PATRICK AND MARY bought their house in 1964, the first spring after they were married. Mary had roamed north London with a real estate agent for two months before she decided on tree-lined Piccadilly Street and then it was just a matter of waiting and watching for one of the big old square-jawed houses to come on the market.
Most of their friends and certainly all of the men at Patrick’s law firm were buying out in the suburbs, big brick splits with two-car garages and bay windows, shake roofs and two fireplaces and lower levels to be finished soon with shag carpet and wet bars, but Mary had grown up in a once-modern fifties ranch over behind the university, every solid inch of which, the walls, the baseboards, the doors, the ceilings, had been painted a creamy off-white, and now for her own life she wanted some character. She wanted natural wood and high baseboards and thick plaster walls you could sink a nail into and deep windowsills and the muted, unobtrusive yellow brick that had been the preferred brick when the old part of the city was built. Although she would never have said so, the first time she saw Bill and Margaret’s white frame house, the house Patrick had grown up in, which was so much smaller, so much the lesser house, she decided that she liked it better than her own family’s. From the look of things, Margaret had neither the inclination nor the time for the pristine demands a woman could make on a house. She had moved in with Bill and his kids and more or less maintained what Patrick’s mother had begun. This was the kind of house Mary wanted for her own kids.
Because Patrick still had the last half of Alex McFarlane’s note to take care of, Mary’s father had loaned them the five-thousand-dollar down payment, telling them to go ahead and buy big, buy what they’d need down the line, because waiting was not nearly as wise as it was assumed to be. Moving up was an extremely costly undertaking. He further advised that it would be worth their while to forgo holidays and a new car for a while in order to put every loose dollar they had against their mortgage. Somehow he knew what was coming, knew that the housing market was just on the brink of the kind of growth not seen since the years after the war. He was obviously disappointed to see his money sunk into such an old house but Mary told him she was convinced it would outlast the new houses being thrown up so fast on the outskirts of the city, and besides, the trees alone and the park just a few blocks away and the settled, closed-in feel of the street, these were the things she and Patrick valued. And Patrick’s office was so close he could walk and that would save them the expense of a second car, forever.
Mary was just pregnant with Stephen, didn’t even quite realize she was pregnant, when she got almost exactly the house she wanted and they asked one of Patrick’s colleagues to draw up the papers.
Bill and Margaret said nothing one way or the other about the choice of a house but when Bill saw that the kids were serious about the place on Piccadilly he did bring Archie Stutt in to look over the hot-water furnace and the wiring and the plumbing. Archie’s diagnosis was that the wiring was a bit suspect and should likely be tackled some time in the next five years, the plumbing, being copper throughout, was that much better than new and the old boiler could probably fire the Queen Mary across the Atlantic, if in fact the Queen Mary still existed.
After they signed on the dotted line, but before Paul came in with his half-ton to help bring over what little they owned from the apartment on Oxford, most of it cheap, leftover university stuff, Margaret and Mary stripped all the downstairs hardwood with a rented sander. Then they waxed and polished, both of them on their knees for long hours, their stiff joints screaming because Mary wouldn’t have urethane, which she said looked phoney. They went down to Kingsmills to pick out material for drapes, decided together on good understated linen that was neither in fashion nor out. Margaret didn’t offer to sew these herself, although she did find someone at home who was an experienced seamstress, to run them up.
A year later, after the drapes were hung and the floors buffed to a soft glow by the socks and slippers that moved across them, Margaret drove into the city more than she normally would have to watch Stephen while Mary took herself off to estate auctions to try to find the furniture she imagined filling all her rooms. Stephen was a good, pudgy baby, happiest when put on the kitchen floor with the pots and pans and a couple of big spoons. Sometimes Margaret brought Sally in with her for company, to dispel the hollow sound of the rooms that was caused, she knew, not just by the absence of furniture but by the extremely high ceilings that Mary liked so much. At nine, Sally appeared to have lost every ounce of her earlier maternal inclination, although she would agree to hold Stephen while Margaret spooned him his pablum. Usually Sally just wanted Mary to hurry up and get home and said so.
It took Mary three years to find all the big pieces she wanted and she was careful not to rush it, not to be swayed from her master plan, which she never did articulate to anyone.
Now they were almost a houseful. The boys were in the second biggest bedroom, Stephen up in the top bunk and John, who was born the day after Stephen’s third birthday, just recently coaxed into the bottom bunk. The crib had to be freed because at the end of March Mary had discovered she was carrying her last baby. If it was a girl, and Mary and her doctor both claimed to be sure this time that it was, she would be Rebecca. Rebecca Sylvia.
Patrick was working ten-hour days almost all the time and they hadn’t had a holiday since the big family trip to Florida two years earlier, just before John was born. If he’d stopped to think about it, Patrick would have had to say that he was exhausted but he was still only thirty-three and hungry for promotion, for the added income and the status and the responsibility, for the meat a man like him was expected to sink his teeth into. You didn’t get a promotion in a firm like his if you allowed yourself to appear tired. The walking to work helped. He believed it did. And often in good weather he donned sweats to jog the route he’d laid out for himself, changing it sometimes in response to traffic patterns, finishing off with the seven blocks to his office, cleaning up in the small men’s washroom and changing into the suit and shirt and dress shoes he’d parked behind his office door. This routine was the source of edgy amusement for some of his colleagues, many of whom paid exorbitant fees to belong to a downtown gym that had a weight room and a sauna and a pool. While his jogging precluded his taking part in most of the jock talk and in the much more significant rounds of boasting about paying so damned much money for fitness, his thirty-minute run down the quiet morning streets, through the large, heavily treed central park, past the tank from the Second World War and the cannon from the Siege of Sebastopol and the larger-than-life soldier high on a concrete pedestal ignoring in perpetuity the larger-than-life woman reaching up to him, became an essential, head-clearing part of his day. Perhaps because it gave him his only privacy.
He did enjoy his noisy rituals with the boys, lifting their tough, squirming, slippery little bodies from the bathtub if he got home early enough, escalating their loud, goofy nonsense with his own at the breakfast table on stretched-out Sunday mornings. And he was content with Mary, who was not remotely like Sandra or any of the others he’d been with after Sandra. They did not very often have sex as he’d imagined a man and his wife might, on automatic, when they were tired at the end of a long day or just coming out of sleep in the privacy of early morning. Mary would do anything, go anywhere, but only when they had the assurance of an empty span of time, only after she’d been held for a long quiet time in his arms. And neither of them liked to talk as they waited for it to come to them, the peaceful energy that Mary in the middle of one long night had called their loving freedom, murmuring her satisfied and slightly smug conviction that, for her money, it was a far, far better thing than free love.
