Once More with Feeling Read online

  Well, why not? he thinks. For a moment he lets himself imagine the winged nature of airline travel, as well as the enigmatic spectre of Father Michael, with whom he had conducted a somewhat terse correspondence on the subject of Pat and what Father Michael persisted in calling “Pat’s Voyage Broad.” After some cogitation, Max decided that Father Michael must have meant “abroad,” but when Pat replies, he becomes less sure.

  “You see,” says Pat, “Father Michael, says travel broadens a person. When my mother says she does not want me to come to Canada, Father Michael says to her, ‘Mrs. Ngunga, do you want your daughter to remain narrow as a row of beans or would you prefer her to return to us broadened by all this travel she will be doing?’”

  “So that’s how the old — So that’s how Father Michael talked your mother into letting you visit us!” he exclaims.

  “My mother, she said: ‘Father Michael, I would prefer my daughters to remain narrow,’” Pat says with a sigh.

  “And how many daughters does your mother have?” Max is aware that he should know the answer, but he is charmed by the girl’s air of quaint submission to the Word according to Father Michael, or at least what he imagines the good Father to represent: a gaunt man on a stick, a scarecrow.

  “We are five now. Once we were seven but two are late.”

  “Oh, how sad.”

  “Yes, my father is often sad. He looks at us and shakes his head. ‘Oh girls,’ he says, ‘how am I to marry you all off?’”

  Startled, Max glances at the girl but she appears to share her father’s view, shaking her head sadly at the economic rigours of patrimonial responsibility. “And you, Mr. Macks? How many daughters do you have to marry off?”

  “I’m a lucky man, Pat. I have no daughters at all.” But he doesn’t feel lucky. Sitting beside her, he longs for what he’s never even known he’s been missing. A girl of his own, a little Pat-a-cake. Well, well.

  “That is lucky,” Pat agrees. “My father would be most envious of your lot in life, Mr. Macks.”

  Max laughs. He doesn’t want Sams and Lazar to come as a shock so he tells her about his sons. “There is Sams,” he explains, “and then there is Lazar.” As always he falters, at a loss to apprehend his boys.

  They drive past the last of the airport hotels owned by Grace of God. “Back in the day, that hotel was the site of some shady dealings.” Max hooks his thumb over his shoulder and assumes the voice of a tour guide but trails off when he remembers the charges: solicitation, along with drug trafficking and bare-knuckle cage fighting. For an establishment with such an imaginatively criminal past, the Airport Inn is a bland-enough place now, newly renovated and catering mostly to business conferences and trade shows, although a neon sign that reads “Automatic Off-Track” blinks on and off in a second-floor window. It looks like one of those video horse-racing places he’s heard about. Max thinks of himself as a lucky sort of fellow, but he’s never placed a bet on a horse or a dime in a slot machine. Why is that? Something tugs at his memory, some joke he’s lost the thread of. Poor, luckless, favour, lottery. He could swear he’s heard it before but still can’t remember the punchline. Ah, shoot! When he gets home he’ll ask Maggie. She’ll know.

  Up ahead a level crossing looms. Max, who swears he has a sense for these things, feels in his bones that a train is approaching. He floors it, the Pontiac jumping forward so that they jolt across the tracks seconds before the light turns red and the boom descends. The freight is nowhere in sight, but it’s out there, Max knows, clattering down the tracks toward him.

  Ha! He punches the steering wheel in delight and turns onto Route 90. They’re driving through an industrial area of warehouses and storage lockers and half-abandoned strip malls, many of the buildings already in receivership. It’s a grey flannel day, rumpled and ill-fitting. The only splashes of colour are the Day-Glo orange and fluorescent yellow banners draped over buildings — Liquidation Sale! Clearance Sale! Moving Sale! — and the maple leaf pennants snapping above a used car lot. He notices that the snow banks on either side of the road have shrunk to grimy honeycombs oozing slurries of dirty water beneath a winter’s weight of traffic exhaust and pollution.

  “It’s not usually this bad,” he tells her. “When the sun comes out —”

  But she interrupts him. Her small head is canted toward the sky. Something is falling in flurries, spinning earthwards on wind currents and downdraughts. Are these the wings of which Father Michael spoke?

