The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins

stupid to understand. “Watch out, my dear,” his mother had warned. “You’re so naive, that girl will have you in her clutches before you know what hit you.”
    Would a father have taught him how to handle the situation? Thorstad didn’t know. He’d never had a father, except in a few frames of a Hollywood film and the photo he’d lifted from the celluloid to hang on his wall. His father had died after a leap from the roof of a four-storey building at Centurion Pictures, though only the first few seconds of his jump would appear in the film. His face could not be seen as he hurtled himself from the edge, and of course he’d been dressed to look like the actor Derek Morris, who was playing the role of a policeman attempting to apprehend the man who’d killed the woman he loved. The rest of the cop’s dangerous feats were performed by a second double, who brought the original jump to a happier conclusion by landing safely on a lower roof to continue the chase. Why they hadn’t re-shot the beginning of the jump with the replacement was a mystery, but Axel Thorstad was grateful the possibility had been overlooked.
    The accident had occurred two weeks before Thorstad was born, which was the sort of thing he might expect in a Dickens novel but not in his own real life. He had never seen his father’s face, he had never heard his father’s voice, but he had watched his copy of that black-and-white film starring Derek Morris and the beautiful Marisa Gale, and so had witnessed those final seconds of his father’s life, anguished at his inability to alter the outcome. Anyone who looked closely enough could see that the policeman who lands on the lower roof is not the policeman who leapt from the top of the four-storey building. His mother had pointed this out when he was a boy.
    His mother had explained that as a stunt double his father had known his face would never be captured by the camera. Having failed as an actor himself, he’d chosen to devote his life to the same dangerous career as the famous Cliff Lyons so that artists with real talent could be free to do their work without fear of harm. But he had lost the opportunity to live out this noble purpose when he fell from that roof on his first day before an actual rolling camera.
    Derek Morris may have been grateful for the sacrifice. For thirty years Thorstad’s mother had received an annual Christmas card from the actor, though of course he might have been sending cards to any number of widows whose husbands had made it possible for him to live on, unscarred, to old age and international fame. If it had been guilt that inspired those cards, Thorstad would never know.
    Rather than remain in Los Angeles after his father’s death, his mother had moved north to the place of her childhood, a midsize harbour town, a coal-mining centre in those years before it was rescued from decline by the construction of a pulp mill whose smokestacks pumped foul billows into the sky. Here the new mother lived with her parents in the family home and did not remarry.
    No doubt his mother’s account of his father’s accident explained his early fascination with movies. He’d been the only boy at Saturday matinees who sat silent and unmoving, hypnotized by the activity on the screen—the movies somehow implying a link between his world and his father’s, a direct connection between his town and the mysterious place of his father’s death, a city as magical as it was dangerous.
    As a young man, Axel Thorstad had aspired to something like his father’s dedication to the lives of others, though not in any aspect of the movie business. It was in the classroom that he’d eventually pursued his goals, exploring with adolescents the power of Mark Twain’s humour, the glories of Shakespeare’s dramas, and the heartbreaking beauty of Synge’s Riders to the Sea . Of course the great works of