BILL AND MARGARET were married at the Anglican manse on a Friday night in early February. They had talked about going in to the courthouse in London but then Bill suggested the minister who had shingled the bathroom roof and Margaret voiced no objection.
The ceremony was small and quick and private. Bill’s parents had not been invited, although they’d told him to go ahead and do what he thought was right, because Margaret’s mother and father had both died quite young, in the war years, and Bill didn’t want her to feel entirely outnumbered. She had only one much older brother who had long ago moved to Nova Scotia and he could not have been expected to make the trip just for a wedding. The kids were there, of course, and Murray tagged along, arriving at the house in his suit ten minutes before they left for the manse. Bill’s brother Gerry and his beefy wife Eileen came up from Windsor to witness the nuptials, the sister-in-law a determined, spirited woman who was always interrupting people with apropos quotes from Doctor Norman Vincent Peale. After an hour of listening to Eileen’s relentless cheer, Margaret was glad to remind herself that Windsor was still thought to be a very long drive. There was no formal reception after they left the church. Celebration wasn’t really wanted.
Angela Johnston, who was Margaret’s bridge partner and oldest friend, had made an angel food cake with pineapple filling and dropped it off that afternoon, had opened the fridge and rearranged things herself to make room for it. Good wishes and a few small gifts came to the house over the following weeks, but informally. The wits and their wives bought them the blue punch bowl set that had been sitting in the window up at Taylor’s, calling it when they brought it over one big gift instead of a lot of smaller, useless things.
Margaret sold most of the furniture she’d had in her apartment over the Hydro office to an auctioneer. What she didn’t sell she stored in the basement at Bill’s, expecting that it would be carried up some day down the road and used by someone just starting out. Otherwise she brought with her only her car, a 1954 Pontiac which she said she was ready to make available to Patrick for dates and to the others when they started to drive, a low, round, mahogany table with scalloped edges that was one of the very few beautiful things her mother had possessed, a nearly complete set of good bone china, her hardly used silverware, and her small, recently purchased television set. Although the house did not yet have an antenna up on the roof, Paul carried the television in and placed it on a table in the living room, rearranging all the chairs to face it.
Margaret tried to be careful not to disturb things. She did partially empty Sylvia’s kitchen cupboards and organize the dishes and the canned goods to suit herself, explaining to everyone as they watched her do it that a tall woman wanted a slightly different set-up.
Bill had convinced himself after that first night when they got back to town from the horse races that it was going to be all right for them, but sometimes with no warning he would have long, hard days of remembering Sylvia, bits of her from different times, and he would want her back, badly, he would want their time back. He told Margaret it was like a rancid ache just under his skin, between his bones and his skin. He said this was the only way he could think to describe what was wrong with him.
A month before she died Sylvia had told Bill that anything might happen. Lying in their damp bed he’d listened to her worries about the kids and then he’d heard her describe a probable life for him in the arms of some other, unimagined woman, heard her say clearly that he wouldn’t have any choice, he would just have to trust his needs and take it as it came. She said she believed that if she were in his shoes, that’s what she’d do. She would just have to.
Although Margaret was carefully casual with Bill in the company of others, in their own bed she stroked him and tried to soothe him. She praised Sylvia. She talked about Sylvia with all the affection she could muster, about her courage, her spunk, how she had loved her children, the way she could mimic people, the way she could get everyone laughing. She prodded Bill to remember Sylvia’s take on his sister-in-law, made him laugh with her, remembering. Margaret believed she could do this, allow Sylvia to continue on in him. They weren’t kids.
Gradually her kindness began to work its magic and eventually she found the courage to say that, like it or not, life simply has to be for the living. She told him it was a good thing to keep living. When Bill confessed like a sinner that what he really felt was lucky, lucky having had Sylvia and now having her, Margaret nodded yes in the dark and pulled him down, hoping only that because her own body was so different from Sylvia’s he would be able to believe that this was a very separate thing he was doing now.
In the early spring, after some blunt but encouraging counsel from Doc Cooper, she allowed herself to become pregnant, guessing correctly that babies sometimes alleviate suffering. Walking uptown to work on a bright, clear morning, watching the branches on the trees along the streets sway with the new weight of buds, she willed the sperm she had just received an hour before to give it their very best effort. There will be prizes, she told them.
The kids didn’t bother themselves with thoughts of Margaret in bed with their father. They, too, were not without instinct. The harder adjustment was watching her large hands on their mother’s belongings: her aprons, her Mixmaster, her clothespins, her sewing machine, the junk in her junk drawer. The irritations were petty and jolting, the way she blew her nose in short, quick bursts, and her bags, her growing cache of bags, the way she flattened and folded every bag that entered her domain and tucked it in a drawer, just in case.
Living on her own in the long, narrow apartment above the Hydro office, working at her oversized desk at the back of the hardware store, all those years entering her ledger numbers precisely for an easy balance at month end, her only deviance an occasional ticket for speeding on her way into the city, Margaret had once in a while taken some time to imagine a life something like this one. Among the many choices she’d imagined she would have, things like clean windows and lots of them, good meals carefully prepared and nicely served, a mirror in a bathroom opening on a private, ordinary mix of male and female toiletries, she had always thought she would call a daughter Kathleen and a son Tom.
But late in the summer, when her condition became so evident it had to be taken into account, Daphne, meaning only to make a show of maturity, to be seen to be accepting of this baby and all its implications, brought the naming to the supper table as if she were absolutely entitled to do this, asking Bill as she added another possibility to her list, “So who named me?”
Margaret sat back and let them do it. Stephen it was. Stephen Thomas. Or Sarah Kathleen. Sally.
* * *
HOME FOR THE summer in early May, Patrick had got a promotion at McFarlane’s mill. He was now driving a one-ton truck around the countryside making deliveries, heaving sacks of feed on and off the truck, getting brown and bulking up. Late in the afternoon Margaret would lay out fresh underwear and pants and a shirt in the downstairs bathroom and watch for him at the kitchen window, listen for his footsteps on the gravel driveway. He’d come home coated in a cloud of feed dust and stand in the middle of the backyard to slap his pants and shirt hard and bend over to shake the dust from his hair and then he’d quickly strip to his underwear on the back porch, ducking into the bathroom to shove his head under the tap and wash for half an hour before anyone heard from him.
Although he had assumed he would, Patrick had not liked living in residence much at all. The room was a lot smaller than the bedroom he shared with Paul at home, and John, the roommate assigned by alphabetic proximity, was a loud-mouthed, back-slapping jock from Ottawa who called girls wimen and acted as if he’d just discovered booze and couldn’t seem to get enough of either.
John introduced Patrick to his many, many friends and prodded him to come with them to the Brass Rail to find some friendly small-town wimen who might have their own apartments, their own apartments being the first and only consideration. Thinking there was a chance he had the guy all wrong, Patrick did go along for one of John’s “crime and corruption” nights but at the end of it he found himself in the arms of a not very pretty girl who had no idea what was going on, who said almost nothing but welcomed him into her bed as if it meant something. Her own roommate was in the other bed with some other guy, not four feet away, moaning and whispering, and when everyone else fell asleep, he got dressed quickly and left. He didn’t even want to remember the not very pretty girl’s name.
He said nothing, certainly didn’t tell Murray, and he turned down all further invitations. He watched John’s marks nosedive and hoped he’d flunk out, thinking, If there’s a God, this guy’s gone. Some small hesitation had kept him from telling John that his mother had just died and by October he was glad he’d hesitated.
All his classes were huge. He hated that, the amphitheatres, the fact that not even the professors knew him by name. He and Murray ate lunch together between classes and they worked in the library, went to the odd Mustangs game, drank quietly at the Ceeps where they met but did not take up with several pretty, lively young women who were away from home for the first time too and game for almost anything anyone might propose.
