Aubrey McKee Read online

  Dr. B

  Gail’s father came from Bydogoszcs. I don’t know how to pronounce Bydogoszcs. I asked him more than once to say Bydogoszcs, but I was perplexed when, after a number of repetitions, I couldn’t mimic the sound perfectly. My Polish back then was limited to a very few irrelevant phrases—Jak się masz? Dobrze! To jest bloto—that I would sneak into conversation with Dr. Benninger as I could. It was part of our standing joke, our banter, our back-and-forth.

  The first time I saw him, I was six years old—a surly, tangled-haired kid, unsure of my parents’ recent reconciliation, accompanying my father on Saturday morning errands. We were in a delicatessen called Astroff’s on Dresden Row. Glass display cases of mainly adult foodstuffs—dark salamis, queer-looking pâtés, stinky yellow cheese in waxed paper. With my finger tapping on the glass, I listlessly examined the few items I liked, hoping for a subsequent stop at the Candy Bowl or the French Pastry or even the Downtown Bookmart, which at least sold comics. It was this moment of kid-abstraction that Dr. Benninger interrupted, asking Mrs. Astroff if she wouldn’t mind giving a slice of smoked meat to the little boy in the red hat. I was unnerved that a stranger would talk to me, or about me, and peeked up at a man with curly hair and wavy sideburns in a tilted, grey astrakhan hat, who watched me with a charming but distant smile. Of course my father came over straightaway to greet Dr. Benninger, with an obliging cheerfulness mixed with surprise, and I could tell from this exchange that the stranger was known somehow to my dad—in the way that everyone in the city was known somehow to my parents.

  In the car going home, nibbling at the slice of smoked meat, which my father had allowed me to keep and which I decided I was going to like, I saw Dr. Benninger driving away in a blue Volvo station wagon with round headlights. I wondered where he was going—for certainly I didn’t know who he was. I knew nothing about the guy, as I knew next to nothing about any of the adults in the city. Adults, especially adult men, were impossibly remote and complicated entities. They seemed the result of a thousand decisions made in the generations before I was born.

  But my father talked of Dr. Benninger as if we had met him before (and maybe I had), letting me know he was a doctor at the hospital, that he was from Europe, that he spoke four languages. At home, I stared at the compact countries of Europe on my uncle’s Risk board, intrigued but worried by all the capital cities. From how my family talked, Europe seemed a place of sadly marshalled peoples, border checkpoints, gloomy hotel lobbies, decrepit basements and disintegrating canals in which ebbed and flowed heads of state, adulterers, gypsies, concert pianists, misfit suicides. Dr. Benninger was the first real person I knew from Europe and this explained, what were by Halifax’s standards, his many idiosyncrasies. It was why he drove a Volvo, why he was president of the Bordeaux society, why he wore an astrakhan hat in winter or a straw boater in summer. And it was why he didn’t care if people thought him a showoff or a peacock. Although my father greeted him jovially at Astroff’s, I felt he didn’t quite trust Dr. Benninger—mainly because my father didn’t quite trust any man whose ski hat matched his ski jacket and his ski gloves. Or whose tennis wristbands matched his visor and socks. Or who went jogging without a T-shirt. Which is how my mother and sister and I saw Dr. Benninger one autumn evening a year or so later. Waiting at the traffic light at South and Robie Streets, we spied Dr. Benninger on the sidewalk, also waiting for the light. He was topless in tight black shorts, a house key safety-pinned to his waistband, running on the spot, knees bouncing high, hands on hips, head flung back—acting as if he thought he were by himself, as if he thought he wouldn’t be recognized.

  “Hm,” my sister said. “That’s a little different. Don’t you know that guy, Mom?”

  “He looks,” said my mother, driving away, “like a perfect asshole.”

  To my father, she said: “We saw your pal on the street today.” This in itself did not mean that much. Everyone was a pal to my parents. It was one of their diversions to refer to any recently seen acquaintance—colleague, nephew, adversary—as a pal.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Dr. B. That man is really stuck on himself. He has such stubby little legs he wears these little hot pants to make his legs look longer. He runs around jogging everywhere in them. It’s such vanity. Honest-to-God, you’ve never seen such vanity.”

