Whatever Lola Wants Read online

  PRAISE FOR GEORGE SZANTO

  “Szanto …is a real writer.” —New York Times

  “Exquisitely rendered.” —Gabriola Sounder

  “Szanto has a deft hand with characterization.” —Times Colonist

  “Genuinely heartbreaking …Vividly described …Szanto is acutely, almost painfully, sensitive to the world outside his front door.” —National Post

  “Memory is one of the rare privileges of age. With compassion, wise humor, and a poet’s eye for the telling detail, George Szanto has given us a sort of Pilgrim’s Progress from one man’s intimate story to a dazzling meditation on history and nature.” —Alberto Manguel

  “Szanto writes with wonderful lucidity, never leaving the reader, always circling back to the essence of things.” —Susan Crean, author of the award-winning The Laughing One: A Journey to Emily Carr

  ALSO BY GEORGE SZANTO

  FICTION

  The Tartarus House on Crab

  Friends & Marriages

  Duets (with Per Brask)

  Not Working

  Sixteen Ways to Skin a Cat

  The Conquests of Mexico trilogy

  The Underside of Stones

  Second Sight

  The Condesa of M.

  The Islands Investigations International series

  (with Sandy Frances Duncan)

  Never Sleep with a Suspect on Gabriola Island

  Always Kiss the Corpse on Whidbey Island

  Never Hug a Mugger on Quadra Island

  Always Love a Villain on San Juan Island

  PLAYS

  The Great Chinchilla War (with Milton Savage)

  The New Black Crook

  The Next Move

  After the Ceremony

  ESSAYS, CRITICISM, MEMOIR

  Bog Tender: Coming Home to Nature and Memory

  Inside the Statues of Saints: Mexican Writers Talk About Culture and Corruption, Politics and Daily Life

  A Modest Proposition to the People of Canada

  Narrative Taste and Social Perspective: The Matter of Quality

  Theater and Propaganda

  Narrative Consciousness

  For Kit, for all the past and all the future

  CONTENTS

  PRELUDE: SPRING EQUINOX 2003

  PART I: THE PAST 1959–2003

  One: AS THE TWIG IS BENT

  Two: SO GROWS THE TREE

  Three: COMING OF AGE

  Four: GROWING UP

  Five: FATHER AND SON

  Six: CONNECTING UP

  PART II: THE PRESENT 2003

  Seven: THE GRANGE AND THE STREAM

  Eight: TERRAMAC

  Nine: DIVIDED KINGDOMS

  Ten: DOWN TO EARTH

  Eleven: GRAVE COMPLICATIONS

  Twelve: BEST-LAID PLANS

  Thirteen: HIDDEN DEPTHS

  EPILOGUE: AUTUMN EQUINOX 2003

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PRELUDE

  SPRING EQUINOX

  2003

  Lola sat down next to me. I like it, her here at my side.

  I’ve been watching Merrimac County and the surrounding countryside for near to three years. The people down there—families, lovers, a few enemies. Mostly a peaceful part of the planet.

  Lola was studying my profile. I could feel it.

  I survey my patch of world from some middling white clouds over Mount Washington in New Hampshire. Clouds are easier than vacant ether. Ether’s like the open sea; on clouds you get your bearings better. I take in a solid chunk of geography, from the Connecticut shore and most of Massachusetts up to the Laurentian Mountains in Quebec, from the central Maine coast, Boston, and Cape Cod across to the other side of Lake Champlain. Mount Washington isn’t some Olympus but it gives me pretty good perspective. Haze, the oncoming blizzard, a dazzle of sunlight? I look through them all.

  Lola can’t see like that. She’s a God, higher caste than me. Gods can’t observe what’s happening in the down below, just as they don’t remember the names and places from the lives they’ve lived. But we lesser types, we Immortals, we can; compensation, I suppose. It’s as if Lola’s so nearsighted, time like distance goes all blurred and glazy.

  “Ted?” She smiled now. “Is the week up?”

  “Just about,” I said.

  “You ready?”

  “I am.”

  She nodded. “I could see it.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “Something in your eyes. Like you’re looking far away. Where they are.”