But now it was summer and he wanted someone, needed someone. After several weeks delivering feed, twice to the Elliot farm, he had phoned Sandra Elliot to ask her to go out to the Casino dance on Saturday night. Sandra was going into grade twelve with Daphne and he remembered her from high school, vaguely. He’d heard from Daphne that she had just broken up with some guy from Parkhill and he assumed correctly that they had worked all this out ahead of him, that his call was expected. Both times when he’d pulled into the yard with feed Sandra was just coming out of the house, as if by chance, and when he’d finished unloading she leaned against the truck to talk to him, turned and lifted her head quickly to make her dark red hair swing. She focused on him with big easy smiles, used her posture to make sure he was aware of her breasts, and bending to pet one of the dogs, offered little glimpses of very white cheek not quite hidden by short shorts.
When he picked her up on the Saturday night, getting out of Margaret’s Pontiac to go inside and meet the mother, Sandra came down the stairs in a sundress her mother said she’d got an A for in Home Economics. It was dark red with a full skirt and thin straps which Sandra identified, when they were in the car on their way out to the lake, as spaghetti straps. Spaghetti straps required a strapless bra, she told him.
Less than a year later, when they were finally finished with each other, Patrick guessed it was the irresistible weight of her breasts against those straps, that and nothing much else that had got him through the summer.
The Casino sat high in the dunes above Lake Huron. It was large and square, cream stucco with a dark red roof. Downstairs there were slot machines on a gritty cement floor, not very clean washrooms, and long benches against the cement-block walls. There was a concession where swimmers and sunbathers could buy potato chips or Coppertone for their tans, and, beside it, a big pop cooler. You had to lift the lid and reach down through ice water for a bottle of Coke or Canada Dry or Orange Crush and more than once a kid who had just come in after hours and hours of playing in the afternoon sun stuck an arm down and promptly slumped to the gritty cement floor, out cold.
Upstairs, the hardwood dance floor was surrounded by a wraparound balcony with shutters that could be dropped quickly if a storm came up off the lake. You could stand out there between dances and listen to the waves lapping on the sand and stare out over the shining water toward Michigan. Or you could look up at the stars and the moon in the dark sky above the water, at the clouds that threatened to obliterate the light as they drifted across it. Patrick had been coming out to the Casino dances since he was fifteen and he had never once been with a girl who didn’t like to do this, who didn’t soften looking out at the water or up at the sky.
The band was always the same. They played mostly country and western with a few polkas and square dances thrown in, sometimes a jive. On a good night they could be talked into trying “Sixteen Tons” or “Moments to Remember” or “Blue Suede Shoes” or “Heartbreak Hotel.” There was no booze, not inside anyway, not that you could see.
Patrick and Sandra recognized nearly everyone around them but they danced only together, oblivious to the people they would ordinarily dance with at least once or twice. And no one bothered them because a first date gave you that right, to ignore people you knew, to pretend you couldn’t see their faces, couldn’t hear them speaking even though they surrounded you, same as always.
On the way home after the dance they didn’t talk as much as Patrick had thought they would. Standing on her porch under a naked two-hundred-watt bulb that lit the entire yard and half the barn, with one of the black Labs thumping its tail eagerly against his legs, he leaned in to kiss her and when she kissed him back, he took his chance to cup her heavy breast in his hand. But she pulled the hand away and wrapped it around her back. He assumed she had a set of rules in mind. Although it was the biggest breast he’d touched, it wasn’t the first. And a guy could be forgiven. The rules varied from girl to girl, more than you’d think.
The Wednesday night after the Casino dance he took her into Sarnia to a show, a war movie, which they watched low in their seats, holding hands as soon as the plot was well established, Patrick’s arm quickly closing in around her shoulders. On the way home after the show there was finally quite a bit of talk. Sandra started it by saying how sorry she was about his mother’s death and when he tensed up she quickly said she understood how awful it must be for his family. She told him she was sure it would make him feel better to talk about it, that she really believed talking helped. When he reached to turn up the radio, meaning to say that the song shouldn’t be missed, she was obviously annoyed that he wasn’t even going to try to put it into words for her but she went on bravely to more ordinary things: what he was studying, what he wanted out of university, where she herself thought she might want to go when she graduated. The goodnight kisses took place in the dark of the car, although they were still too few for Patrick and his hand was still very firmly guided. He knew what he’d be doing, wasn’t very happy about what he’d be doing when he got home into his own warm bed.
The show had been a slacks-and-sweater-set date but on the Friday night, when their only plan was to do something and Sandra appeared at her door in a pale pink angora sweater and a wraparound skirt, he drove straight out to Lake Huron. He made two slow trips up and down the beach, nodding and waving at the other guys, mostly high school types who were driving the beach with their girlfriends, and then he turned off to follow the road that twisted back to the inland lakes. He parked the car beside one of the smallest lakes and they leaned forward together to look up through the windshield at the stars. After what he believed was long enough, he said he’d check to see if there was a blanket in the trunk and she helped him spread it out on the soft grassy sand.
Sandra was easy enough to get along with. She laughed a lot and sometimes threw her head back when she did as if she’d never in her life had such a good time. He started to miss her through the week, got so he couldn’t remember how he had filled his time before he’d asked her out.
He did miss Murray, who had stayed on alone in London, to work. They’d both decided that residence was not for them so before Patrick moved home they had hunted around one morning and found an apartment near the campus and Murray was living there until September, working at the Ancaster Inn on the other side of the city. When Patrick told Bill about their decision, explaining that residence was more than half full of assholes, it seemed to Bill that Patrick might be getting unnecessarily surly.
Their apartment had once been just the upstairs of a normal house. It had a narrow living room across the front with big windows overlooking Richmond Street, two bedrooms, a small kitchen, and off the kitchen a back porch with a staircase leading down to a derelict backyard. There was an old fridge, a stove that was on its last legs, and a grey arborite table with two red chairs. They had borrowed a truck to pick up a couch and a couple of armchairs at the Sally Ann, bought two twin beds at Eaton’s, and raided Margaret’s stash in the basement at home for lamps and curtains and pots and pans and dishes and cutlery.
Patrick and Murray tried to describe their apartment one night when everyone was in the living room watching I Love Lucy. Bill’s face looked attentive but he laughed nearly every time Lucy opened her mouth, pounding the arms of his chair in appreciation. Margaret wouldn’t let Bill watch his other favourite show, The Honeymooners, not if she was around anyway, because growing up she’d had enough of sloppy, angry men screaming to last her two lifetimes and how could this possibly, possibly be funny?
She had understood for a long time that the invective at her own girlhood kitchen table, the blind faith in strict rules and the outrage that followed their breaking, had been prompted mostly by a sick longing for order, for a kind of peace, and she knew this longing was not unusual, probably not even despicable. But now, from the vantage point of middle age, standing at the kitchen sink, at her kitchen sink, she recognized that all of it together had been nothing more than ordinary selfishness and stupidity and perhaps even laziness, all of it together had only been her father’s way to make things easier for himself.
She guessed Bill likely turned on The Honeymooners when she wasn’t home. He’d told her that Art Carney was the one to watch, not Gleason, said the way Carney survived Gleason was what made it so enjoyable.
In a commercial for Everlasting pots and pans, when the boys saw the chance to bring everyone’s attention back to themselves, they announced that neither Margaret nor Daphne would be allowed to come in to clean their apartment. This claim to independence caused a look to pass quickly from Margaret to Daphne, one look among the many they would come to perfect between them, “the repertoire” it would eventually be called, after enough time had passed.