  My father, in a we-don’t-have-to-keep-talking-about-this way, said, “Well, Mumsy, old Stan’s an eccentric.”

  “Eccentric?” said my mother. “In my life, I’ve met a hundred people who want to be eccentric. I’ve met maybe two real eccentrics. And Stan isn’t either of them.”

  ~

  It was not exactly anomalous for my mother to offer judgements about people she saw in the neighbourhood. As a rule, she was very free with her appraisals of character, conduct, possible imperfections. Why exactly she attached herself to a conclusion was sometimes hard to pinpoint—for, as we kids intuitively understood, her own biases shifted over time, so that someone who was a perfect asshole last week might be an absolute saint the next. After an evening out, a fundraiser for Neptune Theatre, say, or a reception for the Scotia Music Festival, I would hear my mother in the breakfast nook, sitting at the table with one of my sisters, debriefing the evening, trying to make up her mind if someone was Good or Bad. Dr. Benninger, as a subject, occupied her more than most. “I’m telling you. He sashays around, acting like an I-don’t-know-what, the Byronic hero, I suppose. Bit of a darb. Bit of a darb. Walking around the Burrs’ house in a paisley ascot, talking about the mystique of a Frank Lloyd Wright house. Yuck. It’s enough to make you want to throw up. He thinks he knows something about Frank Lloyd Wright? Let me tell you something. He doesn’t know shit about Frank Lloyd Wright. He doesn’t know shit about Anne of Green Gables! But you can’t tell Stan anything, you know what I mean? He thinks he knows it all. I’m telling you, children, there is nothing more unattractive in someone than self-interest. And the older people get, the worse they are like that. Self-absorbed. I tend to measure people by how much they reach out to others, you know. And that man, he’s full of himself.” But even on this she would flip-flop. From Dr. Benninger’s wife she learned he gave a hundred dollars to a Polish exchange student who was stuck in Halifax over Christmas. (“It was a woman, mind you,” said my mother, holding up a finger, making sure this detail was not lost.) Less easy to explain was Dr. B driving home a male hospital porter all the way to Tantallon during a snowstorm. Or donating a set of Balzac to Hope Cottage, a men’s shelter, or, what almost stopped my mother cold, his offer to pay a teenager’s way through college. “You know that red-haired boy at the express check-out at Sobeys? With the over-bite? From Musquodoboit Harbour? He got to talking to Dr. Benninger because he wants to go to med school. And on the way to the car with the groceries, Dr. Benninger said he would give him the money. The tuition. Not lend it, but give him the money. And the kid doesn’t have to pay it back. He just has to do the same for someone else when he’s older. If he can. Can you believe it? I have never heard of anyone doing that at the express check-out at Sobeys. And I have heard a lot.” I could tell my mother was dissatisfied with these new developments because she preferred definitive verdicts. I would see her sometimes, maybe after a phone call with Mrs. Benninger, thinking about that family, looking as if she’d just swallowed sour milk, but she didn’t speak so rashly about Dr. Benninger anymore. For the moment, his actions were rather outside her purview, contravened her laws of thermodynamics, and her analyses began to subside. I think they would have lapsed entirely had it not been for two further plot-points—me falling in love with Gail, the Benninger’s younger daughter, and my mother becoming the closest of real pals with Sophie, Dr. Benninger’s wife.

  ~

  Sofya Benninger was merely one of the most charming persons known to the city. To see this woman as she was in 1973—when she drove a bunch of ten-year-olds to Lunenburg on a school trip—was to see the most charismatic woman imaginable, c
ertainly she was for me, sitting directly behind the driver’s seat in that same blue Volvo station wagon, peeking as I could at the fluent eyes and nose reflected in the rectangle of the rear-view mirror. I’d seen her before, scanning the school parking lot for her own children, and felt at that time her sense of responsibility toward kids. Most moms were like that—even Mrs. Burr, the glamorously blonde, crinkly-­smiley matriarch of a family of boys, was like that—but Mrs. Benninger was a little different. She had a tacit, relaxed affinity with children and even shy kids ordinarily uncomfortable with physical contact, even the hypersensitive Cyrus Mair, did not mind being touched or finger-poked or grabbed by Mrs. Benninger. She had a genius for it and seemed to mean by it only kindness, amiable provocation, fellow-feeling.

