THEY RENTED DUNWORKIN for the entire month of July. Other years Bill had taken his holidays when they were at the lake, but because it was only a fifteen-minute drive from town and because he couldn’t see sitting around on his duff for four whole weeks, he decided not to that summer. The plan was that he would go back and forth to work every day and Margaret and Sally would stay put. The rest could come and go as it suited them.
Dunworkin was one of the oldest and biggest cottages on the beach. It was painted a muted light green, and it sat in the dunes, was tucked into the grassy dunes for protection from the winds off the water. As part of the deal, a fourteen-foot cedar-strip outboard with an easily managed twenty-five-horse motor sat beached on the sand in front of the cottage, and after an evening spin out on Lake Huron, when it was time to make the turn to come in for a drink, Bill sometimes made a game of testing the strength of his middle-aged eyesight against the block letters painted on a board above the screen-porch door. Like most of the other cottages up and down the beach, Dunworkin had always had its name, was probably named soon after it was built in the twenties, or maybe before, when it was still just someone’s good idea.
It was a magnificent cottage. Across the front, a deep, screened-in, slightly sloping porch with hinged board shutters that in good weather were left hooked up to the ceiling held a picnic table for card games and Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle, several Muskoka chairs painted either a deep cherry red or black, an old canvas hammock at one end and at the other a swinging couch suspended from the ceiling on rusty chains.
Inside the cottage proper there was a large main room with two old maroon sofas and several low-slung upholstered chairs, none of which matched each other or anything else, and beside these a few rickety little tables, each with an ashtray, one with a stack of Reader’s Digests and National Geographics for rainy days. The ceiling was a grid of rough-weathered beams and painted plywood. The walls had been finished with good pine panelling and the floor was covered with broad pine planks. Visible footpaths had been worn into the planks’ grain from the front door back into the kitchen and from the kitchen past the big oak dining table to the open staircase.
The fieldstones in the fireplace on the end wall had been darkened with years of smoke curling out before the fire got going properly and above them a heavy, broad mantel held a spread-out collection of necessities and treasures: pink shells from some ocean, four arrowheads, a red flyswatter, a flashlight, a transistor radio, a small, decorative Japanese fan, and a large box of Eddy matches. Beside the fireplace the owner had left a well-stacked supply of dry wood and a beat-up wicker laundry basket filled with newspaper and kindling.
There was cottage art. Hanging above the mantel a large, heavily framed oil depicted a man in a small boat who was making his way through dense, drifting fog toward a looming clipper ship, the man sitting hunched against the elements, the long oars just lifted from the water, the only real light the painter allowed caught in the drops falling from the oars back into the sea. On the wall at the kitchen door a small framed needlepoint sampler firmly admonished all who entered to leave their troubles behind them and taped to the wall beside the stove a 1963 calendar, courtesy Trevor Hanley’s Chev Olds, had been turned to July, to Saskatchewan. It was the kind of calendar with each month of the year matched to a picturesque colour photograph of a touristy scene from one of the provinces and July was an aerial shot of two lonely but evidently prosperous prairie farms, each of them surrounded by a rectangular shelterbelt of trees and by worked fields, muted tan or green. A small river twisted across the photograph and the sky above the fields was a western summer blue, bouncing with light. And hanging perpetually crooked on the pine wall beside the front door there was another, quite-a-bit-smaller oil painting, this one of a tiny-waisted turn-of-the-century woman dressed in a voluptuous rose dress and a wide-brimmed pink hat. She carried a parasol against the sun and offered the room an old-fashioned, come-hither smile. Bill named her the Tart of Dunworkin and straightened her every time he went out the door.
Compared to town, the kitchen was primitive but adequate. There was hardly any counter space but there were two large banks of pine cupboards, both hot and cold running water at a deep porcelain sink, and a fridge new enough to have a decent freezer across the bottom. The prize was the stove. It was an old six-burner with both a baking and a warming oven. In May, when they’d come out looking for a cottage to rent, it was the stove that had clinched it for Margaret. This was a stove she would have traded her own for.
Upstairs there were five bedrooms and a screened-in sleeping porch that sloped down toward the beach in agreement with the porch below it. There were beds of every kind, old double beds very high off the floor that had once been good pieces of furniture, likely picked up at auction sales, newer single beds on wheels, a rollaway, three army cots.
When the owner had shown them the cottage, he had followed them from room to room and Margaret hadn’t had the nerve to inspect the mattresses with him standing right there, but as soon as they’d brought everything in from the cars, the first thing she did was go upstairs to lift and turn each of them. When Daphne brought up the basket of sheets and blankets, Margaret told her she had been hoping for something fresher on the other side but these warhorses had been turned before, many times. Then she said they would just have to do, wouldn’t they?
Everyone came for the first weekend, all eleven of them. Bill and Margaret and Sally, who was six, Patrick and Mary who were to be married in two weeks in the chapel at Springbank Park in London, Murray on his own again because his wife Charlotte was in Hamilton at her parents’, Paul and Andy with their arms full of Neil and Krissy and all their attendant gear, Andy pregnant again with what she called their last baby for sure, and Daphne.
None of them mourned Murray’s wife’s absence. He had brought Charlotte up the previous summer, just before they were married in Toronto, and everyone had been first surprised and then disappointed. Charlotte dove right in, and while they understood that working for a television station might make someone necessarily forthright, she couldn’t seem to have a conversation without trying to enlarge herself. She paid an extraordinary amount of attention to her appearance, changed her clothes three times a day, expected other people to change theirs. She sat at the supper table puzzled as if she didn’t quite know how to manage just one fork, dropped names like Tolstoy and Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent and Bloomingdale’s, drank only what she called the best Scotch, assumed ignorance, presumed envy. Looking across the supper table at Sally, who at five was freckled and bony and sometimes clumsy and often left in general but happy disrepair, Charlotte told them that she herself had been an unusually beautiful child. She was without question pretty, with her mink-brown eyes and her snub nose and her white, gleaming teeth and she did have the body of a slightly underfed showgirl. But she wasn’t the first good-looking person they’d had a chance to eat supper with. They’d never heard anyone say such a thing.
After Murray decided to marry her, he told them that her father had three car dealerships in Hamilton, that he’d got a pretty good start in the fifties. He said her mother was a great woman, very funny, and a big volunteer. None of this explained anything.
Patrick in particular detested Charlotte and was always ready to call her the Queen if Murray wasn’t around to hear it. Bill and Paul simply ducked out when she came into a room, the sight of her reminding them always of some important thing they’d forgotten they had to do. Daphne tried the hardest, taking the trouble to slip Charlotte a few easy clues. After the third meal at Margaret’s table in town she handed her a fresh tea towel, meaning to say, Margaret looks tired, she cooked, you ate, now maybe you could help dry the damn dishes. She deliberately and repeatedly said Margaret’s name, meaning to say, It would be a really good thing if you stopped calling Margaret Marg. She carefully referred to her niece and nephew as the kids, meaning to say, If you’d pay attention, you would see that we are not the kind of people who want the kids called the children. Charlotte might have saved things if she’d noticed and adapted a bit but it looked as if she couldn’t be bothered. And they hadn’t wanted much. Margaret told Bill the absence of a patronizing tone of voice would have done it for her.
No one could imagine Charlotte at the lake anyway, so far away from a decent hairdresser, the sun so hot, the flies so thick on a muggy day, the mattresses turned but still clearly suspect under Margaret’s crisp sheets.
* * *
MARGARET WAS FORTY-NINE and Bill had turned fifty-one that March. Bill’s hair was mostly grey and he had what he liked to call bandy old-man legs. This would have astonished him even five years before, his legs going. They had always been strong, for most of his life his strength had been in his legs. He was deeply embarrassed to wear the Bermuda shorts Margaret and Daphne had decked him out in the summer before, two identical pairs of them, plaid, but he wore them then and he was wearing them again this year. What else could you wear at the lake? He drew the line at sandals. He was either in his normal shoes and socks or he was barefoot.