Except for the absence of a decent garage that might actually hold a car, he had come to like the house on Piccadilly and to like what Mary had done with it. The oversized armoires and the odd corner cabinets and the heavy little tables and the several reupholstered chairs you could fall asleep in took comfortable hold in the house and in their lives.
At their first cocktail party, which they gave the third year they were in the house, Patrick’s fifth year at the law firm, he’d overheard one of the senior partners’ wives say to another senior partner’s wife, casually, that she could not imagine surrounding herself with someone else’s worn-out junk. But Patrick did not look to such women for any kind of guidance. He didn’t look to such women for anything. When they came to him at his office with their husbands, usually to have new wills drawn up or sometimes to sign the papers on a bigger house at a more prestigious address, he pulled their chairs out for them despising their little downtown suits, their immaculate puffed-up hair, their expensive assumptions, their second-hand confidence. When he passed those particularly gruesome women in his own narrow hall with its sconces and its dark oak staircase, which he hoped to be climbing until he was a very old man, they pretended they had not been heard and he almost laughed, but knew better of course. Their husbands were standing just inside the kitchen talking about Expo and the possible implications for international trade. Lifting their almost empty glasses in Patrick’s direction, they too pretended the women had not been heard. As he poured the Scotch for his superiors he wondered whether this little bit of awkwardness would help him at the office or hinder him. From what he’d seen, he guessed it could go either way.
It had been Patrick’s idea to add the screened-in porch at the back of the dining room. They’d replaced the wide window with double garden doors that, except for the hottest, muggiest days of high summer, were almost always wide open, May to September. Bill had found them an old wrought-iron patio set at a cottage auction, four chairs and a chaise that he’d carefully and thoroughly stripped and repainted white, driving up to Goderich with the cushions to have them recovered in the tough yardage used for boat cushions, realizing when he got there that he’d forgotten to ask Mary exactly what colour she wanted, deciding on his own that she would like the hunter green and she quite sincerely did, nearly as much as she liked Bill himself.
The addition of the screened porch required attention to the garden, which was small but nicely proportioned, with good afternoon sun. Patrick and Mary concluded together that the only things worth keeping were the red maple and the crab apple and a few of the lilacs back near the garage. After Patrick and Paul cut down or hauled everything else out of the ground, the seven or eight too many lilac bushes and the walnut tree, which was dirty, and the old cedars, which had thinned and faded, the first order of business was a new wraparound euonymus hedge, for privacy. They left a good expanse of reseeded grass for the kids and built a sandbox close, but not too close, to the back door, drove out to the lake for a load of fine white play sand. They worked up the flower beds with topsoil and some of Paul’s Cadillac manure from the farm, put in a dozen peonies along the side and three climbing roses against the garage wall. They left the rest to Mary and she took her time with the perennials just as she had with the furniture. The first thing she did was paint the small garage door a dark cherry red to set off the roses, which would be white, which were by the seventh year of their marriage white and robust and almost glowing in the evening light when they sat with their drinks in the screened-in porch with Stephen and John at their feet, the boys revving their trucks in preparation for a big crash, their little mouths working hard, exploding with the sounds of carnage.
* * *
BOTH OF MURRAY’S parents died in May of 1970. His mother suffered a quick, entirely unanticipated fatal stroke while she was standing over her stove grating cheese into a sauce for the broccoli and two days after her funeral his father was gone. He had been sitting alone on the brocade sofa watching Archie Bunker berate Meathead on All in the Family when he had a mild heart attack and soon thereafter a second attack that was called massive and which killed him.
Patrick had done their wills right after he joined his law firm. Mr. McFarlane told his own long-time lawyer at home that he wanted to give the will business to Patrick, just to help get him started, and this was understood as an ordinary gesture from one generation of men to another, a handing down. The McFarlane wills were not complicated. Everything to each other and then everything to Murray. The only exceptions were a bequest to the Anglican Church for new carpet and choir gowns and another larger bequest to the Cancer Society, because both of the McFarlanes assumed that if they lived long enough, they would become familiar with one kind of cancer or another. Some of their oldest friends had died of it, quite miserably.
The day after his father’s funeral, a Saturday, Murray drove into London to Patrick and Mary’s house on Piccadilly, which he’d never seen, to be told what he expected to hear. His parents had always ensured that he understood clearly the specifics of their wills. They did this even when he was a child, to give him confidence, they said. Although neither of them would have shared it with anyone but the other, they had been, in their old age, slightly disappointed in Murray. This materialized in three ways: his mother’s worried judgement that he was foolishly and dangerously resistant to his God, his father’s proud disappointment that he had deliberately sought a career that took him so very far away from home, and their shared amazement at his choice of a wife. But their disappointment did not in any way interfere with what they had always privately called Murray’s birthright. Money, his mother said, was money.
After Mary had given Murray a brief tour of the house, and he did seem interested in the staircase and particularly in some of the cabinets, Patrick picked up both wills from the dining-room table and handed them over, explaining unnecessarily that because Mr. McFarlane had outlived her, his will negated his wife’s.
Mary was glad to see Murray although she had never known him well. There was only the quick year before she and Patrick were married and Murray had pulled back that year, giving her room, giving her first claim, and then he more or less disappeared into his work, into his travelling around. Sometimes they heard from Margaret where in the world he was and once in a while they found something of his in one of the Toronto papers, but they saw him only irregularly and only at home if they happened to be at Bill and Margaret’s when he, too, was in town visiting his parents. Charlotte had stopped going home with him to see the McFarlanes while they were alive, although she was firmly present at both funerals, thoroughly composed in a severe, black, sleeveless dress. She had moved through the crowded church basement, chatting up the elderly church people and touching their age-spotted arms as she spoke to them, her transparently disciplined liveliness so false it clearly astonished them, left them shocked on her behalf and speechless.
Standing in the dining room in her own very early middle age, Mary thought now that Murray was quite good looking, compelling in a way that Patrick was not. His hair had thinned but this made his face unavoidable and she liked unavoidable faces. His cheekbones were his strongest feature, his cheekbones and his light-filled eyes. She attributed the thinking of these lusty thoughts, which were not at all normal for her, to altered hormones. She was always a bit randy when she was pregnant, a bit open. When she was carrying John, she had confessed this to her young doctor, mainly because she was curious to see if he’d say what he usually said, which was, “Oh sure, I hear that all the time, not to worry.” Lying on the table, conjuring fond thoughts about the pulsing baby just there under her thick, taut skin and about herself, her temporarily, she hoped, altered self, she did not pause long enough to realize that she was speaking to a man who probably assumed himself to be fairly good looking and who was just at that moment preparing to insert his gloved index finger into her vagina. When he frowned and offered the opinion that while he’d never heard of such a thing, he would guess that her feelings were likely just a slight aberration and certainly nothing to get excited about, she recognized with a thud her own stupidity and laughed so hard he had to stall his index finger and pretend to laugh with her. Later, when she replayed this scene for Patrick in their bed, snuggling into him, expecting raucous laughter, he just pulled back and lifted his eyebrows, waiting as he had waited before to be told just why this was funny. Disappointed for a week, she finally thought of telling Margaret, who was a better audience for almost anything anyway and who, hearing it, hooted most satisfactorily.