Sometimes Patrick and Sandra drove into London to see Murray. They would pick him up for an early show or just sit around talking before he had to go to work at midnight. Sometimes they arrived with groceries and Sandra made her Home Economics recipe for chili or stuffed green peppers or apple crisp. A few times a month they stayed overnight, telling everyone Murray was going to be there when he wasn’t.
Because Murray never had anyone at the apartment and because he drove home every time he had a couple of days off, Patrick assumed he had nothing special going for him in the city and it seemed reasonable to ask Sandra to set him up with someone. She soon had several possibles for consideration but Murray wasn’t biting. He worked, he slept, he drove home to see his parents, he went over to the house as usual to spend some time talking to Daphne or Paul or to Bill and Margaret.
Patrick didn’t say so directly, but he thought Murray’s reluctance was peculiar. He couldn’t comprehend why Murray was dragging his feet, especially since Sandra was willing to help with the hard part and the rewards were substantial. But he gave it up, carried on alone, left Murray out of it.
He had started to go out to Sandra’s and sit around on the porch with her father and the dogs if she was washing her hair or something, and soon he didn’t have to ask her out any more, she’d just tell him if she had to do something else. They would go to a show or lie around one house or the other watching television until they couldn’t stand it any longer and then they would drive out to the lake to find a private depression in a grassy dune.
Like Daphne, Sandra had two more years of high school, and one night out at the inland lakes after they’d spread the blanket on the sand, at her insistence they began to discuss a time other than the present. Sandra didn’t see the future as he did, as something entirely unknown but wide open, she saw the future as something you could put together, something you could cut out and assemble, like a red sundress. “What we need to have,” she told him, “are concrete plans.”
Patrick knew something was required, that he had to offer something up in return for the weight of her breasts in his hands, the strength of her legs locked behind his back, so he said he’d likely still be in school, he wanted to keep going as long as he could, so why didn’t she just plan on Western? Thinking this and saying it too soon after thinking it, he was for the first time annoyed with her, and then, almost immediately, with himself.
On the way back into town from the lake his annoyance solidified and shifted and landed square in his lap. Yes, they were having a good time, and yes, he hadn’t had any satisfactory action at Western, and yes, it was all normal and usual and probably expected, but there was no damn way it was going to be so thoroughly nailed down, not with him in it.
He replayed the blanket conversation in his head and then pushed back to a couple of other conversations he hadn’t paid enough attention to. Now he was mad, and sitting tight beside him in the front seat of Margaret’s Pontiac, Sandra picked up on his anger. She pulled away to get a good look at his face.
Almost from the beginning she had said the word love when there was no good reason to say it. He didn’t need to hear it, he had never given her any reason to believe he needed to hear it. He thought now, turning onto her concession, that he should have told her right from the beginning that he didn’t particularly like all the romantic talk, the love stuff, that he thought in fact it was a bit simple-minded.
And even at the start of this first dissolution of what he would much later in his life describe with a hard-won edge in his voice as a first affair, he knew that ending it was not going to be a cold-blooded exercise. This urge to stop her, to stop himself, was as hot as the urge to begin had been, easily as hot.
How to get it done, that was what he thought about as the summer cooled down. Fast or slow? And was there anyone to ask? Murray wouldn’t know. Paul wouldn’t know. But not Bill and certainly not Margaret.
* * *
MURRAY HAD FINISHED the year on the dean’s honour roll and he was more than happy to stay on in London at the apartment for the summer. After exams he quickly got himself a job as the night desk clerk at the Ancaster Inn out near the highway, undercutting any assumptions people might have had that he was counting on a free ride. He had never before found a job on his own, although he’d done his time in the office at the mill learning how to keep a ledger and he always helped out at Bill and Margaret’s and cut the grass at home, washed the cars, sometimes washed the dishes if his mother had one of her migraine headaches.
His parents had called him every two months or so that first year to say they were coming into the city and would he like to meet them downtown at the Iroquois for dinner, and one time they’d invited Patrick and Daphne to come along too, but they never went near the residence and they didn’t have many questions. They were content to let him manage the details of his life on his own. When he told them about the desk clerk job, they both said that sounded fine. His mother said he would get to meet people he perhaps wouldn’t get to meet otherwise and his father said working with the public was valuable experience for anyone.
He’d got lucky with his residence roommate, a studious Jewish guy from Toronto named Geoff whose marks hadn’t been high enough for U of T, but who wanted to transfer there after first year if he could pull it off. Geoff studied all the time, was devoted to his books, asked for and got Murray’s help with some of his essays. His father was a big-name journalist who had covered the war in France and Italy and then in the Philippines, and although his expectations never left the room, Geoff didn’t see him because he still had to be out of the country a lot, even in peacetime. He just couldn’t take the time to visit, understandably. Geoff said his father had a million stories, fantastic stories, and he tracked him through the world not by the pieces he wrote for newspapers but by the postcards taped above his bed, a small but growing gallery of exotic locales with the private, scribbled messages turned to the wall. He went home with Murray and Patrick a few times for the weekend and occasionally they hauled him down to the Ceeps for a wasted evening, buying him beer and telling him his skin was turning a putrid green from too much time at the books, that he’d never get laid if he didn’t put out at least a bit of effort. They won’t come to you, they told him, all the pretty horses.
Pretty horses notwithstanding, Geoff’s marks had been high enough for the desired transfer to U of T and after they were packed up he’d offered Murray his hand and thanked him for the help with the essays and told him if he was ever in Toronto, if he ever needed anything at all, to look him up, for sure.
In June, almost comfortable with his desk clerk job, Murray agreed at the last minute to book a night off sick so he could go home to take Daphne to her high school formal. She hadn’t really explained herself when she called to ask him so he assumed her on-again, off-again nonsense with Roger Cooper had left her stranded with a new dress and no date. At the dance, feeling a bit out of it, he spent perhaps too much time standing under the streamers talking to the teachers, but they had a nice time, Daphne told him she’d had a really nice time. And she got to show off the dress, which he understood to be the purpose of the exercise.
He drove home whenever he had a few days free to see everyone. When Margaret began to really show, it seemed all right to say something so he told her she looked great. She continued to make him feel welcome, setting a place for him at the table without making a big deal about it. Once she took his hand and brought it to her stomach so he could feel the soft punch of what she said was probably an elbow or a foot or a baseball bat.
At the Ancaster Inn he hardly saw anyone after midnight. He learned to put the registrations and the receipts in order for the bookkeeper and to clean up any mistakes made during the day shifts, which were the busy shifts. He always had a novel under way. Over the summer he went through all of Faulkner and then Steinbeck, ignoring Hemingway because even though Hemingway was supposed to have been a journalist and Murray was interested in journalism, from what he’d heard he was pretty sure he wouldn’t like the fiction. He wasn’t all that drawn to the tough stuff, the bulls and balls.
He didn’t see many of the motel’s usual clientele, the families. By the time he came on they were all tucked in for the night and when he left at dawn they were still sleeping or just up, just getting organized to go back on the road. He did see the evidence of a few obviously illicit affairs, men who registered late and alone and good-looking women who walked out through the lobby quickly in the middle of the night.
And he met Crystal, his first high-class hooker, a long-legged bottle redhead in very expensive clothes who arrived at the inn every three weeks through the summer on the arm of a man who called himself Mr. Crystal, who was her manager, her pimp. Mr. Crystal was a slight, boisterous man in a high-gloss white summer suit. When they registered he always left his mauve Lincoln Continental under the awning out front with the keys in it, running, and he always took two connecting rooms.
