Barney wept on Aggie’s shoulder the Monday after his son lost his leg; put his head down and let the tears run. “Thank God,” he said finally. “I couldn’t do that at home. Everybody’s so upset, and I sort of feel I have to be strong. Thanks, Aggie.”
Not since Frances was a child had she felt the helplessness of someone seeking comfort from her. She patted his shoulder and stroked his hair, to tell him she was glad at least that he felt free to weep with her.
Over the weekend, Barney had aged. So many years of friendship, recounting their days and exchanging their questions in that single hour nearly every morning — simply the routine of smiles, a break, that breather in their days — and suddenly, in just a matter of a weekend’s absence, he was abruptly aged. Even his hair seemed more white than grey, and the lines of his face dragged it downward. Some internal sagging had left him shrivelled and small, like a child leaning on her shoulder.
So many hours they’d spent talking about, wondering about, wars and murders, assassinations and atrocities, all those events that consumed the newspapers and television, but always at a distance, trying to imagine, peering at incidents through lines of print and pictures. It was hard, impossible, to grasp deliberate infliction of pain. There was so much pain anyway, they agreed, without going out creating it.
But now this accidental, random sort of tragedy had happened to Barney. His middle son, John, himself by then a father of two young children, worked in the warehouse of the box factory. A transport truck had backed up to the loading dock and John, misstepping his usual vault from the ground to the dock, from which he would supervise the loading of the truck, had been an instant too late pulling a trailing leg to safety, and it was crushed against the wall. “They tried to save it, the doctors worked all night Friday,” Barney said, “but there was too much damage.” On Saturday they had amputated.
And everything was altered. Not only for John, but for a widening collection of people that now included Aggie. The ripple effect of disaster; that shock, she thought, of being reminded that anything can change in an instant, everything can be overturned.
For Barney there was not only the terrible mutilation of his child, his son, but there also would be specific, concrete changes. John would have to undergo long therapy, and then might never work again. He would have a disability pension of sorts, but he also had two children and a wife who did not have a job. They had decided over the weekend that they would have to move in, for some time at least, with Barney and his wife. It would be crowded, but that was hardly the point. “It’s tough, two families, and John’s going to take a lot of care, and not just physically. He’s always been so active — hunting and fishing and building things, all that outdoor stuff — it’s going to be hard on him.” Also there was Barney’s wife, who had grown frail. “She cried all weekend. Nobody could get her to stop, and she wouldn’t take the pills the doctor gave her.” Barney looked so weary and lost; well, the shock of course, and that awful impotence to prevent or even control the pain of people he loved.
Aggie too felt some of that, able to comfort but not cure. She tried to imagine his home, where she had never been, and this seizure of horror striking it breathless. This friendship of hers and Barney’s, it occurred to her, almost seemed to float in the air; it couldn’t be set down firmly in any location but her kitchen.
She loaded him up with loaves of bread and a cake to take home with him and watched, worried, as he dragged his way out, off on his rounds again. His own feet stumbled, as if his capacity to walk had been, like his son’s, diminished.
“Oh, poor Barney,” Frances cried. Unlike June, she was fond of him, even used to give him a kiss on the cheek in the morning when she was a child coming downstairs for breakfast. But then, for her he was a fixture in the routine of the house, not an intruder, as he apparently was to June.
June herself, hearing the news, just shivered.
Aggie looked at Frances and thought, “Oh, God, what if she lost a leg? Or an arm, or a life?” It really was a struggle not to be terrified like June. It really was hard to advise Frances to be daring but alert, brave but comprehending consequences. But fear was as paralysing as a broken back. Look at June, afraid to move. As crippled, apparently, as if she’d actually been in one of those accidents she worried about all the time.
Frances, lacking many fears of her own, was restricted by June’s. “But what is she afraid I’ll do?” she had demanded when June forbade her to go out with boys, at least until she was sixteen. “Doesn’t she trust me? Couldn’t you talk to her for me?”
“I could, but it wouldn’t make her change her mind.”
Well, Aggie thought, Frances had hit on the word. All one could give was blind trust. Whereas June, with all her blind faith, was still afraid.
Later, Aggie heard Frances telling June, impatiently and bitterly, “I can’t wait to grow up. Then I’ll get to do what I want.” And June answering, “Is that what you think happens when you’re grown up? You’ve got a lot to learn, my girl.”