It had been a wretched winter, long at both ends, with weeks of high wind and sleet that had made driving treacherous. Then for one solid month after Christmas there was nothing but new snow, wet and dangerously heavy on the roofs. Lots of people had decided to climb up to shovel their roofs clean that year, Bill and the boys among them. Margaret had got herself through the winter imagining this month at the lake and after they had spoken for the cottage she told Bill that it might be the last summer with all of them together, and for this reason they should do what they could to make it one of the best summers they’d ever had.
She was very much looking forward to Patrick’s wedding. She had her dress, which was not the expected mother-of-the-groom beige but teal blue with panels and a very low-cut back, and Bill had bought his first new suit since Sylvia’s death, a good navy pinstripe that should do him another seven or eight years. Aside from the groom’s dinner, which was to be held the night before the wedding and which they had decided to have at the cottage, they didn’t have any particular responsibilities at their end. The wedding was to be quite small because Mary wasn’t much for ceremony and her parents, nice people who had always lived in London and who had a cottage down the lake, said when Margaret called to offer her help that they had everything under control.
Patrick and Mary seemed to Margaret perfectly matched. Where Charlotte appeared to be just a run-of-the-mill phoney, Mary was forthright, pleasantly frank and blunt. She was never rude, not even slightly, but if you asked her for an opinion, you might as well be ready because you’d get one. You could tell listening to her that she would have been astonished to be told she was blunt. And meeting her mother you could see it was not likely that she would be mellowing with age. Like her mother, Mary had large, wide-set eyes, a very thick head of dark hair, and good, delicately squared shoulders. But she was gracious about her appearance, laughed about it, said she was more than happy to be told that she looked like Jackie Kennedy, who wouldn’t be? Although Margaret neither said nor indicated anything of the sort, she was pleased to see that Mary had almost cured Patrick of his habit of taking refuge behind his sulky little moods. When he did try to escape, Mary went right in after him to haul him out.
And Murray had his own someone. Charlotte was quite unlike any woman Margaret had ever known but she’d had a good talk with herself about Charlotte and she had decided that at the end of the day, if that was what Murray wanted, they were all going to have to learn to like it. There had to be something there, something Murray could see. He wasn’t a fool.
There was no question at all in Margaret’s mind about Paul and Andy. Three years married, two kids, bang, bang, and another due soon. They’d had a big country wedding out at Andy’s church on a hot Saturday in June. There were two hundred people in the pews, friends, relatives, neighbours, and then a wonderful country meal and a dance of course. The only thing that spoiled it was Andy’s dad’s coughing, not because it interfered with the vows or the music but because it made a few of the people who loved him think they might be back at the church sooner than they wanted to be. And so they were. A year later, after he was gone, and gone quickly, diagnosed, cared for, and then dead inside of two months, his wife moved into town and Paul and Andy had a farm to run. But they were doing all right. They planted only cash crops and there was no livestock, so it wasn’t a twenty-four-hour kind of farm.
That left Daphne. As far as Margaret knew there had been no one at all since Roger Cooper. But Daphne was only twenty-three. And she worked shifts at the hospital which had to make a social life difficult, the odd hours, the fatigue, the constant regime of having to grab some sleep when you got the chance.
Aside from wanting each of them to connect with someone who was good enough, who was comfortable and dependable and, given the choice, easygoing, Margaret didn’t care much what the kids did with their lives otherwise. She assumed they would be able to make their living. They were all smart, exceptionally smart in her opinion. As far as she knew they were doing fine.
Most of them spent the best part of the first Sunday at the lake lying on the sand on blankets drinking illegal beer from picnic tumblers and then swimming out to the third sandbar and back to cool off. By noon, Bill had taught Sally how to float. He had been a strong swimmer since the war. Before he left for overseas he’d come out to the lake alone and taught himself, tested himself way out past the last sandbar. He’d started Sally off with the dead man’s float, face in the water, arms extended, holding her up with one trustworthy hand under her small rib cage. When she had almost mastered that, he turned her over to face the clouds. With his hand light on her spine, over and over again holding and releasing her, he told her that floating was the first and most important part of swimming, that if you could relax your body, if you could get that feeling, the rest was only technique, just muscle control and breathing.
After lunch Bill and Margaret walked down the beach to the store to buy overpriced butter to go with the lobsters. Murray had brought the lobsters, eight of them, packed in ice in a cooler in the trunk of his Mustang, explaining that he’d got in on a shipment from Nova Scotia arranged by a friend of a friend of a friend at work. When they got back with the butter they went upstairs to bed for the most stifling part of the afternoon.
Murray did the cooking that night. He used an old roasting pan he found on the back porch, boiled the lobsters up two at a time. Patrick rummaged around until he found the extra leaves for the oak table and then Margaret covered it with newspaper, put out two big loaves of homemade bread and a bowl of her potato salad, the sterilized-under-boiling-water pliers from the trunk of Bill’s car, and several pretty little sauce dishes filled with melted butter and wedges of lemon.
When they were finished with the lobster eating, she was going to give them fresh peach pie.
* * *
PATRICK’S GROOM’S DINNER was held the Friday night before the wedding. They’d had two good weeks of sun. Everyone was brown, even Bill and Patrick and Paul and Daphne, all of whom had been going to work most days, Bill just into town and Patrick and Daphne into London and Paul out to the farm. Even Murray, who had been coming and going from Toronto, taking long weekends. Paul tanned the fastest of course. His face and arms were brown all summer, every summer.
They’d got quite a bit of enjoyment out of the boat. Mary and Sally sometimes took lunch and went up the lake to Port Franks, twice all the way to Grand Bend. And every evening after their walk, Bill and Margaret pulled sweaters over their bathing suits and went out on the water, cutting the motor to drift and watch the sun go down, returning in the dark, quiet and sometimes holding hands like middle-aged European film stars as they walked toward the cottage.
At the end of the first week, Mary and Daphne and Sally had gone into London to the bridal salon for their final fitting. Mary had long ago sketched her dress for Margaret. It was plain winter-white satin with a full, ankle-length skirt, a tight bodice, a high collar, and a row of tiny satin-covered buttons running down to the small of her back. She had found the dress in Vogue, had taken the magazine with her in March to see if it could be copied. Daphne and Mary’s friend Joan, who was to be maid of honour, were going to wear full crinoline-skirted pale pink lace, had been more or less directed to lace by Mary’s mother who, having wisely restrained herself from directing her daughter’s choice, felt more than entitled to guide the attendants, explaining with blunt confidence that there should be a bit of show to this occasion. Sally’s dress was an exact but smaller copy of Mary’s, pink to match the others, but satin. And she was to have wrist gloves secured with tiny satin-covered buttons.
Without being asked, Sally had decided that while they were at the lake she would take on the job of keeping Neil and Krissy entertained. It was obvious to everyone that she had set herself this responsibility. She spent most of the time rolling around on the floor with them or flopped in the hammock or down at the edge of the water digging in the fine, clean sand with old serving spoons, filling brightly painted sand pails to build castles for them, pulling them back out of the water when they crawled or toddled too far away. She got them to help her collect unusual stones and pebbles along the water’s edge, tried to make them understand exactly why the stones were nice. Her arms were so small it was hard for her to lift or carry the kids, so the others watched her at a confident distance and intervened once in a while when it was necessary. But they did so quietly and quickly, as if it were hardly necessary at all.
Because Sally was so helpful, Andy spent a lot of time on the porch couch reading first Crime and Punishment and then The Feminine Mystique. She drank a lot of juice, watched small boats pull skiers back and forth, watched the waves roll in. One afternoon she called Margaret out to see a bunch of kids, they would have been eighteen or nineteen, horsing around in the lake. Margaret said she’d heard their antics from the kitchen. Two of the guys were diving and then blasting up under their squealing, laughing girlfriends, between their legs, lifting them up out of the water and tossing them backwards. The third guy was dunking his girlfriend’s head, holding her under with both hands, letting her up and holding her under again. She fought it, she flailed and thrashed, but the more she fought, the harder he pushed. And he was stronger of course, he was a very big guy. When the girl finally got free, got her footing, the boyfriend suddenly dropped his arms and bent down sharply into the water. “I bet she kneed him,” Andy said, pleased with the possibility.
