The Museum of Love Read online

  THE MUSEUM OF LOVE

  Steve Weiner

  to

  Deborah Weiner

  Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Author’s Notes

  One

  In August that year a Lutheran farmer named Ed Gien shot a social worker in the cranberry bogs. Prison guards from HM Prison Swallowfield helped disarm him and take him to an insane asylum. My father drove me down to see the farm.

  Ed Gien had dug up women from the Lutheran cemetery, brushed them with resin and beeswax, and dressed them in his dead mother’s shawls. He made ash-trays of their joints and lampshades and upholstery of their skin. Vises held rotted women’s limbs in steel ball-and-socket armatures. Hip, breast, hair and thigh twirled over our heads from black fishing wire.

  ‘Woman,’ my father whistled. ‘Disassembled.’

  My father was a prison guard. I ate lunch with him. Gruel and Oberlander, the German, ate with us. My father was an ugly man. His hands were swollen and knotted with veins. His ears stuck out and his red hair was combed over a bulging forehead. His eyes were dark and hollow.

  ‘All this rain, Jean,’ he said. ‘Where does it go?’

  ‘To the air.’

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘So it can rain again.’

  We ate fried bread, ragoût de boulettes, squares of liqueur-filled chocolates. The coffee from the thermos was strong and French, so thick the grains oozed down the sides of the cups. The fragrance of rich caffeine steamed up between his big hands. My father was very depressed.

  ‘Merde,’ he said. ‘All this rain.’

  Oberlander picked up his concertina.

  ‘O liebling, mein liebes Kind

  Das Schiff geht ab, das weisses Schiff…’

  ‘My darling child,’ Oberlander sang, looking at me by the rain of the window. ‘The ship leaves, the white ship.’

  My father and I climbed the E-wing stairway. The red-brick gothic arches, statues of previous governors, rose over the cobblestone courtyard. Somebody had inscribed Dieu et mon droit on the walls. Prisoners below marched around a dead well in the heavy rain. The rain whistled through the toilet pipes. We went on tour.

  Grotowski, a jut-jawed Pole with a shaved head, bent under an electric bulb hot and white under a damp ceiling. The wind boomed through the ducts. My father banged on Grotowski’s bars.

  ‘What do you want, mon capitaine?’ Grotowski yelled.

  ‘You made a bad mistake, Grotowski, using a crowbar on old Gunther.’

  ‘One makes mistakes.’

  ‘You’ve got lice.’

  ‘I shall change my soap.’

  ‘Your hands are scaly.’

  ‘I shall use lanolin.’

  ‘Grotowski, you’re rotting.’

  ‘Not as fast as old Gunther.’

  My father banged on the cell bars. Grotowski put his hands over his ears. We walked down the black corridor. Voisin lay on his wooden plank and stared at the dripping stone roof. My father shined his flashlight on a whitened face.

  ‘Voisin, get your hands out of your pockets!’

  Voisin jumped up, pale and sweaty, wiping his hands. My father spat. We went to see Schlegel. Schlegel scratched his armpits. He saw me and stopped.

  ‘Who have you brought me, mon capitaine?’

  ‘My son.’

  ‘And a very nice son he is, too.’

  My father grabbed the bars. His huge hands, his hairy hands, squeezed until the big knuckles went white.

  ‘Pederast.’

  My father rattled the bars.

  ‘This Schlegel is a bad number,’ my father warned me.

  We went to the darkest wing of all. Barrault the Jamaican lay on his cot in the damp of the dark. His breaths congealed in blue vapour. His smooth chest rose and fell and his eyes were yellow as yolks. Blue vapour crawled along the chains, bars, causing mould.

  ‘Leave me alone, Verhaeren,’ he muttered.

  ‘Ha. Who? I?’

  ‘Every day you come make trouble.’

  ‘Why did you beat up the Ojibway?’

  ‘I needed money.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘THE CINEMA!’ my father shouted. ‘YOU WENT TO THE CINEMA!’

  My father wiped the bars where he had accidentally spat. Rapidly and excitedly he cracked his knuckles.

  ‘This man is a Negro,’ he whispered to me, breathing hard.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Observe the difference.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘This man contains négritude.’

