Lives of Girls and Women Read online

  Nevertheless I went. I did not take Owen because he would tell. I thought I would knock on the door and ask, in a very polite way, if it was all right for me to read the newspapers on the porch. But before I got to the steps the door opened and Madeleine came out with a stove-lid lifter in her hand. She might have been lifting a stovelid when she heard me, she might not have picked it up on purpose, but I could not see it as anything but a weapon.

  For a moment she looked at me. Her face was like Diane’s, thin, white, at first evasive. Her rage was not immediate. She needed time to remember it, to reassemble her forces. Not that there was any possibility, from the first moment she saw me, of anything but rage. That or silence seemed to be the only choices she had.

  “What are you come spyin’ around here for? What are you come spyin’ around my house for? You better get out of here.” She started down the steps. I retreated before her only as quickly as was necessary, fascinated. “You’re a dirty little bugger. Dirty little spybugger. Dirty little spy-bugger, aren’t you?” Her short hair was not combed, she was wearing a ragged print dress on her flat young body. Her violence seemed calculated, theatrical; you wanted to stay to watch it, as if it were a show, and yet there was no doubt, either, when she raised the stove-lifter over her head, that she would crack it down on my skull if she felt like it—that is, if she felt the scene demanded it. She was watching herself, I thought, and any moment she might stop, fall back into blankness, or like a child brag, “See how I scared you? You didn’t know I was fooling, did you?”

  I wished I could take this scene back to tell at home. Stories of Madeleine were being passed up and down the road. Something had annoyed her in the store and she had thrown a box of Kotex at Charlie Buckle. (Lucky she wasn’t holding a can of corn syrup!) Uncle Benny lived under a hailstorm of abuse, you could hear it from the road. “Got yourself a Tartar there, didn’t you, Benny?” people would say, and he would chuckle and nod, abashed, as if receiving congratulations. After a while he started telling stories himself. She had thrown the kettle through the window because there wasn’t any water in it. She had taken the scissors and cut up his green suit, which he had only worn once, at his wedding; he did not know what she had against it. She had said she would set fire to the house, because he had brought her the wrong brand of cigarettes.

  “Do you think she drinks, Benny?”

  “No she don’t. I never brought a bottle into the house and how is she going to get a bottle by herself and besides I would of smelt it on her.”

  “You ever get near enough to her to smell it, Benny?”

  Uncle Benny would lower his head, chuckling.

  “You ever get that close to her, Benny? Bet she fights like a pack of wildcats. You have to tie her up sometime when she’s asleep.”

  When Uncle Benny came to our house to do the pelting, he brought Diane along. He and my father worked in the cellar of our house, skinning the bodies of the foxes and turning the pelts inside out and stretching them on long boards to dry. Diane went up and down the cellar steps or sat on the top step and watched. She would never talk to anyone but Uncle Benny. She was suspicious of toys, cookies, milk, anything we offered her, but she never whined or cried. Touched or cuddled, she submitted warily, her body giving off little tremors of dismay, her heart beating hard like the heart of a bird if you capture it in your hand. Yet she would lie on Uncle Benny’s lap or fall asleep against his shoulder, limp as spaghetti. His hand covered the bruises on her legs.

  “She’s always goin’ around bumpin’ into things over at my place. I got so much stuff around, she’s bound to bump into things and climb up places and fall.”

  Early in the Spring, before the snow was all gone, he came one day to say that Madeleine had left. When he went home at night, the day before, she had been gone. He had thought she might be in Jubilee and he waited for her to come home. Then he noticed that several other things were gone too—a table lamp which he was planning to rewire, a nice little rug, some dishes and a blue teapot that had belonged to his mother and two perfectly good folding chairs. She had taken Diane too, of course.

  “It must have been a truck she went off in, she couldn’t of put all that in a car.”

  Then my mother remembered that she had seen a panel truck, she thought it was grey, and it was going towards town, about three o’clock in the afternoon of the previous day. But she hadn’t been interested or noticed who was in it.

