Howard Engel: Dead and Buried

Irma was just pouring the tea when I went back upstairs. “Did you find anything interesting, Mr. Cooperman?”

“Look, Irma, if you’re going to be Irma and not Mrs. Dowden, then you’d better start calling me Benny.”

“Here’s your tea.” She put two blue-and-white mugs on the green table. She pulled out a wooden chair and slid into it. “This is a piece of early Canadian, Jack told me,” she said, tapping the table top with her teaspoon. “He was always going to strip it down to the wood, but we never could spare it long enough for the whole treatment. Jack always wanted to settle down and get out of driving for a living. He was always talking about setting up in the antique business. Jack loved wood.”

We sipped our tea, while Irma told me about their life together. She dabbed her eyes a couple of times with the handkerchief I lent her. I tried to take in what she said, but the details of the children they never had or the uncles who could never leave them alone didn’t really change anything. Even on the subject of Jack’s relations to Kinross, I could find nothing sinister. Before I left, I asked to see Jack’s papers. Irma shook her head. “Jack didn’t leave anything in writing,” she said, “unless you count the three love-letters he wrote to me, but I’ll show you what I’ve got.” She led the way into the bedroom, where in a corner a shoebox full of credit-card flimsies was produced. I asked if I could borrow these. As I was about to leave, I saw a few books in a pile.

“Are the books yours or Jack’s?”

“Oh, Jack’s. I’m not much of a reader. Television’s too easy. I guess my brain’s been softened, Benny.” I tuned out Irma’s prattle and checked the titles. There was a Robert Ludlum in paperback, two Stephen Kings and then the surprise: Chemical Nightmare: The Unnecessary Legacy of Toxic Wastes by John Jackson, Phil Weller and the Waterloo Public Interest Group. I opened the book and found that it was well thumbed. It wasn’t much, but just what I needed for bedtime reading. Irma made no objection when I asked to borrow it. She saw me to the door and down the walk before she shut the front door to the night.

After a wash, I took the book under the covers with me and read myself silly for about an hour. When I woke up, the light was still burning and the clock told me that I would have to begin a new day in under two hours. I turned off the light and got rid of my bed-partner. Chemical Nightmare could hang around the apartment all day when it got light. It didn’t have to make ends meet.

The drive up to Secord University was one I always liked. It took me over the course my father used when he taught me how to drive. The curves of road leading up the escarpment were recorded in my elbows and feet like they’d been programmed. The escarpment was heavily wooded, but the trees were beginning to lose their leaves. There were still plenty of maples strutting their stuff in reds and gold. The sumachs were scarlet at the edge of the quarry, where I caught a glimpse through the trees of the shack where Garth Gardenia and I’d spent a teenage afternoon with a Mrs. Stagg. Mrs. Stagg lived alone with a collection of photograph albums full of turn-of-thecentury showgirl beauties. She might have been in the theatre herself, but we never asked. We’d heard that one of her legs was wooden, but it was hard to tell under her long skirts. During the spring and summer, her cabin is invisible from the road. Maybe that’s why I never think of her except when I drive up the escarpment in the autumn and winter.

I’d phoned Eric Miller, an old friend of mine, who’d once been a cut-up in grade ten science with Miss Red Scott at the helm. Now he was a lecturer in botany. I wonder whether Red Scott ever knew that Eric used to circulate drawings of flowers showing the reproductive parts in unmistakable human forms. And I remember a verse that accompanied one of them, something with the rhyme “saturnalia” and “genitalia” in it.

I found Eric by following a colour-coded strip painted along the corridors. All of the departments were colourcoded for the illiterate. History was dark blue, biology was green. Eric’s office was a large, dim room on the tenth floor.

“Benny! How are you?” Eric’s grin took me right back to Red Scott’s lab tables. “You son of a gun! I haven’t seen you in five years. What have you been doing with yourself that you can say in a room that may be bugged by the Mounties?”

“I keep seeing your name in the papers, Eric. Didn’t you get some honour a few months back? I’m sorry, I should keep up on these things.”

“Yeah, I agreed to suppress some startling facts about the procreation of trilliums so that the province wouldn’t have to find another official emblem for its logos. So they gave me a gong. I used it to crack nuts with, like Tom Canty in The Prince and the Pauper.

For a minute or two we chatted away, recalling old friends and trying to reconcile our present faces with the younger versions in our memories. “It’s a nice place you’ve got here, Eric,” I said at last, as an exit ramp from memory lane. Nothing very bright as an observation, but it did deal with the here and now.

“This, Benny, is not a place, it’s a herbarium. Come in and roll up in an old newspaper.” I followed Eric through rows of cabinets taller than both of us. The dark, institutional green killed much of the light coming into the room from the generous windows along one wall. Between the back-to-back cabinets, a few wooden desks were scattered, all of them stacked high with drying plants between layers of newspaper showing various tints of yellow. “This department should double as a periodical archives, you know, Benny. Look at this.” He picked up a folded copy of a Toronto paper and read the headline: JOHNSON REFUSES TO SEEK ANOTHER TERM. I’m sure I’ve got one with Roosevelt going for a fourth term around here somewhere.” Eric found his desk. Like the others, it was cluttered and dusty. It must be the last desk on earth with a well in it for hiding a typewriter. I was amazed that the university would allow such ancient equipment into the science departments. It didn’t seem so odd that I might find it in the humanities departments.

“I’m working on a case, Eric,” I began, trying to remember that my time was being paid for. Eric nodded as he took off his tinted glasses and began cleaning them with a tissue from his pocket. His strawlike hair, which made him a wonderful Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night at the Collegiate when we were in grade twelve, was looking pale and thin. It was that sort of blond that goes grey without anybody noticing. I took the envelope with my electric bill and poured out the contents into a small pile on a clear spot on Eric’s desk. I hoped I wasn’t going to ruin years of research by bringing the pods and leaves from Jack’s cuffs to the herbarium. For all I knew, this might have been a closed environment. Eric’s mouth frowned slightly as he examined the mess I’d made on his desk. He poked about at the pods with a yellow pencil with a pink Ruby Tip eraser on the end.

“Hesperis,” he said.

“What?”

“Hesperis matronalis to be exact.”

“And once again in English, Eric. What do you know about it, and where is it found?” Eric smiled over the seed pods, prodded them again and lifted up a silvery membrane with tiny brown seeds caught in the fine fabric of the centre section of the beanlike pods.

“That’s the septum,” he said, “as in your nose and mine.” He touched the membrane gently. “Hesperis is also known as Dame’s Rocket. It’s a member of the mustard family. The septum’s the give-away; no native Ontario plant has one.”