When he’d arrived Murray had made a sincere and appreciated fuss over five-year-old Stephen, who was Stephen Murray, and then over John, who at two was still small enough to be lifted and swung up into the air, and now Mary called the boys back into the dining room to say goodbye. After Murray bent down to shake the boys’ hands he turned to her. “You were never in my mother’s house,” he said. “Patrick gave her a rose bowl once and I’d like you to have it. And she had a chest you might like. I think it’s walnut.” He held his hand at his own chest to indicate the height. “It has about a hundred drawers.”
Mary smiled and nodded yes.
“Come maybe Wednesday morning,” he said. “The auctioneers are going to be there Wednesday afternoon to look things over. I’ll hold back anything that catches your eye.”
Moved by this unexpected generosity, Mary told him she would come Wednesday morning for sure, and thank you. And she decided she would definitely choose something. If there was nothing she liked, she could just pick something small, something she could tuck away in a cabinet.
Before Murray arrived she had told Patrick she’d take off with the boys and it still looked like the right thing to do. She reminded him about all the ingredients available for lunch and then went out the door to settle Stephen and John into the car and take them the hour’s drive over to see Bill and Margaret and Sally. Bill in particular loved to look up from the cash register at the hardware store and see her standing there with his grandsons, come all this way to visit their grandpa at work. He always kept a stash of multicoloured Laura Secord suckers in the back of the register for his grandchildren and for all the other kids who came in, who were expected to stand stock-still and quiet while their fathers contemplated wrenches and roach poison.
Driving down the highway trying to find some music on the car radio, Mary found instead a report of a shooting at Kent State University. Four American students had been killed by troops from their own National Guard. The troops had shot into a crowd of protesting students. That was the phrase the reporter used, shot into the crowd. Listening to the reporter go on about Nixon and rallies and demonstrations and Cambodia and casualties, the word casualties sounding as always like very much the wrong word, she thought, not for the first time, how good it was to be Canadian, to be alive in this country now. A Canadian in 1970 didn’t have to fear her own armed government. Patrick and Murray and Paul were not required by law to hand their lives over to fight someone else’s war.
She hoped Patrick would take the trouble to get to know Murray again, that Murray would stay around for a while, that they’d drink beer in the sun porch all afternoon, listen to some of Patrick’s jazz, to John Coltrane or Thelonious Monk, get themselves loosened up. They had not seen much of each other for years but this could be understood as simply an ordinary interruption caused by jobs and marriages, distance, Murray’s constant moving around. She remembered watching them, especially that summer at Dunworkin, thinking that she heard in their casual, sometimes nasty banter an oblique male commitment, a kind of contract. They seemed to have been steady, easy, dependable friends and why not resurrect that? She didn’t know how grown-up men survived without it, or why. Her own friend Joan, who was married now, too, and living on the far side of Toronto, had become indispensable, like a sister who didn’t slow things down to a crawl with the need for context or background or explanation.
* * *
IT MIGHT HAVE been better if Mary had stayed with Patrick and Murray in the porch. She might have been able to give Murray more of what he’d come for.
With the wills out of the way, Patrick’s intention was to ask briefly about Charlotte and then to take the chance to get Murray to talk if he would about journalism. He thought he might be able to feel that he knew him again if he understood more about his working life. And he had a lot of questions, starting from the almost nothing that he knew about the job and from the assumption that anything Murray could tell him would be at least slightly interesting. But the one question about Charlotte, the simple, She looks good, how is she? took them straight down Murray’s line of thought, which apparently had been the plan from the start.
“Oh, Charlotte’s fine,” Murray said, answering the question with a nod and then adding quickly, as if it were part of the answer, “I’m going to leave her.” He tilted his head back toward the wills on the dining-room table. “There is substantial money now. She could live well enough on half of it.”
Patrick eased himself back from the edge of the reinvigorated friendship. He didn’t like divorce. Not at all. There was nothing to like about divorce. “Why now?” he said. “Why not earlier, before you got the money?”
Murray laughed. “Once a lawyer…”
“No,” Patrick said. “It’s just that, well, why would you want her to have any of that money?”
“Because it was not her fault that I married her. I married her because she has the best legs and the finest breasts I have ever seen. And I sincerely believed that would be enough to last me.”
“She is a very good-looking woman,” Patrick said.
“But you’ve never liked her,” Murray said, watching closely for a reaction that was not forthcoming. “Nobody has ever liked her. And now I don’t.”
“Charlotte must be similar to the rest of us,” Patrick said, getting up from his chair to get a couple of Pilsners from the fridge, calling back, “She must be made of all the usual stuff. Strengths. Weaknesses. Needs.” Coming out to the porch again with the beer, he said, “I admit I didn’t like her much at first, but I decided some time ago this was probably only because I was used to a different kind of woman. We were unfair to Charlotte, I’m sure.”
Murray waited until Patrick was comfortably stretched out in his wrought-iron chaise. “I hope you haven’t wasted a lot of your time feeling guilty,” he said. “She has never liked any of you. Almost right from the beginning, she had vicious nicknames for everyone.”
“Which I don’t want to hear,” Patrick said. “Not today or any other day. Anyway. I think everyone pretty much came around. I just assumed I couldn’t see what you saw.”
“And indeed you couldn’t,” Murray said, taking a long drink. “The fact that she’d been with quite a few other men has always been a bit of a turn-on but I never did get to like the idea that someone like you, for instance, might look at her and imagine her naked.”
Patrick laughed a low male laugh, the kind women get to hear only by mistake. “You are deluding yourself a bit there,” he said. “I have never imagined the good Charlotte naked.” He had, of course. He caught Murray’s skeptical gaze. “Call it friendship,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. “Call it taste. Yours. Mine. Not necessarily the same.”
“If you say so,” Murray said. He had rested his foot on Stephen’s beat-up dump truck and was rolling it back and forth in front of him. “And you’re right, she does have needs. What she needs is to feel superior to everyone on the planet. What she needs is to have received a good swift kick in the ass when she first started to strut her mind-boggling vanity, whenever that was. Before my time.”
“This sounds a bit like hatred,” Patrick said.
“The problem has become more about what it isn’t,” Murray said, “than what it is.”
Patrick started to run his thumbnail down the sweaty label of his beer bottle, shredding it. Murray dug round in his pockets and found his lighter but no cigarettes because he had purposely not bought any. “I’ve been smoking,” he said. “And now I’m quitting. Everybody I know smokes,” he said. “My car stinks of it. My clothes stink of it. Can you smell it on me?”