If Frances was a somewhat grumpy teenager, it wasn’t entirely without reason. Then, too, it was surely strange for her, being raised by two such different women. Bound to be confusing, and perhaps bound to lead to a few years in which she frowned a good deal more than she smiled.
June kept trying to do something about her. She’d say, “Goodness, Frances, do you know how unattractive you are when you pout like that?” or, attempting a more light-hearted rebuke, “Careful, now, your face doesn’t freeze that way.”
What an exclusive world Frances lived in, though, outside of June and Aggie. Once she was finally old enough to go out on dates she was rarely home, and when she was, she spent much of her time in muffled conversations on the telephone. Aggie, catching only odd words and laughter, thought how natural and easily accepted Frances had turned out to be, despite her moods. So unlike the isolation of her own growing up, or the withdrawn quality of June’s. Of course, June came of age in wartime, quite as queer a circumstance as Aggie’s, in a different way. Times were freer now, there were more possibilities, more things known, and also more opportunities for pleasure.
Aggie did wonder, though, if June sometimes watched Frances slam into the house and out again, off to parties and movies and dates, and thought this was something she had missed. Did she regret a lack of choice, the result of the war or her own rigidity? Did she envy Frances? Because sometimes when Aggie was lying awake late on a Saturday night, listening for car doors closing, footsteps coming up the walk, low voices, and sometimes a long quiet before the front door downstairs opened and then clicked shut — sometimes despite herself Aggie felt a stab of envy, or worse, resentment. Not nice, that. Not generous, or loving.
She was reminded, regarding this sturdy young woman, that Frances would soon be leaving home. It would be a triumph of reason and generosity and courage, Aggie felt, over sentiment and greed and cowardice, to help Frances go off to university, instead of flailing about like June, who wanted Frances to stay home, go on to teachers’ college, and repeat, as far as Aggie could tell, all their mistakes. “There’ll be a job right here for you then,” June insisted.
“But I don’t want to be a teacher.”
“Whyever not? It’s secure, you get all those holidays, and if you’re that set on going to university, you could do it in the summer. It only takes a little longer.”
“But I don’t want to be a teacher, and I don’t want to stay here. I want to get out and do different things. Anyway, you hate teaching. Why do you want me to do something you hate?”
“Because, as I’m trying to explain to you, it’s a good job and something you can always fall back on. It’s something for you to do at least until you get married.”
“Married! There you go again, wanting me to do something you didn’t like.”
June’s face went white. “Oh, Mum, I’m sorry.” Frances really has never been deliberately cruel, just inadvertently, sometimes. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just, I don’t want to settle down here.”
“What do you want, then?”
“I don’t know exactly. That’s what I want to go away for, to find out. Do you see?”
“No. Nor do I see how you think we can afford it.”
Which was where Aggie stepped in, unnecessarily, she thought later. “I’m sure we could afford it, June, if that’s what she really wants. I have money saved, and she can work in the summers, and there are loans. You might,” turning to Frances, “even get a scholarship.”
“Not likely,” said June. “Not with her marks.”
“Oh, Grandma, thank you,” Frances cried, and flung her arms around Aggie’s neck.
So Barney’s son lost his leg; and Aggie’s granddaughter went away. These were not comparable sacrifices, of course, but she was also bereft and sad. To be truthful, lonely. Frances’s departure was trivial in comparison with Barney’s loss, and Aggie was ashamed to tell him how she felt; so when she wept, she did so on her own. And yet in its way, this was an amputation. She even thought of it that way. Sound had been cut off: no music rocking from Frances’s room, or quick footsteps pounding up and down the stairs, no slamming doors, or raised voices, or, for that matter, whispers. The phone hardly ever rang. Absence was in the air. She missed confidences, secrets: the quarrels Frances had with friends, and how her first kiss felt. Even the small sins, like the time she shoplifted lipsticks and a powder compact from the five-and-dime.
Periodically, Frances returned from university and later on spare weekends from her work. From the world in which, as she told them, people called her “Fran” and “Frannie”, never Frances, as if she were someone else entirely.
“You’d love it, Grandma,” she said, shining with her own pleasure. She talked about men and making love, and books and lessons and friends, protests and discussions. She brought home dispatches from a world outside that Aggie had never been able to see for herself. She also brought home petitions against the war in Vietnam, and wept over pictures of napalmed babies. “My God, Grandma, how can people do things like that?”
