The Age of Cities Read online

  And he’d come to understand that there was disappointment to take into account as well. Teachers did chortle now and again at the crazy gaffes a student might make. Yet often enough Winston listened as their conversations changed form, growing into resigned-sounding laments about degenerating student quality—each new generation, so went the refrain, offering surer evidence of man’s fall from grace. The Nuclear Age of Robotics was upon us, Cameron McKay the science teacher had moaned only last spring while flipping through Popular Mechanics at the staff room lunch table, but it’ll never amount to much with these feeble-minded car-crazy hooligans at the helm. “It’ll turn to rust,” he’d said with a doomsday prophet’s conviction. He’d snuffed his cigarette with a drawn-out finality, revealing a theatrical streak Winston had never before witnessed.

  Nurturing young minds (Mrs. Pierce’s phrase) or drilling them (Mrs. Mittchel’s disposition): neither held much of an appeal. Books were simple, Winston could say after handling thousands of them, and getting students to find the ones they needed was rewarding without becoming too much of a draw on his personal reserve. Unlike Delilah Pierce, he had only so much to give. It was improbable that he would have ever become one of Father Pourguet’s underlings a century ago, spreading the word to the pagan and uncivilized. It was his belief that a man either wants to learn or he does not: no amount of cajoling or force-feeding is going to make him arrive at a place he has no desire to reach.

  Winston turned onto his street and stood in front of his house. He’d apparently rushed; even with the cooling weather, he could sense that a fine sheet of moisture had begun to spread on his forehead. As he patted his face with a handkerchief, he looked up. The worn-at-the-edges house he and Alberta mirthfully called Wilson Manor never failed to raise his spirit. Alberta’s front yard handiwork of profusely overgrown flowers—hollyhocks, calendulas, zinnias: end of season, a riot of colour and impending rot—greeted him, but caused none of the chagrin his orderly neighbours hinted at with their kindly offers of clippers, mowers, and fertilizers.

  He could not count how often he’d been told that the pickets were crying out for a fresh coat of paint. As though the neighbourhood could hear the plaintive wails each and every day. The weathered wood is a nice match for the flowers, sang his mother whenever she encountered one of these help-happy men. Winston had wondered about his mother’s actual motivation on occasion, not sure if she’d turned the Manor into a ramshackle pile—the insulting term originating across the street—or simply to goad those upright neighbours and their wheedling wives. Alberta admired what she called independent thinkers; when she was in a mood, she grew garrulous faced with their lemming timorousness. “Thou shall paint all pickets white. I must have missed that commandment,” she’d huff.

  He walked to the side gate. His mother would be with her vegetables.

  “Hello, Mother. Is everything as it should be?” Winston said as he trod across the grass toward her.

  Alberta was digging around in her dwindling plot of onions. She gave him a little wave and stabbed her pitchfork into the loosened soil. Walking toward him, she held three runt bulbs that swung by their green shoots like tiny pygmy heads. She said, “I think it’s time for tea. What do you say?” She handed the onions to Winston.

  “That would be delightful.”

  Alberta removed her gardening gloves and turned toward the shed. She disappeared for a moment, leaving behind her hat and dirty gloves as she closed the door. With a halting gait she moved across the grass and corralled strands of kinky grey hair that leapt out from her head. She held out her hand and Winston returned the onions.

  “Well, another day, another dollar,” he said as they started toward the house. Grendel burst from nowhere and raced to the kitchen door.

  “Cynical and weary already, my dear? The year’s just begun. Surely you’ve saved a soul already? Helped one of the Wachowski boys find his way to the principal’s office?”

  It was their habit to mull over the events of Winston’s day soon after he arrived home; though she rarely visited him at the high school, Alberta easily recalled the names and personalities her son mentioned. She enjoyed keeping up to date with their stories—some having lunar predictability while others unraveled crazily, like a yarn ball under a cat’s fickle guidance.

  In the kitchen he told her about the mobile clusters of juveniles and mentioned the boy with the smart aleck question. As she filled the kettle, Winston excused himself. He wanted to see if there was mail—Alberta hadn’t mentioned any, so he understood that checking would probably be in vain—and to change out of his stifling work clothes.

  Approaching the kitchen from the hallway, Winston saw Alberta stooped near the radio: news at the top of the hour. She lowered the volume when he came near. The newsman’s emphatic pronouncements subsided into a murmur. The radio was good company, she said on occasion, as if answering her son’s unspoken question about its constant presence. Winston knew she could talk circles around him when it came to current affairs and begrudgingly sought her opinion at election times. He also piggy-backed on her handy overviews for use at the library—fairly or not, students approached him as an all-purpose walking-and-talking encyclopedia, equally knowledgeable about Michael Faraday’s contributions to science, the territory and foes of the Mesopotamians, and the exact differences between St. Laurent’s Liberal and Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative policies on taxation.

