6

Ralphie had done all things in order to make others happy. He had moved into his mother’s house on her request. He had opened a business downtown, he had joined the Kinsmen; he was not happy. And as he turned twenty-six, it seemed to him that he could be thirty-six or fifty-six and it wouldn’t matter at all.

He knew his wife Adele wasn’t happy either. She wasn’t happy in the large house with nothing to do.

He knew Ivan would do anything for him or Adele – he knew, in fact, that Ivan looked upon him as a brother. There was an incident in their lives which Ralphie never forgot.

When he and Ivan worked back at the mines Ralphie was bullied by one man. Every day the man hid Ralphie’s lunch, or filled it with ore, and made light of whatever Ralphie said or did.

One day Ralphie came to work in a new work shirt, and the man looked at the top button and said: “Do you want this?”

“Yes,” Ralphie said, smiling.

So the man pulled it off and handed it to him.

“Do you want this?” the man said, touching the next button.

“No,” Ralphie said. So the man pulled the button off and threw it away.

He continued until all the buttons were pulled from the shirt. Ralphie had to pretend that this was a joke that he himself appreciated, and that all the other men and he laughed at this in the same fashion.

It was not until a month later that Ivan learned about this. Ralphie did not tell him, or complain to him, but Ivan finally saw what was going on. He never once said that Ralphie should be ashamed for not standing up for himself, and he never mentioned it to him in any way. But Ralphie was frightened of getting hurt in some way, and every time the man teased him, he instinctively weighed the alternative.

One afternoon, when Ralphie was in the dry, the man walked towards him, his pale blue eyes unfocused – and as soon as he realized Ralphie was there he turned immediately and went in the opposite direction.

“He’ll not bother you again,” Ivan said on the way home that night. “Gutless fucker.”

Ivan said nothing else and Ralphie never had to thank him.

Ralphie had almost forgotten this incident. Until now. Now he tried not to think of it. But last week when Ivan pulled up in his car in front of the shop, Ralphie pretended to be out.

When Ivan couldn’t find Ralphie, he went to see Adele to ask her if she had talked to Cindi. It was the first time they had met in a year, and Adele was sitting in the den when he drove up in his car.

“Who is that?” Thelma asked. The car’s fender was smashed, and the window had a pebble crack in it. The tires were almost bald. It was as if he had come out of another world entirely and entered theirs through some other, heated atmosphere.

“Oh, that’s a friend of ours – you know him – Ivan,” Adele said.

“Ivan who?” Thelma said, in the same immediate and accusing voice she always had when dealing with her daughter-in-law.

“Ivan Basterache,” Adele said.

“I don’t know him,” Thelma said. “I have only heard bad things about him.”

“Of course you do,” Adele said. “You met him at Ralphie’s apartment a long time ago, and he came to our wedding.”

Ivan had gotten off work late on the day prior to Ralphie and Adele’s wedding. He was working in Port Hawkesbury and had no way to get home, unless he hitchhiked. And he began to hike late that night, and arrived at the wedding – it was a bitterly cold January day – wearing his suit under his coveralls and carrying his shoes.

The reception was at the house, and as soon as they arrived it became apparent that the furnace was shut off – the oil-tank line was frozen. Ivan put his coveralls back on and went out with a torch and unfroze it, coming back in, his ears raw, and smiling. Thelma, though she remembered this, still pretended she did not.

This pretence persisted when he came in. She pretended she didn’t know who he was, and then looked severely at Adele, not for any particular reason except that she had an opportunity to.

“Dontcha member the time I come for the weddin,” Ivan said, smiling.

But Thelma, though her eyes registered that she remembered this incident very well, had gone too far in her testament of denial to back down.

“No,” she said, smiling the exact same way Adele saw her smile at her when others were present.

Ivan nodded at her in the dark hallway. Then he looked quickly at Adele to show that he knew exactly where he stood.

“Come in, come in,” Adele said grouchily, almost as if to protect him by grouchiness. They went into the den, and Thelma, with her back to them, set up her ironing board in the hallway.

The den window faced the southeast and overlooked a field of tangled bushes on the far side of the street. Ralphie and his sister Vera called that the “gully” and they had made a fort there when they were children.

Although the night before Ivan had been very determined to see Adele, he now had nothing to say because Thelma was standing five feet away. He didn’t seem to know why he had come, or care about the outcome of it.

And Adele did not want him to talk about Cindi at all because she felt Thelma would get into an argument with him. So every time he mentioned something about it, she would mention something else and then look towards the hallway.