She developed, Aggie thought, a finer sense of rage and a more intelligent sort of compassion. June said, “Well, at least she doesn’t sulk any more.”
Of course, June disapproved of Frances’s choice of a career. “So unsettled,” she said. She wondered how Frances could take such risks as flying frequently in airplanes, or meeting people she didn’t know, with who knew what results. “You simply never know,” she warned, but Frances said, “Exactly.”
As her father had once done, Frances brought home tales of life out there. Except that hers were more interesting. His had been about people in furniture stores, and movies he’d seen, whereas his daughter could fill in unknown, unprinted details about stories they might already have read in newspapers: an unsolved murder, for instance, in which she knew that the police were quietly waiting, collecting evidence, perfectly aware who had done it. A politician who had taken his mistress on a junket with him, and introduced her to foreign dignitaries as his wife. Aggie loved this inside knowledge, confirming her view of there being so much underneath the surface.
Of course, it was a jolt to have Frances confirm it, too, to learn that this young woman whom Aggie assumed had kept so little from her had had a secret, something almost like a secret life, for years. Only when it was gone, apparently, was it possible for Frances to talk about it.
She was home for a visit and June was out shopping. Aggie was in the front room in her big chair, reading, when Frances came wandering in and curled up in the corner of the sofa. “I did something really stupid a couple of weeks ago,” she began.
Aggie’s mind leaped to a man who was wrong, or another pregnancy; but maybe nothing quite so serious. “What?”
“I tracked down my father.”
“Good God.” That brought her upright. “Herb? How on earth did you do that?” She might have meant why.
“Oh,” almost airily, “I’ve been hunting around for years. Whenever I go someplace, I check the phone book. Do you have any idea how many H. Bensons there are in this world? I wrote his old company, too, but he left there years ago and all they knew was that somebody thought he’d gone out west. I remember you said he had a sister on the prairies somewhere, so I thought maybe that’s where he’d gone, but it turns out he went all the way to the coast. I found him in Victoria.”
“I had no idea.” That was what was astounding: that she hadn’t known any of this.
“You know, Grandma,” Frances said wistfully, as if she were looking so far back at something it was really some other person she was speaking of, “when I was little, I used to pretend sometimes that he was looking for me and someday he’d find me and take me with him, maybe on the road, and everything’d be different.”
Different? “Was it so bad here then?” Aggie asked sharply, but Frances didn’t seem to notice the tone.
“Well no, I don’t suppose it was bad really, most of the time. I mean,” catching herself a bit belatedly, “not with you, but sometimes with Mother I used to feel I wanted to get away. And it is weird when you don’t have a father. Other kids’ fathers were so neat. They’d take us places and make tree forts and all that stuff; I guess I missed that. And I guess I made up something better, so it wouldn’t bother me so much.
“So if Mother was yelling about something, or you two weren’t getting along, or if something happened at school, or I just got pissed off, I’d think about him looking for me and getting closer and then bingo, here he’d be. I’d lie in bed and wait for the knock on the door and imagine going out to the top of the stairs and he’d be standing in the hall down there saying, ‘Give me my daughter, I’ve come for Frances,’ and Mother would say, ‘No, you can’t have her.’ And I’d speak up and say, ‘Here I am, Father,’ and we’d meet on the stairs running toward each other and he’d scoop me up and race out and we’d drive away like fury. We wouldn’t even stop to pack my clothes. I think,” and she grinned, “I pictured him with a convertible. We’d go really fast, and there’d be a big wind in my hair. I mean, it was like having another life, kind of an escape.”
“But you never said. All these years, you never mentioned it.”
“Oh well, even when I was a kid I must have known that if he’d wanted to find me, he could have. It wouldn’t have been exactly hard. I guess I didn’t want to know that, and if I’d said anything, I would have had to see.”
“But you still wanted to find him?”
“Of course. Because he could have found me if he’d wanted to, and I wanted to know why he didn’t.” She spoke as if that should be evident to Aggie; and it did seem an obvious enough desire, now that she’d mentioned it.
“Boy, am I dumb!”
“Why?”