  The school trip was on a muggy Saturday morning. Six kids and a mom caged in a car, lost trying to find the highway back to Halifax. Careening around the twisty, inclined streets of Lunenburg, Mrs. Benninger invented a game called Carp Shorners wherein all her passengers went into the back seat and allowed the centrifugal force from the Volvo’s turns to propel them from side to side—aided by a well-­positioned foot or extending arm. We stacked up on each other, cramming elbows into ears, fogging the windows, screaming for them to be lowered so we could breathe, kids bouncing around the back seat like ball bearings in a wagon. But, as we approached the on-ramp to Highway 103, she pulled over onto the gravel shoulder, and had us quiet down and put on our seatbelts again. After games of Buzz and My Grandmother Packed My Bag, Mrs. Benninger said we should go around the car, that each of us could tell a joke. I don’t remember my contribution but I recall Mrs. Benninger’s to this day. “So it’s my turn?” she said. And then, colludingly, as if she too were on the run from the adult world, she asked me to draw on my fogged-up backseat window. Under her supervision, I diagrammed an overhead view of a house, a stick-woman in a bed, a red light in the front window, the street outside—and four stick-men, three inside the house and one across the street.

  “Is this a puzzle?” a kid asked.

  “Sort of,” said Mrs. Benninger. “It’s a whorehouse. And those are four different men. Can you guess their nationalities?”

  Pause. Kids looking at each other in bewilderment. What kind of joke was this? And did she just say whorehouse?

  Starting to giggle, Mrs. Benninger pointed at the four stick-men. “He’s Finnish. He’s Russian. Himalayan. And that’s a Newfie waiting for the light to change.”

  Jolted, we were, that a joke could be so involved, that adults actually told dirty jokes, that Mrs. Benninger would repeat one to us, a bunch of kids in grade school.

  She invented Carp Shorners. She told us a dirty joke. She said whore. I was in love with her. We were all in love with Mrs. Benninger.

  ~

  I never saw my mother laugh as much as she did with Sophie Benninger. Just helpless, pee-your-pants, that-woman-is-a-riot hysterical. For my mother, Sophie was a brunette counterpart, an accomplice, a sister. Whether working on the board of Neptune Theatre, organizing a fundraiser for the Halifax Trojans Swim Team, or just flirting together at a cocktail party, they touched off something in each other’s sensibility and between themselves, developing a giddy, feed-backing party personality. They would laugh-talk in a way that made everyone feel involved and scandalized and delighted—and wanting to participate in the froth of that delight. No one knew what they were going to be excited about, no one knew how far they would go. I see them from those years, in the slide show of memory, in white tennis dresses with green trim, arriving at the Ottway’s tulip party, clutching Dunlop racquets and fluted glasses of champagne. Then at my sister’s wedding reception at the Lord Nelson Hotel, hiding from their husbands and sharing a Cameo Mild cigarette, Mrs. Benninger politely swishing her exhales upwards as if this method dispensed the smoke faster (I thought it looked European). Preparing sangria in our breakfast nook, Mrs. Benninger dropping orange slices into a pitcher, her slacks unbuttoned because somehow the “dryer had shrunk the waist five inches.” Then, later in the rec room, the two of them in their stocking feet, watching The Producers on TV, laughing harder than I thought women could laugh.

  My sisters were cautious of Mrs. Benninger’s high spirits, thought her uncontrolled, too hotsy-totsy, called her Mrs. Dubonnet—then later Rhoda after The Mary Tyler Moore show, a TV program my mother and Mrs. Benninger debated long after it ended. Wasn’t Georgette fantastic singing “Steamed Heat,” why did Rhoda leave the show, what was she doing with that husband? Of course as I grew older, my crush grew with me, and to my pubescent imagination Mrs. Benninger was the fantasy older women sans pareille. With her dark, somewhat slanted eyes, straight nose, pale complexion, and full, dark hair, she had the concupiscent feminine presence of an Italian movie star. In those years, the very words bosom, zaftig, and camisole excitedly implied Mrs. Benninger. I remember Digby Lynk on Jubilee Road, returning from a party at the Benningers, turning to me somewhat unbelieving, somewhat embarrassed, speaking in a whisper of hushed admiration, “Gail’s mom’s fucking hot.” And sure she was—she was la femme la plus séduisante du ville and, years later, reading my way through War and Peace, I thought of her when I read about Hélène Bezukhov: “‘So you have never noticed before how beautiful I am?’ Hélène seemed to say. ‘You had not noticed that I am a woman? Yes, I am a woman, who might belong to anyone, might even belong to you,’ said her eyes.”

