The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins Page A

literature needed little assistance from him, but they could sometimes supply the key that would open the doors to those mysterious teenage lives.
    And what had he ever been but a servant of love? For more than thirty years he’d explored with teens not only the wise compassionate powers of the masters but also the more recent wonders and insights of contemporary writers. He had supervised dances, and organized weekend conferences with living poets. He could think of former students whose love of poetry had led them to take up the teaching of Literature themselves; he knew of computer programmers who were writing plays in their evenings. And of course there were young people in the world today who would not be in the world at all if he hadn’t encouraged their shy-and-awkward fathers to invite their pretty-but-overlooked mothers to the graduation dance.
    In later years he had needed to do far less of this gentle sort of matchmaking, since somewhere along the way young women seemed to have taken matters into their own hands. Such gestures—even where needed—were far less welcome than they had been. Perhaps this was due to the widening gap between his age and their own. Year after year students continued to be seventeen, while he’d advanced steadily through birthdays towards his inevitable exit into the dark obscurity of retirement. Amongst the latest students were the youngest children of those shy boys and girls—middle-aged couples who’d turned out on parents’ night to make sure he knew their gratitude had not worn thin. Grey hairs had begun to show up on their heads, while they could not help but notice the deepening lines in his face, the spots on his hands.
    By the time he’d emerged from the woods behind his shack, a dark cloud had moved in above the strait, obscuring most of the sky and all of the facing island’s mountains. Insects flew past. An owl hooted somewhere in the woods, perhaps thinking night had fallen. The waves slapped weakly onto the beach and then hissed and gurgled while sliding back through the gravel.
    Normie Fenton’s little wooden rowboat had been pulled up onto the rocks, and Normie himself was at work doing what Thorstad had once done for himself every year—rebuilding the retaining wall damaged by the winter tides, its logs and buttresses washed away or left in disarray along the beach. Normie raised a hand in greeting but continued hauling solid lengths of driftwood up the beach, seldom looking up long enough to notice anything outside the world immediately around his boots. If he needed help he would holler for it, but otherwise he worked alone to shore up the crib so the sea would not steal more than it already had of Axel Thorstad’s soil.
    Normie was as awkward and shy as a thirteen-year-old boy, but as strong as a labouring man in his thirties. When the commune disbanded he’d been left behind by his parents, who had handcrafted the willow-twig cradle they’d left him in. Since they hadn’t bothered or remembered or perhaps cared enough to come back for him, he’d been watched over by the few who’d remained in the commune’s sprawling log house. Though he was considered “simple” by some of those who employed him for odd jobs, he had acquired a practical knowledge that allowed him to know the secret of discouraging moss from overwhelming a roof, the proper dates for planting vegetables, and the best angle for stacking a bank of mismatched logs so that neither rain nor waves could seriously undermine them, at least for another year.
    Thorstad had tried to do more for Normie than just hiring him for the occasional labouring job. Since the young man was afraid to leave the island, Thorstad had offered to help with correspondence courses, but courses and help had both been refused. He had tried to get Normie interested in books, but had failed at this as well. It seemed there was nothing he could do except