Crystal was a busy lady. All of her calls came in through Murray, through the switchboard which looked just like he had imagined a switchboard would look and which he’d almost mastered by the end of the summer. Sometimes, wide awake and brisk in the middle of the night, she would call down to the desk for tea and a muffin or something. There were no busboys on after midnight and, except for the calls prompted by the presence of Crystal herself, the switchboard was pretty quiet, so Murray would go into the kitchen and make her a pot of tea and grab a muffin or a Danish and take them down the inside corridor to her room. Eddie, the second-in-command maintenance man, would sometimes be in the kitchen with a couple of his crew, eating yesterday’s Danish, drinking coffee, and they would razz him, tell him he should demand a real good tip from a woman that well off.
Twice Crystal called down for two pots of tea and Murray found her sitting in a negligee talking to Mr. Crystal, who was always, at least any time Murray saw him, dressed in his classy white suit.
One night she opened the door wrapped in a peach see-through nightie thing with a thick ridge of fluffy feathers at the cuffs, the kind of thing Doris Day might wear to seduce Gordon MacRae. She sat down on the bed to watch Murray put the tray down and when he turned to look at her, not expecting a tip or anything, just looking, she patted the bed with her stubby fingers. He could see her jewellery on the bedside table, a watch surrounded with a heavy circle of diamonds and several large rings that looked cheap but likely weren’t. When she asked, clearly making it a question, “Take a load off?” he could feel quarts of blood rushing up through his neck to fill his face. Then she said, “I guess not,” and smiled a coy, almost kind smile. He saw when she smiled that she might be older than she looked.
They checked out a few days after her offer, moving on to Windsor or Toronto or some other city on their circuit. Mr. Crystal paid the bill with cash and handed Murray a crisp ten for all his trouble.
When they returned for another week at the end of the summer, and Crystal patted the bed again, Murray set the tray down on the small table by the window, locked all the doors, and climbed in beside her fully dressed, leaving the front desk unprotected and soon entirely forgotten. Unbuttoning his shirt, Crystal told him this one was on the house, because he had been such a sweetheart, such a darling. When he was naked, and shivering, she laughed a little and called him very fine, a fine specimen indeed. If she guessed it was his first real time, she didn’t let that spoil things. Halfway through, he decided that she most certainly was older than she looked and that this was not a bad thing but a good thing. She didn’t always wait for him to think of things to do and when she was finished with him he was almost laughing too, because now he knew, oh yeah, now he had the inside information.
* * *
IN JULY, DAPHNE got a job cooking at the drive-in restaurant out near the golf course and soon she couldn’t eat much of anything, couldn’t stand the smell of meat especially. At home Margaret fixed her cold plates, devilled eggs and cottage cheese and jellied fruit salads and marshmallows rolled in toasted coconut. Already feeling puffed up and clumsy with her pregnancy, she made the same plate for herself and by the end of the summer she said she felt much better.
Daphne had been briefly embarrassed about Margaret’s condition, mainly because at forty-two her eggs would probably be stale or at least no longer in their prime, which was exactly the reason not many women that old had babies. Not many women that old even got married. But she didn’t say anything because it wasn’t really her business and anyway what could she say? Have a nice baby?
After a month of Margaret’s cold plates, she dropped down to just over a hundred pounds and stayed there so the next time she drove over the Bluewater Bridge to Port Huron on a shopping trip with her friend Catharine she bought a black two-piece bathing suit, black to show off her tan, two-piece to show off her small midriff.
Climbing up after her onto the raft that was always anchored in front of Doc Cooper’s cottage, Roger Cooper told Daphne that he really liked the bathing suit but missed her old breasts. When she stretched out to sunbathe and didn’t laugh or even smile he said of course it didn’t matter, he understood, he understood completely.
Daphne had started to go out with Roger, who was a grandson to Doctor Cooper, in October of grade eleven. Roger was someone to want, someone to be pleased about getting. She had no idea why he’d asked her out, but if she’d had to guess she would have guessed that Doc Cooper, who had been at their house so often that spring, must have mentioned her name somehow.
Roger wasn’t tall but he was on the hockey team and the basketball team anyway because he was muscular and fast and accurate under pressure. He was handsome in a Montgomery Clift kind of way, dark, slick, very blue eyes. And he had nice square shoulders. If anyone had been asked to name just five guys in grade thirteen, Roger would have got named.
Daphne was not one of the grade-eleven girls who would have got named. But now she knew about some of the things she thought her mother likely couldn’t make herself say that night in the living room. She assumed that Patrick and Paul and Murray would be the same as Roger, anxious with their hands, eager with their tongues, quiet when they wanted something. Why wouldn’t they be?
She had not needed Murray’s help with grade eleven. He’d started her off with some useful habits when she was in grade nine, how to set logical priorities, when to bluff it through, when to dig deeper, when to quit. Occasionally, if he was home for the weekend, he still sat down with her at the dining-room table after Sunday lunch, leafing through her notebooks the way a teacher would. She told him twice that she didn’t appreciate this and when she finally told him please don’t do it any more, that she was getting first-class honours on her own, thank you, he quickly lifted his hands up and away from her work and pushed back his chair. He said he knew she didn’t need him, he was just curious.
In March, she did go into London with Murray’s parents for dinner at the Iroquois. The McFarlanes picked her up at home in their Buick, Mr. McFarlane knocking gently on the kitchen door, Mrs. McFarlane sitting patiently in the driveway. She had agreed to go partly because she had always thought they must be lonely, just the three of them, and partly because Margaret said what reason did she have to refuse? She wore the deep green wool dress that Margaret had given her for Christmas and she had to wear her duffel jacket over it because she had no good coat but Margaret said it wouldn’t matter, there would be a coat check any place the McFarlanes ate and she would leave her jacket there, before she went into the restaurant.
Murray’s parents seemed really pleased to have her along. Mrs. McFarlane talked a bit formally but quite easily, pausing to include her husband, explaining things to him as necessary, calling him dear. Daphne got the impression that they always talked like that, Mrs. McFarlane leading, directing the conversation toward some topics, away from others.
They met Murray in the lobby at the Iroquois Hotel and Patrick was there too, both of them in a shirt and tie and sports coat. After they checked their coats, walking into the restaurant beside Daphne, Mrs. McFarlane looked her up and down and then quietly told her that the dress suited her perfectly, because of her skin, which was like alabaster, and because she was so tiny. When Daphne told her it had been Margaret’s Christmas gift, Mrs. McFarlane nodded deeply as if she wasn’t the least surprised. She said that Margaret’s taste had always been pretty trustworthy.
Then, almost at their table, she turned to look directly at Daphne’s face and said how pleased they must be that her jaw had healed so remarkably well after that awful fall when she was a child. Daphne had to concentrate to keep walking. She knew what her jaw looked like. No one ever said anything to her about her jaw. It was a rule, a way to give her a chance to forget about it. But Mrs. McFarlane apparently made her own rules about what could get mentioned. Only when she turned to her husband to say how very unappetizing the lobsters looked in their tank did Daphne realize that she wasn’t expected to say anything back, that no answer was required. Mrs. McFarlane had just wanted to say it.
They were not offered drinks but Murray’s father consulted each of them and ordered some of the most expensive things on the menu: smoked salmon from the coast to start, T-bone steak and fries for the boys, Chicken Kiev for Daphne, Chateaubriand for himself and Mrs. McFarlane. The conversation started out a bit stilted but Mrs. McFarlane ploughed on through, including everyone on every topic at least briefly.
After dinner Mr. and Mrs. McFarlane went into the bar on their own for a drink, and when Patrick left to go to the washroom, Murray said to Daphne out of the blue that he’d decided he liked university so much because it was substance, it was something you could get your hands on. He nodded toward the bar and said it had always been this way with his parents, all surface, no substance. Daphne was fiddling with the pecan pie that Mr. McFarlane had recommended and insisted on ordering for her, telling the waiter it might put some meat on her bones. Looking up from the pie she told Murray that maybe substance was overrated anyway. Who could say?