The girl ran out of the water and grabbed a towel on her way past the blankets where they’d all been sitting, sunbathing. Then she climbed into one of their cars. The others had stopped to watch her go, and just before her boyfriend got to the car, and he was surprisingly quick to come after her, she had rolled up all the windows and locked the doors. “I’d guess that girl has just made up her mind,” Margaret said. “Let’s hope she can stick to a decision.”
Most afternoons Andy carried the transistor radio around with her from chair to couch to chair, sang a wholehearted “She Loves Me” and a plaintive “Return to Sender,” kept time with her hands on her distended stomach. Sometimes she got up to dance around the porch with her arms raised above her head and her hips swaying seductively in her baggy plaid shorts and sometimes she sang and danced her way down to the water to cool off, wading in just to her thighs, bending down to splash her face and her arms and her shoulders. Margaret kept an eye on Andy and watching her she thought more than once that she was behaving as if she were all alone in the world, as if she couldn’t be seen. She wondered if she had done that herself, carrying Sally.
The morning of the groom’s dinner, Patrick and Paul and Murray took Paul’s pick-up into town to go to the liquor store and to get what was needed from the house. Margaret wanted the big dining-room table and the chairs brought out because she thought everyone should be seated and there was no way to make the cottage table hold them all. She told Bill she didn’t want a buffet, would not serve a buffet for Patrick’s dinner. She gave the boys a list of the things she wanted from the house, most of which she’d wrapped and boxed up before they came out. The two linen cloths, her own china as well as Sylvia’s, her own silver and Sylvia’s, the lead crystal glasses, the blue punch bowl, the trays. The butter tarts from Mrs. Rinker. The liquor. Lots of film.
When Patrick and Paul and Murray got back from town, Bill said they should set up in the porch so they could watch the sun go down over the lake while they ate. So the picnic table and the Muskoka chairs were carried from the porch out onto the sand beside the barbecue and the dining-room table was unloaded from the truck and brought around to the front and in through the wide screen-porch door. Getting the cottage table out to the porch was not so straightforward, and after ten minutes of trying to manoeuvre it through the narrower main door, they had to give up and take it off its pedestal, which wasn’t easy, given nuts and bolts and screws untouched for decades. After nearly an hour and three different wrenches from Paul’s truck, the two tables were finally joined end to end, and they were not dissimilar. When they were covered with the linen cloths they looked as Margaret had hoped they would look, like one long banquet table.
Bill had gone into Clarke’s before lunch to get the roast he’d ordered, a big rolled rib, and he’d started it over a hot fire in the middle of the afternoon, adding a few coals every half hour or so and then just leaving it covered to finish on its own as the coals turned to hot ash. Several people who had been walking the beach with their dogs had to run up to the barbecue to pull the dogs away, and one guy, holding his German shepherd firmly by the collar, asked about the chances for an invitation to dinner. This was just a friendly, aren’t-we-all-so-damned-lucky kind of question, asked only to give Bill the opportunity to talk about the meal they were going to enjoy that night and about Patrick and Mary, about having a second son who was ready to tie the knot.
Margaret and Mary and Daphne had got up at dawn to try to beat the worst heat of the day. They’d made a huge pot of lobster bisque, the leftover lobster squirrelled away in the freezer after Murray’s dinner. They’d baked the angel food cakes and three dozen pull-apart rolls. They’d scrubbed the sweet new potatoes and shelled the fresh peas, which were to be creamed, and cut up the asparagus and the carrots, which were to be caramelized. While they worked Andy sat on a stool in the corner of the kitchen with Krissy on her lap, talking to them and taking pictures of them washing and chopping the vegetables, stirring the bisque, beating the eggs, picking one last time through the nuts for bits of shell. By noon they were all sweating buckets and Margaret said they likely didn’t even need the damned oven, the kitchen itself could cook the dinner.
Late in the afternoon, after a rest upstairs with Bill and then a quick swim with a bar of soap, Margaret made a Waldorf salad with the apples she’d got at the cold storage. Instead of walnuts, which no one liked, she used the hickory nuts she’d gathered the previous fall from the ground under the last remaining backyard hickory and smashed with her hammer on the cement stairs that led to the cellar.
The younger women went for their swim and then they changed into sundresses and put the vegetables on to cook and started to set the long table. The blue punch bowl was filled with Sylvia’s lemonade and for dessert, on silver trays, there was the choice of Mrs. Rinker’s butter tarts or angel food cake, with a milk-glass bowl of fresh strawberries and another of stiff whipped cream to follow the cake around the table. Murray came to the kitchen with a small jar of expensive British horseradish for the beef so Margaret kept her own back.
There were nineteen of them for dinner. Mary’s parents came over from their cottage, bringing with them her elderly grandfather. Sylvia’s mother drove out from town with Bill’s father and Mary’s friend Joan brought her boyfriend Dennis, who had a guitar and very long dull hair. Charlotte came from Toronto, arrived just as they were dishing everything up. She had stopped at one of the fruit stands on the highway and bought a bag of mushrooms and when she appeared in the kitchen offering them, Margaret almost opened the fridge to put them away for another time but then caught herself. “Oh,” she said. “Just the thing we’re missing.” She quickly scrubbed a pan clean and melted a spoonful of butter over high heat to fry the mushrooms with a quickly chopped handful of sweet onion.
When the table was ready, after Bill had carved the roast and piled it on the platter and the potatoes were tossed with butter and a bit of mint and all the bowls were brought out from the kitchen, Bill put Patrick at one end of the table and Mary at the other, insisting. Everyone else sat wherever they wanted and when they were seated, instead of grace, Murray, who was to be Patrick’s best man, stood to offer a toast. Happiness, he said. And health. A long life. Comfort. Joy. Great, mindless, sweaty sex. Progeny. Lifelong friends. Naked ambition. Success. Blue skies. A ton of money or just enough, whichever. A split-level in the suburbs or not, whichever. A red Porsche. Holidays in the sunny south. He wished all these things for them, claimed he spoke for everyone here present.
They ate and drank and talked and lied and laughed on that sloping porch. Neil and Krissy were passed around and across the table like treasures, fed strawberries and peaks of whipped cream from their Great-grandfather Chambers’ finger. Mary’s mother had brought a camera and Paul got up with Margaret’s, took two rolls of film, making sure he got shots of everyone. Sally was so happy she cried. She had been walking around and around the table lightly touching everyone as she passed behind them, and when she squeezed in to stand between Margaret and Charlotte, she could no longer hold it back. The talking gradually stopped and everyone watched as she tried to explain her tears, and when they were finally understood, Charlotte was the one who reached out to comfort her.
An evening breeze flowed around their shoulders and the sun went down for them just as they’d hoped it would, slowly and beautifully, the red and orange and pink and mauve descent filling the sky above the shining water and then spreading, moving in across the water toward the shore. They talked as long as they could over the table but when the darkness brought cold air in off the lake they decided to move inside. Paul lit one of his fires and Dennis started to play his guitar, although not very well. The other men got out the rye and the gin and the crokinole board and the cards for euchre and all the women but Mary, who was after all the bride, and Andy, who was by this time extremely tired, and Sally, who was upstairs getting Neil and Krissy settled down to sleep on their army cots, started to clean up the dishes so the men could bring the tables in.
Charlotte stayed out on the porch long enough to pick up The Feminine Mystique from the hammock, asking no one in particular, “Who among you is reading this horrid thing?” Then she tossed it down and walked to the kitchen carrying the silver tray of leftover tarts in one hand and the empty salad bowl in the other.
Seeing Charlotte with her hands full, concluding that she had decided not to sit this one out, before she could put a stop to it, Margaret thought, Now this is an occasion. She took the tray and the salad bowl, handing them off to Mary’s mother, and then she turned Charlotte by the shoulders and reached to tie a fresh apron around her waist. It was the first time Margaret had touched her. Feeling the jumpy bones beneath Charlotte’s firm flesh, she thought, perhaps as punishment for the earlier thought, Oh, how awful for her.
“We’ll let you wash,” she said. “If you wash, the rest of us can get things put away and then we’ll be able to join the men that much quicker at the fire.”
To her everlasting credit, Charlotte put her watch and her rings up on the windowsill beside all the others, poured a pink stream of dish soap into the deep porcelain sink, and threw on both taps, full blast.