  She rolls down her window and puts out her hand.

  Maggie, who was about to turn forty, claimed that the Christmas card from their World Vision brat was snarky. When Max asked how, she hit the flat of her hand against her forehead and drew her brows together as if to mime, Jesus who is this fool? But in the end she just snapped: February. She meant that the card had arrived much too late to have had any effect on the Binders’ Christmas celebrations, always conflicted occasions anyway on account of Max’s divided loyalties and Maggie’s ongoing grudge against God, not to mention his son.

  “You’d think a Valentine’s Day card would be more to the point,” she said. “Or something for Easter. But no, there it is, ‘Seasons Greetings from Your World Vision Child in Zambia.’”

  “Perhaps Pat didn’t send the card, exactly,” he felt compelled to point out.

  “Perhaps there’s no such person as Pat,” said Lazar, lifting his eyes from whatever Xanadu of the dispersed mind he was currently scrolling through. “Perhaps Pat is just a front for a Russian mafia–owned offshore pharmaceutical company.”

  Max was struck by his younger son’s eyes which, he suddenly realized, he hadn’t glimpsed for months because they were always narrowed over a screen. Lazar’s eyes were roughly the same as he remembered them — colour: blue; shape: eye-shaped; size: in this case enlarged by devilish advocacy — but he looked for too long and somehow got entangled in the spokes of the boy’s dreamy irises. Lazar swerved his eyes back to his unfolding, palm-held universe and his father felt bereft. For something to say, he asked about Pat.

  “Seems to be thriving, actually,” Maggie said. “Whole bloody village of Nakonde seems to be thriving. Ever since the Mission brought in the water system and Mr. Mwenyi returned from his pig management course. So hooray! And since our Christmas card was two months late, they saved postage by tossing in his report card early, so that was a bonus.”

  “Oh-ho, how’s young Pat doing this term?” Max asked in the appeasing tone that he’d not yet learned was an elbow to the ribs of Maggie’s composure.

  “Not too bad for a Third-World, fifth child, only son of struggling subsistence farmers, and a damn sight better than either of your sons are doing. Let’s see — he ‘excels’ in language and health studies, whatever they are, and achieves ‘good to excellent’ marks in everything else with the exception of art. And, if the crappy sketch of what I suspect was some sort of hut-type dwelling was anything to go by, I’m not sure I agree with the optimistic conviction that he ‘could do better.’”

  “Still think it’s a girl,” said Lazar. “Or at least a girl bot.” He smiled without bothering to raise his head.

  “Well, there you go,” his mother replied. “The oracle has spoken. The Oracle of Angry Birds has had his say.” But she managed to tousle his head before he escaped the room and the beaky peck of her love.

  The woman at the Goodwill Store, at first undecided, has thrown in her lot with young Pat.

  When the two shuffle through the door — Max half-­carrying the girl, whose stockingless, sandalled feet are awfully cold; a combination of shock and freezing temperatures, not to mention the Pontiac’s dodgy heater — she stares at them from over her bifocals for a long Geez Louise moment. Something or someone is being nastily interfered with, the Goodwill lady seems to be thinking, and she is uncertain whether her own good nature is the victim.

  But Max immediately stumbles over a rack of dresses
, setting the wire hangers clattering, and his helpless clumsiness mollifies her.

  “Zambia!” she exclaims. “Well, well. Must be hot in Asia this time of year, poor child.”

  Pat stares at the rows of jackets and winter coats, their weight dragging at the flimsy hangers. Sweaters flap their woollen arms out of bins as winter boots march off into the distance, measuring the length of the store in their stride. Over the pervasive smell of disinfectant there is the strident note of what is not quite concealed. Pat sniffs, sneezes.

  Her feet, which have been tingling unpleasantly, turn red and cramp in agony. Pat tries not to mind. Mr. Macks has been so kind to her, and Father Michael has charged her with being of good cheer, no matter where she finds herself. Where she finds herself is in Hell. Her feet are the fiery coals of everlasting damnation, and the pins and needles of the Lord’s displeasure are radiating through her toes, her ankles, her heels. Pat stumbles to a chair and hunches there, watching Mr. Macks and Mrs. Goodwill hold up winter coats to their chests and say, “Hmm?” and “Too puffy!” and “Just a slip of a girl, so . . .”

