John Woolfrey 4061 words
1729 Rue de la
Visitation
Montreal, Quebec, Canada
H2L 3C3
Phone: (514)
597-2189
Pages
from My Window:
Red
Geraniums
Copyright by Raymond
John Woolfrey
Published in:
• Queeries. Edited
by Dennis Denisoff. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 1993;
• The James White Review,
Minneapolis: Lambda Literary Foundation, December 1993; and
• La Rosée, Aids Community Care Montreal, Montreal,
Quebec, Canada. 1996
Review:
… The best pieces in [Queeries] – such as … Raymond John Woolfrey’s
“Pages from My Window: Red Geraniums” … – are more traditional works of short
fiction. All three explore a different aspect of gay life, and are subtly
crafted stories that engage and challenge the reader’s imagination and
intellect.
– Daniel
Jones. Books in Canada, Brief Reviews: Fiction. February 1994.
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
We have days on end of bright sunlight
whose heat never touches the dirty, barren streets.
December 29, 1990 (3 pm)
On sunny
winter afternoons, when the streets
are blanched with salt and the shouts of hockey players pierce the cold, dense
air, I sometimes catch Alex’s geraniums basking in their window nooks, all warm
and cozy as the faded sunlight washes over them. I envy his sunshine—I get so
little in my flat across the street. If I lived in his house, I’d stretch out
in his sunshine—on the bed perhaps, or on a carpeted floor—like I did as a kid
in the upstairs den before going back to school for the afternoon; everything
was silent as I lay there with that contented after-lunch feeling, bathed in
the golden heat, squinting my eyes against the sun to see the spectrum form in
my eyelashes. I wonder if Alex ever does that.
Not on this dark and
gloomy day. Right now, freezing rain coats the glass, and the geraniums look
like a detail from a Seurat painting.
Alex bought his little row house
two years ago. Although it had been renovated with modern casement windows and
horizontal blinds, the façade remains as plain as the untouched flats next door;
the only ornaments are some scrollwork brackets on the cornice. Alex keeps the
blinds in his bedroom raised just enough to let the geraniums soak up what
little daylight we get this time of year.
The front of his
house is flush against the sidewalk, with two concrete steps protruding outward
for the snowplough to dodge. When Alex returned from hospital after a bout of
pneumonia last spring, it was hard for him to mount the steep risers, so I
installed a grab-handle on the door frame. He grips it firmly as he hauls his
emaciated body up to the door, one step at a time, and inserts his key. His
mother, when she visits from Toronto, uses it too.
One warm June day, a
few weeks after his return home, we met on the street. “You’ve gained a lot of
weight,” I remarked.
For a moment his big,
deeply set eyes stood still and apprehended me. He grinned with a string of
small, evenly spaced teeth. Slowly and quietly, while leaning on his cane, he
said, “I hope I’ll be able to ride my bicycle again soon.” Alex couldn’t work
his mouth well enough to pronounce all his consonants perfectly, especially his
T’s.
He looked up at the
front of my greystone flat. “I like the flowers you set on your window sill.
I’d put some out too, but my windows open outward.”
“But you’ve got your
beautiful garden in the back.”
“Oh, I want to show
you how it’s come along.”
As we passed through
the house he gestured at some bold abstract oil paintings propped up on the
floor. “Those are Louis’s. He just moved in, but he’s not here right now.” On the
wall hung Alex’s charcoal sketches of steam engines and rail yards. A model of
a modern passenger train from the railway for which he works as a mechanical
engineer dominated a large glass coffee table.
Once in the back, I
asked, “How did you manage to create such a beautiful garden with so little
sunlight?”
He beamed.
(10 pm)
Tonight, dark-haired men in black
leather jackets go by with heads bowed under black umbrellas held against the
blowing rain. As they pass by Alex and Louis’s house, they steal a glance into
their living room through a window whose louvers are stuck open.