* * *
ALMOST EVERY EVENING after a light, early supper, Bill and Margaret went for a long walk along the shore of the lake. They would start out barefoot on the warm sand but they carried their shoes because Margaret liked to go far beyond the main beach, she liked especially to go the two miles south to Stonebrook Creek, and they eventually ran into sharp, coarse stones and, at the Point, shale and a broad outcropping of rock.
When she was a girl Margaret had been invited once by a young friend, who was really just the daughter of an old friend of her mother’s, to spend three summer days at a cottage which was not on the main beach with Dunworkin and all the other big cottages but down near Stonebrook Creek. Her mother hadn’t had many actual friends because she was an occasional kleptomaniac, bringing home things that her father had to quickly find and immediately return or once in a while pay for if it was something that had been partly used up, like perfume, but this one woman had been a true friend and Margaret could remember her quiet kindness. She had been exactly the kind of woman people guessed to be slow-witted but she was not slow-witted in the least, she was simply shy and clumsy the way some women are, the way very young men are before they come into their own, and, regardless, she was very kind.
Angela’s parents’ cottage was not as old as some of the others at the creek but it was small and dark and ramshackle, with one main room that was mostly kitchen and two bedrooms added on and then another room, a porch, added on to that. On the first day of Margaret’s visit, the girls had played hopscotch on the white-sand shore of Lake Huron and practised their swimming strokes both in the air and in the water and then they were given a picnic lunch to eat on a blanket in the dunes. After they’d helped Angela’s mother cut up apples for pies, Spies, the apples were called, they used the afternoon to explore, to crouch down low to watch some of the other cottagers through their windows, and to follow the footpaths worn through the trees and scrub brush and poison oak that filled the empty space between the cottages and the road to town.
By this time, Margaret realized that the lemonade she’d shared with Angela at their picnic had worked its way through to her bladder and, because she refused to pull down her bathing suit and squat in the shelter of the trees, as Angela suggested, they had to find the nearest outhouse. At the end of a short dirt path lined on either side with painted stones, when Margaret reached to open the outhouse door, her hand was stopped by the sounds they heard inside, a wet slapping like the hurried beating of a cake at a kitchen table, and then a very sad moan, and then another. Angela put her finger to her lips, the signal for opportunity, for discovery, and they crouched again, as if this position were as natural to them as walking upright, the perfect stance for girls loose in the world. They took their turns at a small knot low in the weathered outhouse boards, each of them encouraging the other with a sharp elbow in the ribs: You look. No, you look. They watched him in silence, although they could see there was little chance they’d be heard. They could not see any part of his face so they couldn’t begin to guess his age or his place in the world. It was Margaret’s eye at the knothole when he delivered himself, his delivery a big, bursting achievement, and after Angela pushed her away she had no choice, she did have to run into the trees and squat naked to empty herself. And Angela was soon beside her, laughing quietly and holding her stomach and reaching up to pull clean summer leaves from a small maple. When they heard the outhouse door creak open behind them they were careful to look busy, to look away.
Then Angela turned to check and, positive that he was gone, or almost gone, because she did see someone ducking around the corner of a cottage, she said, “You know what that was?” She was erupting with laughter now, so pleased with what she already knew, with the things she did not have to learn. “It was the dastardly one-eyed worm. And that’s what they do with it. All the time. Day and night, my aunt says.”
Pulling up her bathing suit, Margaret laughed too, but privately, with only the shaking of her skinny shoulders. Although it had been her first sighting, her first true exposure, she didn’t believe there was much point to being surprised. And it wasn’t the achievement she would remember but the helpless pulsing and the colour, the deep blush of red in the pale, fisted hand, like something left outside the body by mistake.
Back at the cottage, they found Angela’s mother sitting halfway down the hill watching the waves pour in and tickling herself, her weathered face, with a long blade of dune grass. She must have been lost in thought because when Angela crept up and hugged her from behind, she jumped and yelped as if she’d been attacked. Then she said she was very happy to see that they were having some fun together and before they went inside she made them stand still against the cottage door for a picture. After she’d got their fun recorded for posterity, she handed the borrowed box camera to Angela and stepped up to the door herself. She ran her fingers quickly through her short, thin hair and smoothed the skirt of her summer dress and then she squared her shoulders to smile into the afternoon sun.
On the second morning the father walked with the girls to one of the farms that bordered the lakeshore to take them horseback riding. This was the surprise he’d promised the night before at the supper table. The men saddled the horses and then Margaret and Angela climbed up on the rail fence, as they were told, to mount. The farmer rode a blue-black stallion, the father was given a big russet mare, and the girls rode strong fat ponies. Margaret’s pony was friendly and calm and obedient, its tan-and-white face almost pretty, its knobby flanks patched like the map of a world that was nothing but desert and snow.
They’d gone for miles along the beach, the horses long since trained to walk out into the shallow lake to skirt the stones on the shore, knowing in their horse heads that soon there would be sand again. The men stayed behind the girls, ignoring them, trusting their good sense and trusting the ponies, but their voices carried through the summer air and the girls heard their talk, which was briefly about their time together at Vimy, where they had both been stablers for the cavalry. Because she knew even as a ten-year-old girl that Vimy Ridge had been a battle and that the war these men had fought was called the Great War and because it was the first time in her life she had heard it used like any other word, Margaret remembered that the farmer said the word gallantry, and she remembered too, the way you remember a fright, the dark burst of laughter that fell on that word. The men didn’t stay with the war for long. Soon they were talking about a stallion stolen in the dead of night from a neighbouring farm and then about a flaxen-haired woman they didn’t name but seemed to have known well, both of them, their laughter falling much more gently on the shared memory of this woman.
The horses had to be turned inland to follow the rutted road only at Kettle Point, the Indian reserve, where the wet black shale that covered the shore was dangerously slick underfoot and the rocks extended deep into the lake. There were still kettles to be counted at the Point then, large grey stones worn perfectly spherical by the action of a million waves, resting in the water like oversized pearls. This was before the time when people started to drive onto the reserve to pull the kettles out and haul them home to use as decoration on their front porches.
Margaret’s mother had accepted the invitation on her behalf without asking her if she even wanted to spend three days at a cottage but in the end it didn’t matter. They had been the best three days of her childhood.
Any summer evening, standing as an adult woman at the mouth of Stonebrook Creek, Margaret found it hard to believe that the creek entered the lake at all, the offshore waves pushed in so surely, with such a steady force. But the creek did join the lake. On calm days, most days, it crept in slowly, nearly invisibly, the only evidence a murky cloud of silt drifting out into the cleaner blue of the lake. And after a storm, after a pounding, roaring, creek-rising rain, the force of the current was more than strong enough to overtake the shoreline waves. Running down the bank, surging down, the creek emptied its mud-churned, overflowing self full force into the larger body.
It was widest there on the sand, meeting the lake, maybe sixty feet across. Back from the shore where the land began its quick climb up and inland, the creek narrowed and the banks soon became steep enough to require buttressing with fieldstones and large broken slabs of scrap concrete, refuse from highway upgrades.
At the edge of the water, swamp grass grew wherever it could find purchase among the stones, and higher up the bank, where the real soil began, sumach took hold, and then trees, beech and maple and oak, leaning in over the creek to make a leafy tunnel above the current. Even in a canoe, you would have needed to duck your head here.
There were still cottages on both sides of the creek, built up on the high ground that overlooked Lake Huron, situated close together and at odd angles to one another, perhaps to catch the extraordinary sunsets through the desired windows. Margaret thought she recognized the cottage she’d visited as a girl but she couldn’t be sure because most of them were old and rambling now.
Not long after the cottagers were established, someone, some group of them, had decided it would be a very good thing to be able to get back and forth between the cottages quickly so they’d built a narrow, swinging footbridge high above the water across the creek. It is likely that the idea behind the bridge was to promote evening visits among summer friends or to allow more interesting morning walks, to free the kids a bit. They’d suspended the footbridge from heavy steel cables that were threaded on each bank through tall, soon-rusted posts and then securely anchored deep in solid ground. When it was first built the bridge gave access not just to the southside cottages but to a grassy picnic spot, with swings and teeter-totters and a fire pit and an open pavilion, for shelter from the rain. The pavilion did not withstand many years of winter storms off the lake, and it was not replaced, but Margaret had seen in Angela’s cottage a framed black-and-white photograph of summer people in their bathing suits getting ready under the pavilion’s low-pitched roof to share a meal, the very best of everything imagined laid out with pride on the picnic tables.