  My father collected weapons. It was his private black museum, kept in the annex lunch room. He had the lead shingle of Joseph Bidolski, the hammer of Bert Rideau, and the knives of Willy Leszek. My father laminated newspaper photographs of our criminals and kept them in a vitrine. He bought one of Ed Gien’s lampshades.

  We were the Verhaerens.

  Our house was brown sandstone shingled with a dark black roof. Our neighbours were the Dybs and the Zylches. Our living room had a red divan, red easy chair, brass floor lamp and radiator. Leaves’ shadows moved at our dusty windows. Photographs of dead relatives hung over our altar where black crêpe twirled down. Bowls of salt water represented tears for those left living. Upstairs was my bedroom. From it I saw a smokehouse, a graveyard with black spike chain, rose bushes, hollyhocks stunted by the lake wind. There was a broken sundial. Lilies-of-the-valley lined our driveway.

  I was Jean-Michel Verhaeren. I was Catholic. I was twelve years old and wore a red and black hunting jacket. My hair was brushed up in front. I had a speech impediment. As I said, I was Jean-Michel Verhaeren.

  It was August 1954. I remember because the hot yellow light streamed down the leaves of our broken trellis. Filaments of algae grew toward our coal-cellar. In the heat of that August snakes were born. Our mother chased them. My brother Ignace beat them with a broom.

  ‘Tue-lé!’ she screamed. ‘Kill them!’

  ‘Y sont trop vite!’ Ignace yelled. ‘They’re too fast!’

  ‘Mon Dieu seigneur! En-dessous! Under there!’

  The snakes escaped to the lavender lilacs. She danced into the yard, over the yellow grass, our mother, her pretty legs under the whirling dress.

  ‘AAAIIEEE!’ she screamed. ‘THE BASEMENT WINDOW!’

  I threw two snakes out of the basement. My father scraped up the rest, splashed them with kerosene, and I lighted the fire. There was a woosh. The snakes suddenly fried, became skeletons in red ash, rubbery, even their teeth charred.

  ‘JEAN!’ my mother yelled, pointing behind me. ‘Au garage!’

  I caught that snake, too, dipped it in kerosene, lit it and twirled it until it sparked like a Roman candle.

  The Petit Croix River came down from Manitouwadge past the Pic, toward Lillala Lake. Then it dropped to St Croix on the north shore of Lake Superior. Rutherford and Coldwell were going to be on the new trans-Canada Highway 17 but St Croix was not. St Croix had 2535 people, two coal-mines, a bowling alley, five churches and thirteen taverns. St Croix was going to die. So were Gilbertsonville and Heron Bay.

  Sometimes lake steamers stopped. The boats were long and white, cut very low on the blue water. The pistons ran so smoothly one heard only a liquid tic-tic under the wooden decks. Camshafts turned bright as a penny, with the sweetest smell of oil, like
the hot sugary smell of plum tartes. From brass rails one watched St Croix passing: the bluffs, the stunted grape-vines dark green and dusty, raspberry bushes, apple trees, and pygmy oaks, the French and Protestant districts, Ojibway Flats.

  Behind our stone breakwater and lighthouse was the Portobello Hotel. Kelbo’s Fish Market sold fresh muskellunge. In a tangle of reeds and broken pier posts, Ojibway fishing nets obstructed the banks below Abattoir Road.

  Above St Croix was HM Prison Swallowfield. Behind, la forêt and darkness.

  There came days when nobody went near our mother. Those were the green days when she walked into our living room and smeared paste from her mouth on to the walls.

  She soaked in long hot baths (she kept the hot water running and the plug out). She dreamed of the convent where she had been noviced, Our Lady of Trois Pointes over the St Lawrence Seaway. Cherry red and somnolent, wrapped in white, her pretty black hair in a white towel, she slipped barefoot over the linoleum and treated us with silent, smug condescension.

  Oak leaves fluttered at the windows. One had expectations. I combed her hair after the bath.

  She was pretty. She was petite, with sparkling black eyes. An hysteric, sure she was, and illiterate, but a fine Catholic woman. She had had two miscarriages between Ignace and me. They weren’t even buried, but burned at the Rutherford hospital. She had no secrets, not from me.

