Anxious Gravity. Jeff Wells

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      It came from mine own heart, so to my head, And thence into my fingers trickled; Then to my pen, from whence immediately On paper I did dribble it daintily.

      John Bunyan, The Holy War

       I

      A joke is the epigram on the death of a feeling.

      Friedrich Nietzsche

       0

      Gideon Frye was my uncle, my mother’s elder brother, a I gunner in a Lancaster bomber during the Second World War. He was my grandmother’s favourite, his incendiary death in the night sky over the Eder Dam in ’43 only compounding her prejudice. To me he wasn’t much more than musty clothes and nondescript oddments packed tight, in a swampy-smelling trunk tucked behind the furnace. That, and a few hand-tinted photographs set in silver frames on my mother’s bureau before she moved out, was all he was to me. But he was also the reason I was named Gideon.

      One photo was from wartime — my uncle smiling broadly and squinting into the lens, stripped to the waist, lying on the wing of his plane with his palms cradling the back of his head. I suppose less was expected of a man’s body in those days, and perhaps the prospect of a sudden, bloody death made scrawny guys less inhibited about taking off their shirts, but it’s a wonder a fella could go to war and still look like a pushover.

      The other picture had been taken shortly before he’d left for England, and served him better. He was wearing spiffy black oxfords, brown, wide-wale corduroys, and a rumpled white shirt beneath a copper-coloured wool vest my grandmother had knit. He was grinning as though it were V-E Day, with his spindly arms thrown around his Mom and his wife, with his 10-year old sister, my mother, in the middle. They were standing in a crowded midway, beside an amusement ride that resembled an open, inverted umbrella with candy cane striping. Buckets hanging from its metal joints were filled with girls pretending to be scared paired with boys pretending not to be. My grandmother told me how the umbrella would open and close as it creaked about, the buckets swinging wildly from the horizontal to the perpendicular with the movement of its joints. “Aye,” she said, “that was a fine ride. Biggest damn umbrella ever’s been.”

      Before the war my uncle had designed amusement rides. He was just 20 when his idea for the Devil’s Umbrella was sold to Francis Suchmann Pastimes (later to become Krazy Ways Inc., one of the North American midway’s seven sisters). It wasn’t long before he received the green light for his first rollercoaster, the Eager Beaver, to be erected on the grounds of the Canadian National Exhibition. Frye had no interest in engineering or cost feasibility; Suchmann paid others, poorly, to worry about that. All he had was an intuitive sense for what made people drop a quarter to cheerfully wish they were dead. In those days of blitzkrieg, that counted for something.

      And it had to be intuitive. From his childhood Gideon had refused all rides, including his own. “Our Gid didn’t like to be spun about,” Nanny said. “He had a tender belly ever since I dropped the cat on him that once.” She also told me, with the smile of someone who couldn’t quite believe she once cared about such nonsense, that she’d fiercely objected to the name “Devil’s Umbrella.” But the decision had rested with Mr Suchmann, so she hadn’t held it against her boy.

      I remember a very heavy, very black, leather-bound Bible in my uncle’s trunk. It was Nanny’s. There were two inscrip tions on its blotting paper The first: “Dear Alma: ‘Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good’ — Rom, 12:21. Love Sarah — Christmas, 1922.” (I wish I’d thought to ask who Sarah was.) The second was dated July 13, 1935, “on the occasion of your 16th birthday ‘He will not suffer thy foot to be moved; he that keepeth thee will not slumber.’ — Ps. 121:3. Love always, Mum.” Pressed between the pages of Second Corinthians was a yellowed clipping from the Toronto Telegram:“Mimico Lass Beats the Beaver”:

      Young Elfie Wheatmore may be many things, but queasy she most definitely is not. As visitors to the Canadian National Exhibition can attest, riding the Eager Beaver but once takes a stalwart belly, but for a girl of 18 to test her intestines СКАЧАТЬ