Sometimes, when I’m
at my window talking on the phone, I also look in and see them going about
their daily lives: two frail men with moustaches—Louis’s black like his
hair—sitting on the sofa or at the table together, often with friends. They set
up an old-fashioned Christmas tree in a corner where I can see it. All I did
was lay some pine boughs and lights on my window sill, but Alex said he found
them cheerful.
As for those men who
peek into that little house as they pass, I wonder if they see what I do, if
they notice the grace and purpose with which the pair inside embrace what may
be their last Christmas together. Do those voyeurs ever wonder, as I am asking
myself now, whether the two travellers in that living room aren’t the ones who
are really living, that the rest of us are merely waiting for something? To
die, perhaps, or for life to begin?
Friday, March 1, 1991
Louis died today. As I was
leaving my flat yesterday morning, an ambulance was waiting out front. Alex
waved me over and explained, frantic with imagined guilt: “I got back from
Toronto late last night and didn’t want to disturb him. I only realized
something was wrong when he slept way past his usual time, so I tried to wake
him. He was burning up—incoherent, delirious. I should have noticed something
last night.”
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
I had met Louis before Alex moved
in across the street. At the aids
conference in June of ’89 where we both wore sandwich boards publicizing the
Names Quilt. Louis impressed me with his quick mind and easy-going air, then
and later when I met him again at Alex’s. He spoke a soft, elegant French, and
would often initiate a conversation just as warmly in English.
I hadn’t seen much of
Louis over the two months before he died. One airless, mid-winter day I
performed an errand for Alex. “Would you like some homemade soup?” he
entreated.
Their overheated
house had that medicinal smell old ladies’ places have. Despite Alex’s best
intentions to create cheer, the atmosphere was dank with despair and
frustration: he sometimes snapped and mumbled at Louis; Louis was remote and
uninterested—even in the television he stared at. I felt uncomfortable sitting
alone at their table with Alex serving me as he insisted. I tried to make
interesting chatter, but I was afraid I was intruding.
“Am I interrupting
your show, Louis?”
“No,” he replied,
resurrecting his charming smile. “I don’t really pay attention to what I’m
watching. It’s all the same.”
The magic that had
sustained them through Christmas and beyond had dissipated, leaving them with
the reality of their deteriorating bodies. Late in January, a Buddy had been to
clean their house and the Christmas tree was finally put out for collection. It
had no needles left at all. For two days, arctic gusts rolled the skeletal tree
like tumbleweed up and down the deserted street.
I called on Alex one
evening and was dismayed to discover I’d awakened Louis. Though no longer
spending day after day on the sofa in front of the tv, he was still sick. It was minus twenty that evening, but
he didn’t ask me in to shut out the cold. He just stood there in his dressing
gown with the door wide open and said in that pleasant manner of his: “He’s in
Toronto visiting his mother. He’s coming back on tomorrow night’s train.”
Astonished by his insouciance toward his health, I kept the exchange short.
After Louis died, a
friend of his told me Louis had wanted to hasten death. I felt angry at the
possibility of being used in that way.
Sunday evening, April 1
Freezing rain is spraying my
window in waves. It sounds like crumbs of hard candy being hurled against the
glass.
Alex is in hospital
for severe stomach pains. His mother, Maretta, is his house’s sole occupant.
She must have gone to bed by now—the downstairs windows are all dark. I had not
met her before, and when I called on her earlier, a little old lady who looked
like a James Thurber character answered. “Are you all right, all by yourself?”
I asked.
A thin smile formed
on her round, cherubic face. In a little-old-lady voice, she replied: “It’s all
right. I’m used to being alone.”
Today I called the
hospital from the big downtown church to which Alex and I both belong. It was
only recently we found out about each other (he’d been attending the early
Sunday service and I sing at the ten o’clock one). The rector asked me to look
in on him, to make sure his spiritual needs were met. I don’t want be a
nuisance: I only want to be there for him when he calls, and to drive him to
church when he wants to go.
I’m pleased when he
goes with me. Unless I sing in the choir, I have no one in particular to sit
with, and I feel I have a special bond with him that I don’t have with anybody
else. He always wears a tie and a brown tweed suit, even though it’s not easy
for him to dress. And in spite of—or maybe because of—being so much thinner
than when he had the suit fitted, he looks strong willed and dignified with his
neatly combed grey-brown hair. He even manages to shave his bony cheeks.