“Yes,” Patrick said. He thought about asking if there was someone new, a replacement, someone who was prompting Murray to admire Charlotte less than he had when he was a lonely, lusty twenty-four. He decided to wait it out. If there was a woman, and if Murray wanted him to know there was a woman, he would bring the conversation around.
“I wanted kids,” Murray said. “It never occurred to me that this was something you should have to ask a woman beforehand.”
“Charlotte doesn’t want kids?” Patrick looked at Murray straight on, as if this surprised him.
“She’d had herself sterilized before I even met her.”
“And didn’t say so?” Patrick asked, incredulous.
“What she says now is that she just assumed that because I was from the beginning so determined to get a posting in London and from there maybe to Southeast Asia or at least some place with some significance, that because we talked all the time about what she now likes to call with a bitchy little twist ‘the world out there,’ that I wouldn’t want to be tied up or tied down with the extra responsibility of a family. And because she was so up front about her own career, her own ambitions, she thought this made us a match. She assumed it didn’t have to be discussed.”
“You did talk all the time about your job,” Patrick said. “You talked endlessly about your possible career moves. And it looks like you’ve done at least half of what you imagined doing. She has a point, perhaps.”
“She has a point? Perhaps?” Murray sent the dump truck rolling into the dining room. He leaned forward in his chair to face the floor, bracing himself on the long bones of his legs the way he had when they were boys, when he was a sometimes anxious boy.
“No, of course,” Patrick said. “She should have levelled with you. Given you the opportunity to make a choice, to do without the legs and the breasts.”
“So I’m just your average piece of pond scum?” Murray asked. “The one who sees he has to leave is automatically pond scum.”
“Usually,” Patrick said. “In my experience. Do you want me to get the divorce under way?” he asked. “Maybe a legal separation first and then see what her lawyer comes after?” He gave Murray a chance to think this over. “We could likely go for irreconcilable differences, which is just new on the market and quite generally applicable.” He waited again for Murray to take in what he’d said. “I’m assuming you don’t want to go after the sterilization, although we might be able to argue some breach there.”
“Irreconcilable differences would suit me fine,” Murray said. “From where I sit it sounds almost precise. And I won’t fight her, not unless she wants more than half. I doubt very much that she would go after more than half.”
Patrick laughed. “Oh, my son,” he said. “You might know your way around Heathrow but you obviously know dick about domestic life.” He stood up and went to the kitchen, came back with two more bottles of Pilsner and a bag of potato chips that he threw into Murray’s lap. “Lunch,” he said. “Or we can get in your dazzling new Volvo and go grab a hamburger. Or you could buy me a proper prime-rib lunch down at the Iroquois.”
“I’ll be wanting to get married again fairly quickly,” Murray said.
“As I surmised,” Patrick said. Waiting for it had made him more curious than he might have been otherwise. He assumed he wouldn’t know the woman. She would be a journalist of some kind, or connected to that world. “Who is she?” he asked. When he didn’t get an answer he continued. “She’s nice and fertile?” He intended this to be black and funny. Like his taste in women, Murray’s taste in retort had long since been established and there was no reason to expect any deviation.
Murray looked up to watch if and how Patrick’s face would respond when his brain cells registered the word he was about to hear. “Daphne,” he said.
Hearing it, Patrick realized he’d felt it coming, he had felt something coming. He was extremely careful to control his facial muscles, to hold them exactly as they’d been before the question was asked and answered. Mary liked to complain that he could do this in his sleep. “The Daphne I’m thinking of?” he asked. When Murray nodded, before he could stop it, he muttered a quick “God,” giving himself away. He could not have explained, not even to Mary, precisely why he did not want this to be true.
He thought he would like to ask Murray if he’d had contact with Daphne lately. It didn’t seem probable. She’d been at both funerals, as had they all, and she was her usual self as far as he could tell. She’d handled Murray the way she would be expected to handle him under the circumstances. She had talked to Charlotte, led her around the room to introduce her to the kids, the nieces and nephews.
Then he thought what he would really like to know was if they had been together when they were young, right under everyone’s nose, when Daphne was just a gullible, disfigured, innocent kid, taking all that shit from Roger Cooper. And what were the circumstances? Where, for instance? When? And where was he? And did anyone else know about this? And then he understood that there was a better-than-average chance he was going to get extremely pissed off if he allowed himself to go much further in that direction.
Murray felt the air thicken with Patrick’s anger, the particulars of which were unchanged. He recognized the economy of movement, the concentrated hold on the beer bottle, the way his eyes quickly located a horizon, in this instance the dark red garage door, and locked on it. There would be no outburst. The stillness was the outburst.
He reached over the trucks at his feet, across the space that separated them, to grip Patrick’s knee, hoping that this gesture might break the connection to the garage door, that it might say what it was generally understood to mean in the world of men, which was, Come on, guy. Come on, friend. This can’t be such a big deal. And it worked, at least to the extent that Patrick looked at him.
“You can relax,” Murray said. “I have no reason to believe your sister has any particular feelings for me.”
This was not exactly true. It was, exactly, a lie. From the night of the big storm, the night in the shed behind the Casino, although there had been nothing since, not even the casual weight of her hand on his arm or his back or his shoulder, he had been able to imagine something tangible coming to him from Daphne. For the seven years since, whether he was with her at one of Margaret’s occasional suppers or much more usually not with her but in a plane crossing the Atlantic or sitting in a gritty hotel bathtub at two in the morning listening to rocket fire from the outskirts of a ravaged city, he had been able to imagine something tangible.
But he decided on the spot that friends could lie. The best of friends could tell the best of lies if they absolutely had to, to get themselves through something, intact.
* * *
ON TUESDAY MORNING Daphne drove up to Murray’s parents’ house because standing beside her over his father’s open grave the week before he had asked her to come.
It was hot for late May, and dry. The lilacs that surrounded the wraparound porch were in full, droopy bloom. She knocked on the double oak door, distracted by their sickly scent.
Before she arrived Murray had gone up to the Blue Moon for two cups of coffee, graciously accepting the condolences offered by the young waitress who took his money and then by the owner who had come to the front immediately when he thought he recognized Murray.
He sat Daphne down at the small kitchen table and gave her a coffee, which was black and only lukewarm now. The table was still covered with one of his mother’s many embroidered cloths, which had been ironed, perhaps just ten days earlier, into neat creased squares. “How to start,” he said.
“Patrick said you’d offered Mary first crack at everything,” Daphne said. “That was good of you. She loves old stuff. She will appreciate anything you give her.”
“Patrick called you?” Murray asked.
“He’s taken to calling me once or twice a week,” she said. “He never has much to say so it’s usually a bit of a mystery why.”
