam? Just tell me if you’ve seen him.”
“No. Why would I see him?”
“Greta Savage has taken him. Taken him away.”
“Greta Savage.”
“We think ... the police think ... she’s going to bring him here.”
“Why would she do that?”
“Are you sure they didn’t come here?”
“They wouldn’t come here.”
My throat closed with helplessness. Why did he have to speak in these dead, ritualized negatives? This convoluted room with its lights and mirrors and riotous grass was just another dead-end. I bent down for a moment and touched the tops of the grass. “You’re leaving all this behind?” I asked.
“I’ll take seed,” he said, pointing to a suitcase beside the bed.
I stood up abruptly, and at that instant Watson’s face took on a startled expression. For the first time I became aware of a commotion down below on the street, a screeching of brakes, car doors slamming, people running on the road, some of them shouting. We heard too the sound of footsteps on the stairs of the house. Brother Adam rose with haste; the folds of his robe sighed around him.
Then, quite clearly, I heard Eugene’s voice calling me. It seemed to come from the street. Or was it echoing up the stairwell? He was shouting something. It sounded like, “We’ve got Seth, Charleen, we’ve got him. We’ve got Seth and he’s okay.” I stood completely still. I had never, it seemed, listened before with this degree of intensity. There were more voices. And again there was the sound of running on the stairs.
Brother Adam picked up his suitcase, and with a sweep of his robe, he moved toward the fire escape. But he stopped there, staring at me for a moment as though waiting to be released.
“Charleen,” was all he said. A question or a cry? Even afterwards I couldn’t decide. Who was it who said that the sounds of our own names are the only recompense we have for the difficulties of living? I am certain, however, of one thing: that Watson didn’t actually step out onto the fire escape until I nodded across at him. Then without a sound he dropped into darkness. I never even wished him good luck.
The next face I saw was Seth’s. He burst into the room with Eugene behind him, absurdly off-hand in his tan windbreaker. My arms around him, his tumbled hair smelling of potato chips, his familiar face laughing at me above the brilliant jungle of living grass.

Late Wednesday night. Some days are too long; it seems too much to ask of mere human beings that we live through them. What we need, what Ineed, is release from today. I need sleep, darkness.
But I can’t sleep. Consciousness is flaking away, but I’m still absorbing the various levels of unreality which have suddenly invaded my mother’s Scarborough bungalow; I’m breathing them in, examining them, puzzling over their intricate folds and, like a classic insomniac, reliving all of it.
The policemen—they’ve all gone home now. How do policemen manage to get to sleep after a night like tonight? Of course, it’s probably nothing to them; line of duty and all that; a ho-hum affair really; wouldn’t even make the papers, one of them had told us.
Doug and Greta. It has been so simple in the end, so completely unspectacular. (Greta had simply driven up to the house and opened the car door. She never even suspected she was being followed.) How tender Doug had been with her. In the middle of the street with the searchlights and the beginning of a curious crowd, how gently he had held her, crooning into her hair, “It’s okay now, baby, I’ll take care of you, there now, don’t cry like that.” But she had cried. A small, animal weeping perforating the quiet neighbourhood, her thin shoulders shaking, “I don’t know what I was doing. He was going to India. I wanted Seth to see him. I didn’t know what to do. All I want to do is go to sleep.”
“I know, I know,” Doug had said. “You need to sleep. I’ll take care of you now. You don’t have to worry about anything.”
Watson. No one had seen him come down the fire escape. No one knew where he went. “Too much confusion,” one of the officers had said, rather embarrassed. “Anyway, it looks as though he wasn’t involved.”
“He was moving out anyway,” the scrawny man told us. “Paid up his rent yesterday, but the bugger left all his goddamn garbage behind. Lived there two years and you oughta see the goddamn junk he’s got. A real nut, one of yer hopheads, oughta be in jail.”
Watson living alone for two years! Watson, a crouching ascetic! How extraordinary really, considering his terrible need for an audience. (Then I remember the mirrors.)
Louis Berceau, another solitary—but his time is coming. What a lot he’s giving up, the enormity of the sacrifice! Why? Why? His blissful detachment is ending; now he will be assaulted by all sorts of troubling concerns; his life will begin to overlap with others in ways which are not casual but responsible and which may throw into jeopardy his springy step and his childish good faith. Ah, Louis, sleep well tonight.
My mother who will be married the day after tomorrow: she has taken a sleeping pill. As soon as we came home with Seth, she announced that she was going to take a sleeping pill and go to bed. She explained that she does not normally indulge in such drugs. The doctor had given her these, but she takes them very sparingly. Only for pain and anxiety, she explained. Pain and anxiety: she pronounced these two words absently as though they amounted to nothing more than a case of indigestion, a stomach cramp, a twinge of heartburn. Judith and I exchanged wry looks. Only pain and anxiety? Was that all?
Judith and Martin. They are sleeping together in the back bedroom off the kitchen. Judith has been offhand but tactful. “Look, Char, it’s not that I don’t love you and all that, but as long as Mother’s dead to the world—if you don’t mind—the fact is, I just can’t sleep soundly unless Martin and I are ... you know ... you get used to the feel of someone, and Eugene probably—”
Eugene, yes. Lying in my mother’s veneer bed, his arms around me—he is sound asleep now, but he has thought of everything: he has set his travel alarm for six-thirty so we can be sure to switch back before morning. He has also driven Greta to a hospital, found Doug a hotel room nearby, bought Bill Miller a bottle of rye. And checked Seth over for damages: “Of course I’m not a doctor, but there’s nothing wrong with him that a good night’s sleep won’t fix.”
And Seth is here in this house. Still a little baffled, a little confused—“I know it sounds crazy but she said you and Dad were getting back together again and she was supposed to take me to Toronto and I was too mixed up and half asleep. I guess I even believed her for the first day or two. It sounded like a dream, you know ... like a wish come true.”
“A wish? You mean you wished—?”
“Well, not exactly a wish—” He stopped, smiling suddenly, a self-mocking grin, but I could tell he was smiling at something else too, smiling at that swelling intangible that the “pome people” refer to as fate and others simply call life. It was a dazzling smile.
He was glad to see Eugene. Eugene is going to get him a plane ticket so we can fly back together Friday night after the wedding. The concert is Saturday; with luck they’ll let him play even if he did miss a few rehearsals. He’s in good spirits and went to sleep almost immediately.
And that’s the most extraordinary thing of all: Seth is asleep in this house and he’s sleeping where no one else has ever slept before, not my father, not Cousin Hugo, not Aunt Liddy, not Eugene, not anyone. Wound in a sheet and topped with a single blanket—for it is surprisingly warm tonight—he is sound asleep in the living room on my mother’s sacred chesterfield.
The whole house, in fact, is asleep.