  I nodded, glanced for a moment over an edge of cloud, a slanted glimpse down to the west, and turned her way. She was still studying me, her lovely face so near.

  She spoke softly. “Will you tell me?”

  It pleases me, her wanting to know like that.

  •

  1.

  In maps of the down below, the straight border of northern Vermont is broken by an extension of Merrimac County, a fist-shaped bump of woods, fields, and two streams, reaching fourteen miles north into Quebec’s Eastern Townships. This acreage, depending where your sympathy lies, was rescued from Quebec in 1790 for freeborn Vermonters by the patriot Ethan Allen and his Green Mountain Boys, or stolen from the very bosom of Lower Canada by Allen the land venturer. Map lines show the border jagging up, around and down again. From where Lola and I sit, those demarcations don’t exist.

  One chunk of Merrimac land, two extensive properties. The western piece belongs to John Milton Magnussen, direct descendant of Jack Magnussen, whose Tory cousin was smithereened while trying to blow up a Green Mountain gunpowder cache. Milton and his wife, Dr. Theresa Bonneherbe, moved into the family farmhouse there, Magnussen Grange, their base for thirty-four years. And out again after her stroke, to an easier house at the edge of Burlington.

  The other place, the old Fortier Farm, was bought five years ago by John Cochan. Cochan had come to explore the land and there found his ideal site, the place to build his city of tomorrow. The hills, fields, and waters flowed well; the geology that gave them shape was ideal for his hopes and purposes.

  Milton and Theresa exchange equinox tokens twice a year, over breakfast. Once, they had celebrated the solstices too, with long hikes in the woods, December on skis, June smeared with bug repellent. Since her stroke two years back—the first year of the new millennium, and Theresa understood a treacherous revenge had been inflicted upon her—they’ve honored the days, summer and winter, spring and fall, at dawn with a glass of fresh orange juice, sunset with fine cognac.

  Milton helped Theresa get dressed, aid she loathed but couldn’t do without. He’d learned to plait her long white hair into a single braid. She allowed this, her affection and her impatience near equal. Now she lunged her wheelchair along an invisible path toward the stairs; Theresa at this precipice daily scared the shivers out of Milton, but she permitted no assistance. Deftly she rolled onto the platform of the electric haul-ramp, clamped the chair in place, and clicked to DOWN. With a taut whine the cables lowered the platform to the entryway below. Milton followed.

  She released the chair. “Silly motor gets slower every day.”

  Her disability reduced her, angered her, but her voice sounded clear, the tiny sibilant slur undetectable, unless one had known Theresa before, a tall strong woman with a commanding ring to her speech. He’d never see or hear that Theresa again.

  Her chair rolled along the hallway and its book-lined walls, past the sitting room and more shelves of books, by the dining room into the large white kitchen where only cookbooks, and birding and insect guides, were allowed. Beyond the windows lay the garden and the seven acres of their new home. Mount Barton rose in the distance. Left from the kitchen, the door to her study stood closed. She gave M
ilton a twitch of a grin. “I need to go in there.”

  “You’re going to work on equinox morning? Come on, Tessa.”

  “For one minute.”

  He scowled. “Okay.” He opened the freezer—“Sixty seconds”—and took out the coffee beans.

  She muttered at him but without rancor, wheeled to the door, turned the knob and glided in. Built out into the room, five stacks of bookshelves. Journals and magazines lay heaped along the wall, news­papers in piles on two chairs. File cabinets, more files by the side window in half a dozen boxes. No typewriter, no computer. A trail of bare floor led to her desk.

  From a drawer she took a package, her equinox present for Milton, wrapped in newsprint and decorated with flower shapes cut from the Sunday comics. He’d like it but it wasn’t enough. She could never thank him fully for his fundamental gift, bringing her back from where that lance out of hell had sent her to. The hospital announced she was done and over. “They gave me up for dogmeat,” she’d told Milton weeks after he had found her tottering at the edge of her mind.

  Now she fingered the paper flowers. She turned the chair and darted back.