In June she had a huge fight with Roger about his pushing her, even pleading with her sometimes, which made her cringe, so she’d had to ask Murray to come home to be her date for the spring formal. Margaret had already taken her over to Port Huron where they’d found a pale green organza dress with tiny, almost invisible sprigs of flowers, which Margaret said was the finest dress she had ever seen, and they’d bought a stiff, pale green fifty-yard crinoline to go with it and a pair of elegant satin spike heels, dyed to match. She couldn’t see any reason to miss the formal and she certainly wasn’t going to turn up with a brother.
Murray was a gallant escort. He made a game of being a gallant escort. He brought her a wrist corsage of white sweetheart roses and stood tall while Margaret pinned a carnation to his lapel. After the dance he kissed Daphne’s hand at the door as if he was going to turn and leave and then he came in with her to have a grilled cheese sandwich and to help her tell Margaret about the dance, although he had taken no notice of what girl was with what guy, and of course he had nothing of interest to say about any of the dresses.
Roger was back on the doorstep a week after the formal, his assumption being that if his replacement had to be good old Murray, he and Daphne were not really what you’d call history.
Roger was getting ready to go to Guelph to study veterinary medicine. His grandfather had carefully explained the difference in income between veterinary and ordinary practice, he had even estimated the difference in the two lifetime incomes to show him what his decision was really costing, but Roger ignored the numbers. He told Daphne they had all watched his grandfather go through years of deaths and sickness, always getting up in the middle of the night to drive over to see someone he couldn’t save anyway. He said he didn’t think he had what it took to live a normal life doing what doctors had to do, that his mother had told him when he was a kid that it was a lot worse than people imagined, that his grandparents knew things, miserable, ugly things, and of course they had to pretend they didn’t know anything at all when they met people on the street. He said he couldn’t see caring much if a cow died, although he understood full well the economic importance of keeping cows alive and kicking.
Saying all this, using the words couldn’t and save and normal and miserable and ugly and pretend, Roger had not stopped to think that he might be fouling Daphne’s memory of his lame, soft-spoken grandfather leaning over her mother’s bedside, and listening to him, she decided that his instincts were correct. He was wise to decide to stay away from people.
Daphne had realized by the end of June just how badly Roger wanted to leave, to get out of town, and through the summer she began to understand exactly how far away he was going, that it wasn’t just to Guelph. He had never once said a word about her jaw, about the off-centre look of her face, so she didn’t really believe that would be it but she could see her own absence in his future clear as day.
He had been telling her that he loved her and she believed he did in the sense that she was fine for now but she knew he said it only because he thought it was required. It was the thing guys said all the time. He could have put it lots of other ways but he would have been saying the same thing. Some nights out at the lake, lying on a blanket on the soft sand under the stars, listening to the lapping water, she would watch him fall alone into what he described as normal human passion. He insisted that she really loved him and then begged her, ordered her, to prove it. Sometimes he squeezed her arms so hard they were bruised when she woke up the next morning.
None of it was doing him much good. She had been holding the line and she was going to keep holding it. She wouldn’t let him take himself out of his khaki pants, would only touch him on the outside, her hand kissed and then directed by his own.
All through the summer they drove out to the lake to the Casino dance every Saturday night, sometimes double-dating with Paul and Andrea or some other couple, sometimes alone. Everybody went to the Casino. To amuse themselves, Daphne and Andrea pretended to have a crush on the lead singer, a young guy with a dreamy voice and a nondescript wife, and they wasted a lot of time trying to catch his eye, which annoyed Roger. Daphne danced with Murray and once in a while with Patrick and occasionally with some of the older guys from town who worked at the mill or the factory or the foundry, who she just sort of knew from working at the drive-in restaurant, who ribbed her and told her she was getting to be too hot to handle. She danced with her father if he and Margaret were there because Margaret usually spent most of the night standing out on the balcony talking to some of the other women and cooling off, pulling at her maternity top until the breeze caught it and sent it billowing out around her.
Roger told Daphne he didn’t care who she danced with. He wandered around talking to people or went out to the parking lot or down to the shore for a beer with some of the guys, and on one of the many nights he came back to her at the end of the dance a little drunk, he called her the thing he believed to be the worst possible thing a girl could be. Lying on the soft beach sand, staring up at the stars and thinking about the words cock and tease and about the men she had just danced with, Daphne told him she thought his brand of passion was just another word for lack of control.
“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.” And then, trying as he always did for another way in, he finally hung himself with, “What if this is our only chance?”
Daphne was content to make Roger pay in advance. She didn’t want, had no desire to create a heartsick parting at the end of the summer. She hated weak, blubbering movie-star tears and the idea of allowing him to see her shameful loneliness was as nauseating as the smell of the pukey meat she sometimes had to pitch into the garbage behind the drive-in.
When it was time, maybe after a few fall dates when he was home from Guelph for the weekend, if that’s what he thought he wanted, she would let him leave without any fuss at all. He wasn’t going to be hurting her. Hurting her, and then after he was gone, thinking about her that way, hurt.
* * *
PAUL WAS THE first one to be told outright that Margaret was pregnant. He listened to her throw up one Thursday morning in early June and, tensed up but afraid to even think about her being sick, he asked if maybe she shouldn’t go see Doc Cooper. She was sitting in a kitchen chair, clutching a cup of tea, holding a cold cloth to her forehead, groaning. She looked at him and tried to smile to ease his mind and then she laughed and said, “Not for about seven more months.”
He caught on fast, although it was the last thing he was expecting. “Holy shit,” he said.
She gave this right back to him, “Holy shit,” and laughed again.
When he said he wouldn’t let on, she told him, “Go ahead. Let on. Your father isn’t sure just how to do it and it’s likely time. It will be time soon.”
Paul had been taken on at McFarlane’s mill too, a few hours a week, not driving but loading sacks of feed on the trucks for delivery and hanging around the office wasting the bookkeeper’s time with jokes. One day the woman stopped Margaret on the street to tell her that she thought Paul was just wonderful, he was so funny, that he was becoming more and more like Sylvia in that way. But Paul told Margaret the bookkeeper thought everything was wonderful, she was one of those.
He had struggled in grade ten. Margaret had not been able to help him with his French or his Latin but under her eye his geometry marks had improved significantly and after Andrea Sparling materialized it looked as if he might pass.
In January, only five months after his mother’s death, he had taken Andrea home from the New Year’s Eve dance at the arena. He had always thought he wanted a tall girl, that he would look stupid with anything else, but Andrea Sparling wasn’t even five feet high. At first when they were dancing they tried to talk but she soon got tired of leaning back to look up at him and finally she just rested her face on his chest. Holding her, he thought, She has such a small back, how could anyone have such a small back.
The New Year’s dance was the big one. You could hardly move around the floor. People had house parties first, then they came over to the arena in laughing carloads. At eleven-thirty the band stopped and everyone got their coats and poured out into the cold night to walk uptown to the main intersection, where Front Street met George, to dance in circles around the lit-up Christmas tree, a twenty-five-foot spruce that had been set in a big tub of sand and secured by guy wires to the highest corners of the two banks. At midnight, the Town Hall siren went off to wail in the new year, 1956. Everyone was supposed to kiss everyone else but Paul lifted Andrea off her feet and held her buried in his arms so no one else could touch her.