His mother came to
church with us on one of her visits to Montreal. Together we crept to and from
the Communion rail, Alex’s right arm on mine, his other driving down shakily on
his cane. We each took our turn accepting the wafer and sipping the wine—first
Alex, then Maretta, then me. Others followed. I couldn’t help feeling proud of
us all: Alex for daring to claim his right, and the rest of us communicants for
being rational enough not to hurt him through groundless fears about a common
chalice.
As we slowly made our
way back to our pew near the rear (where Alex could lie down if he needed to),
I glanced at faces among the congregation. On one or two of them I thought I
caught a barely perceptible flash of recognition—a sudden panic and horror, as
though they just realized that the skinny fellow they’d been unconsciously
examining is just a little too gaunt to be merely thin, that it’s not just from
stress or overwork, that there’s another explanation.
I often feel helpless
with those who aren’t as healthy as I—guilty for my robustness, embarrassed by
my sexual wellness. The only help I can offer is the practical kind: driving
someone, fetching things, installing grab-handles. Mostly I just keep an eye on
Alex from my window, as if one day I’ll see him collapsed on the sofa, call the
paramedics, and feel like a hero. It’s that part of me that fears I’m nothing
more than a snoop and a busybody.
Saturday, April 13
I left Alex a little while ago. I
helped Maretta get him upstairs and into bed where I stayed with him until he
was ready to sleep.
He moved into what
used to be Louis’s room. He says it’s quieter than his own in the front. But
the street side is only noisy when the windows are open, and of course the
weather’s not warm enough for that yet. (He never speaks of Louis since he
died, except to invite me to the reception he had in his memory two weeks ago.)
I lay with him on his
bed for about an hour, his head nestled in the crook of my arm as I stroked his
thinning hair. He clutched my other arm with a hand dotted with lesions—they
look to me just like chicken-pox pimples when they dry up.
We could see his copy
of Lawren Harris’s North
Shore, Baffin Island out in the
hall. We thought of other places in his native Ontario where we’d both been:
Shadow Lake in Toronto’s “cottage country,” and Northern Ontario where the
Polar Bear Express runs between Cochrane and Moosonee. Lying there on the bed
with him, I felt close. I pressed my body against his. “I’d like us to drive
through Northern Ontario,” he said dreamily.
“I could do the driving,”
I said.
He stared at the
print and we talked about some of Harris’s other paintings. “One of my
favourites is North Shore,
Lake Superior,” he said. We looked
at it in our minds, the shafts of yellow sunlight shining down upon the lone
stump.
“In high school I
painted in his style,” I said. “I’ll show you the one I did of the mountain
across the lake from my cottage in the Laurentians. It has the same shades of
turquoise and green.”
“You know, I don’t
think you should go away to Japan to teach English. You’ll miss your cottage,
for one thing. Normally, I never tell people what to do, but this time, I feel
strongly.”
I was leaning toward
staying, anyway, and that was about all I needed to convince me. If I’d gone, I
would have missed this time with him; he might even have felt abandoned. I
hadn’t thought I could be that important to him; he has many friends, three
Buddies, and his mother to look after him. But I began to wonder whether he
regarded my role in his life as something that needs to be played out to the
very end. Most of the time we’ve known each other we’ve been little more than
neighbours. But now I feel as though we’re floating along on a light beam
together, and soon I’ll have to get off and leave Alex to ride on without me.
This afternoon Alex
stared at a paint sample for a long time, as though meditating on it. It was
the same colour of turquoise as in the Lake Superior print. “Would you paint
the wall in the upstairs hallway this colour, to go with a portrait of my
grandfather?” he asked.
When he finally broke
away from the paint sample, a rich, bold green caught his attention. After
another long stare, he looked up at me and exclaimed, “Green is the colour of
life!” The April sun seeped through the blinds, daubing him with streaks of gold,
while his mother clanged pots in the kitchen. I hope he lives long enough to
see the real green of spring break out.