  ~

  “Oh Sophie’s something else, I want to tell you,” my mother would say, as though Mrs. Benninger were someone she knew only vaguely. “She knows what she’s doing. Never met a woman so sure of her effect on a man. At every moment. Could have anyone she wants. So what’s she doing with that old thing? She is fifteen years younger than Stan. What’s she going to do when he’s old?”

  Together, as husband and wife—actually I never saw them when they thought themselves alone. But in front of others, Stan and Sophie Benninger carried on a kind of vaudeville routine. She would touch at him, act as if she were unable to keep from touching him, stroking his shoulder or absently fingering the hair at the nape of his neck as she sat next to him at a dinner table. He would wince, affect extreme displeasure, slap at her fingers: “Stop playing with my hair, woman!” (His nicknames for her were Woman, Frauenzimmer, Sophalina; she called him Ivan Skavinsky Skavar.)

  My mother detected animosity in these performance pieces. “He’s always got to have her under his thumb. You watch him. He’s threatened by her. Sometimes he doesn’t even like her. Maybe that’s why he’s always going on those trips. I mean, if that guy isn’t fooling around on his wife, meeting other doctors at conventions and whatnot, I’ll give him a thousand dollars.”

  “Mackie,” my father would say, concerned the topic was hardly child-suitable. “What kind of talk is this?”

  “And why in the name of God would he? He’s only married to the most vibrant woman in the city. If you ask me, that man needs help.”

  And perhaps he did. But much of this came later. I am free-ranging over many years and details here. In Halifax, priorities are not always obvious.

  ~

  I was aware of Gail Benninger and her exquisite-­looking sister Brigid my whole Halifax life. I have tried elsewhere to give an account of Gail’s character—and her very persevering sense of justice—and faltered, because truthfully I don’t know, and I’m a little afraid of, what drifts in the deep end of my ideas and feelings for her. Two Quick Notes: on a first day of school, in kindergarten, Gail pulled the fire alarm in the gym. On the last day of high school, she gave our valedictory address and refused the Edith Cavell Award (“awarded to a girl in Grade 12 who excels in personality and in possession of high womanly qualities”) on ethical grounds. That goes a little way to indicating the virtuoso contradictions inside Gail and some of these manifested in her relations with her father—a man to whom she often did not speak for weeks on end. “Could you tell my daughter, Charles,” Dr. Benninge
r would say to me, deliberately getting my name wrong. “Could you tell my daughter that she is not to use the front door, indeed any door belonging to this family, until she apologizes to her mother for what she said this morning.” Or: “It’s very simple, Charles. Your friend, my daughter, has been sent home from her convent school for, if memory serves, calling Sister Irmgard ‘a fascist hog.’ So she will remain in her room until she writes a letter of explanation and apology.” In these instances, he did have a kind of Mitteleuropean arrogance that bugged me and which I found burdensome and distracting. Then I would resent the melancholy and disdain which floated in the air after his yellow-voiced remarks. I never talked back to him but I did hurry out of the car one afternoon a few years later, in Grade 11, when Gail and I were in the back seat talking about applying to MUN, the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Benninger pulled over, switched off the engine, and turned very slowly to Gail. With imperious self-regard, he said, “You are not enrolling in some glorified fish school just to spite me.”

  But before all that, back when Gail and I were just ragamuffin youths, during our teenage years, we were both loose in the city. My parents had separated again, for three years this time, and I was running with disparate kids who wrecked beater cars on the weekend and chugged vodka and Lemon Tang behind the bubble of the Halifax Junior Bengal Lancers—delinquents who knew Gail. One afternoon, rolling joints in her basement, she guided me to a second-floor bathroom—it was the first time I’d been upstairs—and in my spaced-out reverie the rooms and furniture had the faultless, presentational splendour of an art gallery, a vibe it retained all the years I knew it.