  “Grey panel truck! I bet you that was her! She could’ve put the stuff in the back. Did it have a canvas over it, did you see?”

  My mother had not noticed.

  “I got to go after her,” said Uncle Benny excitedly. “She can’t take off like that with what don’t belong to her. She’s always tellin’ me, get this junk out of here, clear this junk out of here! Well it doesn’t look so much like junk when she wants some herself. Only trouble is, how do I know where she went to? I better get in touch with that brother.”

  After seven o’clock, when the cheaper rates came on, my father put through the long distance call—on our phone, Uncle Benny didn’t have one—to Madeleine’s brother. Then he put Uncle Benny on the phone.

  “Did she go down to your place?” Uncle Benny shouted immediately. “She went off in a truck. She went off in a grey panel truck. Did she show up down there?” There seemed to be confusion at the other end of the line; perhaps Uncle Benny was shouting too loudly for anybody to hear. My father had to get on and explain patiently what had happened. It turned out that Madeleine had not gone to Kitchener. Her brother did not show a great deal of concern about where she had gone. He hung up without saying good-bye.

  My father started trying to persuade Uncle Benny that it was not such a bad thing to be rid of Madeleine, after all. He pointed out that she had not been a particularly good housekeeper and that she had not made Uncle Benny’s life exactly comfortable and serene. He did this in a diplomatic way, not forgetting he was talking about a man’s wife. He did not speak of her lack of beauty or slovenly clothes. As for the things she had taken—stolen, Uncle Benny said—well, that was too bad and a shame (my father knew enough not to suggest that these things were of no great value) but perhaps that was the price of getting rid of her, and in the long run Uncle Benny might consider that he had been lucky.

  “It’s not that,” said my mother suddenly. “It’s the little girl. Diane.” Uncle Benny chuckled miserably.

  “Her mother beats her, doesn’t she?” cried my mother in a voice of sudden understanding and alarm. “That’s what it is. That’s how the bruises on her legs—”

  Once Uncle Benny had started chuckling he couldn’t stop, it was like hiccoughs.

  “Wel ye-uh. Ye-uh she—”

  “Why didn’t you tell us when she was here? Why didn’t you tell us away last winter? Why didn’t I think of it myself? If I’d known the truth I could have reported her—”

  Uncle Benny looked up startled.

  “Reported her to the police! We could have brought charges. We could have had the child removed. What we have to do now, though, is put the police on her trail. They’ll find her. Never fear.”

  Uncle Benny did not look happy or relieved at this assurance. He said cannily, “How would they know where to look?”

  “The provincial police, they’d know. They can work on a province-wide basis. Nation-wide, if necessary. They’ll find her.”

  “Hold on a minute,” said my father. “What makes you think the police would be ready to do that? They only track down criminals that way.”

  “Well what is a woman who beats a child if she isn’t a criminal?” “You have to have a case. You have to have witnesses. If you’re going to come out in the open like that you have to have proof.”

  “Benny is the witness. He’d tell them. He’d testify against her.” She turned to Uncle Benny who started his hiccoughs again and said witlessly, “What’s that mean I have to do?”

  “Enough talk about it for now,” my father said. “We’ll wait and
see.” My mother stood up, offended and mystified. She had to say one thing more, so she said what everybody knew.

  “I don’t know what the hesitation is about. It’s crystal-clear to me.”

  But what was crystal-clear to my mother was obviously hazy and terrifying to Uncle Benny. Whether he was afraid of the police, or just afraid of the public and official air of such a scheme, the words surrounding it, the alien places it would take him into, was impossible to tell. Whatever it was, he crumpled, and would not talk about Madeleine and Diane any more.

  What was to be done? My mother brooded over the idea of taking action herself but my father told her, “You’re in trouble from the start when you interfere with other people’s families.”

  “Just the same I know I’m right.”