“We had a good talk on Saturday,” Murray said.
“So I heard,” she said, her face implacable.
He didn’t want any part of this to be an ordinary game between a man and a woman. “Did he tell you I’m leaving Charlotte?”
“Oh,” she said. “No.” She covered her jaw with her hand as she always did when she found herself in a conversation that might make a difference to someone. “I didn’t realize there was that much trouble.”
“Oh, that much and more,” he said.
She lowered her hand and traced her finger along the ironed crease of the tablecloth, then lifted it from the crease to lightly circle a mauve pansy. “Imagine women sitting around all day doing this work. Or, I guess, doing it after the harder work was done. Think what it would be like to make all your own beautiful things. From plain cloth, from bits of coloured thread. From nothing.”
“You do know what’s coming,” he said.
“No,” she said, turning her face to the window above the huge old sink, away from what she could see coming.
“But if you had to guess…?” he said.
“I would have to guess you’re thinking about an unusually bad storm,” she said.
He nodded.
“You shouldn’t likely plan any kind of life around a storm,” she said.
“You hadn’t been with anyone,” he said.
She faced him again. “But I have since,” she said. “You gave me a taste for it,” she said, opening her eyes wide, trying to laugh, to make him laugh.
“Don’t ever tell me about any since,” he said. “It would sound obscene to me.”
“I wasn’t about to,” she said. “Believe me. And ‘obscene’ is a very strange word. Are you and Charlotte obscene?”
“We should leave that alone,” he said.
“I’m all grown up, Murray,” she said. “All grown up now.”
“If I leave her, will you come to Toronto with me?” He ran a hand back through his thinning hair, which was not a nervous but an absent gesture. “We should get married. I would like us to have kids.”
“If I say yes, you will leave your marriage, but if I don’t, you’ll stay?”
“You are the only really good reason to leave her,” he said. “This will hurt her. It will certainly upset her parents and maybe even Bill and Margaret.”
“You could try it alone,” she said. “Many people do. And successfully.”
“That wouldn’t be much of a change,” he said, although he did not want to go down that road. He’d decided standing at his father’s grave that he wouldn’t use that kind of thing to win her over. “Look,” he said. “It was a mistake. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was a mistake.”
“You were so wild for her,” she said. “You were so obvious it was embarrassing.” She covered her jaw again. “You touched her all the time, more than you ever touched anyone. For the flimsiest reasons.”
“I realize that,” he said. “It was true.”
“What you’re looking at now is not a woman like Charlotte,” she said. “Although I guess you would realize that too.”
“Standard issue,” he said. “That’s one of the only things I could hear you saying the night behind the Casino.”
She stiffened. She wasn’t laughing now. “You don’t get to say that. I do, but you don’t.” She pushed her chair back from the table a little and crossed her better-than-average legs, smoothed her suede skirt. The skirt, like skirts everywhere now, was very short. “I’ve never had any complaints.”
“Don’t,” he said. “Come on.”
“I’ll confess that I’ve thought about this,” she said. “Imagined it.”
He reached over to touch her, to take her forearm in his hand, and she let him do this, although there was no change in the air to suggest she was being touched. It moved just the one way, as if the nerve endings in her skin had been tripped to block a small, localized invasion. She knew the feelings, recognized the absence. Her skin had done this for her before. Healthy bodies do this all the time, she thought.
“You picked,” she said. “You chose. It wasn’t me.”
“You could have stopped it,” he said.
“And I would have done that how, exactly?” she asked. “I was twenty-two when you married her. I had no idea how I felt. I knew nothing, even less than I know now, if that can be believed. Except that you were so hot for her, so smitten, so gaga, so dumb-as-a-fence-post gone. I thought it must be love. Her perfection, your idiocy.”
“All that time you treated me like just some kind of dull old reliable friend and then the summer after I married her, you peeled off your bathing suit for me in the Casino shed.”
“But I did not feel that coming,” she said. “That was a true surprise to me.” She finished her cold coffee. “Maybe I thought it wouldn’t matter then,” she said. “Because everything was decided. Nailed down. Locked up. I wanted what I wanted and maybe I was afraid to go to anyone else. Perhaps I thought you would understand that. And anyway,” she said, “although I was probably jumped-up and fairly hot with curiosity, and likely with need, with a particular need, I’ve tried to think of that episode as just a kind of very detailed hug.”
“I remember the details,” he said.
She took his empty coffee cup from his hand, dropped it down into her own empty cup. “Maybe something else had happened by then,” she said. “Which I didn’t understand until very recently.”
“What something else?” he asked.
“If I’d loved you,” she said, “after you’d decided on her, married her, I should have pined away in some kind of heartbroken agony. When I couldn’t have you, I should have wanted you more. But I didn’t. I wanted you almost not at all and that’s what allowed me to peel off my bathing suit.” She got up to pitch their empty paper cups into the garbage bag sitting beside the back door. “I don’t think it’s supposed to work that way. Is it? It’s certainly not the way the story gets told. It’s not the way the song gets sung.”
“Songs and stories,” he said, “do not offer reliable guidance for life.”
“I can’t do it,” she said.
“Explain this to me,” he said.
“You were the one who should have known. And you didn’t. You didn’t take me into account. So why would I trust you now?”
Murray leaned back in his chair. Time, he thought, could be a major player here. And it’s all I’ve got. “What if things just stay the same for now and you think about our options,” he said. “I won’t do anything. I’ll wait as long as it takes for you to make up your mind.” He did not describe their possible lives, did not tell her that he was ready to hold her skinny little body every night of her life. He had imagined so much of what they could have so thoroughly it would have been easy to do but he didn’t.
“I would like kids,” she said, leaning against the sink. “And yours would be by far the best.”
“So you don’t anticipate marrying anyone else?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I do not.”
He was ready to start speaking in paragraphs, to force her into a corner with sound argument, with logic, but he shut it down, hard. She had just said part of what he wanted to hear and he believed if he opened his mouth, she might be prompted to take back what she’d said, and that would be far worse than never hearing it. He hated women most when they said a thing and then backtracked to kill it.
“What if we make love right now?” she asked. “What if I have us a baby? We could go that far.”
He had not wanted to hear this. He had not once imagined this. “An illegitimate baby?” he asked.
“The baby would be fine,” she said. “Later on maybe you could come back and see how you liked the looks of me.”
