Almost a Great Escape Read online

  Later that morning on the hill, Jens asks Pilot Officer Ottar Malm about her. He trusts Ottar who has skied here before and knows everybody. Ottar is outgoing. Confident. Gregarious. A natural leader. Her name is Alice Tyler, Ottar says. Her parents own the Alpine Inn. They are rich. They own the golf course. They own businesses in Montreal. They live in Westmount. Very exclusive. She has two sisters and a brother. They are the beautiful Tyler family.

  “A Norwegian pilot like you won’t have a chance with Alice,” Ottar warns but smiles. “She says she’s going to McGill University when she finishes school.”

  “School?” Jens asks. “She looks older than that.”

  Ottar laughs. “That’s why her mother is already making plans for her to marry a rich boy from a proper family. Before some pilot like you comes along and steals her. If you meet her mother you’ll know why you don’t have a chance.”

  Jens believes he has a chance. There was something in the way the blue of Alice’s eyes brightened when she talked to him. As if the sun flooded the morning sky. He meets her for lunch.

  Right away he thinks this conversation is going badly. As usual, he is too serious. Instead of being charming and witty, he talks about the long hours of pilot training. The push to get the pilots into the war. The Battle of Britain. The Luftwaffe versus the Royal Air Force. Dogfights on the horizon. About the plans he had before the war. Studying to be an engineer. About Norway and his motorcycle races. He knows he’s making a fool of himself with all these details. He should be flattering her. Complimenting her clothes. Asking about her friends. She seems surprised by his attitude. She seems surprised he would tell her what he thinks about.

  It goes better while they are skiing. There’s not so much time for him to talk, to make mistakes. She’s a determined skier and tries hard to keep up. He admires her bravery. She’s not afraid to fall. She’s not afraid to make mistakes. She laughs until tears run down her cheeks and he can’t help laughing too. He forgets to be serious.

  That evening Alice leads him into an office behind the Inn’s front desk and closes the door. “This is my father’s office. My parents aren’t coming up North until New Year’s Eve. I study here.”

  She reaches her arms around his neck, pulling him towards her. “Kiss me, so I know you are real.”

  Afterwards, she says, “A week isn’t very long. I’ve only known you one day and I am already beginning to miss you.”

  She is not shy like him. In the dining room she holds his hand as the maître d’ leads them to a table. He is self-conscious. His pilot friends are watching.

  Her blue eyes pause to rest gently on him. He wishes he knew what she was thinking. Does she think he’s just another man hanging around because she’s rich? A show-off? Smooth? How can he prove he’s different?

  They meet again the next day for lunch and skiing. The evening kiss in the office is longer. Her hands around his waist pull his hips into her. At supper they share a table with Ottar and a low neckline redhead from Montreal. Alice’s changing eyes are brighter, faster than Jens has ever seen them. She talks excitedly about how her skiing is improving with Jens’s help. “Norwegian men know the right techniques,” she says. “They have experience.” The Montreal girl blushes. Ottar grins.

  Alice opens a silver cigarette case. “Can I tempt you, Jens?” she asks.

  “I’m not a smoker,” he replies.

  “Do you have a match?”

  He shakes his head, no.

  “Pilots should carry matches,” she says, “for emergencies.” She turns to Ottar to light her cigarette.

  “Jens doesn’t have temptations or emergencies,” Ottar tells her as he strikes a match. “He is the only pilot who helps the mechanics during his free time. The others just lounge about the camp.”

  “I love temptation,” Alice says.

  Jens knows he’s expected to have a response. He thinks carefully before speaking. “If you make up your own rules, if you live the way you choose, then nothing can tempt you.”

  Alice rests her cigarette on the glass ashtray and wraps her arms around Jens’s neck. “But not everybody can make up their own rules. Not everybody is like you.” Then, in his ear, she whispers, “That’s why I might love you one day.”

  He thinks late into the night, lying on his bed while his roommate sleeps drunk twisting in the blankets on the other bed. Could Alice ever love him?

  When they meet for lunch the next day, she has brought him a present. “You can open it after skiing today.” She tucks a red ribboned box into the pocket of his ski jacket. “I’ll meet you in the dining room tonight. Tell me then if you like it.”

