The Master of Happy Endings by Jack Hodgins Page B

insist on paying him for physical work he was willing to do without pay for the man who’d saved him from drowning. Nothing further was asked except that Thorstad listen occasionally to the plot of the latest Star Wars movie that Normie had seen on the commune’s television set.
    While Normie hammered spikes into logs, Thorstad brought the Sinfonica over to the chair and encouraged it through the first few tentative bars of the Adagio finale to Schubert’s Piano Trio in E flat, almost unbearably beautiful. But the instrument refused to go beyond the moment where Elena’s piano accompaniment was intended to take dominance over cello and violin. When several more attempts led him no further into the piece, he put the cello back in its case—a child sent to its bedroom for refusing to behave—and sat on his doorstep to read one of today’s letters, a single typed page signed by an “Alan Doyle.”
    He had known an Alan Doyle—a Math teacher down the hall, beginning somewhere back in the seventies, or maybe the early eighties. He’d been an affable man whose bald head and long body were so exceptionally narrow that he appeared to have been squeezed in a full-length vise. He’d retired a few years before Thorstad, and would—if this were the same man—be eighty years old by now, or more. Perhaps a grandson was in need of a tutor.
    Axel Thorstad!
    Apparently when Alan Doyle began a letter he saw himself leaping from behind a curtain.
    I was so sure it was you the minute I saw your anonymous ad (and address) in the paper that I won’t even bother with “If you are not Axel Thorstad please ignore the following.”
    I suspected you would go downhill when they deprived you of a classroom full of adolescents you could charm and inspire and make ambitious with your antics. Maybe you should have stayed and volunteered as a teacher’s aide. I take that back. You would drive the teacher crazy with your enthusiasm.
    But I think I have to warn you that your ad campaign is bound to fail. Nobody is going to want an old geezer for a tutor, not when the world is full of over-educated and unemployed teachers right out of university and waiting for the old ones to die off and make room.
    Travel, why don’t you? You and Elena used to take off for exotic parts, if I remember. New Zealand. Spain. Argentina! Why not retrace your steps? When old men fall off their rockers they’re expected to do outrageous things. Why not rob a bank? Why not kidnap an heiress if it’s excitement you want? If all you want is an excuse to get off Estevan Island—and I can imagine any number of reasons to get off it fast—why not sign up to spend a winter on a Greenland ice floe, or take up deep-sea diving? Better still, find yourself a lonely widow (as I did) and move to Florida (which I didn’t—this letter is being written in North Vancouver).
    Good for you, for making the effort to get back into life with that advertisement, but you shouldn’t put all your hope in that alone. Minna and I are planning a trip to Iceland this summer. You could be doing something like it yourself.
Yours,
Alan Doyle
    â€œI suppose that is one of your famous letters—hah?”
    He hadn’t noticed von Schiller-Holst approaching along the beach. He came up the slope, planting his long staff in the grass and leaning into it just a little at each step, his stomach straining the buttons on his shirt.
    Instantly annoyed, as he was whenever the maestro intruded, Thorstad also felt a sudden need to defend himself. It was ridiculous, of course, but he held up the sheet of paper and hoped he did not look sheepish. “A former colleague, suggesting I find myself a widow and move to Florida.”
    â€œDon’t ask me in for coffee,” the maestro said, though Thorstad had never invited him inside in the three years the man had lived here. “I’ll sit just long enough to