  “You may be right but that doesn’t mean there’s a thing you can do about it.”

  At this time of year the foxes were having their pups. If an airplane from the Air Force Training School on the lake came over too low, if a stranger appeared near the pens, if anything too startling or disruptive occurred, they might decide to kill them. Nobody knew whether they did this out of blind irritation, or out of roused and terrified maternal feeling—could they be wanting to take their pups, who still had not opened their eyes, out of the dangerous situation they might sense they had brought them into, in these pens? They were not like domestic animals. They had lived only a very few generations in captivity.

  To further persuade my mother, my father said that Madeleine might have gone to the States, where nobody could ever find her. Many bad, and crazy, as well as restless and ambitious people went there eventually.

  But Madeleine had not. Later in the spring came a letter. She had the nerve to write, said Uncle Benny and brought the letter and showed it. Without salutation she said: I left my yellow sweater and a green umbrella and dianes blanket at your place send them to me here. 1249 Ridlet St., Toronto, Ont.

  Uncle Benny had already made up his mind that he was going down there. He asked to borrow the car. He had never been to Toronto. On the kitchen table, my father spread the road-map, showing how to get there, though he said he wondered if it was a good idea. Uncle Benny said he planned to get Diane and bring her back. Both my mother and father pointed out that this was illegal, and advised against it. But Uncle Benny, so terrified of taking legal and official action, was not in the least worried about undertaking what might turn out to be kidnapping. He told stories now of what Madeleine had done. She had held Diane’s legs to the bars of the crib with leather straps. She had walloped her with a shingle. She had done worse than that, maybe, when he wasn’t there. Marks of the poker, he thought, had been on the child’s back. Telling all this, he was overcome with his apologetic half-laughter; he would have to shake his head and swallow it down.

  He was gone two days. My father turned on the ten o’clock news, saying, “Well we’ll have to see if old Benny’s got picked up!” On the evening of the second day he drove the car into our yard and sat there for a moment, not looking at us. Then he got out slowly and walked with dignity and weariness towards the house. He did not have Diane. Had we ever expected him to get her?

  We were sitting on the cement slab outside the kitchen door. My mother was in her own sling-back canvas chair, to remind her of urban lawns and leisure, and my father sat in a straight-backed kitchen chair. There were only a few bugs so early in the season. We were looking at the sunset. Sometimes my mother would assemble everybody to look at the sunset, just as if it was something she had arranged to have put on, and that spoiled it a bit—a little later I would refuse to look at all—but just the same there was no better place in the world for watching a sunset from than the end of the Flats Road. My mother said this herself.

  My father had put up the screen door that day. Owen was swinging on it, disobediently, to hear the old, remembered sound of the spring stretching, then snapping back. He would be told not to, and stop, and very cautiously behind my parents’ backs begin again.

  Such steadfast gloom hung around Uncle Benny that not even my mother would directly question him. My father told me in an under-tone to bring a chair from the kitchen.

  “Benny sit down. You worn out from your drive? How did the car run?”

  “She run okay.”

  He sat down. He did not take off his hat. He sat stiffly as in an unfamiliar place where he would not expect or even wish for a welcome. Finally my mother spoke to him, in tones of forced triviality and cheerfulness.

  “Well. Is it a house they are living in, or an apartment?”

  “I don’t know,” said Uncle Benny forbiddingly. After some time he added, “I never found it.”

  “You never found where they are living?”

  He shook his head.

  “Then you never saw them?”

  “No I didn’.”

  “Did you lose the address?”

  “No I didn’. I got it down on this piece of paper. I got it here.” He took his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out a piece of paper and showed us, then read it. “1249 Ridlet Street.” He folded it and put it back. All his movements seemed slowed down, ceremonious and regretful.

  “I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t find the place.”

  “But did you get a city map? Remember we said, go to a gas station, ask for a map of the city of Toronto.”