If she was going to start talking about her face, he was prepared to stop her in her tracks. He’d had the words ready for a while, from the time his guilt had finally, and almost without his noticing, transmogrified into the lesser sin of profound regret. And he did not see it as a self-serving act, this ridding himself of guilt. He would never have hurt her deliberately, not in ten thousand years, and having seen in his travels mountains of deliberate, murderous harm, he now believed that guilt could not exist without intention. That guilt was starved without the nourishment of intention. This conviction freed the young man he’d been and it freed Patrick too, although Murray had never made the offer. He wasn’t a priest. Of course Daphne had never accused either of them, not then when she was a kid and not since. What she’d said when Bill ran under the water tower to gather and comfort her was what innocent people always said: “I’ve hurt myself.” This was wrong, of course. Worse than wrong.
“Not just small breasts but small slightly sagging breasts,” Daphne said. “Does that sound appealing?”
“I don’t understand,” he said.
“What I want is a child,” she said. “I’m lonely at the core and while some people would say this is the worst reason to have a child, a despicable, selfish reason, it must be the very best reason, or so it seems to me. I’ve seen women hold their babies as if they’ve been lonely for them all their lives. No one ever speaks up to say that’s suspect.”
He watched her small body, watched her cross her arms to protect it. The light from the window behind her framed her sandy hair, which she had lifted and pulled back from her forehead to expose the widow’s peak, Sylvia’s widow’s peak. “I’d make it as easy for you as I could,” he said. “I would give you money.”
“That sounds to me like a good deal,” she said. “I like money. It’s one of my favourite things.”
“So you’re saying now would be the right time?” he asked. “We’re going to go upstairs now?”
“When I was driving out from London,” she said, “I was thinking about this house. I was thinking in particular about the wraparound porch, about the lilac bushes and the low branches of the spruce trees along the side.”
“It’s the middle of the day,” he said. “There will be people on the street.” He waited for her to come around, to be sensible, but she wasn’t going to give an inch. “We will have to be quiet,” he said.
“This time quiet in the quiet.” She moved toward him, reached down to his lap, and urged him to his feet.
They went out the kitchen door and followed the porch where it turned at the corner of the house. When they came to the place where the lowest branches of the spruce trees were almost as dense as a man-made wall, Murray stopped.
Daphne stood very still. She was facing him, staring at the creamy surface of his shirt, at the still-hidden chest and shoulders. She was making for herself a sharp, reliable memory of the time before she saw him exposed to the light of day, before she knew every part of his daylight body.
Almost always, until now, when she was with a man, trying like a child to guess exactly what was wanted and, more exactly, what was not wanted and, more crucially, what the final cost of all of it might turn out to be, she recognized in herself and quickly tried to blunt a nearly irrepressible and surely hurtful impulse to cringe when the hands reached out for her. Standing quietly on the porch protected by the spruce trees, she was thoroughly enjoying the absence of that impulse. And she believed that she understood the reason for its absence. This understanding was a release, a fine, small release. “I’m thinking it might be important, it might be best if we try to keep some space between us,” she said. “Quiet should help.”
Let her get this said, Murray told himself. It’s only what she believes now. He took for his own memory the top of her small, beautiful head which was almost ready to lift itself up. Her face is going to be calm, he thought.
It was not absolutely quiet on the porch. There was a bird of some kind hidden among the boughs of the spruce. The bird was agitated, likely fearful for the safety of a nearby, recently constructed nest. They couldn’t see it but they heard its loud defence.
* * *
MARY AND ANDY were out by the garage deadheading end-of-July roses when Daphne came into the backyard to tell them that she, too, was pregnant. The boys were busy with their trucks in the sandbox and “Midnight Cowboy,” a song Andy especially liked, a song she was humming along with, was playing on the stereo in the screened porch.
Mary and Andy didn’t know each other well. When Mary and Patrick were first married, Andy had had her hands full with her kids and lately Mary had been equally busy with her own two and now she was going to have a third, a last baby. Paul was the one who had encouraged Andy to start coming into London, to make the effort to get to know Mary a bit. What he really meant, what almost everyone meant, was, Get away, take some time for yourself. Get your mind off Meg, at least for a few hours. You’re entitled.
Andy’s first response to Daphne’s news was a loud yelp. Then she reached out to embrace her husband’s slightly older sister, moving aside when she was finished to give Mary a chance. When Mary didn’t take the chance, Andy quickly began to talk nonsense, starting with the first thing that came into her head. “But all this time I’ve been hoping for one more bridesmaid’s dress,” she said. She looked over at Mary, who was about to speak, and carried right on. “Mary and I decked out in matching peau-de-soie, and with pretty little pumps dyed to match. I was thinking baby blue. You’re saying there won’t be any baby blue peau-de-soie in our future?” She was trying to give Mary some time, to fill up the air between them so Mary could take a minute to think, so she wouldn’t speak any of the words that looked to be banging around in her angry head. It didn’t do any good.
“Did I hear you right?” Mary asked. She had taken a step back, an actual step back, from Daphne and Andy beside her.
Daphne said it again, just the one word. “Pregnant.”
Mary looked at Andy to see if this might have been a set-up, prearranged, to see if Andy had been already told and won over. But Andy’s face was blank. She looked back to Daphne. “Is there a man connected with this?” she asked, her voice scraping like fine steel wool across the word this. “You don’t have anyone…”
Mary’s tone of voice was brand new to Andy, but hearing it, Daphne recognized the stilted cadence and the quick drop to a lower, deadly serious pitch. Knowing without a doubt that she had heard hints of this tone of voice before she wondered at her own foolhardiness, at her own casual assumptions. If it had been even slightly appropriate, if there had been any room back there beside the roses for a quick acknowledgement of absurdity, she would have smacked her own forehead hard with the heel of her hand. If they’d been alone, Andy would have laughed. Margaret certainly would have laughed, hearing it.
“Yes, there is a man,” Daphne said. “Likely the difficulty is not going to be with the word ‘man’ but with the word ‘connection.’”
Andy felt exactly as she did when she was trying to drive the loaded half-ton up an incline through greasy spring mud. She geared down, hoping for traction. “Okay now,” she said.
“Kids need a father,” Mary said, gearing up. “And so will you. You’ll need help. It’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks. About a thousand times harder. Childbirth is nothing. Childbirth is a bloody piece of cake.”
Aware that this could get very bad very fast, Andy decided that she was not going to get sucked in any further. She would do whatever Daphne wanted, whatever she needed, anything at all short of turning on Mary. Because the only future she could actually see had all of them in it. As far as she knew none of them were going anywhere. Mary would just have to stretch her mind to accommodate this little bit of reality. But in her own time. Because how else did people do this kind of thing? She could not credit herself with a tolerance greater than Mary’s or a heart that was bigger or more yielding. She just didn’t care, she just truly didn’t give a damn, not as long as Daphne was all right with it. Whatever it was.
Daphne was turning to go, not in anger, not crying but turning firmly, ready to head for the gate and down the driveway to her car.
Mary reached to put a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry,” she said. “But you’re not some hippie freak, you are a nurse, for God’s sake. You’re a grown-up.”