This left Ivan with nothing much to say.

Though Ivan was small of stature, his hands were large and he rested them clumsily on his knees. He had worn his spring jacket and his new pants and shirt. He sat very stiffly on the brick ledge that ran along one side of the den, while Adele sat in the chair with her back to the window – so it looked as if this huge halo had circled her head. And there was something about his tea and how cautiously he tried to drink it. Adele then decided to admonish him to let him know that friendship had limits, and so whenever he said something she found herself disagreeing with it, and looking angrily at him, for the first time in her life. (She, too, knew how he had protected her husband but had suddenly forgotten this.) She was not as skinny as she was as a teenager, but all her movements were the same, which made Ivan look extremely delighted at one moment, and then suddenly frown because she was determined to undercut what he said.

And Adele realized this also. She realized this but couldn’t stop – not until he left. After he drove away she became very glum. She walked about the house believing she had betrayed someone, and was not certain who.

After Ivan’s visit, Thelma did not speak to her for a month.

“Why is she seeing people like that?” Thelma would ask Vera.

Vera would explain to her the crisis Cindi was now engaged in, which Thelma pretended suddenly not to know anything about.

“Oh my God – oh my God.”

Vera would nod in silence.

Thelma, like many of us, often drifted between posture of knowledge or posture of ignorance.

“Those people – drunks and dope addicts – coming into my house and slurping tea.”

She told Vera she did not want Adele to have anything to do with that “epileptic” girl. Other reasons could be perceived in her as well, however, by Ralphie who had to listen to a lecture every time he came home. Thelma held him personally responsible for even knowing a man like Ivan.

“Well, we’ve seen your friends, Ralphie, haven’t we – swear words cut into his hands – fine. And Adele likes him, does she – fine. And his wife is having a baby – that retarded girl – just the type to populate the world. Fine, Ralphie. That’s the type of people to get to know – of all the good, decent, hardworking, law-abiding people on the river – you drift into the gutter. That’s where they come from, Ralphie – just the gutter. People like to always talk about those people as being from here. People even write dirty books about them. So when we go anywhere, it’s always those people who’ve given us a terrible reputation – poachers and murderers and criminals – so we have to lock our doors at night. But you like them – like those people – I see. And I’ve seen them before, greasy-looking people, you know, with big muscles, always going out of their way to kill somebody. I thought you belonged to the Kinsmen.”

Yet underneath he could see that she was glad Adele was involved because it gave her an excuse to be upset. It was in these perverse double standards she was most at home.

For Adele, it wasn’t Thelma’s abhorrence of sexuality that came through, but a particular type of sexuality. Not the nice discussed sexuality of those who pretended they weren’t prudes. And were of course “concerned” about “children.” That type of sexuality, the embalmed learned response to the last twenty years, would go right past Adele. But it was the immoral sexuality of a person like Cindi, that brown-headed sexually epileptic, and, worse, of Adele herself that distressed Thelma.

“All having babies and on welfare too – and our taxes supporting the lot of them.”

This was one reason why Adele refused to see her child, why she hated most children, and why she believed that Ralphie had betrayed her, because they still lived with his mother.

Whenever Olive and the little girl came, Adele would look out the window, sniff so loud her nose closed completely, and say, “Hum – sure has her dressed funny – gonna look like some little faggoty ballerina.” Then she would go up to her room and sit in the corner. Every time she heard the little girl laugh or screech or cry, she would turn up the radio.

“Hey baby baybby-bayyybyyy baby I love you,” the music ironically would yelp, drowning out everyone downstairs.

On occasion she would have to see Olive, who dropped in after work. Adele would sit there very politely for about a minute. She knew Olive didn’t like her, but she could also tell that Olive knew she was the outcast in the family and no one paid attention to her.

Adele would sit there broodingly quiet and unhappy, scratching a mosquito bite on her foot, or, in defiance, blowing a larger than usual bubble and having it explode over her nose. Then, trying to peel the gum away, she would say, “Hey you?”

“My name’s Olive, Adele.”

“Right – got any dental floss – or what?”

Olive’s face was smooth except for some white hair that sprouted from her chin. And she was a good enough person, Adele supposed, at least that is what she was always telling herself: “Oh, she’s a good enough person, I suppose.” But in reality every nice thing Olive said only intensified Adele’s feeling that she was being left out.