“Oh, because by now I should know better. I mean, I made up all this stuff about a reunion, long-lost father-daughter, hugs and tears, all that, and I should know by now that things never turn out the way you imagine.” There was a peculiar hard tone there that spoke of other disappointments, perhaps, that Aggie didn’t know of.
“I tell you, Grandma,” and she laughed, “it scared the shit out of him when I called and told him who I was.”
“Why, what did he say?”
“None of the things I’d made up for him, for sure; he just gulped and sputtered and said stuff like, ‘My my, little Frances, who’d have thought, after all these years.’ When I said could we get together because I wanted to meet him, he said sure, but I could practically hear him thinking how to handle it. I guess it was partly my fault. I never thought of him having a real life. I only ever thought of him as my father, not somebody who’d have other things going on. I can see why he was upset.” When she paused, Aggie just waited silently.
“Anyway, we arranged to get together in the bar at my hotel, but then he said, ‘But how will I know you?’ and that shook me up too. I really am so stupid. Somehow I’d been thinking that of course we’d know each other, that there must be some kind of instinct about things like that. So I laughed and said I’d be wearing a carnation in my lapel, and he didn’t get it, he didn’t understand I was kidding. So I had to go down to the flower shop and get a damn carnation for my damn lapel.
“But he was right. We could have passed on the street a million times, and I would never have dreamed he was my father.”
“He’s not what you pictured, then?”
“You could say that,” Frances said wryly. “You know, when Mother wouldn’t talk about him, I thought he must be kind of sinister or decadent or something, and then you used to say he was attractive and sort of charming. So I imagined somebody fairly good-looking, maybe with a moustache, a bit devilish but debonair, you know? Something like David Niven in those movies in the sixties maybe. But here’s this old shrimpy, nervous-looking guy saying, ‘Excuse me, would you be Frances Benson?’ and it wasn’t exactly a moment to stand up and throw my arms around him.”
“But wasn’t he glad to see you?”
“Not so’s you’d notice. What he was, was nervous. Kept on with that ‘Well well, so you’re little Frances’ until I couldn’t stand it, so I started asking him what was new, what he’d been doing with his life. You know, being the interviewer.”
“And?”
“And he runs his own furniture store, which he talked about for a while, but there’s only so much you can say about furniture, so I started asking if he lived alone, or how he lived, and then he really got rattled. Grandma, did you know he and Mother are divorced?”
“Divorced! Of course not. She flat refused.”
“Well they are. Apparently he got one when the laws changed and all you had to do was be separated for a few years. Why on earth didn’t she ever say anything?”
Spilled secrets piling up here. Aggie felt a bit short of breath. But “She probably just went to her room for a while. She has a way of licking her wounds in private.”
“Oh, but that’s so sad!”
“I don’t know. You seem to have managed to keep some things to yourself, too.” If Aggie sounded sharp, she didn’t much mind. “Anyway, what else did you find out about him?”
“That he’s married again, mainly. To a widow who had kids. He’s a grandfather now. He showed me their pictures. His wife’s kind of dumpy and blonde, and there are two girls and a boy from her first marriage, and then this one grandson. He’s got a little white frame house with lots of flowers and vines. He said he likes gardening when he gets home from work. He’s not a bit what I expected from the way you and Mother talked about him. I mean, gardening!”
“He certainly seems to have settled down, at any rate.”
“Maybe,” Frances laughed, “it was the love of a good woman. Or maybe it was the good woman he couldn’t stand.”
“Did you ask him why he left?”
“Oh yes, and he was about as helpful as Mother. Said they weren’t suited, and it was nobody’s fault and he was sure she was a good woman and obviously a good mother, but he’d thought it best to split while they were still young enough to start again.
“So I said, but what about me, I’d been just a little kid, and I could see somebody walking out on a marriage, but not leaving their own kid.” She looked as she might have when she was speaking those words to her father, as if she might cry.
“He just said he was sorry, of course, and he’d missed me and it was all very sad, but he didn’t think it was good for a child to grow up in a house where the parents weren’t happy.”
“What did you say?”
“I said bullshit, and that made him jump. I told him people just say that sort of thing when they’re copping out, and he obviously hadn’t wanted to be bothered with me because if he had he would have made some effort to see me in a quarter of a century. Old hypocrite.”
“Still, you know,” Aggie reflected, “he might be right, in a way.”