  He’s pleased by the gift, but disappointed they won’t be meeting in the office for a kiss before supper. He doesn’t say anything. The skiing goes well and he thinks about the red ribbon as he rides the lift to the top of the hill. There, he tells her, “I must admit I was tempted to open the box on the way up. Maybe you know me better than I know myself.”

  “Maybe,” she replies.

  When the lifts close at dusk, they carry their skis over their shoulders to the racks on the porch of the Inn.

  “May I open the gift now?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. “After you’ve had a bath. Then you can open it.” She kisses him on the cheek. “I’ll see you soon, sweetheart.”

  He is alone in his room when he unties the red ribbon and opens the box. Inside, resting on a bed of cotton wool, is a box of matches. “I Am Your Emergency.”

  A GOODBYE MOTHER STORY

  BEFORE THE FORGETTING CAME

  As I read The Jens Album, our 13 years of Goodbye Mother memories begin to find me. I write them as they find me and read them aloud to you at Eden Brook. This is the first.

  Old Canmore, and our cabin there, wasn’t much. Everything was black and dying in that 1950s coal town except the Three Sisters mountains, the Bow River, and the wind scattering shadows beneath the spruce.

  For me, the best thing that happened at Canmore was nothing. I did everything inside nothing. Everything I wanted to do or know was in the nothingness I lived.

  The main street was a few old low roofed dirt floored shacks, cracked sidewalks, a fight and spit hotel bar, the RCMP jail, a barber shop, and Leong’s grocery and coffee shop.

  I was an unnoticed little kid and did what I wanted. Nobody said anything, or cared, as long as I stayed away from the bar.

  Mary Anderson and I saved pop bottles and exchanged six empties at Leong’s for a full one. Leong’s had wood floors, black and slippery from years of coal dust ground into them by miners’ boots. If we had five empties we had to drink the full one on the steps and return the empty right away. Mary figured out the best deals on liquorice, gum, jawbreakers. She was alive in the nothingness of summer and so was I.

  The barber shop had one chair and one haircut for boys. A pig shave. I rode Dolly there once a month and when I got home you rinsed my bald head with coal oil to get rid of the bugs.

  The mine railway ran on the edge of the town. On the cabin side of the tracks was the miners’ golf course, nine holes with oiled sand greens. Our cabin was beside a green. Geoff — two years younger — and I played rounds of golf with one ball and one club each for driving and putting. I chose your two iron. Geoff was always the best at sports and could beat me with any club. The golf course was also good pasture for hobbled or picketed horses.

  Our cabin was a shack. Plywood walls sided with half logs. A Bow River stone fireplace built around a Heatilator metal box banked with coal at night. Where your nightie caught on fire and Aunt Joanie rolled you in the rug to put it out. Both drunk.

  Across the flat from us were the Firmstones and the Andersons. Duncan Crockford, the Scottish landscape painter, lived on the hill above the Rundle Mountain Trading Company Store and the Canmore Coal Company Head­quarters. It wasn’t until I read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer that I understood why you loved these people so much. First there were the quick snorts. The sudsy ones. The
before and after dinner ones. The nightcaps. Finally, the ones for the road. I’d be burrowed into a corner listening as the bottles piled up on the kitchen counter. Helen Firmstone was the sharpest and forever a good friend to you. Her father was Harry Pollard who carried his photograph equipment from the Rockies to the pharaohs’ tombs.

  Helen was as hardy as her father and the only person I know who could put her arms around me and I didn’t feel like crying before the forgetting came. The drinking just about killed her husband Gary but he kept up.

  Like Dad, Dr. Anderson wasn’t around much (for different reasons) but Hilda and their girls were. Hilda played the banjo and the girls all sang and I was astounded. The older Anderson girls had boyfriends hanging around. They took us to the flickering movies in the Canmore Opera House and carried us on their shoulders home asleep and safe over the Bow River trestle. Hilda sunned in her bra at lunchtime on our mountain hikes.

  And into the cabin the screen door shoved aside would roar Duncan Crockford his Scottish accent rolling through his thick beard and bad teeth. His wife Wynn urging him to get back to his painting. Impossible. He had money today. Duncan crashed through life painting and womanizing. His eye always wandering to you. Teasing English accent Ted. The office man. I’d see Duncan later unmistakable in his kilt seducing businessmen’s bored wives at the symphony art auctions.