  ‘I had chlorosis in the convent,’ she told me. ‘I was green. They scrubbed me with hard sponges. It did no good. I was fifteen before I had my first period. When it came, blood trickled even from my ear.’

  ‘And the rapids roared.’

  ‘Yes. It was high over the St Lawrence.’

  ‘But you did not marry Jesu.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Though you had permission to.’

  ‘I was affianced. One might say affianced.’

  ‘You had a screw loose.’

  ‘I worked in the kitchen. I washed the drain. The slits were always clogged with hair. I had to pluck them out with my fingers.’

  ‘You were crazy.’

  ‘The light came through a dirty skylight,’ she said. ‘I lay with Sister Veronica, who was cold, until she died. I sewed her burial slip.’

  ‘That was mercy, not crazy.’

  ‘The dark chambers of women frightened me. They stroked me and whispered in my ear. I prayed until my knees were sore.’

  ‘Did it help?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Sister Alicia.’

  ‘Sister Alicia started dying. I slept with her. Also Sister Patrice. At least she said she was dying. I washed Sister Germaine. The steam covered us like a silky soap. I cured diseases of the foot. I worked with aloes and jasmine. I bathed Mother Superior and cherished her knees.’

  ‘Who made you crazy?’

  ‘I was in love with Jesu. We all were. I wanted to be a saint. Is that so sinful? I became delirious. They sent me to St Bonaventure in St Croix. I served the fish fry at the Oddfellows Hall and met your father.’

  ‘Was he ugly then, too?’

  ‘Y était ben laid. Very ugly. He got me drunk on red wine.’

  ‘There in the hall?’

  ‘No. He took me out to the cinema.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘No. Instead of taking me to the cinema he walked me down the embankment.’

  ‘There?’

  ‘It began there.’

  ‘What began? Exactly. In your own words.’

  ‘He gave me sloe gin from a flask in his pocket,’ she said. ‘I became dizzy. I held on to the rails. Dirty waves splashed over my convent shoes. He took me to the Portobello Hotel. We went to the ballroom, danced, then he rented a room. We went upstairs and he took off my clothes and penetrated me twice.’

  ‘But you loved him?’

  ‘I was frightened. I took the bus back to Our Lady of Trois Pointes. They rejected me. I had become vulgar. I took the bus home and did not eat for two weeks. Jack Verhaeren found out where I lived, came with roses. He spoke to my father, took me rowing on Old Woman Lake and did it to me again in the rowboat.’

  ‘In the middle of the water?’

  ‘By the ferns.’

  ‘You were impregnated with Ignace?’

  She smiled.

  ‘I had a dream on the night you were conceived,’ she said. ‘I was in an ossuary in Bavaria. Ribs, skulls, fingerbones, made arches on pure white chapel walls. Monks groaned in the basement. I carried a lantern down deep stairs, past iron rings and coffins. Skulls clacked on the stairs. Teeth rained from the rafters. But I never found the monks. I couldn’t move. I woke. Your father was on top of me.’

  ‘It was his groaning you heard.’

  My mother became abstracted. She told me it was like hearing a far-away celesta, in a dark forest.

  Excrement rained on St Croix. It happened this way. The Poniatowski night-soil wagon was leaving Swallowfield when a sudden wind came off the lake. The composted dust flew high, and suddenly the wind changed and at the same time a rain squall hit the bluffs. Brown liquid rained down the streets.

  My father was having his hair cut at the time. He looked out the window.

  ‘Just as I thought,’ he said. ‘Le bon Dieu shits on us.’

  * * *

  It was an exciting time for the Catholic women of St Croix. Pius XII had just canonized Catherine Labouré. Like Catherine Labouré my mother had worked as a waitress. But she (Labouré) suffered a vision of the Virgin Mary on a globe. My mother only saw dirty windows where she worked at Kelly’s Nursing Home. She mopped the drain, cooked rice and made Jello. Her black hair was in a net, her face sweaty, under the cafeteria lamps.

  ‘Michel, play with Manko.’

  I played manille in Room 113 with Manko Eli as is. Manko had Newington’s Disorder. His skeleton was being dissolved by his own kidneys. He excreted his own minerals. Finally Eliasis moved on a trolley. As he died he became a legless embryo, singing Greek lullabies.

  ‘La la lalla la.’

