Читать книгу Anxious Gravity - Jeff Wells - Страница 8

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 from sun up to sun down, every day but Sunday for three weeks, takes the kind of stamina that could teach Mr Hitler a thing or two about the indomitable Canadian spirit — should he have the stomach for it!

“The Beaver’s different every time,” Elfie told us. “If it wasn’t, I would have stopped long ago. I bore easily!”

Elfie’s devotion to the Eager Beaver caught the eye of Exhibition officials, who arranged for Elfie to meet the amusement’s designer, Toronto’s own Mr Gideon Frye. Frye, 21, is something of a sensation in the world of the midway, where many old carny salts have taken to calling the local lad “The Wizard of Ahhhs.”

“I’m delighted, of course, that Elfie finds my little ride so compelling,” said Frye. “It’s for people like her, after all, that I’m doing this sort of thing.”

Elfie’s day ended with — what else? — a spin on the Beaver. This time accompanied by her new friend, “the Wizard.” One guess who didn’t look green about the gills at ride’s end!

It was, apparently, my uncle’s first ride on his — or anyone’s — coaster. But it was also the first time he’d fallen for a girl.

By the time they were engaged, Elfie had cajoled him into riding the treacherous Port Stanley Hog’s Back and the notoriously untrustworthy Aldershot Axis Smasher. Thanks to Elfie, my uncle had outgrown vertigo like he had his Paddington Bear, which my Mom had inherited and kept on her night table into her 60s. Soon after they married, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Soon after his death, she rode the Eager Beaver to the crest of the first drop and stepped into the sky.

It was in all the papers, my Mom said. But she hadn’t saved any.