EVERY MORNING SHE STILL took the wedding ring from the bathroom vanity and put it on her finger and turned it in the light. The traditional left ring finger, as they’d agreed back then, even though the right finger had been fashionable for a while in the fifties. But they would be hard-working professionals with busy right hands. Both with their brand new degrees, his in geology, hers in law, and her early interest in law mostly because Grandmother had instilled in her the old-world belief that law was about justice and as a result it was the noblest of professions.
Fresh out of law school in Toronto, she’d applied for an articling position at two different law firms, and was told there were no openings. Eventually she landed a job with a firm on Danforth Avenue. They paid her next to nothing and used her mostly as a filing clerk and to make coffee and fetch lunch at the corner. The lawyers, all men, winked at her and invited her for drinks.
She stuck it out until the bar exam, hoping the firm would give her real work then, and pay more. They did not, and so she found other jobs. One of them she walked out of when, after hours, a junior lawyer cornered her against the telex machine. She struggled, and it helped greatly that the machine suddenly began to chatter and type.
She found another job in an office on Bathurst Street, and this one lasted long enough for her to meet her articling requirements. Two months before Andrew was born, they let her go because they were worried about the demands of motherhood.
She loved her time with baby Andrew—the nursing, the sweetness of it all, the closeness. But at the same time, if she was honest, she often also wearied of it. In those moods she wanted her body back. All this nursing on demand, for hours. She missed getting out, missed the challenge of work, missed her independence, and at the same time felt guilty feeling that way. She admitted it only to Aileen on the phone. With Aileen she could talk about it, and because of little Danny, who was only a year and a half older, Aileen understood exactly.
Meanwhile Jack was brilliantly successful, and it had become clear to her that Canada with its resource-based economy had a far greater need for keen new exploration geologists than it had for keen new women lawyers. It seemed Jack could spot good properties by knowing almost intuitively what the geological ages and the ice ages had done in certain geographies, how strata in others had risen up and broken apart to mirror certain events at depth, and how to run the geophysics and plan his core samples. With skill and youthful enthusiasm he quickly became a sought-after mine-finder, and often he was gone three, four weeks at a time, travelling all over the world. He was gone more than he was home.
By the time she was ready to go back to work, she had a gap in her resumé, still no courtroom experience, and the responsibility of a child at home. She did find new jobs, usually short-term replacement jobs, and to be able to leave the house she had a series of live-in and day nannies. Because she’d read up on the benefits of breast milk over formula, she pumped milk and put it in small jars with the date and hour on them. She kept a second pump in a locked desk drawer at the office for emergencies, and often when she had to work late, or when the nanny called in a panic, she’d pump in the washroom at the office and send the jars wrapped in wet papers and plastic home in a taxi.
It was true what she’d told Michael about the teasing and insults from her colleagues in those early days. What she’d never talked about to anyone except Aileen, never to Michael or Jack, was the shame of it. The shame for herself, and even more so her shame and contempt for the men, who always only grinned at her and winked, as though the cracks about full-fat milk and milkmaids in her condition were some sort of clever mating call.
After a while she learned to smile and stare them down until their grins froze on their faces. The decision she made, and confirmed over and over in the private stillness of some taxi going home late at night, was that this was all just part of the price of admission. It was something unpleasant to be endured, and surely before long to be left behind.
As it happened, it was in corporate work where eventually she found her niche. The firm she worked for at the time took on a complicated tax case, and the lawyer told her to learn the file by heart and then to find whatever supportive material she could and brief him.
She spent days and nights at it and built a file for him of similar cases and their rulings, each case with an outline of fact, principle, and procedure, and in the end it all worked out exceptionally well. She did more cases for that same lawyer, all white-collar crime and tax issues, and after a while he took her with him to court and introduced her as his associate counsel.
Soon other lawyers noticed her, and after all the rejection and condescension early on she eventually received good offers from other law firms. From then on, she was on her way. She made tax loopholes, tax deferral, and tax jurisdictions her first specialty, and after a while added investment law and offshore ownership. In time she became very good at it all, and she was proud of that fact. It gave her confidence. She told herself that this was her gift, the gift to organize her life around, and she treated it with great respect. A solid career, and now, after many difficult years, nothing less than the promise of a partnership at a top law firm with international clients and multi-million-dollar cases.
In the evening Aileen and Franklin saw the small beam of the flashlight in the dark, stopping and pointing up trees and moving on, the pale robe at times, and at times also a small gleam or reflection on Margaret’s face.
“What’s she got on?” said Franklin. “Glasses or something?” “Safety glasses,” said Aileen. “She told me. She’s wearing them against the branches in the dark.”
“But why? I mean, what’s she doing out there?”
“She told me and I sort of understand, but it’s hard to explain.”
“Try me.”
“You’ll think it’s weird.”
“What if I don’t?”
“She’s going back a while. The other day she started looking for a book about trees she remembered, a children’s story. And the thing is, I remember it too. Trees talking to each other. The love and kindness among them, their roots all in the same soil. Don’t smirk, or I’ll stop telling you anything any more this minute.”
“No, no. Go on.”
“It came from England, kind of like the Curious George book. It was sweet and it was a popular book in our days. She was looking in her dad’s work shed at the back of the boathouse, and that’s where she found the safety glasses and his ring binders with notes about the forest and a textbook on trees and lumber.”
“Charles’s notes? When he did all that planting?”
“Yes. Eighty-eight truckloads of soil, it says in the notes. She told me. He made notes on all the native trees he planted there, the ones he wanted to preserve after some of them were practically wiped out by the shipbuilding. Bicycling all over and scratching around for seedlings, he was, among deadfall in the clear-cuts.”
“And why is she out there now? In the dark?” “Probably because she can’t sleep. Why else? And she’s working things out.”
“What things?”
“Just things, Franklin.”
They watched from the picture window, leaning forward to see Margaret’s little light winking and moving and pausing among the trees, heading back up the slope to her house now.
“She might trip out there,” he said. “And she might drive off the fox.”
“No, she won’t drive off the fox. She likes it here, and she trusts us by now. The fox does. I heard her tonight before you came up. And all those cars today were an exception too. I think she knows that.”
“The fox knows that?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t you go soft on me too now, Aillie.”
“I’m doing nothing of the kind. And neither is Margaret. She’s planning to identify all her trees. Put little labels on them. She says creating order calms her.”
When Franklin left she watched him from the window in the half-dark. His bright windbreaker, his unruly white hair, heading for the path down to his place. He was carrying a flashlight because he’d fallen on these rocks more than once already and he had a bad knee.
When she couldn’t see him any more she turned into the room and picked up the glasses and carried them into the kitchen. Out the window her old Vauxhall was the only car on the rock. Danny was away in his truck, on his south loop again.
She tidied the kitchen and turned out the light and headed up the narrow stairs to her bedroom. She thought of Grandmother Dotty in her wooden shoes clomping up and down here. Danny once said it was like living inside a guitar, especially once the fall wires were up.
She opened her bedroom door and in the dark stepped around the bed to the window and opened it wide to the night air and all the sounds she loved.