Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage: Stories Page 19

  We walked in the open, detouring around the fallen limbs. The rain had almost stopped, and the air brightened. I was walking with my head bent—so that the water from my hair fell to the ground and not down my face—and I felt the heat of the sun strike my shoulders before I looked up into its festival light.

  I stood still, took a deep breath, and swung my hair out of my face. Now was the time, when we were drenched and safe and confronted with radiance. Now something had to be said.

  “There’s something I didn’t mention to you.”

  His voice surprised me, like the sun. But in the opposite way. It had a weight to it, a warning—determination edged with apology.

  “About our youngest boy,” he said. “Our youngest boy was killed last summer.”

  Oh.

  “He was run over,” he said. “I was the one ran over him. Backing out of our driveway.”

  I stopped again. He stopped with me. Both of us stared ahead.

  “His name was Brian. He was three.

  “The thing was, I thought he was upstairs in bed. The others were still up, but he’d been put to bed. Then he’d got up again.

  “I should have looked, though. I should have looked more carefully.” I thought of the moment when he got out of the car. The noise he must have made. The moment when the child’s mother came running out of the house. This isn’t him, he isn’t here, it didn’t happen.

  Upstairs in bed.

  He started walking again, entering the parking lot. I walked a little behind him. And I did not say anything—not one kind, common, helpless word. We had passed right by that.

  He didn’t say, It was my fault and I’ll never get over it. I’ll never forgive myself. But I do as well as I can.

  Or, My wife forgives me but she’ll never get over it either.

  I knew all that. I knew now that he was a person who had hit rock bottom. A person who knew—as I did not know, did not come near knowing—exactly what rock bottom was like. He and his wife knew that together and it bound them, as something like that would either break you apart or bind you, for life. Not that they would live at rock bottom. But they would share a knowledge of it—that cool, empty, locked, and central space.

  It could happen to anybody.

  Yes. But it doesn’t seem that way. It seems as if it happens to this one, that one, picked out specially here and there, one at a time.

  I said, “It isn’t fair.” I was talking about the dealing out of these idle punishments, these wicked and ruinous swipes. Worse like this, perhaps, than when they happen in the midst of plentiful distress, in wars or the earth’s disasters. Worst of all when there is the one whose act, probably an uncharacteristic act, is singly and permanently responsible.

  That’s what I was talking about. But meaning also, It is not fair. What has this got to do with us?

  A protest so brutal that it seems almost innocent, coming out of such a raw core of self. Innocent, that is, if you are the one it’s coming from, and if it has not been made public.

  “Well,” he said, quite gently. Fairness being neither here nor there.

  “Sunny and Johnston don’t know about it,” he said. “None of the people know, that we met since we moved. It seemed as if it might work better that way. Even the other kids—they don’t hardly ever mention him. Never mention his name.”

  I was not one of the people they had met since they moved. Not one of the people amongst whom they would make their new, hard, normal life. I was a person who knew—that was all. A person he had, on his own, who knew.

  “That’s strange,” he said, looking around before he opened the trunk of the car to stow away the golf case.

  “What happened to the guy who was parked here before?

  Didn’t you see another car parked here when we came in? But I never saw one other person on the course. Now that I think of it.

  Did you?”

  I said no.

  “Mystery,” he said. And again, “Well.”

  That was a word that I used to hear fairly often, said in that same tone of voice, when I was a child. A bridge between one thing and another, or a conclusion, or a way of saying something that couldn’t be any more fully said, or thought.

  “A well is a hole in the ground.” That was the joking answer.

  The storm had brought an end to the swimming-pool party. Too many people had been there for everybody to crowd into the house, and those with children had mostly chosen to go home.

  While we were driving back, Mike and I had both noticed, and spoken about, a prickling, an itch or burning, on our bare forearms, the backs of our hands, and around our ankles. Places that had not been protected by our clothing when we crouched in the weeds. I remembered the nettles.

