Ross MACDONALD - The Archer Files

Reluctance to deal in print with still-painful personal memories, many pressing distractions, and finally illness prevented Macdonald from writing any of those books.

Winnipeg, 1929 is two tantalizing fragments of one such work that might have been. Penned in ballpoint in one of Millar’s notebooks, these give a fictional glimpse – drawn closely from life – of a smart and vulnerable lad much like the young Ken Millar, who also journeyed alone by train to Manitoba in the 1920s, to be placed in the care of an aunt and uncle he’d never met.

The streetcar ride from the school to my aunt’s apartment on Broadway was like a journey from one planet to another, from Mars to Venus, say. The school was partly religious and partly military. Aunt Lola’s apartment was neither. There were pictures on the walls of her big dining room, not all of them reproductions, some of them nudes. Lola herself wore deep rich autumn colors most of the time. Most of the time her face had a cold look, as if she anticipated a hard and early winter. Once or twice in the short period I had been with her, her eyes had thawed and I could see the flickering heat behind them.

One of those times had occurred the week before, on the day I arrived in Winnipeg from the east. She was waiting for me when I stepped off the train. Uncle Ned took my solitary suitcase, and Aunt Lola put her arm around me. Then she held my face between her hands. Her eyes were dark and bright.

“You’re your father’s boy, aren’t you? Did you know your father’s coming to Winnipeg to see you?”

“No.”

“How long is it since you’ve seen your father?”

“I don’t remember, Aunt Lola.”

“Has it been so long?”

“I don’t remember.”

There was a squeak of protest in my voice. I tried to swallow it. Adults liked happy thoughts and smiling faces.

Lola slapped me lightly with her gloved hand. “Don’t keep repeating yourself. I heard you the first time. How old are you now?”

“Thirteen.”

She drew her face together in a grimace which made her look a little like a bulldog and made me wonder if she was in pain. “That’s an unlucky number, Robert. If anybody asks you, say you’re fourteen.”

“Even at school?”

“We’re not talking about school. We’re talking about when you’re with me. The number between twelve and fourteen has always brought me bad luck. Isn’t that right, Ned?”

“I guess so.”

“You know damn well so.”

Uncle Ned let out a short angry laugh. “I know that we were married in nineteen thirteen, if that’s what you’re talking about.”

“That isn’t funny,” she said.

Her voice was quiet, barely audible among the station noises. Its effect on Uncle Ned surprised me. He hung his head and looked down at the platform.

“I want you to take it back,” she said.

“There’s nothing to take back. I was thinking about my bad luck when they sent me over to France.”

Lola accepted his obscure apology, though it sounded far-fetched to me. I had had some experience of broken marriages, and it made me wonder what was happening to theirs. And I made a sudden inarticulate decision to avoid the middle ground between them if I could. This marriage was the kind of game that nobody won, but it fed like gang war on the spectators.

Uncle Ned decided to move before he lost further ground. He slapped me rather heavily on the shoulder. “Are you hungry, Bob? It’s lunchtime. Why don’t we go and get something to eat?”

“No drinking,” Aunt Lola put in quietly.

“Nobody said anything about drinking.”

“I did.”

“All right. I heard you. No drinking.” Ned turned to me. “How about a glass of milk and a sandwich?”

I hesitated. It seemed that as the balance of power stood, it would be safe to oppose Ned, quietly. I said: “I promised Paul to wait for him.”

“Who the hell is Paul?”

“He got on the train at Lost Lake. He’s going to St. George’s, too. I told him maybe you’d give him a ride out to the school.”

“But you’re not going to the school today.”

“Paul is. He’s a real nice guy. His father’s a minister in Lost Lake. Paul says he’s thinking about being a minister, too.”

Ned looked at me as if I was a viper in his nest. “I don’t care if he’s Jesus Christ himself. I’m not driving him out to St. George’s School today.”

“Then I will,” Lola put in. “He sounds like the kind of friend that Robert should be making.”

“A bloody Christer?”

“Don’t you dare talk like that in front of this boy.”

“I’ll talk any bloody way I want to talk.”

“Then I’m not going to stand here and listen to it.”

Lola started away. I guessed that she wouldn’t go far, but I couldn’t be sure of that. She was the only friend I had in the city. Already she was almost out of sight in the swirling crowd. I turned and looked at Ned. He was standing behind me, stony-faced, holding on to the suitcase which contained everything I owned in the world. I made a quick grab for it. He held it back out of my reach.

Ned was smiling darkly, his teeth a bone-white gash in his lower face. “You’re not going to get it back,” he said, “till you get down on your knees and beg for it. If you don’t I’ll take it down and throw it in the river. And if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, I’ll throw you in after it.”

I was a boy going on fourteen, and Laurie was nearly nineteen, but we had somewhat the same position in my aunt’s apartment. She was an apprentice beauty operator (in my aunt’s “beauty parlor”), unable to work just yet because she was recovering from childbirth. She lay around the apartment reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures , and looking so beautiful and wan that I fell in love with her.

My position in the apartment was this: When my mother’s relatives turned me out, Aunt Lola sent for me and put me in private school. My wandering father was her favorite brother. She seemed to like me in her dry stoical way, and sometimes invited me home from school for the weekend. This didn’t suit Uncle Ned. He didn’t like me. He didn’t even like Laurie, though she lolled like a fallen angel in the living room, and in her kimono at the breakfast table looked pale and pure as a young Madonna whose baby had been put out for adoption. (Her breasts were bandaged the first Sunday morning I saw her, to keep the milk from forming.) (“I had everything taken out,” Aunt Lola said instructively at the same breakfast.)

Looking back on the situation, I think I know why Ned couldn’t stand to have anybody around. He pretended to be a businessman and investor. He dressed in flannels like an Englishman and drove a big black Packard. But the Packard belonged to my aunt, and the main errands he used it for was going to the drugstore to pick up her headache medicine, or hauling cases of liquor for her parties. She gave orders nicely, but she gave them. He didn’t want Laurie and me around because we were witnesses to his humiliation. He was living on Aunt Lola the same as we were.

The apartment wasn’t a happy place to be; it always smelled of liquor and carnations, like a wild funeral. But it meant freedom from school, and this became important to me, especially after I started to get into trouble. Besides, there was a player piano in the living room, an electric player grand. I remember one Saturday night when Lola and Ned were at somebody else’s party (probably Mr. Castor’s in the penthouse) and Laurie and I played all the rolls of music in the house. She said when she was feeling better she would teach me to dance. We sat together on the davenport, it must have been for hours, and my soul was wafted out of my body and moved around and above her. She let me kiss her. When my soul came back to me, and the music stopped, it smelled of Laurie forever. I can still taste her sweetness on my tongue and hear that music.