One day Olive made the mistake of mentioning children to Adele. Adele said, “Don’t mention them – don’t want to know them – hope never to see them. Hope I never have to take care of them. We should abort them all!”

“Is that what you think about Cindi?”

“I don’t think nothing about Cindi – I never think about Cindi. Why should I think anything about her?”

Olive looked at her and then looked through her purse for a Kleenex.

“’Cept it seems to me everyone else wants to decide for Cindi – who should be allowed to decide for herself.”

“Well,” Olive said, “it’s just that Cindi is running about now with this cousin of Ruby’s from Montreal, and Ruby is worried about her – she’s worried that Ivan is going to blow up again.”

Adele sniffed and said nothing.

Adele had taken her sneakers off and had rested her feet on the tops of them. Both her feet had black rims about the ankles and both ankles had little red marks on them. She rubbed her feet back and forth to scratch them.

“Well–”

“Ha–”

After a while, Adele left the room.

She went upstairs and walked about in a circle.

No, she didn’t like Ruby, she didn’t like Cindi, she didn’t like Ivan, she detested Ralphie and hated Thelma, and Vera and Nevin were dupes and fools, and the whole lot of them were twits, especially Olive, so there had to be some way to get the child away from her and head to Nova Scotia, or at least to Sussex. And if that didn’t come about, she would end up drowning her own daughter, whom she detested the sight of anyway.

And, thinking of this, she headed back down the stairs and marched into the living room, only to find no one there. Then she went into the kitchen.

When she walked in her daughter was sitting on a chair with three big cushions under her, so she could reach the table where the glass of milk was.

“Hello, Dell,” the little one said. Then, as always when she saw Adele, her movements became cautious. As if she was used to having Adele pounce on her. The cushions on which she sat seemed to overflow the chair.

She was so tiny her head seemed no bigger than an orange. Her hair was blonde and wispy, as fine as a spiderweb. Her little eyes were black. Her three favourite dolls were sitting in chairs about the table also, each of them on cushions as well. She wore one red sock, the other was in the far corner of the kitchen, lying heel up near the stove. When Adele saw this, she stopped and looked about as if confused. Her face changed.

“Where Walphie?” the child said.

“There,” Adele said. “You have to have every cushion in the house down in the kitchen though, don’t you? And the arm of Snoopy is torn off again – I noticed that right away!”

With this, Adele smiled. The little girl stopped smiling and reached clumsily for her milk.

Everything was Vera nowadays. The family revolved around her now. Vera was practical-minded. Vera gave piano lessons to little “underprivileged” children from Barryville. Vera belonged to “concerned and forward thinking” women’s rights organizations. Vera was going to have her child at home – in her own bedroom and not in some “sterilized foreign” atmosphere created by the hospital.

All of this had Dr. Hennessey upset, but Vera had gone instead to Dr. Savard, who said it was a perfectly reasonable thing to wish. That is, she wanted a midwife. This idea for Thelma was “new and fresh.” And Vera was something of a saint for being as she was.

Unfortunately Vera didn’t remember that Hennessey had helped deliver children all over the river – from a wagon to a half-ton truck. That old Mrs. Garrett’s children had all been born in the bed where they were conceived, and it was not such a strikingly new idea at all. What was new was only the attitude developed because of other criteria, and Hennessey was worried because of Vera’s health, which had been so bad a few years ago.

But, in fact, Hennessey was looked upon as old-fashioned and out of touch, and, of course, a woman-hater, while Savard was looked upon as a person who understood the problems of modern society and was willing to challenge them – all because of a birth at home, of which Hennessey had done over a hundred and Savard had not yet done one. Also, Vera went about mentioning words like “birthing.” It was “birthing” this and “birthing” that with Vera. The old doctor visited, took her blood pressure, weight, and checked for too much fluid. But the doctor, though he disliked the idea, realized that she was set on it.

As far as Adele was concerned, this made the baby-to-be a rather political baby-to-be, and not just an ordinary baby like hers was – which was born in the men’s washroom of the community centre. But Vera was adamant about this, and her health wasn’t good.

Adele, of course, hated the whole idea of Vera’s pregnancy, of her going to have the child at home – or what she hated was the climate about the two opposing pregnancies. Vera was not supposed to get pregnant, but she did – and now it was absolutely natural that she did. Cindi, everyone perceived, could get pregnant every time she dropped her pants, and this was absolutely unnatural. Olive was “expert” at “mothering,” as Adele was told, while Adele, who had the child, was never mentioned as a mother.