Pulling away from the shore of Lake Huron, Stonebrook Creek flowed past the tennis courts and the rough stone pillars that marked the cottage road and then it passed under the first car bridge, under the highway. On the other side of the highway it veered away respectfully from the old cemetery and soon began to cut a shallow valley through the apple orchards and the fields of corn and wheat and oats and barley and white beans, through bush and pasture.
If you were out for a Sunday drive, you could locate Stonebrook Creek from any of the roads by the haphazard trees that followed its twists and turns. The crows and starlings that fed on the crops nested in the trees, as did swarms of hornets, and sometimes you would see herons. In the fall, farmers who watched for bothersome beaver dams became small-time hunters, walked back to the creek with their guns for ducks or pheasant.
Cattle had long since established paths down to the creek bank, had walked the scrub brush flat so they could get to the edge, to drink, and on the hottest days, where the water was shallow, and it often was shallow on its way to town, the cattle waded right into the water, stepping clumsily around the visible stones. Sometimes they’d stumble and go down heavily and then thrash in the mud to get themselves upright and sometimes, once down, they stayed down to let the murky water cool their dung-matted, fly-bitten flanks.
And there had always been garbage. If you were anything like the child Margaret had been, and if, for something different to do, you had biked out from town to stand on one of the municipal bridges to engage in some private dreaming, or to drop small stones into the middle of the current to test the depth of the water, listening for that deep, satisfying plop, you could see, upstream and down, that any number of people used the creek for garbage. Not much of it, only the occasional rim of a tire or a saw blade, a toolbox, a few cement blocks, a few heaps of broken bricks. And you could see islands of drifting twigs. And deadfall, whole trees or rotted, broken limbs blown down by wind storms, resting on the largest of the stones.
And, until the days of DDT, you could enjoy the brilliant presence of butterflies, the rusty orange of Monarchs, the beautiful, shy Northern Blue, lush grey Cabbages, the long-forgotten red of Admirals.
There were five municipal bridges between the lakeshore and town, on concession roads or side roads depending on the turn of Stonebrook Creek. Most of the bridges were cement and all of them had been constructed high above the water to accommodate spring flood. But the creek seldom overflowed its banks, not significantly and not for long, because the lake was there, just a few miles away, ready to take whatever came.
Although Margaret and Angela had raced across the suspension bridge those hot summer days at the mouth of the creek, protected only by the chicken-wire guard and a light running grip on the steel cable, and both of them loving the rhythm their running made, the snaky sway, she had to coax Bill onto the planks and he went across just once.
“It has never so much as threatened to give out,” she said, pushing him gently from behind, her hands on his narrow hips. “Not once.”
“And they say that’s exactly when you should play a slot machine,” he told her. “Just when it seems it will never give out.” He was laughing now and gripping the steel cable with both hands, exaggerating his terror for Margaret’s enjoyment.
Standing halfway across, they looked straight down to study the water, to watch for movement in the churning mud. Margaret was quickly able to find the ripple of a lost, spinning school of minnows, anxious to get back to the lake where they belonged, and with the minnows found, she turned from the lake and squatted low to look back up the creek. Bill bent down to join her. Through the dark tunnel of overhanging branches they could hear frogs croaking and the squeal of gulls and they could see deadfall and upturned, tangled root balls and drifting twigs. They could gauge how quickly the creek got deep as it began to move inland.
Leaning there, looking with Margaret at all these things that obviously had some meaning for her, Bill put his hand on her sturdy shoulder. “This has been a good summer for all of us,” he said. And then he moved his hand to the crown of her head, turning her face toward a perfectly common but good-sized snake that lay curled on the slope of the bank, resting in the damp shade after a hard day of snake work, its long, curved body the boundary, the asylum, for a dozen slithering offspring.
* * *
IN THEIR LAST week at Dunworkin, late on a Tuesday afternoon, lying on the couch in the porch and breathing deliberately, using all of her discipline to relax, Andy tried to describe her cramps to Paul and Margaret. She said they weren’t really much different from what she’d been having for the past week, from what her doctor assured her were just fairly common bouts of false labour, except that she was positive they were lasting longer now.
Margaret sat close to Andy in one of the Muskoka chairs, reading Andy’s finished copy of The Feminine Mystique which, until now, she had been enjoying thoroughly because, as she’d told Bill, in her opinion there certainly was something to it. Paul stood at the screen door.
“You’re the only one who knows how it feels,” he said. “You have to say one way or the other.” He moved over to the couch, leaned down to put his hand on Andy’s stomach. “I’m ready to take you in right now.”
“If it comes now, the baby will be nearly a month early,” Andy said. “I think I should try to hang on. I’m supposed to be able to hang on.” She gave into it then, her soft eyes filling with streaming tears, as if the concern expressed by this loving man was itself the cause of her discomfort.
Margaret closed the book. “I think you’ve got your answer,” she said. “She shouldn’t have to go through any more of this. And they’re promising a change in the weather so it might be a good idea to get her in now anyway.” She was up out of the chair. “I’ll pack her a quick bag.”
Paul helped Andy into the truck and took her straight to Sarnia without stopping in town at the doctor’s office. He said he was afraid they’d be told the same old thing and he was real tired of hearing it.
At the hospital, after the paperwork, they put Andy in a wheelchair and took her up into the stage room right away. Paul stood back as a nurse in a white turban and a scrub dress helped her into a johnny shirt and up onto a stretcher, asking as she eased her back on the pillow, “How are we doing?”
“Not all that well,” Andy told her.
“Which baby is this?” the nurse asked.
“Our third and last,” Andy said.
“Are you in labour?” the nurse asked.
“I’m not sure,” Andy said. “This time it seems to be going differently. I’m not due until next month but I’ve been having cramps for weeks. And they’ve been a lot worse today. They’ve been bad today.”
The nurse ran a hand over Andy’s stomach to determine the position of the baby’s back and then she used her stethoscope to find the heartbeat, counting the rate with a watch pinned to her scrub dress. She put her hand on Andy’s stomach again, gently, to time the frequency of the contractions.
Then she asked Paul to leave them, to wait out in the hall. He did as he was told but he didn’t go far, he didn’t go out of earshot. The nurse pulled the privacy curtain around the bed and put on her mask. “We’ll just see how many centimetres,” she said, “if any.” She pulled down the sheets, arranged Andy’s small, shaking legs into the frog position, snapped on a glove, and lubricated her index finger. Andy took a deep, quivery breath as the nurse inserted the finger into her rectum.
“I must be nearly ready,” she said.
The nurse peeled off the glove and tossed it into the wastebasket on the floor beside the bed. “Your cervix is two fingers dilated,” she said. “And the baby seems to be on a bit of an angle, seems to be coming not quite square. I’m going to call the doctor at home. He should be able to tell you more.” She pulled Andy’s johnny shirt down, smoothed and tidied it, and then brought the covers up and folded them across her chest. Just before she left the room she turned and said, “You shouldn’t drink anything, just in case.”
Paul passed the nurse on his way back in and she didn’t stop him. He lifted the curtain, ducked under it. Andy was quiet, not quite so apprehensive now that things seemed to be under way. She pushed the covers off, asked him, “Is it hot in here?”
Paul said no, he didn’t think so but then he wasn’t doing any work.
The nurse returned in a few minutes to check the baby’s heart rate again and soon after she left them the doctor on call came into the room. He let Paul stay, which worried Andy, although she didn’t say this out loud. The doctor moved his hands over her belly, his fierce blue-black eyes concentrated on her taut, mounded flesh as if the small dips and lumps could be read, could be comprehended. He told them that he didn’t think it was a case of anoxia in utero, he didn’t believe the baby was in any difficulty. He said Andy could deliver normally, and because the baby was relatively small and not far off true in its position, he should be able to give it a slight turn. He said he was sure a turn was all that was needed and that they would take her into the delivery room in an hour or so, depending.
