Guy Vanderhaeghe - Homesick

How’s Stutz expect to win an argument with me when he doesn’t have the facts? Me, I’ve got them cold. “Look,” I told him, “Senator Kennedy’s been to Harvard and Princeton, the best colleges in America – ask anybody, it’s public knowledge they are – and one in England besides, the name of which I don’t recall offhand. He’s a war hero and he reads 1,200 words a minute – about a thousand more than you do in a year. He’s visited thirty-seven countries and wrote a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. And look, just look at that wife of his. They say she speaks five languages and buys her clothes in Paris. It isn’t any ordinary dope that attracts a wife such as that. Like attracts like.”

When I was Daniel’s age I was going to speak French. Now there’s nothing left but Je ne sais quoi. Quelle heure est-il? Not enough for a conversation with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Not enough for a conversation with a dark, sophisticated man on the deck of an ocean liner.

She’s a beauty, that Jackie Kennedy. Even pregnant she’s beautiful, which is a feat. It’s how you can judge if a woman is really beautiful, if she can hold onto her beauty six months gone. Then the good bones and breeding shine through. Me, I was never happier in my life than I was six months pregnant, my feet disappearing underneath me, ankles like an elephant’s. But beautiful I wasn’t. Now I’m sorry I wouldn’t let Stanley take my picture. “Next time, next baby,” I said. “I’ll improve with practice.”

What gets to me is nobody around here is smart enough to recognize what’s truly beautiful. In particular the men. Big tits is their idea of beautiful. Ask a man in this dismal hole to name a beautiful woman and nine times out of ten you’ll get Marilyn Monroe. A person shudders to think that their kid will grow up no different. Not that I expect Daniel to marry a Jackie Kennedy. I’m not that far gone. Just so’s it isn’t some doll who wears too much make-up, tight skirts, and owns a pair of pointy boobs that look like they’re trying to drill their way out of a pink angora sweater. All I ask is for her to be good enough for him and not so good that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Amen.

Still, the rumour is that Papa Joe Kennedy isn’t cut from the finest glass himself. You have to hand it to the old Paddy sonofabitch, he saw to it that his boys were an improvement on him. Which is all I aim for. I take heart when I see what can be done when you put your mind to it. Love conquers all. Not one of those Kennedy boys can’t pass for the finest Irish crystal – Waterford, no less.

Which must make it kind of disheartening for a father when he sees those brainless women carrying on over his boy, misjudging the Senator for a movie star instead of a future president. Old Joe didn’t raise him to be Errol Flynn, did he? The reporters have a name for them – jumpers. The double-jumpers are the ones holding the babies. They ought to have their heads examined, bouncing up and down on tiptoes, jiggling, squealing. It’s enough to give us all a bad name. Worst of all, men like to see it. A certain kind of smile will pass over Stutz’s face when he sees them hopping all over the TV. Deep down, he has it figured for sex, even in my case. Let him suppose what he supposes. Nobody imagines a person like me can believe in the higher, finer things. My friend Pooch certainly didn’t. That time I made the mistake of letting down my guard and talking of Stanley, what did she say? “Rub your eyes, Vera. Nothing could ever have been like you say, that good. How long were you married? Less than two years, right? Trust Pooch, who knows whereof she speaks, two years is as long as the warranty lasts and then something is sure to break. Money troubles, he starts running around, something. Seems to me that what you’ve been admiring all these years isn’t a husband but a character out of a book. Either way, he’s dead or never was. A ghost.”

She had no notion whereof she spoke. She never even met Stanley.

I’ve lived most of my life with the feeling that I missed the important things by a breath, an inch. Daniel isn’t going to. That’s why I try to point him in the right direction every chance I get. “The Senator is a man you can look up to and admire,” I said to him. “A man like your father was. A scholar and a gentleman. The type of man who can be an inspiration to you.”

And he laughs at me and says, “Let him be your inspiration, Nixon’s my man.”

You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make him drink. Of course, if nobody shows him the trough then he’s done for. He didn’t want to sit through that first debate with me but I made him, the two of us side by side in the restaurant on counter stools. You can’t tell me he didn’t see Nixon all shifty-eyed like a door-to-door salesman asked to show his business licence. Yet when it’s all over and I ask him what he thought, he says, “Couple of times it looked to me like Kennedy was lying.”

He can’t fool me. Deep down inside he’s his father through and through.

Old Joe Kennedy says he never interferes with what the Senator thinks. Regardless, I don’t doubt he gets the Senator to where the Senator doesn’t know he’s going. That’s love, too, in a good cause.

A cheerless Saturday morning in October found Daniel standing beside his grandfather’s pickup in a windy street, waiting for the old man to come out of his house. With each new gust the wind seemed to gather strength, setting all the naked elms which lined Monkman’s street swaying and creaking faintly. By nightfall their broken branches would litter the road. On Main Street, the tin store signs flapped and clanged as clouds of grit were driven down its length with the force of buckshot, pinging softly wherever they struck glass. Overhead the sky was streaked like a river heavy with silt, murky with the dust swept up from farmers’ fields and scurried into the heavens. A blanched, fuzzy sun tried to break out from behind this dirty grey curtain.

Daniel, shivering, leaned his back into the wind, wobbling indecisively on his heels when he lost his balance in its violent fluctuations. Every now and then he blew on his numb red fingers and then drew them up inside the sleeves of his jacket. Underneath the jacket he was wearing a white shirt and tie as his grandfather had requested.

He wondered if maybe being so nervous made him feel the cold more. There were times – if he was really nervous – that he shivered in a perfectly warm room. Now he trembled like a leaf thinking about how he was going to tell Alec it was out of the question, there was no way he was going to do what he wanted. It wasn’t so very long ago that he had stepped out of his grandfather’s house and into the windy street in the hope that he would find there the courage to say what had to be said. He hadn’t though.

Now he repeatedly and impatiently glanced at the front door, wanting his grandfather to make an appearance so he would be forced to settle it. When Daniel had left him over a quarter of an hour ago, his grandfather had promised to be right out. So where the hell was he? Dawdling and pottering, most likely. Checking all the lights and the burners on the stove for the tenth time, looking for the cigarettes or matches he had mislaid. He was getting to be a proper pain in the ass to get moving, apt to lose track of time and things, speedy as a drugged snail. Hurry up for chrissakes, don’t you know it’s cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey out here?

Daniel had debated climbing into the cab of the truck where he would be warmer out of the wind, but he worried he would feel trapped again, like he had in the house. He was still convinced it was wiser to break the news to his grandfather out in the street, rather than inside the house, or inside the truck where the old man had a chance to corner him. Inside anywhere Alec might be tough to escape. But out in the street if the old boy started to argue and kick up a fuss all Daniel had to do was turn away and walk off in any direction. That was his right, wasn’t it? There was nothing that said he had to go along with every crazy idea the old bugger dreamed up, was there?