  Sitting in Sunny’s farmhouse kitchen, wearing dry clothes, we told about our adventure and revealed our rashes.

  Sunny knew what to do for us. Yesterday’s trip with Claire, to the emergency room of the local hospital, had not been this family’s first visit. On an earlier weekend the boys had gone down into the weedy mud-bottomed field behind the barn and come back covered with welts and blotches. The doctor said they must have got into some nettles. Must have been rolling in them, was what he said. Cold compresses were prescribed, an antihistamine lotion, and pills. There was still part of a bottle of lotion unused, and there were some pills too, because Mark and Gregory had recovered quickly.

  We said no to the pills—our case seemed not serious enough.

  Sunny said that she had talked to the woman out on the highway, who put gas in her car, and this woman had said there was a plant whose leaves made the best poultice you could have, for nettle rash. You don’t need all them pills and junk, the woman said. The name of the plant was something like calf’s foot. Coldfoot? The woman had told her she could find it in a certain road cut, by a bridge.

  “I could go and ask her to tell me again, exactly. I could go and get some.”

  She was eager to do that, she liked the idea of a folklore remedy. We had to point out that the lotion was already there, and paid for.

  Sunny enjoyed ministering to us. In fact, our plight put the whole family into a good humor, brought them out of the doldrums of the drenched day and cancelled plans. The fact that we had chosen to go off together and that we had this adventure—an adventure that left its evidence on our bodies—seemed to rouse in Sunny and Johnston a teasing excitement. Droll looks from him, a bright solicitousness from her. If we had brought back evidence of real misdoing—welts on the buttocks, red splashes on the thighs and belly—they would not of course have been so charmed and forgiving.

  The children thought it was funny to see us sitting there with our feet in basins, our arms and hands clumsy with their wrappings of thick cloths. Claire especially was delighted with the sight of our naked, foolish, adult feet. Mike wriggled his long toes for her, and she broke into fits of alarmed giggles.

  Well. It would be the same old thing, if we ever met again. Or if we didn’t. Love that was not usable, that knew its place. (Some would say not real, because it would never risk getting its neck wrung, or turning into a bad joke, or sadly wearing out.) Not risking a thing yet staying alive as a sweet trickle, an underground resource. With the weight of this new stillness on it, this seal.

  I never asked Sunny for news of him, or got any, during all the years of our dwindling friendship.

  Those plants with the big pinkish-purple flowers are not nettles.

  I have discovered that they are called joe-pye weed. The stinging nettles that we must have got into are more insignificant plants, with a paler purple flower, and stalks wickedly outfitted with fine, fierce, skin-piercing and inflaming spines. Those would be present too, unnoticed, in all the flourishing of the waste meadow.

  Post and Beam

  Lionel told them how his mother had died.

  She had asked for her makeup. Lionel held the mirror.

  “This will take about an hour,” she said.

  Foundation cream, face
powder, eyebrow pencil, mascara, lip-liner, lipstick, blusher. She was slow and shaky, but it wasn’t a bad job.

  “That didn’t take you an hour,” Lionel said.

  She said, no, she hadn’t meant that.

  She had meant, to die.

  He had asked her if she wanted him to call his father. His father, her husband, her minister.

  She said, What for.

  She was only about five minutes out, in her prediction.

  They were sitting behind the house—Lorna and Brendan’s house—on a little terrace that looked across at Burrard Inlet and the lights of Point Grey. Brendan got up to move the sprinkler to another patch of grass.

  Lorna had met Lionel’s mother just a few months ago. A pretty little white-haired woman with a valiant charm, who had come down to Vancouver from a town in the Rocky Mountains, to see the touring Comédie Française. Lionel had asked Lorna to go with them. After the performance, while Lionel was holding open her blue velvet cloak, the mother had said to Lorna, “I am so happy to meet my son’s belle-amie.”

  “Let us not overdo it with the French,” said Lionel.