They waited together through the contractions, which Andy said were the real McCoy now. She said she’d know them in any dark alley. When it was time to go she leaned up to kiss Paul goodbye. “If the baby is born tonight,” she said, “it will be Tuesday’s child, like Krissy, full of grace.”
Meagan started to come just after midnight, which made her Wednesday’s child, full of woe, although in the throes of labour Andy would not be able to remember this next line of the verse. Paul sat down the hall in an orange plastic chair with his head in his hands, waiting as he had waited before, ready to wait out the night, but Meagan didn’t take long getting herself born.
While the doctor stitched Andy up, good and snug this time, he said, winking, as if consideration for a husband’s lifelong pleasure was one of the hospital’s policies and certainly one of his own, certainly worth an extra tug or two on the sutures, a nurse took Meagan to the other side of the room to bathe her. After she’d got her cleaned up and wrapped snugly in a receiving blanket she laid her on Andy’s already aching breasts, allowing them a couple of minutes before she took Meagan down to the nursery. Andy couldn’t see much of her new daughter, could see only her fuzzy scalp and her odd little face and her tight-fisted hands, but by all appearances she was a healthy baby.
Paul spent a few minutes with Andy in the recovery room, just long enough to assure himself that she was all right, and then he went to the nursery to get a look at Meagan through the glass. After they pulled the nursery curtain shut, he drove out to the lake to wake Bill and Margaret and Daphne and Sally, to tell them. They all got up and sat around the big table in their pyjamas and nighties to listen to him tell it.
Just before dawn Andy was deemed recovered and taken up to another floor where she was put into a room with three other patients, two of whom still had the slightly mounded bellies of recently delivered women, the third not a woman at all but a girl of no more than sixteen. She rested, dreamed, talked a bit to the woman beside her who had just had her first baby at an astonishing and likely dangerous forty-six. The nurses appeared regularly with thermometers and blood-pressure cuffs and Andy drank all the juice she could get her hands on, which meant she was soon up to the bathroom on her own.
Paul ate Margaret’s celebratory breakfast of bacon and French toast and after he’d held Neil and Krissy on his lap to tell them about their sister, he drove back into the city. He sat out in the waiting room while Andy slept, went down to the gift shop to buy her a small bouquet of cut flowers, helped her with her sponge bath. The first time they brought Meagan down he waited in his mask and gown until the nurse was gone and then he laid Meagan out on Andy’s stomach, unwrapped her blanket, and took off her tiny shirt and diaper to expose and examine her, to run his hands over every inch of her long bones, her bright pink skin.
That night he went back out to the lake to tell them everything all over again and to say that Andy was in a normal room now and that he’d had a good look at Meagan and she was just as she should be. He slept alone upstairs on the sleeping porch, his dreams filled with the fishy smell of a boat after a storm. In the morning, Margaret and Sally took Neil and Krissy for a long walk down the beach, leaving the cottage quiet so Paul could sleep through until his body had had enough.
* * *
WHILE PAUL SLEPT, Daphne drove in to the hospital. She came into the room just as a nurse was finishing up her examination of Andy’s sutures so she stood quietly outside the curtain, waiting until it was yanked open. The nurse hadn’t heard her and as she was leaving she backed into her and yelped in startled surprise. She told Daphne she should wait in the hall next time. She wasn’t much older than Daphne herself, maybe twenty-five, but she did not lack confidence, she was in fact just the kind of nurse people liked. Finished with Andy, she walked quickly over to the girl by the window, who was lying curled on her side with her back to the room, pulled the privacy curtain around the bed, and asked the girl to please roll over.
When Andy saw Daphne standing there with her skin so tanned and her body so fresh and trim and tight and angular and jumped-up with energy, she said, and immediately wished with all her heart she hadn’t said, “Oh, Daphne, you look like a slightly different species of woman. Maybe vaguely related to the species in this room, but not really the same, not the same at all.”
“And hello to you too,” Daphne said, smiling, meaning to let it go.
“It’s just because you look so strong,” Andy said. Which was the truth.
“I’ve been down to the nursery,” Daphne said. “They brought her to the window for me. She’s lovely. She’s small but it looks like she’s got Paul’s bones so she won’t stay small for long.” She sat down in the chair beside the bed. “How are you doing?” she asked. “Sore bum? Sitz baths helping the sore bum?”
Andy was thinking, I do love this woman. “Yes,” she nodded. “Although sore hardly says it.”
The nurse who had been examining the girl by the window yanked the curtain open again. “Today makes it three days,” she said firmly and loudly. “If you won’t do it yourself, we’ll have to haul you out of that bed. And we’ll do it, believe you me. You’ve got to get up and get walking and not just to the bathroom. It isn’t a matter of choice.”
The girl didn’t answer. The nurse left the room, shaking her head, fed up.
“Have they had you up and down the hall yet?” Daphne asked. “It’s chock-full of slow-walking women in really awful housecoats.” She looked at the two empty beds. “Your roommates must be out there already.”
“No, I haven’t,” Andy said. “But it’s my understanding that today is the day.” She started to sit up, pulled herself up straighter in the bed. “The doctor is going to give Meagan a once-over this afternoon and he’s supposed to come to see me first thing tomorrow morning. Then maybe we can come home.”
Daphne was just about to tell Andy how pleased Bill and Margaret and Sally were when the nurse who had just left returned with another, much larger woman in a different uniform. They walked quickly over to the girl by the window, pulled her up by her arms, turned her, lifted her off the bed, stood her upright, and walked her out the door, not a word said.
“Oh,” Andy said, covering her mouth with her hand so she wouldn’t be heard. “For the love of God.”
“I don’t see why they think they have to keep her on this floor,” Daphne said. “If they gave it two minutes’ thought, they might figure it out.” She shook it off, stood up from the chair. “Are you ready to give the hall a try?”
Andy brushed through her wet hair with her fingers to tidy it. “I guess,” she said. “I’ve showered and, after much repeated encouragement, pooped. So what else is left?” She turned and dropped her legs over the side of the bed, wincing. She stopped moving for a minute, looked down at her bare feet. “It’s a mighty long drop to that stool,” she said.
Daphne eased her down. “We’ll find someone out there to challenge,” she said.
Andy tried to hold her johnny shirt closed while Daphne helped her into her housecoat. “Your day will come,” she said. “And I’ll be there just as soon as I can to inquire about your bum.”
They went out into the hall to join the flow and halfway down to the nurses’ station they passed the girl and the woman in the different uniform who held her up. The girl’s eyes were shut and she was walking close to the wall, hugging it. The other women who were up working off their various discomforts looked only briefly and then took care to avoid bumping her.
Daphne and Andy continued slowly past the nurses’ station and down to the nursery. All the babies were being transferred to a kind of trolley, a long row of little rolling beds, and Meagan had already been moved, she was lying snug in her receiving blanket waiting to be delivered to her mother. “She has your face,” Daphne said. “Your forehead. And your chin.”
Meagan stirred a bit, stared and blinked at the ceiling lights high above her. “I saw one of the older nurses pinch her arm and watch to see her reaction,” Andy said. “Almost like a test. But she didn’t react. Neil and Krissy could raise a complete stink by the time they were a day old but she doesn’t fuss at all.”
“Paul told us,” Daphne said. “I say good for her. There’s already too much fussing in this sorry world.”
They walked down the hall with all the other women who were making their way back to their rooms, and after Daphne got Andy up onto the bed, she asked if she wanted her new nightie from the suitcase. The nightie had been Daphne’s gift. It was a beautifully soft cotton print with two discreet nursing slits, two secret little passages. While Andy unbuttoned her housecoat, Daphne found it and handed it over.
A nurse came into the room pushing the two other babies, and after she had them safely in their mothers’ arms, she brought Meagan and parked her close to Andy’s bed. Without looking at Daphne she told her she would have to leave now. This was no surprise to Daphne. She thought about asking for a mask and a gown but then thought no, she’d leave them their privacy. “I’ll be back in a little while,” she said. Just before she stepped back to pull the curtain around them, while the nurse was busy admiring Andy’s nightie, she reached out to touch her fingers to the top of Meagan’s fuzzy head. “This, my little love,” she whispered, “is called breakfast.”
