Free What Is Left the Daughter by Howard Norman

imagined it. This time it had lost all decorum. It was as if she'd hired a total stranger to shout on her behalf: "You are allowing into our house the
wrong Germans
out of history, Donald! You're letting the wrong ones into our house!"
    "What are you trying to say?" my uncle replied.
    "I'm saying, listen to all the war bulletins you want to in your shed. But in the house? Donald, those war broadcasts are all murder, aren't they? All Hitler and death and ships lost at sea. I'm saying Beethoven's not those things."
    But my uncle made up his mind differently, and one cold, windy, rainy morning in early October, all of his gramophone records were nowhere to be seen. Not just the Beethoven but his entire collection. "I've looked high and low," my aunt said in great distress. "They're gone." After that, it was exclusively radio programs — standard broadcasts and shortwave—that kept me awake until I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. Bulletins, updates, casualty tolls, even stories of individual Canadian soldiers. Bleak news, that is, with the occasional reprieve of less bleak news. Static, static, static. My uncle puttering around in the kitchen. My aunt would call him to bed, often with reproach, and he'd respond, "Not yet, there's some news coming in from France," or something along those lines. I'd hear the tea kettle whistling or the coffeepot percolating, the thud of a whiskey bottle set down too hard on the table.
    "God forgive me —and keep this to yourself," my aunt said. "Lately it's as if my beloved Donald's become a stranger to me, and we're married thirty-seven years! When I look in on him in the kitchen, often the lights are off. No candles, either. And he's blowing on those glowing radio tubes, when for years Donald has maintained that blowing on those tubes doesn't help the reception one bit."
    In the last week of September and up to October 3, my uncle and I completed two sleds and a toboggan. The weather was all lowered clouds, rain threatened, threats realized, the Minas Basin wildly tossing and turning. Here is a sentence from the biographical notes printed on the back of the record album of Beethoven's First and Second symphonies: "During this period he was all too judiciously attended by insomnia." I knew what that meant. And so there we were, Constance, Donald and myself, absent Tilda. No books, no gramophone music. The radio in the shed, the radio on the kitchen table. My uncle listened to the radio in the bedroom too.
    At seven A.M. , October 5, Donald made a remark about my method of sanding a toboggan plank (it was one of my best skills) that was too critical for me to tolerate, so I drove, three hours earlier than usual, to the bakery to have coffee and a scone. Tilda was there, but not Hans, and I sat with her at a table near the window. "I see you're sitting here alone, without a book to read," I said.
    "Hans is upstairs writing his supervising professor a letter," she said. "He keeps tearing it up and starting over. Obviously he hasn't been in classes. He's asking for next semester away from Dalhousie, too. It's called a leave of absence. Problem is, he doesn't want to upset his uncle, whose been so generous. That'll take a separate letter to Denmark. If letters still get there. Hans isn't so sure. He hasn't received one in months."
    "And he can't tell this professor the real reason he doesn't want to come back, can he?" I said. "That reason being Tilda Hillyer."
    "That's true," Tilda said. "It wouldn't wash."
    "Well, if it doesn't work out the way he wants, you could always visit him in Halifax," I said.
    "You mean the way
we
want," Tilda said. "Me and Hans, the way
we
want it to work out."
    "I didn't mean that," I said. "I didn't mean that on purpose."
    "Well, you should mean it," she said. "For my sake."
    "Nonetheless," I said, "you could visit Halifax."
    "Or I could
move
to Halifax," she said.
    Naturally, that little exchange was a far cry from what my aunt had meant by declaring