  The overcrowded cabin of laughter and flames was your drowning time with Henry Miller in Montmartre. Your brawl with Ernest in Havana. The coal grime, everyone pissing behind the cars, the Rockies and Bow River painted by Duncan. This was your life of New Yorker stories. The nowhere time of Canmore cold water showers and bottles of gin stories ready for mailing.

  I remember knowing for the first time I was loved. It didn’t happen fast. Probably over a summer or even over a couple of years. I was five when I noticed it, 1954.

  I remember standing on the plywood porch of the bunkhouse. The noth­ingness of the morning quiet. Pine and spruce smells flowing like water around me. The smell of my nothingness. The sun flickering on silk centred cobwebs in the bush.

  I always wore a T-shirt and blue jeans with rolled up cuffs. Unless it was cold. Then I wore my dark red flannel shirt with gold horseshoes and silver lariats. Most cowboy shirts had pearl snaps. Mine had plain white buttons. The cuffs and elbows were fraying and I pulled the loose threads off. I was tidy. I tucked the silver tip of my belt into the loops of my jeans. The belt had a turquoise bead pattern on the back. Some cowboys I had seen at the McBride corrals had brands stamped on their belts. Some cowboys wore knives on their belts. I kept mine in my pocket. It wasn’t very big.

  I always wore sneakers. Tennis shoes. They were best because you never knew what you might be doing that day. Boots were too hot and no good for running or in the water. Men wore boots. I lived to be ready for anything.

  My brothers were sleeping in the bunks, their blankets pulled around their heads. It was cold in the mountains at night. They didn’t like me to wake them. They liked sleeping. I liked being alone in the morning and wandering around. I went to the corrals first to feed the horses from a big stack of bales beside the corral. I had fed the last of a bale the night before, so I had to climb to the top of the stack and roll one free. It bounced to the ground. The horses pushed against the rails as I cut the strings and hung them on a fence post. They were useful when rails came off the corral. I couldn’t pound the big nails.

  The best horses that summer were Twinkle, Trixie, and Belle. Other horses came and went. Apache who always rolled when I rode him into a creek. The saddle got wet and unless I was quick to jump to the bank I got wet too. Red who could gallop on hobbles so Mum had to be careful when she let him out to graze.

  I threw the hay flakes into the corral, spreading them out so all the horses got enough. I couldn’t ride Belle until she had finished eating but I could sit on her. The only way I could get on was to take her hay to the corral fence and push her tight against a rail. Before she moved away I had to run behind her, crawl through the rails, climb to the top, and swing a leg over her back. Sometimes it took two or three tries. I sat on her while the horses ate the hay. Until they started biting and kicking each other, fighting over the last flakes.

  I slid off and got my rope halter. I stood on a log to put it over Belle’s head. I had to slide the halter’s stiff loop through a keeper and bend it onto a hook. I took my chances with being safe and just tugged the loop over the hook. I led her from the corral and brushed her. I would have saddled her but that took time. Yesterday it took so long I got stopped riding past the cabin and had to go inside and eat breakfast. Better to eat first. Then ride.

  The buzzing of flies grew from the quiet. Belle swished her black tail. The sun was warm and all around the clearing were the tall emerald trees and above them a circle of leaning mountains. The brush slid over Belle’s coat. I had nothing else to do but stand in the bottom of that morning cup of sky blue life and brush my horse. That was forever made wordless real and nothing to talk about.

  I knew Mum was awake now. I led Belle back to the corral and walked along the path to the cabin. Scuffed roots crossed the path. Between the roots the dirt was low and hard and rust red pine needles drifted in the dips. My fingers trailed through the branches pulling fresh needles. I stopped at the door and held my hands against my face, washing with the smell of broken emeralds.

  Geoffrey in his flannel pyjamas stood on a chair at the table banging a spoon on the edge of his bowl. He splashed the spoon into his glass of milk and laughed as the milk splattered over his hand. Teddy the biggest of us sat at the end of the table cutting toast. He was setting an example and had his hair brushed and was sitting up straight.