“Oh, Grandma,” Frances said impatiently, “I’m not saying he should have stayed, just that he was still my father. You don’t get divorced from that. He could have written me letters or even come to see me, but I think he almost forgot I was alive. You know, it was weird looking at those pictures of his family. Even if they aren’t really his kids, they’re his family and I’m not. I was just some dangerous person from the past he had to deal with so I wouldn’t bugger up his present.
“I was going to tell him about dreaming about him coming along and rescuing me, and how we were going to live together and I’d look after him, all that stuff. But he wasn’t that father at all. He wasn’t that real. The real one turned out to be the one I made up. Isn’t that strange?”
Less strange than it might have seemed a half-hour ago. And think of June, divorced and never saying.
“I don’t even know if his family knows I exist. He certainly didn’t invite me to meet them. By the way, he said to say hello to you. He said he always liked you. He said I probably look like you, except —”
“Except for me being big as a barn. He used to tease me about it. Are you going to tell your mother you saw him?”
“Hell no, why upset her? She’s had enough trouble without me bringing him up, don’t you think?”
This unexpected sympathy with her mother was a late bloom in Frances’s life. Too bad it didn’t extend to keeping June’s secrets. Aggie wondered how Frances had failed to realize that telling was a sort of betrayal.
“Well, now you know, anyway,” Aggie said.
“That I do. Except maybe I should have left well enough alone.”
“But surely not. Surely it’s better to know.”
She was startled that Frances turned on her. “Why do you always say things like that? Don’t you ever think that maybe it’s better not to know? Just sometimes that it’s better to have something that’s comforting instead of true?”
She sounded strikingly like June. Aggie said sharply, “No, I don’t think that. I had enough fancies when I was young to last a lifetime and, I might add, they did me nothing but harm. They get you in the end, Frances, they really do, and it’s worse, the longer they go on. They take root, and it’s an awful shock when there’s no living with them any more.”
Sometimes with Frances it’s possible to see her mind taking over, events clicking into place. It’s an odd process to watch: involves a lifting of the head, a squaring of the shoulders, a clearing of the eyes, and a kind of hardening around the mouth that has made Aggie wonder on occasion how her appearance will be affected as she gets older.
“Well, my curiosity’s satisfied, anyway. And in a funny sort of way, he was a pretty good father, probably better than if he’d actually been around. The one I made up got me through some hard times.”
They heard June’s footsteps on the walk. Frances uncoiled herself and stood. “Don’t tell Mother, okay?”
“Of course not.”
Aggie thought later how strange it was that she was old, and Herb and June were aging, and even Frances was no longer quite young. That sense of lost time, making her long again for a comforting hand to drop on her shoulder, some familiar arm to wrap itself around her body. Some man’s arm, perhaps; not even a lover’s, just Barney’s would be fine. It might finally be her turn to weep on his shoulder.
But oh Barney — where was he when she needed him? Gone, vanished, out of reach, the bad timing of events, just when they both might have had more than an hour a day to spare. His disappearance was more gradual, however, than an abruptly lost leg or a granddaughter who moved away; not a shock, just a matter of getting accustomed to absence. And sharp moments, frequent in the beginning, of thinking, “Wait till Barney hears this, I wonder what he’ll think?”
First, his job was retired from under him, when stores and dairies and other businesses stopped making deliveries. “I guess it’s just as well,” he said. “It gets harder and harder, lugging cases of milk around.”
His family’s income now would consist of his pension, John’s disability pension, and the part-time jobs his young grandchildren were able to pick up. “I guess we’ll manage. We’ll get along.”
He began to do odd jobs himself around town, partly for the money, but also for something to do. Mowed people’s lawns, sometimes shovelled out driveways in winter, weeded gardens, mended eavestroughs, and fixed small appliances like toasters and kettles. “You’d be amazed, some of the things I see,” he told Aggie. “People you’d think, just from the outside of their houses or their kitchens, that they live pretty well, you get right inside and rooms are dirty or musty, or they’re crammed up with fifty years of furniture — I was in one old lady’s house yesterday and every square inch of her living-room walls was covered with pictures of people. I didn’t think I’d ever get away. She wanted to tell me all about everybody in every photograph.”
Sometimes he didn’t charge for the work he did. “Well, you figure somebody who has to get a toaster fixed instead of just getting a new one isn’t exactly flush. A lot of them are old, like me.”
