The Memory Artists - Jeffrey Moore [39]
“Did we kill Dad?” Noel asked his mother, after the crash was ruled vehicular suicide.
“No, Noel, we didn’t! Don’t ever think that!”
Suicides become vampires, the children told him at school. And suicidal parents, according to the Welsh nurse, will have children who are suicidal. “Did the world murder Dad?”
Mrs. Burun remained silent before rising from her chair and walking out of the room. “Did Dad leave because I was bad?” Noel wondered as he heard, from the kitchen, his mother’s sobs. Could there be a worse sound in the world? The living room walls suddenly appeared to be streaked; he realized he too was crying. His mother’s sobs, and father’s death, filled him with a bone-deep sadness he would feel, on and off, for the rest of his life. He would never ask these questions again, shutting them up with triple locks inside himself.
When Henry Burun returned from his sales trips, his son would be on the lookout, either from the front porch or, in winter, from behind the closed curtains of the living room, his nose pressed against the frost-covered pane. At the first sign of the silver-blue Chevy Impala or sunfire-red Pontiac Laurentian, he would explode out the door and down the walkway, once barefoot in snow, and his father would set down his bag and lift him high in the air, twirling him round, making him squeal with laughter.
Inside, he would follow his father’s trail of pipe fumes around the house, irresistibly, like a child of Hamelin. He was waiting for his father to give him his briefcase so he could do “the sorting.” Inside the worn Gladstone bag were pharmaceutical advertisements by the pound, blotters with pictures of internal organs and magical names of curatives, business cards from doctors and pharmacists, stacks of his own cards with the logo of his company (which, like the company car, would change almost every year); but the best thing by far were the samples, which usually came in blister-pack booklets. He would put them into piles: analgesics, heart medications, muscle relaxants, tranquillisers, antidepressants (usually empty, seals torn), vitamin pills, energy boosters … The complex medicinal smells never left him; they could be summoned years later by the drug name itself. Noel was not quite sure why this “sorting” had to be done, but he could do it happily for hours, memorising formulas, ingredients, dosages …
Sometimes in summer, on rural routes in Quebec and New England, Noel would wait with his father in doctors’ and veterinarians’ offices in towns like Lacolle and Bury, Killington and Brattleboro, Ossipee and Rindge. Other times, with the car doors locked and radio on, he would memorise baseball stats on cards that his father had bought to help him pass the time. It didn’t matter how long it took—Noel would wait forever. When his father returned he would quiz Noel on batting averages and RBIs and ERAs. Baseball is a mathematician’s dream, his father told him, and a poet’s too. Or it used to be. “Like every other sport, it’s now a venal business circling the drain.”
There were other quizzes too as they drove, an attempt by Mr. Burun to get his son to memorise worthwhile things. Famous quotations, for example, or the names of the classical compositions as they came up on the radio, or the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece,