“The Hidden Elephant” originally appeared in They Have to Take You In, Ursula Pflug, ed. Brighton, Ontario: Hidden Brook Press, 2014. ISBN:9781927725139
~
The Missing Elephant
1967
Alan cautiously stacked the butter dish on top of the jar of peanut butter; which he was balancing on the top of the tin of Empress strawberry jam; which was on the dinner plate he was holding along with a butter knife, regular knife for the peanut butter, and a separate spoon for the jam—the plastic bag with the half loaf of bread was dangling from his little finger—when the doorbell rang. He briefly contemplated putting everything back on the counter to answer the door, but he could hear The Forest Rangers starting up again downstairs after the all too brief commercial break, so he hesitated. And then he heard Mrs. Hassenk, their cleaning lady, coming down from upstairs to answer, and that was that.
When he came back up to the kitchen a few moments later for a glass and milk—skipping the part where Ranger Dan tried to work up the nerve to kiss Sarah—Alan was surprised to discover Mrs. Hassenk still talking to the caller at the door. Usually, she just informed whomever that his mom wasn’t at home and went back to her cleaning. Still, not his problem, and even Ranger Dan wouldn’t hold that kiss forever. He opened the fridge.
“She’s widowed,” Mrs. Hassenk said.
Alan straightened up, milk bottle in hand, to listen.
“Just her and her three sons,” Mrs. Hassenk continued.
“Sorry?” Alan interjected, going to the door. “What are you talking about?”
“This is city census lady,” Mrs Hassenk explained. “I was answering for who lives here.”
“It’s just you, your two brothers and your mom?” the census-taker asked Alan.
“And my dad,” Alan said. “Don’t forget my dad.”
“Your dad?” Mrs. Hassenk exclaimed.
“Um,” said the census-lady, “I have your mother marked down as widowed.”
“Oh, no. That’s wrong.”
Mrs Hassenk hand’s flew to her mouth, and she blushed deeply. ” Oh, Alan, I’m so sorry! I thought your mom was widow lady!”
Alan frowned slightly. It felt vaguely ominous for someone to have announced that his father was dead. As if they had more recent news than he. But as it happened, he had spoken to his father less than an hour before. Dad had phoned looking to talk to Don, but had still managed to interrupt precious minutes of the new Get Smart episode with various “And how are you?”s and “How’s your Mom?” as if he couldn’t just see for himself on Saturday.
“Your parents are divorced?” the census-lady asked.
“No, no,” Alan said, dismissing Mrs. Hassenk’s initial error with a wave. “Let’s start over. There’s me, my two brothers, my mom and dad.”
“And you all live here? In this house?” the census-lady probed.
“Yeah, sure.”
“But,” Mrs. Hassenk objected, “I’ve never met your dad.”
“He’s away on business a lot.”
“But I am cleaning for your family—for your Mother—for three years.”
Alan frowned again. Now that she mentioned it, Dad had been away a lot recently. Alan’s frown grew deeper as he tried to think back just how long it had been, exactly, this time; found he couldn’t really pin it down.
“And I don’t see his things,” Mrs. Hassenk continued, trying no doubt to excuse her mistake. “Your mother’s room looks like lady’s room. And look,” she said, indicating the mud room in which they were standing, “no man’s coat.”
“Well of course not,” Alan said. “He takes his coat with him when he travels.” Really, that was obvious, wasn’t it?
“He only has one coat? For all seasons? He doesn’t leave one coat here?”
“There’s his ties in the bedroom,” Alan pointed out, “He doesn’t take all his ties with him of course.”
Mrs. Hassenk gave a half shrug, half nod of acknowledgement. “There are ties, that is true. I thought maybe memento, but yes, there are ties.”
“So, your Dad does live here?” the census lady pressed.
“Yes,” Alan answered again, slightly annoyed they didn’t seem to be hearing him. “He’s away on business a lot, but gets back to the city whenever he can. He’s mostly here on weekends. Last Saturday, a couple of Saturdays before that.”
“So, he stays here on the weekends,” the census taker asked. “Sleeps here?”
“Well,” Alan conceded, “he usually can only stay a couple of hours before he has to hit the road again.”
“He works out of town? Do you know where? Does he have a place maybe somewhere else for work?”
“Oh, no. He moves around a lot. He’s an insurance adjustor, so he goes from fire to fire, you know? Like whenever there’s a big fire, he has to go and stay there till he’s done; and then he goes to the next one. I don’t mean house fires. Big industrial fires. That grain elevator last month in Ponoka. My dad did that one. He had to stay in a hotel in Ponoka for a week. There are a lot of fires. You’ve got to keep moving.”
“I see. How many weekends would you say he sleeps here?”
“Um, I don’t know. Not a lot I guess.”
“When was the last time he slept here?”
“I uh—” Alan sputtered to a stop. He couldn’t actually remember. “I think you’d better ask my Mom. She’d know.”
“No, that’s okay,” the lady said. “I’ll just put down ‘married’ and that your Dad lives here too. I don’t need to come back.”
And the census lady left, and Mrs. Hassenk went back to her cleaning, and Alan went back to his TV. He resolved, however, to clarify a few things with his Mom.
* * *
When his mom came home after work that evening, and Alan had come to set the table, he casually brought up the earlier conversation at the door.
“And what did you say?” His mom asked, exchanging looks with his much older brother, Don.
“I said he lived here, of course.”
“That was the right thing to say,” his mother assured him.
“Only, now that she mentioned it, I can’t really remember when Dad last slept here,” Alan said. “I mean, if he is away all the time, and only comes over every Saturday, or every second Saturday—” And then Alan paused, because he thought, that’s odd. Because it is exactly every second Saturday that he comes over. Right in the middle of The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour. Like clockwork.