Savard, who spent most of his time at the beach in the summer, drank wine until they held up a towel so he could get sick, and always had young girls around him, always looked sad at just the right time, was wonderful, according to some, while Dr. Hennessey, now in his seventies, who had refused to go to beaches no matter how many times he was invited, and imbibed only by himself, who never got sentimental, was the fellow whose opinion was least likely to be sought.

As for Ivan himself, he didn’t understand very much of this. He did not know why Vera and Nevin dressed like Mennonites, lived on a farm they knew nothing about, had a tractor that they could not fix, and did not work in town – like everyone else here, who lived down river.

He did not understand why they were so easily duped, why Antony felt it was his obligation to cheat them – not once but many times – and why, of all the people on the river, they clung to him. Why they wanted horses that they didn’t understand, and why they had chickens which were unmannered enough to sit on the kitchen table while Vera and Nevin ate.

He did not understand why they went to university and got degrees – Vera had her Master’s in English and Nevin had a B.A. and B.Ed. – and then refused to work at jobs their degrees might entitle them to. He did not know them very well, and he always considered educated people better than he was.

He saw them disdain being employed and only now, because Vera was pregnant, were they trying to recoup their losses, were they trying to get back this prosperity they might have if they decided to work at jobs they would have been suited for.

And since he loved Ralphie he would not say anything about them.

He did not understand this.

Ivan was a little wary of educated people. Not, of course, all the time, but if he had to take his sister down to Dr. Savard, as he did one afternoon, he found himself tongue-tied and shy, and fighting not to be. He found himself shy in front of Vera, the only time he met her. He did not understand Nevin, but he would not allow anyone to make fun of him while he was there.

Ivan felt unequal to words and writing, to books and knowledge of that kind, but he had a tremendous respect for it. In such ways he was left out of life, not because he had to be, but simply because he was.

Once Ralphie gave him a book that was written by one of the local writers. Ralphie told him he might like it.

In the end, he thought Ralphie was making fun of him. Why would a writer put swearing in a book, he’d asked Ralphie. He felt a book was sacred – even though he never read one – and you didn’t put swear words into it. He did not understand why Ralphie thought he would like that book. Secretly he felt it was because he himself cursed and would therefore never understand a book that didn’t have those words.

He never mentioned the book again. But since Ralphie had given it to him he lugged it everywhere. He had it in Port Hawkesbury when he worked there, and now he had it set up on the old greasy shelf in the cuddy.

He did not know why Vera wanted a midwife and why she wanted to have her child at home. But there must be a reason for it. For instance, he reflected, an aunt of his had to lie still for the last three months of her pregnancy in the summer heat. For Ivan, it had to be something like this.

So he asked his grandmother to go over and visit Vera sometimes if she could, and to sit with her.

He did not know what else to do about that situation, but he was proud he had thought of this. That’ll fix things for her, he thought.

And he was happy about this.

But there was not much else to be happy about. He heard that Cindi and some people were going to the Island together, to party, and he knew she was drinking.

He resolved finally to do something about it.

He went to see her, and took his sleeping bag. He walked in, set it down, and asked her if she could mend it.

There were two other people in the apartment whom he didn’t know. It was strange to have them in his apartment. The oak cabinet and the smell of onions, the wobbly bar stools. He did not ask who they were either. One seemed to be a friend of Dorval Gene’s.

He had the appearance of a man who had tanned himself under a light, and he looked at Ivan with the self-assured look strangers give when they feel they’ve been informed about you. Ivan, for the most part, ignored them.

“Could you sew this up,” Ivan said. He did not look at her but at the tanned blond man in the summer shirt with the wristband on.

“No – I’m sorry,” she said.

“You – you can’t,” he said.

“No,” she said. She stared straight ahead.

They both knew that, far from being anything else, this was his plea for clemency.

He picked the sleeping bag up and walked towards the door.

“Okay, never mind, I’ll do it!” she said.

He kept walking towards the door.

“Okay, never mind, I’ll do it, I said.”

“Never mind,” Ivan said, “I won’t bother you no more.”

“You hurt my feelings,” he heard her say. “I spose ya don’t know that, for, do ya!”

He left the apartment, smelling the smell of oil and salt in the hot, carpeted hallway.

It was a muggy day, filled with blackflies. The foliage was heavy and drooped green. Now and then the sun would just break out and then be encompassed in haze.

The woods was as silent as if it was waiting for a forest fire.