Andrea lived out in the country, in the middle of eight hundred acres of corn, and her father kept one of his several old half-tons tuned up so she could come and go without bothering him. Like other farm fathers, he expected his kids to grow up a little quicker than town kids might, mostly because he didn’t have the time or the patience to wait around for it. Paul knew Andrea’s sister’s boyfriend Don, who was in grade twelve. They played on the same hockey team, Paul still a star forward because of his long legs, his long reach, Don a squat brute with a scarred face who played defence, who would take anyone on, who lived to throw his gloves off and get serious. Andrea came to all their games although she didn’t humiliate Paul, didn’t yell at the referee like some of the other girls, or squeal at his accomplishments, or cry into her angora mitts if he got slammed hard into the boards or sliced by some thug’s high stick.
And she became a cheerful fixture at the house when she wasn’t babysitting the Weston tribe after school. Bill started to call her Andy and she befriended Margaret, pitched in whenever there was work to be done. She jumped up after supper to dry the dishes, put the ironing board away for Margaret, grabbed an extra dust cloth on Saturday mornings. She did her homework with Paul in the dining room, eating the taffied popcorn Margaret made for them.
They appeared to be suited to each other. Andy treated Paul the way a young bride would, enjoying him and pleasing him and teaching him how to please her. They made love more often than any of the others and with the happiest enthusiasm. They parked the half-ton in the drive shed out at the farm and climbed into the back with blankets or they crawled into their own beds when they found themselves alone in an empty house. They were firm in their happiness, oblivious, never gave getting caught a second thought. Andy had no questions to ask Paul about his mother’s death, although she held him when he cried and listened quietly the few times he spoke about it, remembered from one time to the next exactly what he had said, the specific words he’d used.
Margaret knew what they were up to and one night after the dishes were done she quietly reached into her apron pocket and slipped Andy the folded list of contraceptive possibilities that she and Christine Lucas, who was Cooper’s nurse, had come up with between them. She had phoned Christine at home and given her every opportunity to decline the conversation because kids especially were not supposed to be given any official guidance but Christine said she was fine with it. “Go ahead,” she’d told Margaret. “Shoot.”
“I just wanted to check that there wasn’t something I’m unaware of,” Margaret had told her. “Perhaps something new.”
“Nothing new under the sun,” Christine said. “Not that I’ve heard about. And I’d hear.”
They had agreed to list sheaths first, which Christine being Christine called galoshes, then a cap, which she said she could likely get her hands on because there were sometimes one or two lying around the office, then the killer foam, then the Pope’s old standby, rhythm, which Christine said certainly worked for him, and finally they threw in pulling out and abstinence. They’d debated a bit about the pulling out and the abstinence, Margaret’s position being that there was no sense recommending something that wasn’t likely to happen and Christine’s position being you never knew.
“I heard once that women used to make caps out of lemons cut in half,” Christine said. “Which makes you think about lemonade a little differently.”
“Really?” Margaret said. “I expect my mother might have used a sponge with vinegar.” Until that moment, she had not once wondered how her mother had solved her own problem.
“Then likely mine did too,” Christine said. “No such thing now though.” And then she couldn’t stop herself. “Do you mind me asking who this information is for?”
Margaret did mind and she had prepared herself for the question. But still, she was thoroughly disappointed in Christine. “All and sundry,” she’d said. “All and sundry.”
Andy just smiled as she read the list of possibilities at the kitchen sink. “It’s fine,” she whispered. “I know what I’m supposed to know. I asked Cooper and he filled me in. But thanks.”
“Oh,” was all Margaret could think to say. Cooper was taking his chances. But then again, maybe not. Before Andy could return the list, she thought to ask and was pleased she did, “Maybe you could mention some of this to Daphne?”
“Sure,” Andy told her, still whispering, still smiling. “If you like, I can do that.”
When Paul wasn’t at the mill working, he took it upon himself to stay close to home. Andy had taught him what it meant to be thoughtful and he tried to anticipate Margaret’s needs, to prevent her from doing any of the heavy work. He cut the grass and set up a fan in the kitchen. He and Andy helped her empty and paint the cupboards, chucking the odd things that had been sitting unused at the back of some of the shelves: a cracked teapot, a rusted strainer, two tins filled with years of unrecognized buttons. They made room for Margaret’s good china which had been waiting all this time in boxes in the basement. Knowing because she was told every time she turned around that she would soon have her hands full, Margaret said what she would really like would be to get the living room and dining room and hall painted. Paul and Andy took right over. They did it all, without any help from Patrick or Murray or Daphne or Bill.
And the three of them drove into Sarnia to buy a white crib with a good mattress, set it up in the big bedroom where it would stay for a while at the foot of Bill and Margaret’s bed. After that, Daphne would be gone or almost ready to go and the plan was that one end of her room would become the baby’s.
Bill had told Paul when he got his grade-ten results in June that if his marks didn’t improve considerably by October he would have to hang up his skates for grade eleven. So Paul was planning to work fairly hard when they went back to school. Now that you no longer needed two languages besides English to do anything, he decided he could afford to drop Latin. He thought things should get easier without the Latin and Andy said she thought so too.
* * *
AT THE BEGINNING of September, Patrick and Murray started their second year at Western. They liked their apartment and they appreciated the casseroles Margaret sent in, the shepherd’s pie and the meat loaf, the baked beans. On their own they ate a lot of bologna and bread, sometimes not even making the effort to slap these together into a sandwich, and spaghetti and meatballs was a time-consuming big deal, a near feast.
They studied hard, compared marks. They brought home armloads of books and went for days without talking unless something actually had to be said. Their papers were twice as good as they needed to be and they both began to rank near the top in all the courses that mattered.
Some weekends Sandra came in on the bus to be with Patrick, telling her parents that she slept on the couch in the living room. She was in grade twelve with Daphne and worked in her aunt’s dress shop after school now, so she had lots of clothes. Murray was happy enough to see Sandra, at least in the beginning. He told her she should bring Daphne with her some weekend, suggested they could go some place, the four of them. But she didn’t bring Daphne and she didn’t say why either, or even if she’d asked her.
After a couple of months of her visits, Murray got tired of Sandra’s presumption, as if her place in Patrick’s bed gave her the right to make herself entirely at home. He got fed up finding the cereal box empty, or the cheese gone, used as a middle-of-the-night snack, and he got particularly tired of the sounds she made in bed. He practised asking them what the hell they thought the walls were made of and did they think it was enjoyable to listen to, all that groaning and her stupid cat sounds?
He came in drunk one night and said he wanted some ground rules. He said she could come some weekends but not every weekend. And she could damn well bring some groceries with her. And she could try to use a little vocal restraint when she was on her back.
In a quiet, mincing voice that was worse than screaming would have been, Sandra asked him why he didn’t just pretend he couldn’t hear anything. She said that’s what friends did. And then she wanted to know why someone with all the money in the whole God damned world would take the time away from his busy schedule to worry about who ate what. Murray didn’t answer her. He was very unsteady on his feet. He went to bed.
Sandra left in the morning and stayed away for a month. This was what Patrick had been saying he wanted, so it should have made him happy but he soon began to feel marooned without the sex, without sex being there for him, regularly. He sulked around and banged dishes and left the bathroom a roaring mess in the mornings. Murray held back, didn’t say, Tough shit, partner.
Murray did start to bring the occasional girl back after a session at the library or after a party he’d tripped into, usually someone who looked to have a bit of spirit. When he got one of these girls in bed he would always encourage her to let herself go, as if he wanted to free her from some sad old restraint. One night after several loud, boisterous sessions in a row, when Patrick and Murray were both in the tiny kitchen, each of them heading for the fridge, Patrick shoved Murray out of the way and then Murray shoved harder, surprisingly hard, and then they pulled themselves back against opposite walls.
“At least Sandra loves me,” Patrick said. “At least she knows what she wants. She’s not just some little piece, some one-time only.…”
“What crap,” Murray said, stepping forward to open the fridge door, taking out a beer and handing it off, taking out another. “You don’t love her and she’s the only one on the planet who doesn’t know it because you haven’t got the stones to make her comprehend. What pure crap.”