  Death came any time. Death came in corpse-sized bags of muslin the Ojibways unloaded from Norwegian freighters. Death came from the United States and was trucked to the towns of the north shore. When we heard the foghorns we crossed ourselves because we knew that le bon Dieu had washed his hands of somebody.

  Death was in Rutherford Meadows, fixing a harrow. One could carry bags of meal to the barn and fall dead like the Basque boy Billy Sher. You could be reading the Diocesan Newsletter like Edmond Pic even in a portable toilet and die of a runaway truck. Death drove the newly-weds’ boat, collecting flowers and money. Death beat the tambourine behind the Lamb of God. Death was a champion at la bataille. He beat the bowlegged priest Father Gregors, who died of lake fever in the spring.

  Death was a great traveller. He rode the trunk-line and knew the trans-Canadian schedule by heart. You could see his overnight bags anywhere. He sold pancakes at the fête and grilled kielbasa with the Poles. He was a hell of a swimmer and hauled down the toughest trawler man, even the Portuguese Pedro Laguin, who went overboard last July with his nets.

  Death hid in cupboards and dived out of steeples. He jumped from manholes and crouched in the ovens of the baker Freddie Granbouche. Death made no appointments. He walked into the Rutherford hospital any time like he owned the place. We had about thirteen deaths per season, almost all Catholic.

  My brother Ignace was born né coiffé. My mother had had the caul blessed and buried under our lilacs. Now he was fourteen and white-haired. He would be a saint. He kept a miniature religious theatre. The house filled with glue, plywood, muslin, gouache, wire, little cogs. He bought transparencies of the Virgin and his little Jerusalem glowed on bluffs where innocents were massacred. Ignace took the Greyhound to Winnipeg and studied with the Jesuits.

  That August molars suddenly oozed up from the banks of the Petit Croix. We found fragments of shroud and knuckle-bones washed down from the poor people’s cemetery. Salamanders came through brown watery dust. If a black spiral move
d on the watery shade, Ignace skipped a knuckle-bone through the lily pads. Plonk, a dead salamander.

  ‘À l’attaque!’ he yelled. ‘Attack!’

  But he crossed himself.

  St Bonaventure was my high school.

  My friends came from Heron Bay, Gilbertsonville, Three Rivers, Struthers, and the Ojibways from Crow Hill, Kalaka Falls and Mount Barrois. The Poniatowskis, Lemiczes, and Kolakowiczes came from the farms on yellow Catholic buses and even the girls smelled like cow shit.

  Pius XII’s photograph hung over the clocks. We wore lanyards with Pius’s photograph. Over the papier-mâché tableaux of Catholic missionaries in Burma was a pedestal with a book of photographs of Pius XII. There was a photograph of Pius XII in the gymnasium. For passing into the seventh grade I received a locket with Pius XII’s photograph.

  In Father Przybilski’s office was a huge framed engraving, black and white: Marquette Bringing Catholicism to the New World. Sun-shafts came through oak trees on Ojibways kneeling in gilded ferns. A medieval engraving, La Crvuvteen faisant mourir les Catholiques, was over his desk, figures boiled in cauldrons, noses torn by pincers.

  It was dark in St Bonaventure. Whatever the cafeteria cooked it always smelled like boiled brussels sprouts. Father Ybert came to religion class and two older students unrolled the St Croix Mural, seventeen-foot long, crayon-resist images of St Croix.

  ‘Here you see the dark forêt of infancy,’ he said. ‘Nature governed you without the Holy Spirit.’

  We followed his pointer. A dog crapped by the Bon Gargon on the rapids.

  ‘The dogs of ignorance excreted your souls.’

  He tapped St Bonaventure’s image.

  ‘But you were received by the Church, which blasted out your natural corruption. You received the Blood and Body of Christ.’

  Father Ybert wiped his spectacles and smiled.

  ‘Old age stalks you, my friends, and disease, and Death. Insanity. For now you suffer only poverty, but Death – you see him here behind the red bus – will take you and you will die.’

  James Queyser looked pale.

  ‘This is your reward for the sadness and sorrows you will be afflicted with in St Croix,’ Father Ybert explained. ‘When you are dead, beetles will chew your brains. Worms will crawl inside your tongues.’