  Billy was in the high chair. He smeared his pablum over his face and licked it from his hands then reached toward Geoffrey’s bowl.

  “Bake,” Geoffrey shouted as he smacked his spoon on the table. “Bake.”

  “Do you want bacon?” she asked me.

  “Bake,” Geoffrey shouted again.

  “I want some,” Teddy said. He looked at me with his four years older than you brushed hair. “Daddy’s coming for the weekend. Today is Friday.” As if I didn’t know. Anything.

  I sank into her big reading chair by the fireplace and flipped my legs over the arm. I reached down and lifted up a pile of her New Yorkers. She read them at night. I knew she was watching me as I turned the pages looking for cartoons.

  “Do you want toast and jam?” she asked.

  “Bake,” Geoffrey demanded. He slammed his spoon on the table. “Bake.”

  Brown toast. Butter. Strawberry jam. Bacon. That was breakfast. That was always breakfast and sometimes lunch. The propane stove whoomped as she lit the burner.

  Teddy made more toast. She fried the bacon and piled it on a plate in the centre of the table beside the can of strawberry jam that said With Pectin. What was that? Nobody ever asked for the jam with pectin.

  Geoffrey waved his slice of bacon in the air. “Bake.”

  Billy cried until she gave him a slice. Teddy used his knife and fork to cut his bacon. I layered mine. Toast, jam with pectin, bacon, toast.

  I squished my sandwich so I could pull the bacon apart with my teeth.

  “Daddy’s coming today,” Teddy said. Again. He was good at chewing with his mouth closed.

  “Yes,” she said. “We’re going to have a quiet day. Teddy’s going to work on his reading and arithmetic and we’re going to be quiet for him.”

  “What’s pectin?” I asked.

  She liked being caught by my guess where to look questions. “We don’t know what pectin is,” she said with her eyes laughing only with me. “You tell us.”

  I turned the can towards her and pointed to the word. “Pectin. What is it?”

  Teddy pulled the can from my hands and read the label out loud. “Straw­berry Jam With Pectin.” He frowned, then smiled. “It’s what’s in the jam. That’s what it says.”

  I looked at her and she was bit
ing her bottom lip. “That’s what pectin is,” she said. “Teddy’s right. It’s what’s in the jam.”

  “Bake,” Geoffrey shouted as he crawled onto the table and tipped over the bacon plate.

  Teddy and I piled the dishes in the sink and she washed Geoffrey and Billy. “Play together,” she said to Geoffrey as she set Billy on the floor. Geoffrey climbed back onto his chair and chanted, “Wanna go in the car! Gotta go in the car!” He slammed his hands on the table.

  She lifted him from the table and set him on the floor to play with Billy. “Wanna go in the car! Gotta go in the car!”

  Billy waved his hands then began to cry when Geoffrey stood up and climbed the chair.

  “Get your books,” she said to Teddy.

  “I’m going riding,” I said as I stepped over Billy.

  “That’s not fair. Tyler should do school work too,” Teddy said. “He should have something to show Daddy when he gets here.”

  “I can’t read,” I said. “I’m not in school.”

  Teddy and Alice laughed. Together. Family.

  She came to the corral and saw me standing small on a bale straining to tighten the cinch on Belle.

  She wrapped her arms around me. It was like the emerald trees and the leaning mountains wrapping themselves around me. Blue eyes like the top of the cup. Only the smell was different. She smelled like bacon.

  “Do you need help?” she asked.

  “It’s tight.”

  “I have to stay with the boys.”

  “I know. Daddy is coming.”

  Suddenly her hands were strong around my waist and she swung me laughing shoes high into the saddle.

  “Don’t fall off or you’ll have to walk home.”

  “I won’t.”

  “I love you.”

  I was her you. I lived. Wrapped inside the blue eyed sky bacon sandwich love of her nothingness.

  AN ALICE AND JENS STORY

  NEW YEAR'S EVE 1941

  Conquering Nazis parade in Oslo. In the snow-covered Laurentians of Quebec, Canada, Jens Müller and four other Norwegian pilots have made the most of their one week leave. Pilots in exile. All week they competed with the Canadian men for the fastest run on the ski hill. They built a ski jump, the first on the hill. Daredevils, the Canadians said.