Daphne had anticipated this from Patrick, maybe. Patrick, probably. Although she would not have claimed to know her well, she had thought Mary was a bit like Margaret, perhaps because they had always got along so well. She had expected Mary to offer some variation on what Margaret had said that morning.
Margaret had taken time for one of the deep breaths she always took in the instant before she reconciled herself to something and then she’d said a mere “I see.” Such fine words. And by the time Daphne had finished her tea and muffin and was ready to come back into the city, to Patrick and Mary’s, Margaret already had her strategy prepared. “Leave me to get your father through this,” she’d said. “There are far worse things and he is one of the people who knows what some of them are. If he thinks he’s forgotten, I can remind him.”
“I’m thirty,” Daphne said to Mary. “I have thought this through. I can work until I start to show and I’ve got a bit of money and I’ll be getting some help.”
“From…?” Mary said.
“From the person who wants to help this baby.” Daphne could hear her own tone of voice adapt itself to the circumstances, a ready weapon, automatic. “If you can’t take my news in the spirit in which it is offered, then don’t take it at all.”
“But this isn’t just your problem,” Mary said.
Andy flinched, not at the tone of voice but at the word. This was not a problem. She was the one who got to define the meaning of the word problem, thanks anyway, and these two lucky, lucky women were the last people in the world who should have to be told that. Meg not walking quite when she should have, not talking when she should have, and then talking strangely, slamming her fists, hitting out all the time now when she was frustrated, which was practically every waking minute of the day. Meg changing everything, changing even breakfast into tension. That was what you could call a problem.
In her head she already had Daphne’s baby safely born. She couldn’t stop herself. The baby was perfect, as her own first two had been. She already had it dressed in some of the things she’d kept, against this time, she realized now. She let it grow up quickly in her mind because that’s what kids do, had it visiting them at the farm with Daphne, who would be a good mother, an easygoing mother, had it sitting on Paul’s knee on the tractor for a picture with Neil and Krissy perched on the wheel wells and Meg standing behind Paul on the hitch, Meg happy about all of it, jumping and squealing with excitement.
She threw her garden gloves down on the grass and told them she had to go home. She walked along the path and out the gate without a sound, the muscles in her shoulders braced so they would heave only slightly, almost imperceptibly.
Mary was the one who broke down.
Daphne watched her, unmoved. She didn’t reach across to touch her and she was not for a New York minute prompted to offer the consolation usual to such circumstances: I know you didn’t mean to be hurtful. And Andy knows it too. I’m sure she does.
She looked at this pregnant Jackie Kennedy lookalike, this small, dark, bony-shouldered, thick-haired woman who would remain connected to her as long as Patrick was alive and likely long after, and thought, Mary, you’ve pulled yourself away. Nobody did it for you. And how do you like being away? Is it better out there?
And then she left, stopping for a minute at the sandbox to tousle John’s hair and smile down at Stephen, who was just old enough to have been listening, to have noticed his mother crying into her hands back beside the roses.
* * *
WHEN MURRAY PHONED, Patrick had asked him to come up to the office. He’d started a file, made some notes. He didn’t have much information yet, only October 1962, Toronto, which was the date and place of their marriage, and a sketched-out offer of settlement that he had deliberately lowballed. He had no idea how much money Murray made, or how much Charlotte made. He didn’t know if they had saved any money themselves because from what he’d gathered they had been living a fairly extravagant life, but he assumed Murray’s inheritance would constitute the bulk of the assets. He was sure Charlotte’s parents were both alive and well, so her probable future security would not be up for discussion, not in front of any judge that he knew. He wondered what the late Mr. McFarlane would have made of this, Murray allowing his carefully husbanded money to dissipate to this god-awful woman.
Murray had said on the phone that he would rather they meet for dinner downtown some place, so Patrick booked a table at the Iroquois. He deliberately arrived one drink early and after his drink was served he took the file out of his briefcase and placed it squarely in front of him. He wasn’t happy, he had even considered passing this thing off to one of his colleagues, but he wanted it done as fast as it could be done. Just to look at her, you wouldn’t know Daphne was pregnant, but walking to the restaurant in the muggy August heat he had thought about late February, how fast late February could come. Normally he could not truly remember winter in summer or summer in winter. Normally he found it impossible to bring to mind the opposite season, its pleasures and drawbacks.
When Murray walked into the restaurant he was empty-handed, no briefcase, nothing. Maybe he had an accountant. Maybe he was going to refer Patrick to his Toronto accountant.
As Murray sat down, he glanced at the open file laid out on the table. “Nice suit,” he said. “New?”
“Hardy Amies,” Patrick said. “Not all that new.”
The very attentive waiter had watched Murray settle into his chair and was soon right there with his “What will it be for you, sir?” They ordered their drinks and after the waiter left them Murray said, “What the hell’s happened to us that middle-aged men are required to call us sir? If this is achievement, I don’t think I like it. We’re not nearly smart enough to make people feel servile,” he said. “Are we?”
“No, we’re not,” Patrick said. “How are things?”
“Good,” Murray said. “Extremely good. I just found out that I’m going to Saigon in September, which almost, but not quite, makes up for the fact that I didn’t get there last year.”
The waiter was back with the drinks and two oversized menus. He recommended the veal and they both said veal would be fine, although they’d pass on the salads. When he left again, Patrick asked, “Should we get at this or do you want to wait until after we’ve eaten?”
Murray reached across the table to close the file.
Patrick set it down beside the legs of his chair. “Fine by me,” he said. “I won’t start the meter until we actually begin our discussion.”
“I’m going to pay you for the work you’ve done so far,” Murray said. “Just send me the bill. But I’ve decided to hold off on anything legal.”
Patrick found his horizon, the restaurant’s name painted in heavy black capitals across the plate-glass window. He held his drink steady in his hand, an inch above the pink tablecloth. “You might as well keep talking,” he said.
“She won’t marry me,” Murray said. “There is less than nothing I can do about it, so don’t you go weird on me. Don’t lay all of this at my door.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Patrick said, meaning that he hadn’t yet found the words for his contempt.
“So I’m not going to put anything to Charlotte immediately,” Murray said. “Things have not been exactly spectacular for her lately. At work. With her parents.”
“This would be the same woman you couldn’t stand the thought of carrying on with three short months ago? The one with the legs and the breasts and the extreme, what was your word, vanity?”
“Charlotte and I are nearly but not quite played out,” Murray said. “Nearly but not quite dead. And I think it will be better all around if I stay until we are absolutely finished, until it is obvious to both of us. And thus unavoidable. Why should I get to miss the worst of it?”
“Some people might call that commendable,” Patrick said. “But the reason you should get to miss the worst of it is, of course, because you are soon to be a father. I had assumed you would not want it to be born a bastard. That is what many people have agreed to call kids who arrive mysteriously without fathers. You’ve likely heard the word.”