“You’re not old.”
“Sure I am, Aggie. I’m old and I’m starting to creak and some days I can barely get started at all. But you know, those mornings I can’t hardly get out of bed, I lie there and figure, well, Aggie’s up working by now, I’d better get on my horse too. Some days I think I only get up because I’d be ashamed not to.”
He helped her, too, fixing small things around the house, mowing the lawn. His morning visits, though, weren’t quite as early as they used to be when he was delivering for the dairy, and sometimes the shop was already open and she didn’t have much time to chat. Then he might only stay a few minutes, just time for a biscuit and a greeting.
What did they talk about? Nothing so much, any more, she supposed. Now it was existence, presence, the connection that counted. They’d gotten, she thought, pretty much down to the roots of the thing.
Of course, whenever Frances had been home for a visit, there was plenty to tell him: stories Frances brought. He’d shake his head and say, “Imagine that. Who’d have thought it,” or “I always thought there was something funny about that fellow. So that’s why.”
He talked about his children and grandchildren, particularly John and his struggles. “You should see him get around,” Barney said proudly when John was given one of the new improved plastic legs. “Prosthetic devices, they call them,” he laughed. “Sound like birth control, don’t they? But he can swing around like nobody’s business, almost as good as he could with his own.” John still couldn’t find work; not only was he handicapped, but he was also no longer young himself. And he had no particular skills. “His kids are good,” Barney said, “real hard workers. It’s a shame, though, they’ve had to grow up so fast. They’ve missed a lot of the fun of just being young.”
Aggie thought not about the fun of being young, but the pleasures of getting on. They were like an old married couple now, she and Barney, sitting briefly together for their chats. Familiarity and fondness. Sometimes she thought, “Whatever would I have done without him?” She would reach out then, perhaps, and pat his hand. She might have burst long ago from too many things kept inside, without his listening ear. Where she might once have taken him for granted, someone fortunate who appeared in her days, she now considered him something of a miracle. The loneliness, bleakness, and narrowness of all these years without him. Or someone like him. If not a sister, or a mother, then a friend.
Poor June, then, she thought: no one to talk to. Might she not burst, with who knew what inside? This was an old concern she could remember vaguely from years ago. Had nothing really changed?
She ought to pay more attention, be kinder. Just, oh, that was all very well in June’s absence, but when she was actually in the same room, all righteous and smug, Aggie really couldn’t help it. It might be sad from a distance, but up close her desire was to stick pins in and see if anything might puncture that smooth surface.
One Wednesday, Barney didn’t show up and didn’t show up. By noon, after a morning of anxious glances out the door, and the uneasiness of a disruption in her routine, Aggie knew he wouldn’t be coming today. But maybe he’d had something special on, a particular all-morning chore. Or, worse, maybe there was another crisis in his family, another injury or an illness.
On Thursday morning he didn’t come. She was worried now, and absent-minded about her work. She gave the wrong change to one customer, and bagged a loaf of raisin bread for another, instead of the cheese bread that was ordered. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I don’t know where my head’s at today.” Her head was off with Barney, imagining things. The trouble could not be just one of his jobs.
On Friday he didn’t come and she was almost, not quite, frantic. There would obviously be an explanation, but it was the not knowing that was upsetting. If anything happened to her, or June or Frances, he’d know right away, because he’d show up here and find out. She couldn’t do that, go wandering over to his home. “You may think this is awful,” he’d told her long ago, “but I’ve never mentioned it at home that I come here every day.”
“But why on earth not?” She didn’t think it was awful, exactly, but was certainly surprised.
“I’m not sure. It’s not that there’s anything wrong about it — well, you know that as well as I do — but maybe it’s the idea of having to explain. Or that maybe Alice’s feelings would be hurt, in a way. She might not understand that we’re friends. And of course now it’s far too late; I’d not only have to explain you, and coming here all the time, but why I’ve never mentioned it.”
He thought for a moment. “Anyway, I think it’s partly just wanting to keep something to myself. Having something that’s private, just to me. I don’t mean a secret exactly, not something to hide. Just private. We live,” he sighed, “so much on top of each other.”
So no, she could not now go traipsing over to his house, inquiring about him.
But there was nothing to stop her from phoning. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? People must call Barney all the time, wanting him to do this and that. She couldn’t come right out and ask, “Is something wrong? What’s going on?” but she might find out anyway.
