Runaway (41 page)

“Of course—aren’t I a rich widow?”

Then, because they were not through with their conversation—nowhere near through, as Nancy saw it—they went up the street to a Denny’s, to drink coffee.

“Maybe you’d rather someplace fancier?” Ollie said. “Maybe you were thinking of a drink?”

Nancy said quickly that she’d done enough drinking on the boat to last her for a while.

“I’ve done enough to last me my whole life,” said Ollie. “I’ve been off it for fifteen years. Fifteen years, nine months, to be exact. You always know an old drunk when he counts the months.”

During the period of the experiments, the parapsychologists, he and Tessa had made a few friends. They got to know people who made a living from their abilities. Not in the interests of so-called science but by what they called fortune-telling, or mind reading, or telepathy, or psychic entertainment. Some people settled down in a good location, operating out of a house or a storefront, and stayed for years. Those were the ones who went in for giving personal advice, predicting the future, doing astrology, and some sorts of healing. Others put on public performances. That might mean hitching up with Chautauqua-like shows made up of lectures and readings and scenes from Shakespeare and somebody singing opera and slides of travels (Education not Sensation), all the way down the ladder to the cut-rate carnivals that mixed in bits of burlesque and hypnotism and some near-naked woman wrapped up in snakes. Naturally Ollie and Tessa liked to think of themselves as belonging to the first category. Education not sensation was indeed what they had in mind. But there too the timing was not lucky. That higher-class sort of thing was almost done for. You could listen to music and get a certain amount of education on the radio, and people had seen all the travelogues they needed to see at the church hall.

The only way to make any money that they discovered was to go with the travelling shows, to operate in town halls or at fall fairs. They shared the stage with the hypnotists and snake ladies and dirty monologuists and strippers in feathers. That sort of thing, too, was winding down, but the war coming along gave it an odd sort of boost. Its life was artificially prolonged for a while when gas rationing stopped people from getting to the city nightclubs or the big movie houses. And television had not yet arrived to entertain them with magic stunts while they sat on their couches at home. The early fifties, Ed Sullivan, et cetera—that really was the end.

Nevertheless there were good crowds for a time, full houses—Ollie enjoyed himself sometimes, warming up the audience with an earnest but intriguing little lecture. And soon he had become part of the act. They had had to work out something a little more exciting, with more drama or suspense to it, than what Tessa had been doing alone. And there was another factor to be considered. She stood up to it well, as far as her nerves and physical endurance went, but her powers, whatever they were, didn’t prove so reliable. She started to flounder. She had to concentrate as she never had done before, and it often didn’t work. The headaches persisted.

What most people suspect is true. Such performances are full of tricks. Full of fakery, full of deception. Sometimes that’s all it is. But what people—most people—hope for is occasionally also true. They hope that it’s not all fake. And it’s because performers like Tessa, who are really honorable, know about this hope and understand it—who could understand it better?—that they can begin to use certain tricks and routines, guaranteed to get the right results. Because every night, every night, you have to get those results.

Sometimes the means are crude, obvious as the false partition in the box of the lady who is sawed in half. A hidden mike. More likely a code is used, worked out between the person onstage and the partner on the floor. These codes can be an art in themselves. They are secret, nothing written down.

Nancy asked if his code, his and Tessa’s, was an art in itself?

“It had a range,” he said, his face brightening. “It had nuance.”

Then he said, “Actually we could be pretty hokey, too. I had a black cloak I wore—”

“Ollie. Really. A black cloak?”

“Absolutely. A black cloak. And I’d get a volunteer and take off the cloak and wrap it around him or her, after Tessa had
been blindfolded—somebody from the audience did that, made sure it was a proper blindfold—and I’d call out to her, ‘Who have I got in the cloak?’ Or ‘Who is the person in the cloak?’ Or I’d say ‘coat.’ Or ‘black cloth.’ Or, ‘What have I got?’ Or ‘Who do you see?’ ‘What color hair?’ ‘Tall or short?’ I could do it with the words, I could do it with tiny inflections of my voice. Going into more and more detail. That was just our opening shot.”