“Of course it has a father,” Murray said. “I am the father.” The waiter was there again, silently placing their plates of veal in front of them. Murray thanked him and he padded away. “Did she tell you I’m the father?” he asked. “Did you ask her?”
“No, she didn’t tell me,” Patrick said. “And no, I didn’t ask her. No one is asking her. Except Mary, who had to take a large load of abuse for her trouble, which she did not in any way deserve. Not from Daphne or anyone else.” He was not going to go on much longer with this. He was going to pull the discussion up out of this shitheap. Practising law, he was required to keep clients focused, disciplined, well away from the murky, useless, self-indulgent talk that could waste hours of his time and truckloads of their money. He was required to keep them firmly concentrated on what the law allowed and he was extremely good at it.
“She won’t have me,” Murray said. “Not now or any time soon.”
“And if she’s got a kid, nobody’s going to be having her. I don’t think you two realize what you are playing at. This kind of mindlessness has repercussions all the way down the line.”
“And when did you get to be the great moral centre of our lives?” Murray asked. “You must be a busy man.…”
“You can’t expect non-reactions all around,” Patrick said. “Dad isn’t exactly jubilant.”
“Margaret will be able to help Bill with it,” Murray said.
“Jesus,” Patrick said. He used his fork to lift the overcooked asparagus and drop it onto his side plate. “Everyone depends on good old Margaret. There’s no escape. Almost for as long as I can remember. Almost that long.” He scraped the sauce from his veal, turned it over to check the other side. “And she’s always right in there, ready and willing to decide what everybody thinks. Christ. As if it’s been agreed she’s got some kind of wisdom. Which she does not have.” He had cut a slice of his veal but it stayed on his fork.
“Margaret’s only solution is to smooth things over,” he said. “Make the phone calls, smooth things over, clean out a cupboard or two, and build a stack of salmon sandwiches. And then assign her little jobs to keep us busy, in case we might want to articulate what’s on our own God damned minds.”
“That sounds a bit like hatred,” Murray said.
Patrick leaned back from his dinner. “I shouldn’t have to explain this to anyone and certainly not to you,” he said. “We should have been left alone longer after my mother died,” he said, making his summation. “It should have taken a lot longer.”
“I have always thought Margaret was a bloody saint,” Murray said.
Patrick counselled himself, swallowed the words sitting ready to go at the back of his throat. He offered instead a calmer, “I have always thought her moving into our lives was perhaps not entirely altruistic, not without significant and obvious benefit to Margaret herself. And if my understanding is correct, you don’t get to be declared a saint unless you’re dead. It’s my mother who is dead,” he said. “Do you remember any small part of how deathly…?”
“Why should you be the only one who remembers?” Murray asked. He hadn’t stopped cutting his veal. He hadn’t stopped eating and he wasn’t about to. “I was there. You haven’t got a lock on it.”
“Do you know what she said to me after Daphne fell?” Patrick asked. “After all the surgery and the wires and the clamps, when it became obvious the price Daphne was going to have to pay and still she refused to even cry a little, to even let on that something serious had happened to her?”
“I know what she said to me,” Murray said.
“She said it had to stop at Daphne’s jaw,” Patrick said. “Right there. She said if I went through life blaming myself, it would only make things that much worse. And that I was to take care of her, that Paul couldn’t do it because he didn’t have the right kind of heart, Paul had her own soft heart. She said I had exactly the kind of heart Daphne would need.”
Hearing this, Murray remembered some of the other things that had been said in that kitchen, in that living room. And he felt a bit cheated. He wished he could find someone right then and there to ask precisely what kind of heart he had. Maybe the waiter would know. But of course there was no one to ask, not any more. The goodness Sylvia had dreamed up and assigned to him at the kitchen table, her generosity in assigning it, would have to do him. And it had done him. It was probably the reason the boy he’d been had gone there, as if he’d known if he just hung around long enough, Sylvia would give him his goodness.
“Listening to you,” he said to Patrick, “I can hear something close to her actual voice. That’s what she understood, you know, when she was dying, that we choose our own words. That we make what we say. We own what we say.”
Patrick was spent. Maybe it was just a combination of the August heat and the Scotch, but he’d had enough. He could feel his body tightening up, and as he concentrated on relaxing the muscles in his back, he wondered if this rummaging around in the muck for something that might be called true, this spilling your guts, your unsightly guts, was what women did, what girls and then women did, when they huddled together to listen to each other with their rapt, intimidating exclusivity. He wanted it over and done.
But he was cornered. He believed he had very little choice. If he was Murray’s friend, and he was sure of only that, it would not be humane to leave the question unasked. “What did she say to you?” he said.
“She said, ‘You’ll have to take your lead from Daphne,’” Murray said. “She said, ‘You and I are the only two people who know how much you care for her.’ She said she believed things would be all right in the end.”
“So this is your ‘in the end’?” Patrick asked. “Daphne and her illegitimate baby here with us and you off somewhere else living your normal, busy, sophisticated life?”
“I trust her to know what she’s doing,” Murray said. “Do you remember when she used to call herself ‘dee-formed’?”
“Without even trying,” Patrick said. “I hated it. Her jaw is wrong but it’s not that wrong.”
Murray laid his knife and fork across his empty plate. “She needs more time because things like this go slower for her. She knows that. We know that. But she seems to be ready to take the time. And she wants my kid with her while she’s doing it.” He pulled his cheque-book from the pocket of his leather jacket. “I’ll leave you with a good chunk of money,” he said. “I can’t be writing cheques to her. I don’t want you to tell me how much she should have, she can have whatever she wants, but if you would administer the payments…?”
“Fine,” Patrick said.
Murray was leaning forward on the edge of his chair now, writing his cheque. His joy was apparent in his still very serious face, in the shoulders hunched confidently across the table. He folded the cheque and handed it over. “Maybe you could just be happy for us?” he asked.
Patrick looked at Murray’s long-fingered hands, which were open, palm-up, in the middle of the table. He was trying to think, Maybe there is nothing to lose here. He was trying to look at Murray fairly, as a man in a great heaving mess, as a troublesome, irksome, loyal man. “Be very careful with Charlotte,” he said. “It can be pretty rough on women. Even when it’s what they want.”
“Could you bring yourself to say something good about this?” Murray asked.
“We will make sure they’re all right,” Patrick said.
Murray closed his hands, tightened his fists, and then opened them one more time. “Say happy,” he said. “You don’t have to make a sentence. Just try the one word.”
Patrick drained his glass and put it down carefully on the tablecloth. He took one of Margaret’s deep breaths. “Happy,” he said. He searched the room and lifted his arm to get the waiter’s attention. “Ecstatic.”