She had thought she would just go out to sit in the waiting room and leaving she glanced for some reason over to the window. The girl was there again, covered and turned away and curled up.
She didn’t ask herself what she was doing, she just walked over, pulled the chair up close to the bed, and sat down. The girl looked up at her as if she had two heads, two very ugly, unwelcome heads.
“I’m on my way down to the gift shop,” she said. “Can I bring you a chocolate bar or something? A magazine? Maybe Seventeen?” The girl was silent, her face collapsed into a sturdy frown.
Daphne took a deep breath. “I just thought I’d like to tell you,” she said quietly, “that I was adopted. My mother was young, like you. But I’ve had a really good life. I’ve always wished I could tell my mother that. And I’ve always wished that she had a good life too. When I think about her, that’s how I imagine her, having a good life of her own.”
The girl’s eyes were wide open now. She was looking at the high green branches of the elm just outside the window. She spoke so quietly Daphne almost missed it. “That’s nice of you to tell me,” she said.
Daphne stood and tucked the girl’s blankets up around her shoulders, a useless gesture because the girl had already pulled them up as far as they would go. But it was all she could think to do. “Sore bottom?” she asked.
“Yes,” the girl said, crying a bit now. “They keep bringing me the heat lamp and I hate it. I really hate it.”
“I’m a nurse,” Daphne said. “Maybe I can try to put a stop to the heat lamp for you.” The girl hadn’t moved but Daphne hadn’t expected her to. She ran her hand lightly over the curled-up, covered body and left.
She found the head nurse doing paperwork at the nurses’ station. By the evidence of her cap she had trained in London too, which would mean that she was a very good nurse indeed. Daphne was careful to introduce herself as the woman’s junior, to smile a quick deferential smile. On the way down the hall she had thought about asking if the girl could be moved to another floor, but with the head nurse standing there in front of her, attentive and patient but obviously busy, she decided to settle for the lesser but more probable win. Initially the discussion veered close to the abrupt, although it soon settled down to a successful resolution, Daphne’s point being that since the nurses themselves decided on heat lamp treatment, what would be the harm in no more of it for a kid who might be distraught but was likely sharp enough to know whether something was helping or hurting her.
The older, larger woman, the one in the different uniform who had been walking the girl up and down the hall, had come up to the desk and was standing there listening. She was, Daphne decided, the homeliest woman she had ever seen. “You think she should be pampered?” she asked Daphne.
The head nurse ignored this. “I’ll have a look at her myself,” she said. “As soon as I’m finished here. If she’ll try to get up and get a move on, we can maybe put an end to the heat lamp.”
Daphne thanked her and went to sit in the waiting room for ten minutes and then she walked back down the hall to Andy’s room. The girl’s curtain was still open and she had shifted to lie on her back, with her hands out on top of her blanket. That looks like courage, Daphne thought, smiling a bit in case the girl looked her way, which she didn’t. She ducked in through Andy’s curtain.
Meagan was asleep in her mother’s arms, apparently sated, and Andy was still sitting up straight on the bed. She had been waiting for Daphne to come back through the curtain. She didn’t speak the question but mouthed it, slowly and clearly. “You’re adopted now?”
Daphne just shrugged her shoulders and reached out for Meagan. “Give her here,” she said. “I’m her perfectly healthy aunt. They can stuff their rules and regulations.”
Lifting Meagan into her forbidden arms she thought, She feels so heavy, why would a baby born early feel so surprisingly heavy?
* * *
THE PROMISED STORM arrived early in the evening two days after Meagan was born, at the end of their last full day at Dunworkin.
Paul and Murray and Margaret and Sally had gone in to the hospital right after lunch, and while they were gone, Patrick and Mary came in the door from Boston, surprised that there were no cars parked out behind the cottage, surprised to find Daphne alone with the kids. They had timed their return to have one last night at the lake and to help clean the cottage properly in the morning, before the owners moved in for August. They hadn’t expected to come home to a new niece.
They’d had a quick rest upstairs and were sitting at the table drinking beer and asking Daphne about Andy and Meagan when they heard the car doors slamming shut. Sally was with Murray in his Mustang and Paul was alone in his truck. Margaret had stopped off in town to come back out with Bill and on the way they’d gone to the drive-in beside the Casino to get fish and chips and milkshakes for everyone.
Margaret set the table and while they ate, Patrick and Mary answered questions about their trip, about the hotels they’d stayed in, the seafood they’d eaten, the people they’d met, the traffic. When the table was cleared Bill said they should start to think about packing up because there was a storm in the air and they were likely going to lose the lights before the night was out. But they didn’t start to think about packing. They took their coffee out to the porch to wait for the storm to come up over the water.
At about seven, the temperature dropped quickly, heavy clouds gathered and settled low over the lake, and the breeze began to stiffen into wind, to skim the sand on the beach and in the grassy dunes. You could see the sand moving in the dunes, shifting itself into new patterns. And then the nature of the waves changed. They came to shore not in frothy little overlapping spills but each wave on its own, in a loud, dark rush, smacking the sand.
Margaret and Mary went upstairs to close the windows and drop the shutters in the sleeping porch and bring the bedding and mattresses inside and Bill ran down with Patrick to pull the boat farther up on shore. Paul and Murray got the tarp and the ropes from the shed and after the tarp was wrestled onto the boat, Bill walked around it and pulled hard on the ropes, double-checking their knots. He yelled to them above the wind that they had to be especially sure because this wasn’t their boat. They’d never had their own boat, although one spring the boys had built a rough raft and launched it in the creek behind the house. They’d taken it only a few miles, past the golf course and Livingston’s gully but not very far after that, not all the way over to the lake.
Aside from a bit of quick eye contact, the younger men made no response to Bill’s comment. Just in the last few years, but more and more predictably, Bill could not restrain himself, could not resist the chance to teach them a little moral lesson, as if grown and educated and capable, and as sensible as they were ever likely to be, they might suddenly begin to slide down the slippery slope to childish or criminal behaviour, to moral decline.
Daphne had joined them on the beach. She was jumping up and down on the hard wet sand, still in her bathing suit from her afternoon with the kids, wrapped in the quilt from the porch couch. She wanted someone to go walking in the storm with her. “Not very far,” she told them. “Just down to the Casino and back. Before it really gets going.”
Bill shook his head. “Not a good idea,” he said. He was looking back at the cottage, at Margaret and Mary. The sleeping porch was closed up tight and they had dropped all but one of the downstairs shutters and now they stood together at the one open screen watching, waiting for the men to come in out of the storm. Soon Sally was there with Krissy squirming in her arms and Neil beside her, standing up wide-eyed on a chair to see the action.
Bill started back up with the wind behind him, pushing him. Patrick and Paul followed and Murray went to Daphne, put his arm out to direct her toward the cottage. But she ducked and pulled away. When she turned around and opened the quilt to him, he moved in beside her. “Not all the way to the Casino,” he yelled above the wind, taking some of the quilt over his shoulders.
Margaret was not surprised to see them go. She stood at the screen and watched the wind as it tried to snap the quilt away from them and then she dropped the last shutter.
Inside the cottage, although it was not yet cold, Paul was ripping and bunching newspaper for a fire. Mary suggested that they rearrange the heavy old maroon couches and the chairs into a circle around the fireplace and Patrick helped her, said they should have thought of it sooner, should have done it the first day. When they were finished, Bill sat in the corner of the smaller couch and Sally flopped down beside him, taking Krissy up onto her small lap. Neil ran across the room and started to climb the stairs, saying he wanted to have some more nap. Margaret scooped him up and cuddled him, knowing that he was both frightened of the sounds the storm made and lonely for his mother, although he wasn’t the kind of child who would want this said.
Margaret always made a point of giving generous attention to the grandchildren. She wanted these two and all the ones that followed to get to know each other, to like each other, and later have a few memories of liking each other. She had told Bill she’d had nothing like that when she was young.
They settled in to watch Paul’s fire. The wood had been seasoned and he’d stacked it carefully, correctly. Within minutes the bottom log appeared to be entirely on fire, the flames jumping out, stretching to lick the logs above it.