  “—fifty-six, fifty-seven—”

  “I’m back, be reasonable. Here, this is for you.” She reached out the package.

  “When I’ve got breakfast on, Tessa. What, you want to destroy order everywhere?”

  “Depends on the kind of order,” she growled.

  He smiled. She was only half joking. He heated the scones he’d made yesterday evening, poured coffee and the orange juice. “Good wrapping, Tessa.”

  “Feasie did it. Made the flowers too.” Their daughter Feodora, the married Noodle, had also located the present, driven into Burlington for it, all the way from the Grange.

  Milton opened the package. A handsome book, Nature in Winter, animals and insects hibernating, sketches by the author, descriptions of their sleep patterns, their waking processes. Milton flipped through it. “I’ll start it this afternoon.” He bent down and kissed her dry lips. “Thank you.” She stroked his cheek.

  His present to her, wrapped in a bookstore bag and tied with September morning-glory vine, was A Ton of Cure, by C. Carney.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Heard him on the radio. It’s a collection of lectures he gave, about catastrophes stupid people cause.” Milton laughed. “I thought, Now that’s Tessa’s kind of reading.”

  She nodded, a small drop of her head. How about a guide for avoiding fiascos in the first place? “Thank you, my dear.” She reached out her arms.

  He bent to receive the hug. He was a large man with a barrel ribcage and a breadth of shoulder. Water-combed white hair scraggled down his nape and over his plaid collar, linting dandruff. A lined forehead and gruff black eyebrows softened to round cheeks, a thin mottled beard trimmed at the sides extending his small chin halfway to his open-necked plaid shirt. Theresa kissed his fingers.

  They spent the late morning outside. He walked behind her along trails converted for the chair. New snow was coming, the radio had announced, a late-season storm, twelve-plus wet inches predicted on a thousand-mile front. And after the storm, real spring? The sap flowing again, the new pale green. How many more springs will Tessa live to see, and how many for him? It was a late spring when he’d met Theresa, she radiant and elegant, so strong, and she’d loved him instantly. Of all the men she could have had, why me? The wonders of the world.

  “I feel the storm on my skin,” Theresa said. She took his hand and gently squeezed it.

  The afternoon she spent in her study, reading her new book. The disaster specialist Carney described twelve catastrophes and explained how this devastation in Alberta need not have happened, how that calamity in São Paolo could have been avoided. For a too-often-corrupt society gone wrong, no good purging the symptoms. You have to doctor the whole disease.

  Theresa couldn’t agree more. Helping a single person here, another there, rescuing them one by one, believing you can correct systemic mayhem piecemeal, what a dump of swan shit. Milton often thought like that, that personal acts of decency could save people, that endless charity could improve people. Hundreds, thousands of hours to save a toe here, an earlobe there. And yet, thankfully, helping only her was precisely what Milton had done.

  She studied the face on the back cover. Handsome fellow, C. Carney, around fifty. Wavy hair, solid chin. The beginnings of an idea played about in Theresa’s mind. More reading, and Theresa decided. The first flecks of snow whisked down.

  Later, before the fluttering fire, Milton poured cognac into their glasses. Outside, fat snow swirled. She spoke at the amber liquid. “To C. Carney.”

  It gave Milton a sentimental satisfaction to see her so involved, a glimpse of how she’d once been. “Glad you’re liking the book,” he said.

  •

  “I’m glad, too,” I said, so quietly I didn’t think the words came out aloud.

  “Why?” asked Lola.

  I smiled, and shrugged.

  She slanted her head and again examined my face. “Ted? Can you really see all that down there?”

  It continues to amaze me, that Gods have become so separated from the down below. Blind to it, so to speak. “Yes,” I said, “I see it pretty clearly.”

  “You aren’t just making it up?”

  The ever-repeated question. Curious to hear it being asked up here. “Which would you prefer?”

  She remained silent for a couple of seconds. “I—don’t know.” She stared down. Saw nothing. “Tell me some more.”

  “Okay. There’s John Cochan. From the landholding to the east.”

  •

  2.

