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Speak Ill of the Dead
by
Mary Jane Maffini
Text © 1999 by Mary Jane Maffini
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
Cover art: Christopher Chuckry
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program.
Napoleon Publishing/RendezVous Press
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Printed in Canada
05 04 03 02 01 00 99 5 4 3 2 1
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Maffini, Mary Jane, date
Speak ill of the dead
ISBN 0-929141-65-2
I. Title.
PS8576.A3385S63 1999 C813’.54 C99-931189-1
PR9199.3.M3433S63 1999
I am most grateful for the endless support and firm opinions of my writing group: Joan Boswell, Vicki Cameron, Audrey Jessup, Sue Pike and Linda Wiken. And also to Linda Berndt, Susanne Fletcher, Janet MacEachen, and Dr. Lorne Parent for their advice and to Georgia Ellis for the fictional use of her balcony. Many thanks to my publisher, Sylvia McConnell, for believing in me and in this book, and to Allister Thompson, the most courageous of editors. Any errors are my own.
Much of Ottawa is as it is portrayed, although it is only fair to mention that Justice for Victims and the Harmony Hotel are both figments of my fevered mind, as is St. Jim’s Parish. Don’t waste your time looking for them. Strangely enough, the one million tulips are real.
-MJM
Contents
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
That particular morning all I could think about was getting rid of Alvin.
It was the thirteenth of May. After the three feet of snow that came in November and stayed topped up all winter, I should have been paying attention to the signs of spring. I stomped along the bike path bordering the Ottawa River, not looking for groundhogs or robins and unaware of the fresh buds on the deciduous trees. Instead, black thoughts of Alvin clogged my mind.
All down Wellington Street and up on Parliament Hill thousands of tulips had popped out of the ground, on schedule for the annual tulip festival. I didn’t notice them.
My mind was focused primarily on liberating my office from Alvin’s presence, and secondarily on dealing with my large, meddlesome family, so Alvin or someone just like him never happened to me again.
By the time I picked up an extra large Colombian Supremo and honey oatmeal muffin across from my Elgin Street office, I was concentrating on the family part and my theory that I’d been switched at birth. That’s how I account for being short, stocky and dark-haired in a family where everyone is tall, slender and fair. My sisters are long-boned and ash-blonde, beautiful still in their late forties. The pleats in their good wool slacks always lie flat; there’s never a button missing on their silk shirts; their hair is just the way they want it to be.
I’m lucky if I can find my clothes on the chair in the morning, and my hair doesn’t even bear talking about. And if I don’t take the fifty-three minute walk to and from work every day, I go off the top end of the scale.
Even now, thirty-two years after my birth, my father still looks at me with surprise. It’s a look I remember well from my childhood. Surprise—when he found me hanging upside down from a tree, or when he discovered six frogs in the bathtub, or when he read a note from The Nun of the Year saying I had played hookey from First Communion Class.
My beautiful sisters would just laugh. They were perfect. So they could afford to think it was amusing when I got fished out of ponds, ejected from Sunday School, stranded on the school roof. And one of them, Edwina or Alexa or Donalda, would rescue me, take me by the hand and make sure that even my father could see the humour in the situation. I would stand there, looking way up at a tall, fair man, hoping he would recognize me.
Donalda was named for my father, Donald MacPhee, and like him she was cool, detached, correct. Alexa and Edwina were named for my mother’s brothers. Good Cape Breton names, although a bit out of place when we moved to Ottawa—a city of Barbaras and Beverlys and Susans. It’s a tribute to my sisters’ elegance as teenagers that they were never tormented about their names. Just floated through high school with their lovely long straight noses in the air, their blonde hair just so and lots of boys to carry their books. I suppose it didn’t hurt that my father was the principal of St. Jim’s.
All