Sandra stayed mad. This was her plan gone wrong. Patrick knew that she assumed he was pissed off for the same reason she was angry, that she expected him to do something, to stand up for her, to make it right. But he didn’t. Murray had given him his chance and, unfortunate as it was, he pretty much had to take it. Sandra was going to have to stay mad.
He had promised in September to take her to the Christmas ball with another couple, some cousin of hers who was in fourth-year law and his girlfriend from McGill. He believed he should stick to that promise, so Sandra came into the city and dragged him downtown to rent a tux to go with the heavy peau-de-soie dress she had just finished. The dress was a soft sea green to set off her dark red hair and it had a scooped neckline that exposed her freckles and her cleavage, which she darkened just before they left the apartment with brown eye shadow, a little trick she said she’d recently learned.
Before the dance, the four of them went out to a new, classy restaurant for dinner where the guys talked about law and drank too many Rusty Nails, a two-hour start that more or less ruined the rest of the evening. Patrick was hanging over the toilet in his rented tux when Sandra went out the apartment door for the last time, her hair still sprayed to perfection and her sea green dress still beautiful, far too beautiful for rejection.
A week later Murray’s father arrived out of the blue to have a talk with Patrick. He climbed up the steep derelict stairs to the back door to ask Patrick if he had a few minutes and then told him to get his coat so they could sit in the Buick to have their talk. Sitting in the car he explained to Patrick that he understood he was doing very well, and he asked if he thought a further degree would be useful to him. Patrick confessed that he had been encouraged by one of his professors to keep going, that law looked interesting. Mr. McFarlane told Patrick that he expected nothing in return for what had been provided so far but perhaps they should look at future support as a business deal. He said he would be pleased to see Patrick continue if he would agree to make reasonable repayments when he was properly established, as he most surely would be, in almost no time. He said, “Business goes in cycles and we’re in a slight slump at the mill now, maybe you know that.”
Patrick said he understood, and thank you, and when he opened the car door, Mr. McFarlane told him that the next weekend he was home they would go up to the bank together to sign a note. He said he would tell the banker Patrick’s word was adequate collateral and a first instalment would be deposited in his account for him to manage as necessary. Patrick recognized Mr. McFarlane’s words as only the courtesy of flattery, the wilful thinking of an old man determined to back a younger, unproven man, but he accepted the flattery because by now he believed what Mr. McFarlane said, he did believe he would be able to hold up his end of the deal.
Daphne was working hard in grade twelve, carrying two of the grade-thirteen sciences because she had decided on nursing and to make the following year, which was understood to be rough, a little easier. Now that Roger was gone she had more time on her hands, so in November she started to go down to the arena to help teach the smallest skaters their figures and their little routines, to prepare them for the winter carnival when they would all be mice or rabbits on ice.
She cooked three nights a week at the drive-in and waited for someone to ask her out. No one did. No one else knew that Roger was finished with her and she could hardly make an announcement. She didn’t help Margaret as much as she might have but when her father brought this up at the supper table, as casually as he could, Margaret said, “That’s all right, Bill. She’s already working quite hard enough.”
Paul settled successfully into grade eleven, and into Andy.
* * *
THE GRANDPARENTS STILL stopped in, Bill’s mother and father, Sylvia’s mother and father. None of them talked outright about the pregnancy although they didn’t indicate anything remotely close to shock that Margaret would want and feel entitled to her own child.
In early December Sylvia’s mother pulled into the shovelled driveway with her trunk open. She came into the kitchen to put a coat over Margaret’s shoulders and then led her out to the car to show her a wicker bassinet, their gift to the baby. She had made a long white eyelet skirt for it and there was a box of satin bows to be attached after the baby was born, when they’d know whether it should be pink or blue. Left on her own, Margaret would not have had bows of any colour, but she was not on her own. She would never again be on her own.
The two of them lifted the bassinet from the trunk and brought it into the living room. That week and the week that followed, as if everyone had been waiting for a sign, other baby apparatus arrived, a big proud buggy for the spring from Bill’s parents, a playpen, a high chair, rattles and rag dolls and a small zoo of stuffed animals. People just kept arriving at the door with presents. Margaret was astonished that so many would take the trouble.
On December 19, she went into hard labour straight from sleep. Bill recognized the sounds she made but he wasn’t adequately prepared because he had not expected it to go so fast. He’d just assumed the older the woman, the slower, the more difficult the labour. He got her into the car and drove out of town through the dark, through the light sleet. The big highway was almost empty. There were only a few hulking semis either on their way to the Bluewater Bridge at the border or just off it, heading for Toronto. He was acutely aware of the black ice that coated the sheltered sections of the road, black the worst of all ice because it was invisible in the dark, it was not even there until your headlights made it shine and by that time you were on it, committed.
As he drove, he talked slowly and deliberately, telling Margaret that from his experience everything seemed exactly normal and that she had to try hard to relax between the contractions, had to keep some of her strength in reserve because she’d be needing it.
At the hospital, he pulled onto the emergency ramp and ran in to get someone, returning with a nurse who pushed a wheelchair. He followed as she wheeled Margaret inside to a desk to do the paperwork and then up the elevator. When they came to the case-room doors the nurse pointed him down the hall to an alcove of brown plastic chairs and then she pushed Margaret through the doors quickly, robbing him of the chance to say one last encouraging word to Margaret’s back.
They put Margaret out right after the delivery. An hour later Bill was allowed into her room but she wasn’t conscious, didn’t know he had kissed her forehead. They told Bill his second daughter appeared to be a bit early but was fine and that Margaret’s uterus was in shock, a common enough reaction with such a fast delivery. Outside Margaret’s room, a nurse wheeled the baby down the corridor and let him look at her for maybe two minutes and then she left him standing there alone. On her way back to the nursery she turned around and said, “You might as well be on your way. Your wife will need her rest.”
He drove the thirty miles home just before dawn. The wet snow was thicker on the windshield and the traffic had picked up so he was forced to take it slow.
When he walked into the kitchen Daphne and Paul were waiting at the table with a pot of coffee ready for him on the stove. “A girl,” he told them. “And Margaret’s all right. She did fine.” He said Margaret was sleeping now, that they’d decided to put her to sleep because it had been extremely fast. “It was very, very fast,” he said. In answer to Daphne’s questions, he said he had no idea how much their sister weighed, all he could say was that she was tiny, a real little runt, and he couldn’t say either if she looked like anyone or when they might come home. After only a few sips of coffee he stood to go upstairs to get ready for work. “I’ll come home at noon,” he called back from the stairs, “and we’ll go back in together.”
Daphne called Patrick and Murray in London and got them out of bed. She talked to each of them, said the same things twice. “It’s a girl and Margaret came through with flying colours. She’s absolutely fine. It’s sister Sally.”
Margaret’s uterus gradually came out of shock and when she woke up, alone, she ran her hands over her sore, softened stomach and then up over her breasts, which in the last few months had become ridiculously large and which were now aching and hard as melons.
They fed Sally sugar water in the nursery and brought her to Margaret several times a day to try to take the breast, one nurse staying with them always, even after Margaret told her that it might be better if they were on their own. By the second day Sally had caught on and the nurse finally left them in peace. Bill had brought Daphne and Paul in that first day to look at their sister through the nursery window and the boys drove down from London, coming awkwardly into the quiet of Margaret’s room in their coats and boots. After four days of it, Margaret told Bill she wanted out, as soon as possible, yesterday.