  That equinox afternoon John Cochan drove to the cemetery. I watched him stop the car, his Silver Cloud, twenty feet from the tombstone. He stared through the windscreen out to sheets of whipping snow. Leaving the engine on, he got out, walked past other headstones to the gravesite. He tried to come every second or third day, had over the many months. Not coming would be betrayal. Crystals stung his face, a couple of inches of white already on the ground. He’d not bothered with overshoes.

  In his work John Cochan’s basic instinct, survival on the highest level, depended on speed. His primary purpose, immense success, demanded it. Both survival and success had been the reason for his five-day foray to Lexington, a suburb of Boston, base of Intraterra, headquarters for the US side of operations and parent company of Terramac, the city Cochan’s vision would build here in northern Vermont. His junior partner for Terramac, Cal Fenton, had been in the midst of setting up an unfriendly putsch down in Lexington; fatal mistake for Cal Fenton. From Lexington, Cochan had set in action the scheme to eliminate Fenton, a distant end-run winding through Intraterra’s Canadian headquarters, Montreal home to the corporation’s legal mazes. Fenton didn’t know fish about Montreal. Last night Cochan had caught the late Boston-to-Burlington flight, then back to Richmond by car. The commercial plane took longer but he preferred it to an Intraterra chopper. By midnight Fenton had become history.

  Cochan should have driven to the cemetery right from the airport. But he’d felt thoroughly drained. He could have come first thing this morning. But the calls from Montreal began at seven-ten.

  He stood by the stone. He took off his glove and brushed a rim of flakes from the granite. He bent over, careful not to step on the snow over the casket under the soil. With one finger he cleared tiny white drifts from the inset letters. And from the dates. 1994–2002. He subtracted, as ever, the first date from the second, as if to take life from death. His eyes filled.

  If he hadn’t brought Benjie to Vermont it wouldn’t have happened. If he hadn’t bought the farmhouse, made it their home, all would be different. If he’d moved them into Richmond a year ago …Simple as that.

  Not simple, Johnnie, Priscilla would say. Nothing is simple. And she was right.

  Right, wrong, what’s the difference?

  Four months back they’d left the farm behind, no way to go on living ther
e. They had a house in town now, on the Common, a large house. Benjie would have loved it. Johnnie came back to the house last night, to Priscilla, to Deirdre, Benjie’s first sister, to Melissa, his second, not yet two. For an hour last night, one relieving hour, Priscilla had loved him as of old.

  He stood, stroked the stone, squeezed his eyes shut.

  Back in the Rolls he sat in silence, engine running also silent. He slid his fingertips along the steering wheel’s gleaming wood. He loved this motor car. Not as one loves, say, a woman, even a good friend, all quirks and demands, but as one loves what is smooth, dependable, ongoing. The engine of the Rolls was the finest integration of mechanical parts he had ever let his eyes delight in, his fingers caress, his mind comprehend. Its balance of space and function, its power, soothed weariness away.

  But no soothing his despair. Not from the gravesite, nor from last night’s dream. A dream from the pit of dreams, a thick dark dream passing beyond forests to flat stretch-scapes beside a wall of water. From the distance, muffled by the roaring wall, surely he’d heard Benjie’s call, help me …At first far off, then closer, close by, the wall thin as breath. Help me, Daddy …help …If a way could be found, whatever way in the universe, Johnnie would embrace it. He had cried out, “Benjie, where are you? Ben—?” Far away, dim in the wet dark …help …“Where? Where!”

  Priscilla had awakened him, stroked his arm, his shoulder. “Johnnie.”

  He grabbed her wrist. “Why’d you do that, I’ll never find him, I’ll—”

  “It’s no good.”

  He squeezed hard. “Damn it, damn!”

  “Shhh. You’ll wake the girls—”

  He slumped his face into the pillow.

  Priscilla whispered, “Johnnie.” Three-four-six times. She stroked his hair. He lay motionless. She drew his head, no resistance, to her breast. Her eyes filled, and flooded over.

  He lay back flat, staring at the ceiling. The moon floated across the skylight. Soon she drifted back to sleep. Somewhere he’d find the dream again. But the worst of it, and so his anger, was she’d said it right, what good—?