WHEN YOU GROW up as the daughter of a blind man, you become adept at both stealth and stealth’s opposite. From an early age, Willow mastered not only how to sneak like a prowler, but also how to reassure with sound—to produce the ideal quantity of it to avoid startling or embarrassing her father without belittling him. Perhaps this explains why, despite witnessing the burial of his coffin earlier this afternoon, she finds herself whistling and scraping her feet on the hallway’s floorboards as she approaches his study, just as she has always done.
It was never a room she entered without good reason. Her father would blockade himself behind its heavy oak door for days or even weeks at a time. Inside, everything is just as she remembers it: the old-fashioned inkwell bolted to his desk, the coal-black telephone; no photographs or pictures, just his stuffed birds and his record player and his classics of literature lining the walls. She runs her hand over the leather writing surface of his desk, feeling the faint imprint of the thousands of documents he signed, the millions of trees condemned to death by the mere stroke of his pen.
She can almost see her father canted back in his chair, eyes shut, one of his LPs of poetry turning on the mantle. If ever he suspected anything in his office had been moved or disturbed, he’d launch into a rage, first directed at the housekeepers, and then at Willow. One time, he ordered her into his study to berate her for stepping on one of his precious poetry records, snapping it in half. She remembers sneaking around behind him so that he scolded an empty chair for five minutes, and how comedic it all was, and how deliciously pathetic he seemed, and yet how wicked she felt afterwards.
Now Willow leans back in her father’s chair, testing its springs, soaking up its sensations, as if it might have something secret to tell her about her father, and shuts her eyes. Though the heroic sitter took her baby after dinner so Willow could nap before yet another memorial service later this evening, she finds she can’t sleep without his gentle huffing against her, or the pasty ticking of saliva in his mouth. Still, the chair is a sanctuary, its cool leather a welcome antidote to her overheated attic room, and her wakefulness starts to slip.
“Ms. Greenwood?” a man’s voice sounds out sometime later.
Willow pushes herself upright to discover the well-dressed Irishman from earlier standing on the other side of the desk. “Sorry, I must have nodded off,” she confesses groggily, as though the fact isn’t already plain to him.
“I wouldn’t have disturbed you,” he says, and again his voice is uncannily familiar to her ear, “but my cab is waiting, and there’s something I’d like to give you.” He’s wearing a wool topcoat and his alligator case waits near the door. From his pocket he produces a small book, which he places on the desk in front of her.
“Is this what you read at the service?” she asks, picking it up.
He nods. “Wordsworth. One of your father’s favourites. He kept a copy with him always.” Despite his brisk, cheerful tone, there’s a heaviness about him, as though he’s just dragged an anchor across the floor in order to stand before her.
“That was a fine reading you gave earlier,” she says. “I was sorry you didn’t continue.”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” the Irishman says. “Normally I detest such ceremonies. But I thought those crusty old arseholes could do with a bit of verse in their lives. I’m happy you enjoyed it, though.” He rubs his hands together briskly, as though warming them. “Well, I should be off.” He turns and starts for the door.
“You knew him well, my father?”
“I worked for him for a time,” he says, pausing at the door without turning around. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to be—”
“He fired you?”
“No, he did not,” he snaps, his voice rising then coming under his control again. He turns to face her. “I resigned, then moved back to Dublin. I adore Canada, particularly its natural wonders, but living so far from home proved wearisome for me in the end.”
“In what capacity did you work for him, then? I’ve never heard of you before.”
He reaches down and picks up his alligator case. “I assisted him for a time with certain negotiations. Mostly I was his describer and his reader. I read him business briefs, correspondences, newspapers—things like that.”
And with that a realization snaps like a deadbolt in Willow’s mind. “Now I know why your voice is so familiar,” she says, pointing to the collection of records set on the shelf beneath her father’s turntable, records she was never allowed to touch under penalty of a two-hour lecture. “Those are your recordings.”
The man sighs, as though her realization has disappointed him profoundly. “It gave your father great joy to be read to, and a friend of mine in Dublin produces music,” he says wearily. “So each year my friend helped me record an album of poetry for your father for his birthday, just a smattering of verses he liked best.” A melancholy expression overtakes him. “He was very kind to me, your father.”
“Well, that must’ve been nice,” she quips. “Because he enjoyed listening to your voice more than he did mine.”
“It wasn’t easy for him, you know,” the man continues, and the more he speaks, the more his eyes seem to fill with hurt. “This world is designed to pit us against one another. Brother against brother. Mother against son. Father against daughter. Friend against friend. But it was especially unkind to your father.”
“Maybe he deserved it? You ever think about that? Maybe he brought it on himself.”
The man shakes his head. “He knew he couldn’t be an ideal guardian for you. That it just wasn’t in him. But he did the best he could.”
“Yeah, well, tell that to the trees he cut down.”
The man drops his case to the wooden floor with a neat bang. “Oh, would you quit your whining about the goddamned trees!” he snarls, the restraint he’d so far been practising now completely cast aside. “You aren’t the only person in the world who ever lost anything, my dear. For a while I was close to something. Something wonderful. And then I couldn’t be close to it ever again. I doubt you’ve lived long enough to know what that means.”
“I’ve lost plenty,” she says, feeling her face grow hot. “Believe me.”
He fixes a hard glare upon her, and for a moment she’s afraid he might jump across the desk and strangle her. “It’s a crime to burden the young with the sorrows of the old,” he says, and she feels an odd sense of secret history, as though he’s speaking about many things at once. And for a moment she’s a child again, wandering this cavernous mansion, picking over the fragments of her father’s story, like she’d been given a jigsaw puzzle with pieces already missing long before the box was opened.
“But you should know that many people sacrificed for you to be here in this study today, Willow,” he adds with an irritated sneer. “And you’d be best fucking served to remember it.”
“I enjoyed your poem, sir,” she says, undaunted. “And I appreciate the book of poetry. But I’ll remember Harris as who he was, not as the self-sacrificing saint that some ex-employee claims him to be, thank you very much.”