When Margaret brought Sally home everyone was ready to hold her, she was never down. Bill called her the Christmas present. After the boys got the tree up and decorated, Daphne wrapped Sally’s squirming naked body in a red ribbon and carefully tucked her in among the other presents for a picture. Margaret leaned against the living-room arch and watched Daphne do this not because she was even slightly worried about Sally in Daphne’s beautiful hands but because before Sally joined them she had not once seen Daphne reach to touch anyone, man or beast.
Murray’s parents were on their first Caribbean cruise, so the big brick house beside the United Church was dark and empty. Murray unpacked but he didn’t stay even long enough for the heat to come up before he got back in his car. He had every reason to go over to Bill and Margaret’s. More reason now. He assumed he would be welcome to join them for Christmas dinner but he offered to buy the turkey anyway and Margaret said sure, that would be fine, although she would appreciate it if he let her go up to Sylvia’s father at Clarke’s and pick it out herself. Last year Bill had gone up on his own and after a Christmas drink or two out back with everyone he had come home with a twenty-eight pounder and, although she hadn’t said so and would not have said so, she believed the meat in a younger, smaller bird was just a lot more tender. If quantity was going to be an issue, better two smaller birds than one monster. That was her policy.
Margaret knew that with all this help around she had it much easier than most new mothers. She rested, aware of her good fortune. When Sylvia’s mother asked discreetly if her milk was coming down all right, Margaret put her hands to her astonishing breasts and laughed out loud, said there was enough for Sally and likely quite a few others. Sally thrived.
* * *
IN EARLY APRIL of the following year, at the end of a beautiful first long week of spring, Margaret stood with her hands buried in soapy water at the kitchen sink watching evening overtake the backyard. Sally was in her basket on the floor at her feet, sleeping as she always did with her small fists curled and her arms uplifted in the position of surrender, her soft scent almost visible. Margaret liked to stand at the kitchen window watching the shadows from the trees make their way across the grass. There were patterns she could anticipate now. She didn’t know if it was having Sally or just more time alone since she’d given up her job, but she saw things here, lovely things, all the time.
The rolling April sky was threatening to do something before nightfall and three yard squirrels were quarrelling stupidly over the hickory nuts they’d hidden in the fall, chasing each other across the garage roof and halfway up the trees, around and around the lawn chairs, which were still overturned from the winter. Bill had been talking about having the back hickories cut down, using the space they took for a shed to store the odds and ends that accumulated, of their own volition, he said, in the garage. He said he could disguise the shed with a trellis or an arbour, maybe add a garden bench. He said with some of the shade gone Margaret could plant some vegetables out there if she liked.
Patrick had come home for Easter to work a week at the feed mill because one of the full-time guys had some heart trouble, and as Margaret rinsed the glasses under the hottest possible water she heard him coming quietly down the stairs. Sylvia had been correct about her oldest son. Lately he had been spending a lot of his free time in his room with his stereo, listening to records, and he always moved quietly now, you never quite knew where he was. He was too well mannered, too thoroughly trained for much outright anger, for outbursts, and she would not have thought to use the word depressed because that word was saved for people who were in serious difficulty, but she did come up with the word cranky. She assumed that a good part of his crankiness was directed at her, although she did not dream that Patrick would tell her what was on his mind. From what she had seen so far, they were not in the habit of levelling with each other in this house, certainly not the way she was used to anyway, with screaming matches and foul, ugly words that had to be mopped up the next day, with mindless accusations that still rang clear miles and years away. And she wasn’t about to teach them how.
Patrick walked into the kitchen wearing a new ball glove, his Christmas gift from Murray. He was working it with his fist, pounding it, giving it shape, and when he pushed the screen door open to leave she stopped him with a question. “When you consider the fact that men generally have longer legs,” she said, “do you believe the greater distance between the bases really does make baseball a harder game than softball?”
His face showed mild surprise but he thought for a minute and gave her a serious answer. “Well, I think that’s the idea,” he said.
“I wonder,” she said. “Sometimes I wonder if I couldn’t have played baseball, given my legs.” She turned to look at him. “Your mother and I played softball together,” she said. “She was a top-flight first baseman and I myself was a half-decent shortstop. You likely don’t remember,” she said, “but sometimes your grandparents brought you guys to the park to watch in your pyjamas.” And then to give him some context, to give him a way to imagine it, she told him, “This was when the men were overseas.”
He was halfway out the door, leaning against the screen, waiting.
She picked up the pile of plates from the counter and lowered them carefully down through the water. “Although no one ever put it in so many words,” she said, “your mother and I were pretty much the backbone of that team. We were good,” she said, nodding once and firmly as someone would after any fair judgement. When she said, “One year we came this close to the provincial championship,” she lifted her hand from the suds to show him the smallest possible space between her thumb and forefinger.
Patrick looked at her soapy hand and for just a split second, but surely, his face softened. There it is, Margaret thought, and, Now maybe that’s done. Then he gave her his own clumsy nod and turned his face to the sound of Murray’s car on the gravel in the driveway.
Margaret raised her head to smile at Murray through the window. She knew he would be watching to see if she did, they all kept an eye on her to see what she might do. And she knew he would be able to see the smile because she had been walking Sally up and down the streets in her high, proud buggy in the evenings and now she understood better than some that what looked from the inside like a square of shadowy darkness was really in the dusk a square of framing light. Murray would see the smile and not as a freakish reflection as she saw it, but clearly, unmistakably. Seeing it, he might put one more tick in his Margaret’s All Right column. She realized that Murray, too, had needed time to get used to things. She had watched him grieve, maybe not as obviously as the others, but not less.
“Sally and I might come to some of your games this summer,” she offered, and although Patrick had nothing to say to this, he did take the time before he jumped the steps to use his elbow against the closing of the screen door so Sally wouldn’t be frightened awake by a bang.
The last part of what Margaret had told Patrick had been a lie, had been what her notoriously blunt, profane, and long-deceased father would have called a bare-assed lie. She had hardly known Sylvia. They had never played on the same ball team and neither of them had ever got close to any championship.
She did have a memory of the Chambers kids on the bleachers those summers when the men were away. They would already be bathed and ready for bed, Paul and Daphne wrapped in blankets in their grandparents’ arms, Patrick running loose with the other boys. Banks of park lights had been installed to illuminate the diamond for night games, sometimes there were two a night, and she did remember warming up behind the bleachers, glancing over once in a while to see how the other game was going and seeing Sylvia on first base slamming a fist into her glove, yelling ball talk with the other women, jumping funny little jumps on the bag to keep herself revved up.
And what’s a lie, she thought, against everything else? Against Sylvia’s bone-thin dying? Or Bill’s having to learn to love a second woman a second way? Against her own stale life above the Hydro office, the small rooms holding like swamp gas the uncut smell of her own body, her own habits, her own little difficulties. Against her living-room view of the cenotaph, where a name she had once said softly and often was etched two inches high in the granite column, her view of that column fouled by filthy windows she could neither open nor get anyone to wash. Against the secret, muffled, after-the-war footsteps of a man not her husband mounting the stairs late in those long evenings above the Hydro office, the pleasure of his company, his praise, and then the hush of broken, wondrous promises. What, pray tell, is a lie?
She was ninety per cent certain Patrick would never mention the championship to anyone, he wasn’t that type, and even if it did get mentioned one day, she could rear up and say, Sure we did, of course we did. She could talk about those years long enough to make them all believe they misremembered. And they would defer to her, just as surely as they watched her. Truth be told, she thought they should be ready to offer a few lies on her behalf.
Alone now, she turned from the window and looked down at the basket at her feet. And then she snapped her sudsy wrist hard in the air above the basket, releasing a cluster of rainbow bubbles that fell in slow time down to her perfectly formed Sally who, sleeping, could neither reach to touch them nor watch with an innocent’s bewilderment their bursting.