  When asked about the latter, he was little more than a parrot for Alberta’s point of view. He could never get himself worked up about such matters, particularly since the ancient civilizations—rising and falling between the Tigris and Euphrates; perched for a span of centuries on the Aegean; spreading out like fever across the Mediterranean—held his attention with such a grip. If it turned out that Alberta made an error of fact, then he would blithely repeat it; so far as he was aware, no such lapse had yet transpired: students were not likely to prove him wrong. “Mind like a steel trap,” she claimed.

  Alberta prepared their tea as Winston drew his chair away from the table. Once he was seated she spoke. “It seems to me,” she said, “that young people always dream that any grass must be greener than the dry patch they’re stuck on. You know: some great excitement must surely lay in a far away place.” She dabbed her forehead with a tea towel: the kitchen always felt a few degrees warmer than the rest of the house.

  She lifted the lid and peered into the teapot. After pouring two cups, she carried one to her son. He nodded his appreciation.

  Leaning near the sink, she continued with her thought: “Yes, when I was a girl—I was one once, you know—I caught a fancy and sighed for months about leaving for Paris to become a milliner. It was London and dressmaking a few months after that. The ideas didn’t seem so far-fetched. Mind you, at the time I hadn’t travelled more than ten miles from home. Imagine that!”

  He inhaled the smoky steam of his mother’s afternoon Lapsang Souchong. She felt that a savory taste was suitable before supper, to whet the appetite. Winston had been taking this blend with her for years, but felt no real love for it; it made him think of burning cedar and smoked salmon. He would have happily exchanged it for another pot of Earl Grey, which he sipped over breakfast on weekends. Alberta held to her rule that it was too sweet for the late afternoon.

  “And then you grew up and settled down?”

  “I suppose so. The line of least resistance, and so forth. Something like that: the world lets you know that one choice will be more vexing than another.” Alberta was roving the kitchen, her cup and saucer in hand.

  “That’s a nice way of saying it, Mother.” Winston raised his cup to salute her placid coinage. He felt parched; even with the hint of breeze passing through the screen door the kitchen air was hot as soup.

  “I seem to recall a period when digging up mummified royalty in the Egyptian sand was how you imagined your future.” Hazel eyes squinted as she smiled.

  “Yes, that is true, I was smitten alright. Mind you, th
at had all ended before I was twelve.” He could not remember what new aspiration had replaced his dream of archaeology.

  “This boy’s disdain, though,” he said, taking a moment to dunk some shortbread into the tea. “We all might imagine adventure-filled lives, but what was remarkable was that he seemed so contemptuous of home—as though the Bend is little more than a prison to him. I know I didn’t feel that and it doesn’t sound like you did either.”

  “You’re right, I wasn’t running away from home. More like I was drawn to some magical place where I imagined hat makers lived.” She topped up her teacup. “But I have no trouble empathizing with the boy, though. You can’t call it the land of opportunity here, now can you? Especially if you want to try something out of the ordinary.” She walked to the table and grabbed a cookie. “Just think if I had chosen to be a hat maker…. I’m already dangerously close to being the town’s eccentric old bat and I never give anyone cause to look twice.”

  She deposited her tea—half a cookie stowed on the saucer—on the table and picked up the newspaper, reading aloud in her mock newscaster’s voice, guttural and low: “‘A local crone, long rumored to be a witch, was burned at the stake by angry berry farmers yesterday evening. They claimed that for reasons unknown she had placed a hex on their crops.’ I can see the headline already.”

  “Oh, Mother.” His mother, the comedienne. They remained silent for a moment; ornery crows on the clotheslines broke into squawking conversation.

  She picked up her saucer again. “I’m thinking of ham with navy beans and fried potatoes for supper … though with this heat, potato salad and a few slices of cold ham might be just the thing,” she announced, her speculation of a minute before having abruptly reached its conclusion. She’d already moved to the pantry and begun to shuffle through her clutter of jars and bottles. Grendel wound himself between her calves.

  Winston told her that he could eat her ham and beans every day of the week. While she prepared it, he’d have time to digest a chapter or two of Claudius the God. He refilled his cup, stirred in a half spoonful of sugar, and headed toward the living room.

  [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 consis
tent, 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.