  Lorna was not even sure what that meant. Belle-amie. Beautiful friend? Mistress?

  Lionel had raised his eyebrows at her, over his mother’s head. As if to say, whatever she’s come up with, it’s no fault of mine.

  Lionel had once been Brendan’s student at the university. A raw prodigy, sixteen years old. The brightest mathematical mind Brendan had ever seen. Lorna wondered if Brendan was dramatizing this, in hindsight, because of his unusual generosity towards gifted students. Also because of the way things had turned out. Brendan had turned his back on the whole Irish package—his family and his Church and the sentimental songs—but he had a weakness for a tragic tale. And sure enough, after his blazing start, Lionel had suffered some sort of breakdown, had to be hospitalized, dropped out of sight. Until Brendan had met him in the supermarket and discovered that he was living within a mile of their house, here in North Vancouver. He had given up mathematics entirely and worked in the publishing office of the Anglican Church.

  “Come and see us,” Brendan had said. Lionel looked a bit seedy to him, and lonely. “Come and meet my wife.”

  He was glad to have a home now, to ask people to.

  “So I didn’t know what you’d be like,” Lionel said when he reported this to Lorna. “I considered you might be awful.”

  “Oh,” said Lorna. “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Wives.”

  He came to see them in the evenings, when the children were in bed. The slight intrusions of domestic life—the cry of the baby reaching them through an open window, the scolding Brendan sometimes had to give Lorna about toys left lying about on the grass, instead of being put back in the sandbox, the call from the kitchen asking if she had remembered to buy limes for the gin and tonic—all seemed to cause a shiver, a tightening of Lionel’s tall, narrow body and intent, distrustful face. There had to be a pause then, a shifting back to the level of worthwhile human contact. Once he sang very softly, to the tune of “O Tannenbaum,” “O married life, o married life.” He smiled slightly, or Lorna thought he did, in the dark. This smile seemed to her like the smile of her four-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, when she whispered some mildly outrageous observation to her mother in a public place. A secret little smile, gratified, somewhat alarmed.

  Lionel rode up the hill on his high, old-fashioned bicycle—this at a time when hardly anybody but children rode bicycles. He would not have changed out of his workday outfit. Dark trousers, a white shirt that always looked grubby and worn around the cuffs and collar, a nondescript tie. When they had gone to see the Comédie Française he had added to this a tweed jacket that was too wide across the shoulders and too short in the sleeves. Perhaps he did not own any other clothes.

  “I labor for a pittance,” he said. “And not even in the vineyards of the Lord. In the Diocese of the Archbishop.”

  And, “Sometimes I think I’m in a Dickens novel. And the funny thing is, I don’t even go for Dickens.”

  He talked with his head on one side, usually, his gaze on something slightly beyond Lorna’s head. His voice was light and quick, sometimes squeaky with a kind of nervous exhilaration. He told everything in a slightly astonished way. He told about the office where he worked, in the building behind the Cathedral. The small high Gothic windows and varnished woodwork (to give things a churchy feeling), the hat rack and umbrella stand (which for some reason filled him with deep melancholy), the typist, Janine, and the Editor of Church News, Mrs. Penfound. The occasionally appearing, spectral, and distracted Archbishop. There was an unresolved battle over teabags, between Janine, who favored them, and Mrs. Penfound, who did not. Everybody munched on secret eats and never shared. With Janine it was caramels, and Lionel himself favored sugared almonds. What Mrs. Penfound’s secret pleasure was he and Janine had not discovered, because Mrs. Penfound did not put the wrappers in the wastepaper basket. But her jaws were always surreptitiously busy.

  He mentioned the hospital where he had been a patient for a while and spoke of the ways it resembled the office, in regard to secret eats. Secrets generally. But the difference was that every once in a while in the hospital they came and bound you up and took you off and plugged you in, as he said, to the light socket.

