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Authors: Guy Vanderhaeghe
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find interesting is that Dr. Brandt, a man of science, steadfastly refused to test my claims about the worldagainst the evidence. It’s not that I deny the practicality of his approach. If a patient expresses displeasure about how the world is constituted, one had better change the patient, since one cannot change the world. The only other possible alternative is for the patient to re-invent the world, and that is a capability given to only a very few.
For the time being I struggle with my dreadful intuitions. When my phone rings at two o’clock in the morning I never assume it is a drunk with a wrong number. No, it is always news of a death in the family. “Eddie, Daddy’s gone. A coronary.”
Two rings and I scatter the blankets, heave my bulk upward, and pound out to the phone, where, throat parched with horror, I plaintively croak into the mouthpiece: “Yes! Yes! For God’s sake, tell me!” Only to be reviled by a drunken gourmand demanding egg rolls and chow mein, or a lonely Lothario with coarse, mumbled offers to sniff my panties.
And now I whirl from room to room, fearful for Victoria. Cancer?
I’ve been afraid of Victoria getting cancer for years now, even though I know that to harbour such fears is to submit to superstition. The old woman, Victoria’s great-aunt, is responsible for lodging that black apprehension in my mind. It was she who raised the subject at the tea party held in the week before Victoria’s and my wedding took place.
Victoria was in the habit of describing her family as utterly boring and conventional. Her mother, she said, had constructed an entire ethical system around the notion of “niceness,” and living with her father, she said, was like living with a clock. However, neither of her parents struck me as being either boring or conventional; I always had the feeling that both of them had loose boards in their attics.
For example, I found her mother’s idea of hosting a tea party to allow the groom to meet the female relatives and friends a little odd. It wasn’t arranged with an eye to making me uncomfortable,but that was the result. There I was, the only male in the company of twenty-three women sipping tea and eating sandwiches the size of postage stamps. No, I tell a lie. I wasn’t the only man there; my father-in-law, Jack, was in attendance also. He had come home early from the office to lend me “moral support.” Evidently Jack’s desertion of his post was unusual enough to make news in family circles, because whenever another lady arrived at the tea party, Victoria’s mother would tell her, with an air of sharing a great confidence, “Jack took the day off to lend Ed moral support.”
Then Jack would say, “Half a day, Frances.”
He was an engineer of some description. His father had been an engineer and he had two brothers who were engineers. He looked like a man raised on girders and graph paper, as if exactitude were bred into his bones. Looking at him put me in mind of a mathematical equation; I got the feeling one could no more argue with him than one could argue with numbers. Throughout the tea party he sat in a distant corner of the room and watched me. Whenever I looked in his direction he averted his eyes and gazed off through the glass patio doors.
Meanwhile Victoria and I made polite conversation with the ladies.
“I understand you and Victoria met at the university, Ed?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. Was it at a Mixer Dance? I bet it was. That’s where I met my husband, Harold. You’ll meet him at the wedding.” Etc., etc.
This sort of chatter I could handle with aplomb. In fact, I was on the point of congratulating myself on my poise when one old girl suddenly addressed me very loudly, in the manner of the profoundly deaf. “Young man,” she said, “has my grandniece had the decency to inform you of the family curse?”
With that the room went absolutely still and all eyes settled on the great-aunt. She was a queer-looking old
For the time being I struggle with my dreadful intuitions. When my phone rings at two o’clock in the morning I never assume it is a drunk with a wrong number. No, it is always news of a death in the family. “Eddie, Daddy’s gone. A coronary.”
Two rings and I scatter the blankets, heave my bulk upward, and pound out to the phone, where, throat parched with horror, I plaintively croak into the mouthpiece: “Yes! Yes! For God’s sake, tell me!” Only to be reviled by a drunken gourmand demanding egg rolls and chow mein, or a lonely Lothario with coarse, mumbled offers to sniff my panties.
And now I whirl from room to room, fearful for Victoria. Cancer?
I’ve been afraid of Victoria getting cancer for years now, even though I know that to harbour such fears is to submit to superstition. The old woman, Victoria’s great-aunt, is responsible for lodging that black apprehension in my mind. It was she who raised the subject at the tea party held in the week before Victoria’s and my wedding took place.
Victoria was in the habit of describing her family as utterly boring and conventional. Her mother, she said, had constructed an entire ethical system around the notion of “niceness,” and living with her father, she said, was like living with a clock. However, neither of her parents struck me as being either boring or conventional; I always had the feeling that both of them had loose boards in their attics.
For example, I found her mother’s idea of hosting a tea party to allow the groom to meet the female relatives and friends a little odd. It wasn’t arranged with an eye to making me uncomfortable,but that was the result. There I was, the only male in the company of twenty-three women sipping tea and eating sandwiches the size of postage stamps. No, I tell a lie. I wasn’t the only man there; my father-in-law, Jack, was in attendance also. He had come home early from the office to lend me “moral support.” Evidently Jack’s desertion of his post was unusual enough to make news in family circles, because whenever another lady arrived at the tea party, Victoria’s mother would tell her, with an air of sharing a great confidence, “Jack took the day off to lend Ed moral support.”
Then Jack would say, “Half a day, Frances.”
He was an engineer of some description. His father had been an engineer and he had two brothers who were engineers. He looked like a man raised on girders and graph paper, as if exactitude were bred into his bones. Looking at him put me in mind of a mathematical equation; I got the feeling one could no more argue with him than one could argue with numbers. Throughout the tea party he sat in a distant corner of the room and watched me. Whenever I looked in his direction he averted his eyes and gazed off through the glass patio doors.
Meanwhile Victoria and I made polite conversation with the ladies.
“I understand you and Victoria met at the university, Ed?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess. Was it at a Mixer Dance? I bet it was. That’s where I met my husband, Harold. You’ll meet him at the wedding.” Etc., etc.
This sort of chatter I could handle with aplomb. In fact, I was on the point of congratulating myself on my poise when one old girl suddenly addressed me very loudly, in the manner of the profoundly deaf. “Young man,” she said, “has my grandniece had the decency to inform you of the family curse?”
With that the room went absolutely still and all eyes settled on the great-aunt. She was a queer-looking old
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