  “I wish my wife was here,” Mr. Macks says. “She’s the shopper in this family.” Mrs. Goodwill looks at him pityingly, as if to say, Really, your wife is a remarkable shopper? How extraordinary! Then Mr. Macks tells the woman about his wife’s really extraordinary shopping talent, but their voices are far away because now the pain is a hornet that stings and stings. No, Pat has had hornet stings before and they have always subsided, but this agony shows no signs of abatement. On the contrary, it increases with each breath.

  Oh! she thinks. Oh Mama! Oh Father Michael! Oh wings seen for the first time!

  Mr. Macks and Mrs. Goodwill have finally found a mutually agreed-upon winter coat. “Look Pat,” says Mr. Macks, and he holds the navy jacket to his chin and prances comically for a moment.

  Mrs. Goodwill laughs. Pat would laugh too, if she could. She is not crying, quite, but her eyes are bulging with refused tears. There is no mistaking it.

  “Oh,” he says. “You don’t like it.” The jacket, he means. It’s true, she doesn’t like the jacket but why would she cry about a jacket? No, it is —

  “It’s her feet!” exclaims Mrs. Goodwill suddenly. “Her feet are beginning to unthaw.”

  “No such word,” Mr. Macks begins to say, but catches himself. “What have I done?” he wails instead.

  After that, things get better. Mr. Macks wrings his hands the way she has often seen men wring their hands in the village, poor fellows, but Mrs. Goodwill knows what to do. She brings a towel and rubs at Pat’s feet, first gently and then firmly. Feeling floods back (more pain), and then warmth. Mrs. Goodwill brings Pat a pair of thick socks and hiking boots that fit. Also jeans and a sweater. Mr. Macks kneels on one knee before her to zip her into her new jacket and she is all set.

  Oh my, she thinks, catching sight of herself in a full-length mirror. Who is this somebody? Her eyes are bright and so wide that she can see the white rim all around the irises. She narrows her eyes and straightens her spine, hangs tough. She hardly recognizes the fierce traveller who stands before her in hiking boots and navy jacket. Also, she has never worn so many clothes before. In fact she feels tighter and itchier than she has ever felt before, even in the jet airliner.

  Mr. Macks sees her struggling to breathe and says, “Out, my girl, go stand outside while we ring this lot up. You need to try out your new duds.”

  She pushes open the door and gulps in the cold outdoor air. From the bottom of her heart she thanks him: Mr. Macks. He is the kindest man she has ever met. Not as wise as Father Michael, perhaps, but kinder. She wants to thank Mrs. Goodwill but can’t bring herself to return to the odorous, wool-stuffy store. Instead, she offers up a prayer of thanks to the goodness and willingness of Mrs. Goodwill.

  Pat stands in the cold in her new coat and boots. Such a coat and such boots of which even that remarkable shopper, Mrs. Macks, would approve. It is a day in late February, flipped inside out, cold side against her skin. For a moment the weather exactly coincides with her protection against it. It has taken thirty-five hours of travel and strife but she is finally, perfectly comfortable.

  The snow is falling faster now. Harder and faster. Pat looks up into a sky of flying wings.

  Maggie had Sams when she was ludicrously young. He’d been a mistake but a good one.

  “What’s a good mistake?” Lazar asked the first time he heard the story.

  “It’s something you don’t even remember regretting,” she’d told him, although the truth was she did remember, vividly. She could hear Lazar turning that one around in his eight-year-old head and before he could offer his own examples of a life lived on the Édith Piaf plan (no regrets about punching Sams or sneaking cookies or disobeying Imee, no regrets at all) she said, “You have to know you made a mistake, though.”

  “Come here, kid,” called Max from the other room where he was watching a college basketball game. “A good mistake is like a good foul, which is basically any foul that prevents the other team from making a basket.” Together they watched a player who had just gotten fouled by an aggressive point guard line up on the free throw line.

  “Swish,” said Lazar. And then a moment later, “Double swish.”