“You should write about that.”

“I did intend to. I thought of an exposé sort of thing. But then I thought, who would care anyway? People want to be fooled, or they don’t want to be fooled. They don’t go on evidence. Another thing I thought of was a mystery novel. It’s a natural milieu. I thought it would make a lot of money and we could get out. And I thought about a movie script. Did you ever see that Fellini movie—?”

Nancy said no.

“Hogwash, anyway. I don’t mean the Fellini movie. I mean the ideas I had. At that time.”

“Tell me about Tessa.”

“I must have written you. Didn’t I write you?”

“No.”

“I must have written Wilf.”

“I think he would have told me.”

“Well. Maybe I didn’t. Maybe I was at too low a point then.”

“What year was it?”

Ollie could not remember. The Korean War was on. Harry Truman was president. It seemed at first as if Tessa only had the flu. But she did not get better, she grew weaker, and became covered with mysterious bruises. She had leukemia.

They were holed up in a town in the mountains in the heat of summer. They had been hoping to get to California before winter. They were not able even to make it to their next booking. The people they had been travelling with went on without
them. Ollie got some work at the radio station in the town. He had developed a good voice doing the show with Tessa. He read the news on the radio, and he did a lot of the ads. He wrote some of them, too. Their regular man was off taking the gold cure, or something, in a hospital for drunks.

He and Tessa moved from the hotel to a furnished apartment. There was no air-conditioning, naturally, but luckily it had a bit of a balcony with a tree hanging over it. He pushed the couch up there so Tessa could get the fresh air. He didn’t want to have to take her to the hospital—money came into this too, of course, for they had no insurance of any kind—but he also thought she was more peaceful there, where she could watch the leaves stirring. But eventually he had to take her in, and there in a matter of a couple of weeks, she died.

“Is she buried there?” said Nancy. “Didn’t you think that we would send you money?”

“No,” he said. “No, to both. I mean, I didn’t think of asking. I felt that it was my responsibility. And I had her cremated. I skipped town with the ashes. I managed to get to the Coast. It was practically the last thing she had said to me, that she wanted to be cremated and she wanted to be scattered on the waves of the Pacific Ocean.”

So that was what he had done, he said. He remembered the Oregon coast, the strip of beach between the ocean and the highway, the fog and chilliness of the early morning, the smell of the seawater, the melancholy booming of the waves. He had taken off his shoes and socks and rolled up his pant legs and waded in, and the gulls came after him to see if he had anything for them. But it was only Tessa he had.

“Tessa—,” said Nancy. Then she couldn’t go on.

“I became a drunk after that. I functioned after a fashion, but for a long time I was deadwood at the center. Till I just had to pull out of it.”

He did not look up at Nancy. There was a heavy moment, while he fingered the ashtray.

“I suppose you found that life goes on,” said Nancy.

He sighed. Reproach and relief.

“Sharp tongue, Nancy.”

He drove her back to the hotel where she was staying. There was a lot of clanking of gear in the van, and a shuddering and rattling throughout the vehicle itself.

The hotel was not particularly expensive or luxurious—there was no doorman about, no mound of carnivorous-looking flowers to be glimpsed within—and yet when Ollie said, “I bet there hasn’t been any old heap like this drive up here in a while,” Nancy had to laugh and agree with him.

“What about your ferry?”

“Missed it. Ages ago.”

“Where will you sleep?”

“Friends in Horseshoe Bay. Or I’ll be all right in here, if I don’t feel like waking them up. I’ve slept here enough times before.”

Her room had two beds in it. Twin beds. She might get a dirty look or two, trailing him in, but surely she could stand that. Since the truth would be a far cry from what anybody might be thinking.

She took a preparatory breath.

“No, Nancy.”

All this time she had been waiting for him to say one true word. All this afternoon or maybe a good part of her life. She had been waiting, and now he had said it.

No.