A woman answered: Alice, no doubt. Interesting, to hear the voice and know so much about the person, but not to be able to fit a face to it precisely. “Could I speak with Mr. Holtom please?”
“Oh dear, no, I’m sorry, that’s not possible.”
“Can you tell me when it will be possible?” Leaping into a lie. “I have some jobs around the house I thought he might do before winter.”
There was a little silence before the voice said, “I’m terribly sorry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else. My husband’s in hospital. He fell and broke his hip this week, trying to patch someone’s roof.”
“You mean he fell off a roof?”
“Off a ladder. It slipped.”
“Is he going to be all right? Do you know how long he’ll be in hospital?”
“I suppose he’ll be all right. But he won’t be able to work any more, so I’m afraid you’ll have to find someone else.”
Aggie knew she must have sounded like some stupid woman who couldn’t get it through her head that Mr. Holtom was no longer available for home maintenance chores. “I’m sorry to have bothered you,” she said, hanging up.
A broken hip. What did she know about broken hips? Only, really, that they were terribly dangerous and terribly common among the elderly. Barney was right, he was old. She was old, too. She pictured him tumbling, rolling, falling through the air, arms flung out to protect himself, landing on that fragile boniness. Did he cry out as he fell? Was he wondering if she knew, or how to let her know? More likely he was lying in a hospital bed, in pain, worrying about how he and his family were going to get along now. What could she do for him? What would she do without him?
She took a taxi to the hospital that evening, but didn’t go into his room. Barely caught a glimpse of him through the open door. He was surrounded by people, members of his family, she supposed. She left the package of books she’d brought with a nurse, to be passed on to him later.
She did see him, finally, the next week. He was barely a lump under the blanket. “I’m sorry I couldn’t let you know, Aggie,” he said in a new, frail, and tiny voice. “There wasn’t a chance. But I can use the phone now — I couldn’t even move before. And I’ll be getting out soon, I hope. Another week or so. They’ve put in a pin. It hurts like the devil.” All of a sudden he was asleep, so she left.
Sometimes she could almost agree with June that changes tended to be fearful things. Maybe just that from now on, possibilities were narrowed and more perilous.
After Barney left the hospital, there was still a long convalescence, and when he did begin to get out, it was a terrible effort. He remained stiff, and the pin still pained him. His face was grey with effort, and he was short of breath. It seemed to wear him out, just hobbling over to the bakeshop. He couldn’t manage it more than once a week or so, and she tried to decide, regarding his exhaustion, if it was more difficult to miss him, longing for his presence when she wanted to talk to him, or to have him here, so worn out he was barely present anyway. She hated it, that he was beaten this way; that all his energy now seemed to go into his next step and how to survive it.
“I guess,” he said finally one morning, “I’ve had it. I’m giving up, Aggie, I’m sorry. We’ve decided to sell the house, and John and his family are going to take an apartment and Alice and I are going to move out to Winnipeg to Ben’s. He and his wife just bought a duplex, and we’re going to take one side of it.”
Oh no, lose him entirely?
“But we can write, Aggie.”
She didn’t think they likely would; not very often. It wouldn’t be anything like this.
“Is it what you want to do?”
“No, it’s just apparently what I have to do. Jesus, Aggie,” with a flash of his old self, “I hate it. I hate having to get used to a new place, and being a burden. I hate hurting all the goddamned time. Jesus, you know,” and he looked at her bleakly, and with anger, “I think I hate being alive. It isn’t fair.”
They did write a few times, for a little while, but of course it wasn’t the same.
For all she knows, he’s dead now. If he died, no one would let her know. She would have liked to think that all those years would mean he could not vanish without some corresponding shiver in her life, but that’s not likely the case. Did he not break his hip while she was doing something like rolling out biscuit dough without a twinge?
Maybe Frances, if she’s so goddamned clever at finding people, could find Barney, too, and let her know what’s happened to him.
What on earth is this ferocious clutch on life about, when more and more it requires letting go of one thing and another? It comes down, it seems, more and more to a slow vanishing of the irreplaceable. One of these times, the irreplaceable vanishing object will be herself.
Once she saw a series of lights, flashing on and on, lighting up time into the future, into the next century, with Frances. Now she sees lights going out, like a city bedding down for the night.