  “That was pretty interesting. In fact it was excruciating. But I can’t describe it. That is the weird part. I can remember it but not describe it.”

  Because of those events in the hospital, he said, he was rather short of memories. Short of details. He liked to have Lorna tell him hers.

  She told him about her life before she married Brendan. About the two houses exactly alike, standing side by side in the town where she grew up. In front of them was a deep ditch called Dye Creek because it used to run water colored by the dye from the knitting factory. Behind them was a wild meadow where girls were not supposed to go. One house was where she lived with her father—in the other lived her grandmother and her Aunt Beatrice and her cousin Polly.

  Polly had no father. That was what they said and what Lorna had once truly believed. Polly had no father, in the way that a Manx cat had no tail.

  In the grandmother’s front room was a map of the Holy Land, worked in many shades of wool, showing Biblical locations. It was left in her will to the United Church Sunday School. Aunt Beatrice had had no social life involving a man, since the time of her blotted-out disgrace, and she was so finicky, so desperate about the conduct of life that it really was easy to think of Polly’s conception as immaculate. The only thing that Lorna had ever learned from Aunt Beatrice was that you must always press a seam from the side, not wide open, so that the mark of the iron would not show, and that no sheer blouse should be worn without its slip to hide your brassiere straps.

  “Oh, yes. Yes,” said Lionel. He stretched out his legs as if appreciation had reached his very toes. “Now Polly. Out of this benighted household, what is Polly like?”

  Polly was fine, Lorna said. Full of energy and sociability, kind-hearted, confident.

  “Oh,” said Lionel. “Tell me again about the kitchen.”

  “Which kitchen?”

  “The one without the canary.”

  “Ours.” She described how she rubbed the kitchen range with waxed bread-wrappers to make it shine, the blackened shelves behind it that held the frying pans, the sink and the small mirror above it, with the triangular piece of glass gone from one corner, and the little tin trough beneath it—made by her father—in which there was always a comb, an old cup-handle, a tiny pot of dry rouge that must have once been her mother’s.

  She told him her only memory of her mother. She was downtown, with her mother, on a winter day. There was snow between the sidewalk and the street. She had just learned how to tell time, and she looked up at the Post Office clock and saw that the moment had come for the soap opera she and her mother listened to every day on the radio. She felt a deep concern, not because of missing the
story but because she wondered what would happen to the people in the story, with the radio not turned on, and her mother and herself not listening. It was more than concern she felt, it was horror, to think of the way things could be lost, could not happen, through some casual absence or chance.

  And even in that memory, her mother was only a hip and a shoulder, in a heavy coat.

  Lionel said that he could hardly get more of a sense of his father than that, though his father was still alive. A swish of a surplice? Lionel and his mother used to make bets on how long his father could go without speaking to them. He had asked his mother once what made his father so mad, and she had answered that she really didn’t know.

  “I think perhaps he doesn’t like his job,” she said.

  Lionel said, “Why doesn’t he get another job?”

  “Perhaps he can’t think of one he’d like.”

  Lionel had then remembered that when she had taken him to the museum he had been frightened of the mummies, and that she had told him they were not really dead, but could get out of their cases when everybody went home. So he said, “Couldn’t he be a mummy?” His mother confused mummy with mommy, and later repeated this story as a joke, and he had been too discouraged, really, to correct her. Too discouraged, at his early age, about the whole mighty problem of communication.

  This was one of the few memories that had stayed with him.

  Brendan laughed—he laughed at this story more than Lorna or Lionel did. Brendan would sit down with them for a while, saying, “What are you two gabbling about?” and then with some relief, as if he had paid his dues for the time being, he would get up, saying that he had some work to deal with, and go into the house. As if he was happy about their friendship, had in a way foreseen it and brought it about—but their conversation made him restless.

  “It’s good for him to come up here and be normal for a while instead of sitting in his room,” he said to Lorna. “Of course he lusts after you. Poor bugger.”