Before supper he
insisted on going for a walk to get some air. His mother and I bundled him up
in clothing suitable for mid-winter, as though he were a little boy. It was a
mild day in April, but he feels the cold so.
Arm in arm, the three
of us headed slowly toward the dépanneur as robins chirped in the early-evening
sun. Thinking of how Alex loved his country and its beauties, I said, “It’s so
Canadian, this light.” Startled, he looked up from the sand-strewn sidewalk on
which he’d been concentrating and at the fronts of the houses glowing from the
amber light. “Yes!” he proclaimed. Behind him the sky loomed electric blue.
As we returned to his
house, he remembered that the outdoor light was burnt out. Once inside, he
asked for the plastic bag full of light bulbs and pawed through it until he
found a sixty. I cleaned the globe, replaced the bulb and switched it on. I see
it glowing brightly now as I write.
The concept of light
seemed to come up everywhere today. It reminds me of the “white light” people
say they see when they die and come back, the one I’d glimpsed in guided
meditations. It occurs to me that part of my job is to help him toward that
light—in his time, and when he’s ready. I pray I’m doing this right.
Wednesday, May 1
Tonight, like every night since
Maretta returned to Toronto last Friday, a single lamp glows in the living
room. Just now, another one came on in the front bedroom above. Timers, like
ghosts, turn them on every evening. Someone comes each day to take in the mail,
water the plants, and occasionally alter the lighting sequence. A large sign
fixed to the brick reads for sale
in French.
Alex had been growing
steadily weaker since his return from Toronto a few weeks ago. It had come down
to a choice between the disease and the short-term cure; he chose to stop the
chemo. Though he needed help just to get to the bathroom, no one but Maretta
felt he should be in the hospital. “I want to stay home, where my friends can
come.”
Though many of them
came over to visit and help, the strain on his mother and Buddies was really
too much, and patience was wearing thin. “I’ve never been surrounded by so many
young men,” Maretta joked, but the constant bustle unnerved her. She really
wanted to be left alone with her son. She’d cared for ailing family members
most of her life, but she was much older now, not emotionally equipped to
attend to a dying son—and one dying of such a complex disease. “I’m all
muddled,” she said, her hand to her forehead, as she tried to unravel the
sequence of multicoloured pills on the table before her. Alex spoke too quietly
for her to hear, which led to crankiness on both parts.
Last Sunday afternoon was very
wet and windy. Inside the hospital room the rector stood smiling calmly on the
opposite side of the bed, and Maretta sat alone in the corner, smiling and
chatting with her son and the priest. The side I was on was crowded with Alex’s
friends—mostly men dressed up in suits. We were all ready for the Holy
Communion he had requested.
The tube that was
running to his nose yesterday had been replaced by a mask; his breathing was
laboured, but he was conscious and aware. I held a prayer book for him as he
read aloud with the rest of us. Alex shared his last Eucharist with those who
wished, and then the rector anointed him with oil. “Do you want a hymn?” I
asked. He nodded. “ ‘Holy, Holy, Holy’?” I knew it was his favourite. He nodded
again, and sang along for all four verses with as much vigour as he could
raise. When the service ended, we gathered outside his room to let him rest,
and voices previously known only over the telephone were matched with faces.
The storm worsened throughout the
rest of the day and into the evening. At ten the phone rang. “The hospital
called and they think I should go back. Could you drive me?” Maretta’s small
voice implored.
“Of course.”
“But I just got back
from there and I’m soaking wet. I need to change first.”
“Just turn on the
outdoor light when you’re ready. I’ll be watching.”
The wind rocked my
little car as we sped through the wet night and climbed the mountain to the
hospital. Mercifully, the lights were green and the streets empty of traffic. I
didn’t know what to say. All I could do was listen while she tried to make
conversation. In a small, thin voice she said, “I didn’t expect this to happen
so quickly.”
