Alone in a big house with no one to care for and nothing to do, she often thought of the idealism of her teenage years when she seemed to have more compassion in her soul. In those days, she had felt sorry for the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands of hungry people on the move in search of jobs or something to eat. She was strong in sciences in secondary school and had wanted to become a doctor and work for Dr. Albert Schweitzer who was running a hospital at Lambaréné on the Ogooué River in French colonial Africa. She had told her parents and they said they had no objection to her studying medicine. However, they didn’t want her to work with Negros, especially in Africa where they lived in mud huts and had leprosy sores on their bodies. In her parents’ opinion, Negros weren’t much better than the Indians everyone saw asking for handouts and drinking cheap wine in downtown Toronto.
Maybe that was why she had been so attracted to Oscar back then. As an Indian, he represented the people she wanted to help. He was also the only dark-skinned person she had ever spoken to. And as she came to know him, she discovered he wasn’t so different from the kids at her school. He laughed, he joked around, and he was easy to talk to. At the same time, he also wanted to help people and was planning to go to university to study to become a missionary to his people in the north. He even liked Chopin, her favourite composer, and seemed to have a crush on her.
Then she had this wild idea. She would invite Oscar to one of her family’s Sunday brunches and they would see for themselves that dark-skinned people were as charming as anyone else. They would see in him what she saw in him — a decent human being who planned to make something of his life. But it had turned out badly. Her parents were so shocked when they saw him they covered up their embarrassment by treating him badly. And Oscar reacted by spilling his orange juice on the living room floor. Her furious parents refused to listen when she tried to tell them about his good qualities and ordered her to break off all contact with him. They must have thought there was more to the relationship than there really was. Taking the easy way out, Claire had dropped her plans to study medicine altogether. She then met and fell in love with Harold, and before she knew it, the years had gone by and she had nobody.
During all this time, she had never forgotten Oscar. She had tried to maintain a relationship in the beginning. She had telephoned him after the frigid reception she and her mother had given him at the general store, but didn’t blame him for hanging up on her. The last time she had seen him was when they were both lining up to register for their first year courses at the University of Toronto, but he either hadn’t heard her call his name or he had deliberately ignored her when he was leaving the building.
Some years later, just before she got married, in fact, she asked about him at the general store in Port Carling and was referred to Reverend Huxley, who told her that he had gone to California. Each summer, Claire made a point of attending at least one service at the Presbyterian church to pick up the latest news about him afterward over a cup of coffee. Early on, Reverend Huxley told her with a note of pride that Oscar had written to say he had left his job picking cherries and had found work in the entertainment business. Although Oscar had not spelled out exactly what that entailed, Reverend Huxley assumed that since he was living in California, and since Hollywood was in California, Oscar was now an actor playing Indian parts in the movies. As the years went by, Reverend Huxley let her know when Oscar joined the army, when he won medals for bravery, when he started university, and when he joined the Department.
With some hesitation, because she didn’t know if Oscar was married or single or whether he was still upset with her for treating him so badly when they were teenagers, she looked up his name in the Ottawa telephone directory and called him. To her delight, he was glad to hear from her and they were soon seeing each other on a regular basis. Since Oscar only had a small one-bedroom apartment in Ottawa and a minuscule Foreign Service salary, she provided him airline tickets to fly to Toronto to spend the weekends with her at her place.
It did not take long for their intimate relationship, cut short in the summer of 1935, to resume. Her friends and family, however, were scandalized that she would take up with an Indian. She tried to include him in her social set but her friends stopped talking to her. Worried about what their friends might think, her children came up with excuses not to go home, and spent their weekends with their father and his new wife. The neighbours on Millionaires’ Row did not include them in their Sunday brunches and the president of the Muskoka Yacht Club, someone Claire had known since she was a little girl, dropped by and told her as gently as possible that the members had asked him to tell her that they were not welcome to join their bridge games. When she took Oscar shopping at the general store in Port Carling, the villagers turned their backs on them. His friends and relatives at the Indian Camp, however, greeted them warmly when he took her to see them. Clem’s welcome was just as enthusiastic when Oscar took her to meet him, and he kept Claire amused with his jokes and witticisms. She was puzzled, however, when Oscar’s mother would not emerge from her bedroom to say hello.
In the summer of 1955, Oscar’s staffing officer called him in and asked him if he would be interested in a posting to the embassy at Bogota, the capital of Colombia, three thousand miles away and nine thousand feet up on the windswept, rainy Alto Plano of the Andes.
“It would be a step up in your career,” he said. “You would be one of only three first secretaries at the embassy, and if you do well, there will be greater things in store for you the next time around.”
Oscar eagerly accepted the offer, but Claire was not happy when Oscar told her the news, especially since he hadn’t consulted her before making his decision. She liked her house in Forest Hill; she enjoyed spending time at the homes whose ownership she shared with her former husband; and she didn’t want to be so far away that she would hardly ever see her children, even if they were now avoiding her. And while she was glad she had connected with Oscar again, there were some things about him she didn’t like. For example, when she took him to the opera, he was always asleep and snoring by the middle of the first act, whatever was on the program. When she persuaded him to accompany her to the running of the Queen’s Plate at the Woodbine Race Track, he refused to wear a top hat and striped pants as required under the dress code, and she had been embarrassed when the race steward told Oscar he could not sit beside her in the VIP section. There were also times when he disturbed her sleep, crying out and laughing in the night, talking about his grandfather and someone named Lily.
Thus, while she was fond of Oscar, she certainly was not in love with him. And when he told her they should quickly get married to comply with the long-standing departmental edict that only married personnel could live together abroad, he mistook the look that came over her face as one of pure joy rather than one of utter panic as she contemplated spending the rest of her life supporting her husband in obscure diplomatic missions around the world and being treated as unpaid labour by the wives of ambassadors.
“You go ahead to Bogota and get things ready,” she told him, desperately putting off the moment when she would have to inform him their relationship was over. And six months later, after mailing him letters every week saying how much she missed him and promising to join him when she had put her affairs in order, she sent him the following telegram:
DEAR OSCAR. I am too much of a coward to tell you in person that I really do not want to get married. Not just to you but to anyone. I don’t want to hurt you any more than I already have and so this is goodbye. CLAIRE.
3
In later years, Oscar would date the onset of his alcoholism, the start of his bizarre behaviour, and the collapse of his career to Claire’s message rejecting him for the second time. When the messenger who had delivered the telegram left his office, Oscar turned his seat around to face the window and stared out at the low black clouds hanging over the bilious green eucalyptus trees on the hills behind the chancery for the rest of the afternoon. From time to time, the telephone rang, but he ignored it. Occasionally, someone knocked on his door and called out his name, but he remained lost in thought.
He saw himself back in the house on the reserve as a child of two or three again, unable to control his bowels, and his mother picking him up and shaking him, calling him a filthy animal, shoving him naked out into the snow and slamming shut the door behind him. Then he was six or seven years old at the Indian Camp. It was summer