  “I did that,” said Uncle Benny with a kind of mournful triumph. “You bet. I went to a gas station and I asked them and they said they didn’t have no maps. They had maps but only of the province.”

  “You already had a map of the province.”

  “I told them I did. I said I wanted a map of the city of Toronto. They said they didn’ have none.”

  “Did you try another gas station?”

  “If one place didn’ have none I figured none of them would.”

  “You could have bought one in a store.”

  “I didn’ know what kind of a store.”

  “A stationery store! A department store! You could have asked at the gas station where you could buy one.”

  “I figured instead of runnin’ all over the place tryin’ to find a map I would be better off just askin’ people to direct me how to get there, seein’ I already had the address.

  “It’s very risky, asking people.”

  “You’re tellin’ me,” said Uncle Benny.

  When he got the heart to, he began his story.

  “First I asked the one fellow, he directed me to go across this bridge, and I done that and I come to a red light and was supposed to turn left, he told me to, but when I got there I didn’ know how it was. I couldn’ figure out do you turn left on a red light ahead of you or do you turn left on a green light ahead of you.”

  “You turn left on a green light,” cried my mother despairingly. “If you turned left on a red light you’d turn across the traffic that’s going across in front of you.”

  “Ye-uh, I know you would, but if you turned left on a green light you gotta turn across the traffic that’s comin’ at you.”

  “You wait until they give you an opening.”

  “You could wait all day then, they’re not going to give you no opening. So I didn’ know, I didn’ know which was right to do, and I sat there trying to figure it out and they all starts up honkin’ behind me so I thought, well, I’ll turn right, I can do that without no trouble, and then I’ll get turned around and headed back the way I come. Then I ought to be going in the right direction. But I couldn’ see any place to turn round so I just kept goin’ and goin’. Then I turned off up a street that went crossways and kept on driving until I thought, well, I’ve gone and lost track completely of what the first fellow told me, so I may’s well ask somebody else. So I stopped and asked this lady was walking with a dog on a leash but she said she never heard of Ridlet Street. She never heard of it. She said she lived in Toronto twenty-two years. She called over a boy on his bicycle then and he heard of it, he told me it was way the other side of town and I was he
aded out of town, the way I was goin’. But I figured it might be easier to go round the city than go through it, even if it took longer, and I kept on the way I was goin’, sort of circling it was the way it seemed to me, and by this time I could see it was getting dark and I thought, well, I sure’s hell better get a move on, I want to find where this place is before dark because I am not goin’ to like driving in the dark here one bit—”

  He ended up sleeping in the car, pulled off the road, outside a factory yard. He had got lost among factories, dead-end roads, warehouses, junkyards, railway tracks. He described to us each turn he had taken and each person he had asked for directions; he reported what each of them had said and what he had thought then, the alternatives he had considered, why he had in each case decided to do what he did. He remembered everything. A map of the journey was burnt into his mind. And as he talked a different landscape—cars, billboards, industrial buildings, roads and locked gates and high wire fences, railway tracks, steep cindery embankments, tin sheds, ditches with a little brown water in them, also tin cans, mashed cardboard cartons, all kinds of clogged or barely floating waste—all this seemed to grow up around us created by his monotonous, meticulously remembering voice, and we could see it, we could see how it was to be lost there, how it was just not possible to find anything, or go on looking.

  Even though my mother protested, “But that is what cities are like! That is why you have to have a map!”

  “Well I woke up there this morning,” Uncle Benny said as if he hadn’t heard her, “and I knew what I better do was just get out, any way I could get.”

  My father sighed; he nodded. It was true.

  So lying alongside our world was Uncle Benny’s world like a troubling distorted reflection, the same but never at all the same. In that world people could go down in quicksand, be vanquished by ghosts or terrible ordinary cities; luck and wickedness were gigantic and unpredictable; nothing was deserved, anything might happen; defeats were met with crazy satisfaction. It was his triumph, that he couldn’t know about, to make us see.