It might have been taken as a refusal of the offer she had not quite made. It could have struck her as arrogant, insufferable.
But in fact what she heard was clear and tender and seemed at the moment as full of understanding as any word that had ever been spoken to her.
No
.

She knew the danger of anything she might say. The danger of her own desire, because she didn’t really know what sort of desire it was, what it was for. They had shied away from whatever that was years ago, and they would surely have to do so now that they were old—not terribly old, but old enough to appear unsightly and absurd. And unfortunate enough to have spent their time together lying.

For she had been lying too, in her silence. And for the time being, she would go on lying.

“No,” he said again, with humility but without embarrassment. “It wouldn’t turn out well.”

Of course it wouldn’t. And one reason was that the first thing she was going to do when she got home was write to that place in Michigan and find out what had happened to Tessa, and bring her back to where she belonged.

The road is easy if you know enough to travel light
.

The piece of paper Adam-and-Eve had sold to her remained in her jacket pocket. When she finally fished it out—back home, after not having worn that jacket again for nearly a year—she was bewildered and irritated by the words that were stamped on it.

The road wasn’t easy. The letter to Michigan had come back unopened. Apparently no such hospital existed anymore. But Nancy discovered that there were inquiries you could make, and she set out to make them. There were authorities to be written to, records to be unearthed if possible. She did not give up. She would not admit that the trail had gone cold.

In the case of Ollie, she was maybe going to have to admit it. She had sent a letter to Texada Island—thinking that address might be enough, there must be so few people there that any of them could be found. But it had come back to her, with one word written on the envelope.
Moved
.

She could not bear to open it up and read what she had said. Too much, she was sure.

She is sitting in Wilf’s old recliner in the sunroom of her own house. She does not intend to go to sleep. It is a bright afternoon late in the fall—in fact, it is Grey Cup day, and she is supposed to be at a potluck party, watching the game on television. She made an excuse at the last moment. People are getting used to her doing this sort of thing now—some still say they are worried about her. But when she does show up old habits or needs reassert themselves and she sometimes can’t help turning into the life of the party. So they stop worrying for a while.

Her children say that they hope she has not taken to Living in the Past.

But what she believes she is doing, what she wants to do if she can get the time to do it, is not so much to live in the past as to open it up and get one good look at it.

She doesn’t believe she is sleeping when she finds herself entering another room. The sunroom, the bright room behind her, has shrunk into a dark hall. The hotel key is in the door of the room, as she believes the keys used to be, though this is not something she has ever encountered in her own life.

It is a poor kind of place. A worn-out room for worn-out travellers. A ceiling light, a rod with a couple of wire hangers on it, a curtain of pink and yellow flowered material that can be pulled around to hide the hanging clothes from view. The
flowered material may be meant to supply the room with a note of optimism or even gaiety, but for some reason it does the opposite.

Ollie lies down on the bed so suddenly and heavily that the springs give out a miserable whine. It seems that he and Tessa get around by car now, and he does all the driving. Today in the first heat and dust of spring it has made him extraordinarily tired. She cannot drive. She has made a good deal of noise opening the costume case and more noise behind the thin plank partition of the bathroom. He pretends to be asleep when she comes out, but through the slits of his eyelids he sees her looking into the dresser mirror, which is speckled in spots where the backing has flecked away. She is wearing the yellow satin ankle-length skirt, and the black bolero, with the black shawl patterned with roses, the fringe half a yard long. Her costumes are her own idea, and they are neither original nor becoming. Her skin is rouged now, but dull. Her hair is pinned and sprayed, its rough curls flattened into a black helmet. Her eyelids are purple and her eyebrows lifted and blackened. Crow’s wings. The eyelids pressed down heavily, like punishment, over her faded eyes. In fact her whole self seems to be weighted down by the clothes and the hair and the makeup.

Some noise that he did not mean to make—of complaint or impatience—has reached her. She comes to the bed and bends down to remove his shoes.

He tells her not to bother.

“I have to go out again in a minute,” he says. “I have to go and see them.”