After we parked the
car, we skirted the lakes that had formed in the hospital parking lot. The rain
lashed at us; umbrellas were useless. I thought of all that she had been
through this day, how tough even the weather was treating her, just so she
could see her son die.
The hospital guard,
when I told him we had been summoned, looked at her sympathetically and nodded
us on. We waited for the elevator in silence. What can you say to a mother
who’s about to lose her only child? She had already buried a husband who was
ill most of his life, and had to support her small family alone. Now who would
take care of her? “Is anybody coming from Toronto?” I asked. Panic seized her
features with the awareness that the only one left was nine floors above and
about to leave her.
We found him shaking,
convulsing, eyes rolling back into his head. The nurse gave him morphine. As
his mother held his hand and spoke to him in her soft, little-old-lady voice,
the drug quickly took effect and Alex became calm. Soon all he did was breathe
very deeply and laboriously as we watched, his chest heaving. This tiny, gentle
woman held onto his hand-watching, incredulous, wishing she could stop it,
knowing she couldn’t. The intervals between gasps became longer and longer,
until one came that seemed to stretch for minutes. I wondered if that was it;
even when the nurse checked his pulse, even when the doctor did it.
Alex had gone. The
precise moment had been imperceptible, at least to me. It was all orderly,
planned almost, as though he knew exactly what he was doing. His body had been
failing him; he received his final Communion that day as he had requested, and
he died with his mother’s hand in his. Then he moved on, confident he was
ready, certain of where he was going.
For a few moments
after, it was just Maretta and I; her eyes fixed on her son, mine on them both.
Still wearing her little-old-lady hat, she peered at him, somewhat puzzled, not
wanting to believe, but knowing all too well. We sat there a minute or two
until a family friend, whom we’d called earlier, arrived to. I stood up so he
could sit next to her. As he took her hand, she turned to me and said in a
still voice, “Thank you very much, William. You can go home now.”
I knew I couldn’t sleep right
away after that, so I went out to my usual bar. Luckily I ran into a friend, a
clergyman from another church.
“Where are you coming
from?” asked James, unwittingly.
“I just saw somebody
die.”
Before him I unbound
the night’s events: the utter sadness of a mother’s loss; the steadfastness of
Alex’s last steps to his new realm; my perplexity at the dual experience of
death and rebirth and the miracle of the parting of soul and body.
Somehow, this friend
swept it all back into the world for me. It no longer felt bizarre, alien, or
unreal. I had been present at the mystical transition of a soul from the mortal
paradox of joy and suffering to a mystery beyond. I’m glad Darrin was there.
Otherwise I might have gone on to live as though it had all been a dream that
had nothing to do with this world or this dance floor with its everyday,
pleasure-seeking lives.
I left him to have a
dance for Alex. As I danced, I thought of one of the hymns he’d requested for
his memorial service, “Lord of the Dance.” It’s about dancing through it all:
love, pain, fear, crucifixion. And as I danced, the music pounding through my
body, I felt intensely aware of my feet and the simple joy they were giving me,
and tremendously appreciative of having a live, healthy body to dance with. I
was my soul and my body its wonderful, magical vehicle: my soul’s servant in
this physical world, dedicated to me, giving form to my thoughts, my art, my
love; a chance to defy the hell of this life that daily turns to grind us down.
Friday, November 1
The whole time the house across
the street from me was empty this past summer, as its timer-ghosts turned on
and off the lights and the geraniums grew bigger and pushed out more red
blooms, I never once saw a passer-by peek in through the living room window.
Maybe they stopped looking because they knew that the warmth and magic that had
once lived within was gone, and now only emptiness resided there.
Last month the house
was sold and the geraniums were removed with the rest of Alex’s furnishings.
The new owners are two guys; just friends, I think, and friends of one of the
brothers next door. They haven’t changed anything: I saw a visitor seize the
grab-handle as he sprinted up the steps and through the open door. When Sylvain
and Mario want to close the blind that’s stuck, they run their fingers up
across the vanes as though playing a great arpeggio. Dark-haired men in leather
jackets glance in as they pass.