“It’s a question of what they call one’s ‘permanent address’, you see,” his older brother explained. “If you travel a lot, you can’t put down every hotel you stay in for a week, because that would be way too complicated. Or the one you happen to be staying in this week, because you might never return there again, so it would be pointless, just completely pointless, to list that address. What you have to put down is your ‘permanent address’, the one they can always contact you at. Your mailing address, as it were.”
“Yes, that’s it,” his mother said, looking relieved and grateful. “One’s mailing address is one’s address for the census.”
“Think of it this, way” Don went on, “If the census people came to a hotel, and you happened to be there that day, just for that one night, you wouldn’t want to put that down as your address, that you lived there, would you? That wouldn’t be accurate information. It would give the false impression on the census that hundreds of people lived in that building, when really, none of them live in that hotel. You’d give them your permanent address, your home base address, instead. To be accurate.”
Alan considered the logic of this. One needed a permanent address, an official address you could put down, regardless of where you happened to be staying at the moment. So even if you travelled a lot, your home address was your census address.
“That makes just perfect sense.” Alan nodded to himself as he put the dishes out for dinner: blue for Don, pink for Mom, green for Rick, and yellow for himself. Knives and spoons on the right, forks on the left. Butter dish, recovered from the TV room, in the center of the table.
And then it suddenly occurred to Alan that there were only four colors in the set; that Dad didn’t have a color. And that in all his years of setting the table, he could not recall this ever having come up as an issue. Indeed, as he stood there at kitchen table, it occurred to him that there were only four chairs. Really, there wouldn’t be room for a fifth chair in the kitchen, even if they’d had one.
Alan tried very hard to remember the last time Dad had eaten with them. He had coffee with them in the living room every second Saturday, certainly; but when had he actually last sat down to supper with them?
Rick, the younger of his older brothers, breezed through the kitchen to the back door. “Anybody seen my good shoes?”
“No,” Alan said automatically, because he didn’t feel he ought to be the keeper of his brother’s shoes. “Say, Rick? When Dad comes over for supper, what color dish would he use?”
“He can use mine; I’m going over to Roxanne’s for supper.”
“No, I don’t mean tonight, particularly, I just meant. . . if he were to come over. And what chair?”
“We’d eat in the dinning room, like last time.” Rick came back through the kitchen carrying his good shoes, paused next to Alan.
“But—”
Rick cut Alan off by punching him in the shoulder. “Just leave it, okay?” He held his index finger an inch from Alan’s face. “Do you want Mom to get another of her headaches? Is that what you want?” And then he went about getting ready for his date.
Alan found himself turning to stare into the dining room, and remembering his father sitting there, at the head of the table opposite his Mom. The dinning room had six chairs, and they had used the good dishes, normally reserved for company, so the issue of color-coding had not arisen. But when was that? How long ago, exactly had that been? Alan stuck with the memory until he recalled his father telling him, though not in a mean way, not to read at the table. It had been a red book, with gray binding, from the school library. Alan mentally zoomed in on the cover, recognized the diamond pattern with the portrait of Doctor Dolittle in the center of alternate diamonds.
But that couldn’t be right, because Doctor Dolittle had been Grade 5. He knew for a fact that he had finished all the Doctor Dolittle books in Grade 5; Grade 6 had been science fiction, starting with Raiders from the Rings. There was no going back to Doctor Dolittle after discovering Alan E. Norse. There had been a clear-cut break before and after discovering science fiction.
Which meant Dad had not eaten with them for. . . four years.
“Uh, Mom. Your permanent address is your mailing address, right?”
“Yes, dear,” his Mom said having come into the kitchen and put on oven mitts, preparatory to pulling the TV dinners out of the oven.
“Dad doesn’t get a lot of mail here, does he?”
“His mail goes to his office, dear. It’s mostly business mail, and he was upset that time the dog peed over everything. He changed his mail to the office, then. It’s better, because if there’s something urgent, his secretary can deal with it right away.”
“Hmm.” Alan nodded, remembering the whole puppy housebreaking process. That had been Grade 5, too.
Stymied, Alan tried a more direct tact. “Getting back to the census lady. She asked when was the last time Dad actually slept here. And I was saying I couldn’t really remember. Exactly.”
His mom busied herself with the tray of Swanson, before answering. “Your father’s been extremely busy with these fires lately. It seems like he just gets done one, and there two more somewhere else. And it’s been extremely hard on him since Mr. Tartly quit. He has to do everything himself, now, practically. Well, there’s that new boy, but he’s too new to be of any real use. Your dad has to go himself, always. Well they ask for him, specifically, don’t they? It’s him they want, you know, not just someone from the company.” She pulled the aluminum off the top tray, saw it was Alan’s dinner, put the tray on the yellow plate. “Isn’t that Star Trek on about now? Did you want to eat downstairs? It’s just TV dinners tonight, I’m afraid. I didn’t have time to cook properly, and Rick’s at Roxane’s. If you wanted, you could eat while you watch, because, after all, that’s why they’re called TV dinners.” She smiled.
Alan took the fried chicken TV dinner on the yellow plate and watched the episode of Star Trek because it was a new one, and because, when he really, really thought about it, his life had changed a lot when he had discovered science fiction in Grade 6.
~
Robert Runté, PhD, is Senior Editor at EssentialEdits.ca, and former Senior Editor at Five Rivers Publishing, a small Canadian press. A former professor, he has three Aurora Awards for literary criticism, which is slightly odd because he wasn’t a professor of literature. His own fiction has appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, and three of his stories have appeared in “best of” collections.