The wind was fully up now. The rain was starting to come down hard on the roof over their heads and the sound of the waves was a pounding roar. Sitting watching the fire, Margaret allowed herself to wonder if Daphne and Murray had found shelter, and where. If the others shared one thought, it was that the two of them would likely come bursting through the kitchen door any minute, would likely come back laughing and drenched from their idiotic adventure.
Looking around the room, from face to face, Margaret noticed that Sally was wanting something. “What is it, babe?” she said.
Sally hugged Krissy close. “Shouldn’t we go find Daphne and Murray?” she asked.
“They’ll be all right,” Margaret said. “Don’t you worry about them. They’re somewhere.”
Satisfied with this answer, Sally turned to the fire to study the quick bursts of firelight that brightened the faces of everyone close to it and then she asked, “Shouldn’t we watch the storm?”
Margaret looked over at Bill. “All right,” he said, getting up. “But if we lift the shutters, the porch will turn into a sandbox and that means in the morning it will be Sally and Dad who wake up really early to sweep it out.” He opened the door to the porch and closed it quickly behind him and they watched him through the big front windows. As he released the hooks the force of the wind pushed the shutters against his chest, pushed them halfway up to the ceiling. After he’d got three of them fastened he turned back to look at Sally, who was standing at the window holding Krissy, nodding her head. He went over to the picnic table and gathered what was left of Margaret’s jigsaw puzzle into the box, bent to collect a few pieces from the floor. Watching him from her chair by the fire with Neil snuggled close beside her, reaching back to knock on the window but then not knocking, Margaret said, “That doesn’t matter, Bill. My puzzle doesn’t matter.”
The sky was as black as night. Every few minutes long branching forks of lightning pierced down through the clouds to the rolling surface of the slate grey water. Sheet lightning, broad and quick and unanticipated, lit the whole grey lake. The waves had thickened, they were moving in now like liquid muscle, breaking hard and sudsy white on the dark sand, throwing up driftwood and bits of garbage and stunned minnows and coarse sawdust from the mills on the far side of the lake, the Michigan side.
The first of the thunder cracked just as Bill was coming back in from the porch with the puzzle box in his hand. The lights, two in the kitchen, one above the big oak table, and three in a floor lamp beside Patrick’s chair, flickered twice as one light and then died. Mary had been sitting holding the flashlight, ready for the darkness, and when it came she pushed the switch and pointed the cone of light at Bill as he walked back to the kitchen to get a towel to dry his head. Paul was fiddling with the transistor radio by the light of the fire, turning the dial back and forth through the static, searching for the voice of a weatherman. “They’ll have a generator at the hospital,” he said.
“They’ll have a generator for sure,” Bill called from the kitchen. “Likely several.” After he was dried off he came back to sit down again beside Sally and Krissy on the couch, put his feet up on the hassock, and locked his hands behind his head. “Let’s talk about Florida,” he said.
This is what they did when there was nothing else for them to do. They talked about going south for a winter holiday, driving down in two or three cars but staying together on the road, finding a nice stretch of ocean, renting some kind of cottage for a couple of weeks. Bill always started the talk. And they had discussed it so often and in such detail, the details always presenting some kind of problem and then one way or another getting sorted out to everyone’s satisfaction, that it seemed almost possible that one day they might actually get themselves down there. They would buy loud American bathing suits and jump ocean waves under a hot February sun and when they were tired of jumping waves, they would lie back in black-and-white striped beach chairs, the stripes being one of Daphne’s contributions to the dream, to drink perfectly chilled glasses of cheap American gin.
* * *
AFTER THEY’D MADE love in the small unlocked shed behind the Casino, Murray and Daphne waited out the worst of the storm with Mary’s parents, drinking Canadian Club.
They had just started back to Dunworkin when it really broke loose. They’d thought it was likely almost over, but running down the Casino hill they could hardly see their feet in front of them and the crosswind coming off the lake soon slowed their running to a hard walk. Their hair was blown wild and plastered wet to their faces and everything that covered them, the quilt, and their clothes and skin under the quilt, was quickly, thoroughly drenched. When a flash of sheet lightning created a brief, queer daylight under the black clouds, they were able to recognize Mary’s parents’ cottage and they left the beach thinking just to take shelter under the broad eaves around at the back where they would be protected from the full fury of the wind. But Mary’s father heard them and opened the kitchen door with a flashlight in his hand. He knew them immediately and ushered them inside, his only comment a surprised but cheerful, “Good grief, Mother.”
Mrs. Wilson pointed them to separate bedrooms and brought towels and dry clothes, a sundress for Daphne and a pair of Mr. Wilson’s best shorts for Murray, telling them in a pleasant, straightforward way what fools they were. “Here,” she said, tossing them their towels, “get yourselves dried off, for God’s sake.” She gave them a few minutes and then knocked on the doors holding a plastic basket for their wet clothes. Daphne told Mrs. Wilson if she could please just have a garbage bag, that would be great, and then she went to the bathroom to fix her hair in the candlelight, to search her face for giveaway signs of joy. Murray went out to talk to Mr. Wilson, who was standing in the kitchen pouring the rye with his flashlight tucked under his arm.
The four of them carried their drinks to the fire in the living room, which was furnished much more formally than Dunworkin, the sofa and chairs obviously just one generation off new, likely brought out from the house in London when a better suite there displaced them. The floor was carpeted and there was a new open kitchen with a breakfast bar. Several oil lamps had been lit and placed on stable-looking tables.
Earlier that afternoon, before they’d arrived at Dunworkin, Mary and Patrick had come to tell Mary’s parents about their honeymoon, about all the historical sights in Boston and the drive back through New York State, and after the Wilsons got Daphne and Murray settled into comfortable chairs with their drinks and a sincere assurance that they had both enjoyed the groom’s dinner just so much, travel was what they wanted to talk about now. They wanted to know had Murray had the chance to broaden his experience with travel? Had Daphne? They themselves had travelled a lot and hoped to do more of it now that Mr. Wilson could take some time away from work. They had been to Florida many times of course and twice to Europe, once to California, to Jamaica, to Banff, to Washington.
Murray was relieved beyond measure that there was nothing to do between the cracks of thunder but drink rye and listen, or appear to listen. He had thought about it so many, many times and now here it was. In all his imagining he had never once imagined it unexpected or clumsy or rushed, or on the rough cement floor of some anonymous cement-block shed in a banging storm. The metal roof above them had been so roaring loud he couldn’t hear or understand most of what she’d said to him, and because he was afraid to raise his voice in case someone heard and came to rescue them, he’d had to try to speak with his hands, had to let his hands say what he might have said if it had happened some place else, some place safe and quiet. Near the end, near the brilliant end of it, he understood that his hands were not moving kindly, they were not soothing her flesh and her bones and her muscles as he had imagined they would, given their chance. He was bruising her with questions, the questions being, Why does this have to come to me now? and, Why do you decide you want me now?
Daphne drank her rye and smiled her misaligned showmanship smile. She was not thinking about the trips she might make. She was thinking about the sheet lightning that had filled the high shed window. In its intermittent flash she had seen that he was as fine as she’d discovered, just this evening discovered she had imagined him to be. She’d looked down at many men lying naked or nearly naked, bruised and broken and suffering or healing or dead. But this was a man as he was meant to be seen, and a man’s moving body, all bones and angles and shadows, was a lovely thing. She could feel his hands on her face and on her body, all over it and all over it again when they were finished, much harder when they were finished. And her body knew her mind. Her body had known enough to brace itself. Her mouth had gone to his skin, to the rain on his shoulders, to his damp belly, instinctively. She could no more have stopped this than she could in other times have stopped her aching arms from reaching for a sweet bundled infant or her mangled jaw from opening wide in unanticipated laughter.
When it had become clear that he should not be asked to wait any longer she had wrapped herself around him and he held her exactly as she wished to be held, and when he broke through into her it wasn’t hurt she felt at all. Or it was hurt with a fine new name.
And even so, even with all of this ringing absolutely true through her comforted, thankful body as she sat there watching the Wilsons’ fire and drinking their warming rye, when they’d finally got themselves hidden from the storm, safe under the eaves, when Murray asked her, “Did that happen?” she could only try to look at him squarely and say, “I might be the last person to ask.”