  “Them’s the breaks, kid,” Max told his son.

  “D’you think that guy regrets his mistake?” Lazar asked.

  “Damn straight,” Max said, watching the coach yank the point guard from the court.

  That had been more than six years ago but Maggie was still thinking about that point guard and his misjudged foul. “There’s no such thing as a morally good foul, Mags, it’s all just strategy,” Max told her when she brought up the game a little while after, but too long after, apparently, to convince him of her sudden interest in basketball stats. The truth was that Maggie was interested in statistics by then, if only to calculate the ratio of free throws to fouls in her maternal standings.

  Sams must have been about eleven because he’d just started compiling the first of his lists: “A Select Guide to Cigarettes in the Movies.” She remembered him sitting quietly on the living room sofa, absorbed in the black-and-white movies he loved, taking notes on cigarettes: hand holds and brandishings, the amount of smoke generated and the way the cigarettes were extinguished. The method used. He watched Double Indemnity five times because in the final scene Edward G. Robinson lights a match for Fred MacMurray by flipping the tip with his thumbnail. It was a good trick, but in the end Sams had to exclude the movie from his list. It was about lighting cigarettes, he explained, rather than smoking them. He was strict but fair. For hours after watching Gilda or La Dolce Vita or Casablanca, he’d scribble cigarette notes, his head bent so low over the page that a dark brown lock of hair touched the paper.

  The truth was that Sams was the best mistake Maggie had ever made. Sometimes, as she stood in the doorway, watching the light from those old movies play across his features, she wondered how the hell she’d gotten so good at free throws. So lucky. But how much longer could her luck hold out, given that the average free throw percentage was right around 75 percent, at least in a league game, which left the other 25 percent in which a person could foul out to no avail? In a game like that you might trade the chance of giving up a couple of points for getting two free throws and still not make a goddamn basket.

  Disaster strikes when they return to the car.

  “Perhaps it would be more accurate to say, ‘Disaster struck when they returned to the car,’” says Mr. Macks, because it happened while they were in that blasted store. But while he is working on her tenses he sees that he has wounded her feelings and, supremely kind man that he is, he says, “Not to worry, dear. How were you to know?” and “Who’s to say?” and “We’ll sort this out in the morning.”

  What happened is that someone — “Some Godless rogue,” Father Michael would have said — jimmied open the
passenger door of Mr. Macks’s superb automobile and snatched Pat’s travel purse from where she had carelessly left it, heaped on the passenger seat. In her defence: she was jet-lagged, confused, hungry, cold, out of her element, entranced by wings. On the other hand: she should have known better. Her mama had made her that travel purse; it was just large enough to contain her passport, her return ticket, and a single Citibank Zambia traveller’s cheque in the amount of ten scraped-together, penny-pinching dollars.

  “To buy a birthday present for Mrs. Macks,” Pat tells Max. “Something wonderful.” In fact, Father Michael had said “Something useful,” but although she has been in the city little more than an hour, Pat has had occasion to measure the useful (coat, boots) against the wonderful (wings), and she has made her choice.

  Max smiles. He can’t help himself, although he would certainly like to. The girl is a whole bowl of trouble: delayed flights, lost luggage, tears, frostbite. And now a stolen passport. Ah, but she is also dauntless and brave as she stands beside the Pontiac, hopping from one foot to another in her agitation.

  “Oh, who would do this?” she cries. With her upturned face and her right fist raised to the heavens, she seems to be addressing the falling snow.

  “Must be someone who needs a new travel purse,” says Max phlegmatically. “Don’t worry about the passport, darling. We’ll go and see about a new one in the morning.” His heart sinks, though, to his boots.

  But the girl is inconsolable. She stands there forlornly, her new jacket flapping about her knees. Max notices there’s a button missing from the cuff of the jacket, and that she has pulled the sleeves up over her wrists, as far as they will go. Oh, mittens! he thinks, but is loath to dart back into the Goodwill Store because he has the irrational fear that when he returns, something else will be missing. The car, the girl. Pat, he now realizes, is the sort of young woman to whom nothing can be added without something else being subtracted. Buy her a jacket and boots and presto, her passport and traveller’s cheque will disappear.